A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  Part sentry, part night-nurse, I lay on my bed in my clothes. The heaviness of the air along with the headiness of my emotions sent me swiftly to sleep. An elusive dream in which I was sailing on a ship that was stranded in the desert was interrupted, first, by a buzzard’s and, then, by my grandfather’s cries of ‘Karl!’ Happy that of all the names at his disposal he had chosen mine, I hurried to his bed and clasped his hand. His eyes were closed and gummy, but his voice was clear, and I was amazed to find him begging me for forgiveness. He ignored – or, more accurately, seemed not to hear – my insistence that none was needed, addressing me with exam-room urgency: ‘I know you were against it, but I believed it was for the best. We had to declare ourselves. We couldn’t sit back while so many were dying.’ Poised between sleeping and waking, it took me a moment to realise that he was talking about my bar mitzvah. I was overjoyed to learn that he had finally endorsed my stand. ‘You were right. There is another way for us to live. Luise always said that I was too set in my ways.’ I was still more confused, until I recalled that my sister had been named for my grandmother. ‘Will you ever forgive me, Karl?’

  I insisted once again that he had no need to ask, but my words were drowned in tears. I kissed his hands and his cheeks, which seemed to soothe him, and his speech dwindled first to an inchoate mumble and then to a stertorous rasp.

  I must have drifted to sleep soon afterwards for, when my mother came in the next morning to wake me, I was still in the chair. She was clearly touched by my solicitude and planted a rare token of approval on my forehead. Mr Selfish, which she had deemed to be my middle name (not long before the Nazis changed it officially), had been replaced by Mr Vigilant. As we stared at the sleeping figure, I reported his outburst of the previous night and his anxiety that I should forgive him. She showed no surprise, either about the request itself or that I should be its recipient, describing both how much my grandfather loved me and the fresh hope I had brought him after my uncle’s death. I wondered aloud whether it was me that he had loved or the idea of me: a new generation to inherit the store.

  ‘You’d be wrong to think of the store as a business or even a way of life,’ she said. ‘For your grandfather, it was a reason for living. He felt as committed to it as a painter to his canvas – except that it was a canvas on which others had space to make their mark.’

  ‘You mean like the Breughels or the Bellinis?’ I asked, thinking of fathers and sons in the same studio. I knew that I had hit on the perfect analogy when she kissed me as tenderly as if I were six. Building on our newfound intimacy, she warned me that Grandfather might not live for much longer. Although she was speaking to me, I suspected that she was addressing herself and urged her not to worry. The doctor had diagnosed nothing more serious than exhaustion. We would soon reach the Azores, where he could regain his strength in the sun. But, in a phrase so unexpected that I felt sure Sophie must have told her about Johanna, she declared ‘It’s not only young men who die of broken hearts.’

  She wanted some time alone with her father. So, grabbing my binoculars, I climbed to the upper deck in the hope of spotting a few birds before being harassed by talkative passengers. I was immediately disappointed. The sky was dull and overcast and there was not even a herring gull to be seen. Edging my way to the prow, up steps still slippery from overnight rain, I caught sight of Mark, the only other traveller willing to brave the billowing sea. He responded to my greeting with a grunt, which I considered an improvement on his previous rebuff. I asked if I might ask him a question: a formula designed to give it more weight than simply asking it outright.

  ‘I hope you won’t make the mistake of thinking I keep to myself because my mind’s on higher things.’

  ‘But I don’t. Not at all. Anyway, it’s not higher things I want to ask about – quite the opposite. Although you’re travelling alone, in the past – in Berlin – you must have known lots of girls.’

  ‘Must I?’ He laughed. ‘What girl would want to touch this face?’

  ‘It’s just a scar.’

  ‘There’s worse inside.’

  ‘Besides, it wouldn’t show in the dark. Last night, I was walking on deck and I saw men and women, some of them quite old, pawing each other like animals. Animals!’

