A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  ‘He might drown her. His hands aren’t steady.’

  ‘He doesn’t drink any more, Karl.’

  ‘Not in public, no. He’s far too clever. I expect he has one of those hollow sticks like in the Alps.’

  ‘You always claim to be grown up. Now’s the time to prove it. Learn to live with your father.’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from someone who never speaks to hers.’

  ‘It’s not the same. I understand – believe me – how sore you feel at the way he neglected you, which is all the more reason to give him the chance to make up for it now.’

  I explained, as simply as I could, that a person did not need a father at fifteen, when he could stand up for himself, but at eight, nine, ten and eleven, when he was abused and abandoned by his school-friends and living in a regime that had not only curtailed his childhood but crushed his very identity. At that moment, Luise caught sight of me and pounded the water so violently that my father and everyone in the vicinity were soaked. My father waved and Sophie responded furiously, to make up for my hands of stone.

  ‘Luise is enjoying herself,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. Daddy’s a new word to her, like Captain or Cuba. I expect she thinks he comes with the ship.’

  ‘And you must have noticed the change in your mother.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to be grateful? With my grandfather barely wet in his grave.’

  ‘You make yourself ugly.’

  ‘I’m not the one acting as if he’d been dead for five years.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d want all of us, your mother especially, to be happy.’

  ‘That’s so easy to say. Well rest assured that, when I die, I want everyone to be miserable. I want you all to remember how cruelly you’ve treated me and be racked with guilt.’

  ‘I give up,’ she said, gazing back at the pool.

  ‘No, I give up on you,’ I replied, determined to maintain the advantage, and strode off.

  Further disillusion awaited me on the sports deck where I found Johanna engaged in a game of shuffleboard with Viktor and Joel. Pain seared my flesh as though I’d stepped on a nail. My one hope – that she had been nursing her love for me alone in her cabin – was dashed at the sight of her flushed face and easy rapport with her friends. Left in no doubt that Joel had sent me to the pool as a diversion, I was doubly offended by the cordial wave with which he beckoned me to join them: a gesture that was repeated enthusiastically by Viktor, who appeared to have cast off his bookish ways along with his glasses, and, more stiffly by Johanna, who screwed up her eyes at the sight of me, although that might have been because I was standing in the sun. In a bid to punish them for their perfidy, I turned down the invitation, but, as I watched them return to the rough-and-tumble of the game, I was the one who suffered. Unable to bear a moment more, I walked away, resolved to spend the rest of the voyage in my cabin, when a cry of ‘Wait!’ changed my mood as emphatically as Willy Kirsei’s scoring a last-minute goal. Johanna had made a choice which, to me, felt as momentous as any in a medieval woodcut. Too scared to express my relief, I asked if her companions wouldn’t miss her. She replied cannily that she’d thought that I would