  ‘I grew up in a village in the Ukraine. One day, a gang of peasants marched in and slaughtered every Jew they could find. Hundreds of dead. Men, women and children. That night, the survivors lay together – and not just for warmth. It was an instinct beyond passion, beyond even personality. The most primal expression of life. It’s the same on this ship.’

  I thought that the most primal expression of life was to eat, sleep and give thanks to God for the right to do so, but I was too struck by his mention of the Ukraine to argue.

  ‘Is the Ukraine like Lithuania?’

  ‘Is Berlin like Paris?’

  ‘Small villages with ancient communities of Jews?’

  ‘Those villages are the same everywhere, as they have been for hundreds of years. Like a living death.’

  I described how, during the War, my uncle had been in the German army which had liberated Lithuania from the Russians. He had been immensely moved by the chance to meet people who lived their faith, according to an age-old tradition, rather than trying to find a circuitous route around it. They had shown him new ways of being a Jew, which he recounted in long letters to my grandparents, while at the same time damning their quest for assimilation as a Faustian pact. I recalled my excitement when I first came across the letters – or rather, sneaked them from my grandfather’s desk in a bid to discover the missing pages in our family history. I felt certain that, in spite of the names on the envelopes, my uncle had addressed himself specifically to me. It was as if he had somehow known that, twenty years on, he would receive a sympathetic hearing. I was therefore doubly offended by Mark’s dismissal of his zeal as a rich man’s romanticism. Having grown up among village shopkeepers, smallholders and farm labourers, he declared the reality to be very different. Theirs was a superstition as restrictive as a prison cell and an ignorance as crippling as leg-irons, from which only the horror of the massacre had enabled him to break free.

  I asked if he had been happier in Berlin and he replied that he had merely exchanged the illusion of home for the illusion of freedom. Then the Nazis had come to power and destroyed both. In an attempt to discover whom, if anyone, he regarded as free, I suggested Hitler, at which he laughed and said ‘No one looks over his shoulder more than the man who holds the gun.’ Remembering the Captain’s equation of sailing and flying, I made a second suggestion of seamen, to which he asked, with what seemed like a jibe at himself, what point there was in travelling if your mind stayed in one place. His gloom was as chilling as the weather and I determined not to be cast down. Despite our ignominious departure, my grandfather’s sickness and even my father’s reappearance, I felt full of hope, which I attributed to having met Johanna. In a burst of enthusiasm, I declared that my mind was travelling as fast as the ship, so fast that I would be happy to stay on board forever, visiting every corner of the globe.

  ‘Like the Flying Dutchman?’ he asked with a disturbing echo.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘First, you have to kill someone.’

  ‘Oh sure, I’ll just pull a name out of a hat!’

  ‘Believe me, it’s not hard. If you need any advice, I’m your man.’ I looked at him with revulsion. ‘Why do you think all the other passengers shy away from me? Thanks to you I’ve washed, so it can’t be that they’re put off by the smell. They see the mark on my forehead.’

  ‘But that’s absurd. My sister Luise is disfigured. Everyone talks to her.’

  ‘Has she killed someone?’

  ‘Of course not! You couldn’t hope to find anyone more loving. Aunt Annette says she’s been given a larger heart to make up for her smaller brain.’

  ‘That must be a great comfort to her. I, however, have a smaller heart … or no heart at all.’

&nb
sp; ‘I’m sure!’

  ‘Why do you think I showed you my forehead?’

  ‘To test me, like a riddle. To see if I could work out that your name was Mark.’

  ‘In which case, you’ve failed dismally. The name on my passport is Sendel. But you know me better as Cain.’

  ‘You are joking?’ I asked with a shiver.

  ‘Am I? I was doomed to walk the earth forever. Why shouldn’t I walk near you?’

  ‘When you said you’d killed someone, was it your brother?’

  ‘I’d have thought a good Jewish boy like you would know that “Am I my brother’s keeper?” has a wide application. Aren’t we all brothers under the skin?’

  My faith in a universal fraternity, which had received such blows in recent years from the viciousness of the Nazis and the disaffection of my schoolfellows, now received another from within my own community. He explained, in a tone more suited to a coroner’s report than a murderer’s confession, that he had killed many brothers down the ages, some of whom were blood relatives. His latest victim was a co-religionist, a toy-maker with whom he had shared lodgings in Berlin. ‘As you so astutely detected, I’d been locked up in a concentration camp. I was let out in April on condition that I left Germany within two weeks. The joke was that leaving the country was even harder than living in it. There was no way I could come up with the money for my passport and landing-permit, let alone the 600 Reichsmarks it cost for my berth. Then it came to me. To celebrate my release, the toy-maker, with whom I’d barely exchanged five sentences, invited me to his room to share a bottle of schnapps. He couldn’t hold his drink and began to boast that he wouldn’t wait around for the Nazis to arrest him. He was planning to leave for Poland, thanks to the wad of notes concealed beneath the floor. Credulous fool! It wasn’t hard to wheedle out its whereabouts nor –’ he added with almost artistic pride – ‘to smash his skull with the floorboard I removed.’ In a voice as pinched as a puppet’s, I asked if the murder had been discovered. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘although the murderer escaped scot-free. That is, unless you intend to report him to the Captain or set up a kangaroo court in the first-class lounge. But don’t worry, no punishment can equal the one to which I’ve already been sentenced. Hang me from the chimney stacks or throw me overboard and I’m fated to return somewhere else, a stranger in my mother’s womb.’ With an anguished glance, he walked away as if to resume his wanderings, leaving me shaken and confused.

  I promise you that this is not about to become a ghost story (although I know that, for Edward at least, that would be a welcome diversion), but I was at a loss as to how seriously to take him: whether he was playing an elaborate trick on me; whether he had lost his mind in the camp; or whether he was precisely who he claimed. After all, every Seder we laid a place for Elijah. What if I’d inadvertently conjured up Cain? I fear that, to you children, the question will appear academic. After all, you’ve grown up in a household where the Bible is, literally, a closed book. Why should the mark of Cain mean anything to you, when you have only the sketchiest notion of the man himself? For me, it was very different. Although my family was not religious, the Bible was central to our culture. My imagination had been steeped in the Scriptures ever since I was given a picture-book version as a child. Cain was the quintessential villain, the second man and first murderer. Suddenly he had materialised, whether from the pages of the Torah or his own imaginings. His identity may have been ambiguous, but it was mine that felt under threat.

  Reeling from the encounter, I hurried down to the dining room, where my reticence at breakfast was attributed to worry about my grandfather. For once, the Professor’s wife’s half-chewed commiserations came as a pleasing distraction. Her expressions of concern remained curt because, in spite of her husband’s strict injunction, she had news that she was ‘simply bursting to tell’, although it seemed to me that any imminent explosion was more likely to be induced by a fourth round of toast. She whispered conspiratorially that, having been told of some ‘local difficulties’ in Cuba regarding our arrival (a phrase she would come to regret), the Captain had appointed a passenger consultation committee, which the Professor was to head. It was clear that, however serious the difficulties – which in ordinary circumstances would have exercised me more – she was prepared to endure them for the sake of her newfound prestige, particularly in the eyes of the Banker’s wife, who was outraged that the Professor’s academic authority should be favoured over her husband’s practical skills. Despite my preoccupation, I felt obliged to respond to the announcement and asked if the Professor were currently at a meeting. She replied, with amusement, that he was confined to the cabin on account of the swell. ‘He lacks my stomach,’ she said, drawing attention to her most prominent feature, which she then chose to fill with another chunk of cheese.

  Although I suspected that the Professor’s fragility was, in part, a ploy to escape his wife, it turned out that his caution was widely shared. I had the deck almost to myself as I grappled with the gale, revelling in the sharp spray on my face, the tang of salt on my lips and the elemental lash on my body. Not since the roller coaster ride at Luna-Park had I felt so secure in my flirtation with danger. My sole companions were children, for once justified in their claim that their parents’ prohibitions had been swallowed in the wind. I was alarmed to catch sight of Luise lurching up the steps behind her two friends, but, like a freshly promoted youth leader, I remained too much the boyish ally for my decrees to have any effect. Instead, the sisters made me party to their pranks, explaining how they had locked various lavatory cubicles from the inside before sliding beneath the partitions to watch while increasingly queasy passengers were left hammering on the doors and then vomiting into basins and bins. ‘She sick … she sick!’ Luise exclaimed with pink-cheeked delight, as she was led away by her partners-in-crime like an elderly, much-loved bloodhound.

  I returned indoors, strolling idly down to the games room where I found two teenage boys playing chess. They beckoned me to join them and I crossed the floor with what I hoped to be the correct degree of swagger. They held out their hands, introducing themselves as if they were their fathers. The taller one with dark hair, a lazy eye and an enviable razor-rash on his chin was Joel Rathenau, a cousin of the one-time Foreign Secretary; the smaller one with reddish hair, freckles and eyebrows so faint that they might have been shaved was Viktor Ballin, the son of a violinist in the Gurzenich orchestra, which the Nazis had Aryanised by breaking the Jewish members’ arms. They asked me my age, which I told them, only to regret my honesty when they both turned out to be seventeen. I resolved to make up for my youth with a display of intellectual vigour but, no sooner had I identified my favourite author as Sir Walter Scott, than Viktor topped him with Tolstoy. I felt so crushed that, when Joel offered me a cigarette, from an adult case rather than a schoolboy packet, I almost accepted, risking betraying myself by a novice’s spluttering. ‘My chest,’ I said sadly, pointing to my scrawny frame and hinting at incurable lung disease.

  We began to relax, swapping stories of our schools, our families and, above all, our girlfriends. I repaid their confidences by introducing them (and myself) to Annelise, a Berlin girl so perfect that she would never have given me a second glance. They chose, however, to ignore the implausibility, content simply to cap my claims of tongue-kissing with theirs of having gone ‘all the way’. To complete my humiliation, Joel trounced me at chess which, since he insisted on commenting on every move, felt more like a lesson than a game. I made my escape, promising to meet them again soon, while determined to avoid them as assiduously as I did Schiendick.

  After lunch, conditions on deck improved and the spray was replaced by prattle. I escaped indoors on hearing a silver-haired man inform a compliant crowd that the lavatories had been locked in a deliberate attempt to degrade the passengers. Finding no refuge in the cabin, which had been commandeered by Mother and Aunt Annette, I was left to wander the ship as aimlessly as Cain. On the stroke of four, I entered the tourist lounge
, where Johanna’s mother praised my punctuality: ‘so much more admirable in leisured people’. I sat at her side and set about charming her, in the face of Johanna’s pantomime grimaces. Her mother, who introduced herself by role rather than name, looked amazingly young, more like her sister, though I knew better than to say so in front of Johanna, whose sensitivity regarding parents was as finely tuned as mine. Christina, as I later found out she was called (a name that was far from neutral on the St Louis), was a woman of marshmallow pinkness, whose neck sank imperceptibly into her bosom and whose bosom swelled when she talked as though she were a singer practising scales. Fixing her with a grin which barely wavered in spite of Johanna’s determined assault on my shins, I strove to prove that punctuality was merely one of my virtues. Then, asserting that a growing boy needed his tea (cue, smirk from the growing girl beside him), she summoned a waiter with the apologetic air of one more accustomed to taking orders. While waiting for him to return, she kept up a constant stream of chatter, which consisted largely of listing every item that she had ever bought at Frankel. After insisting that, despite the rival claims of Tietz and Schocken, it was the finest department store in Berlin, she reported how, on her last visit she had seen a sign in the window reading Aryan store, as if to reassure me that it was in safe hands.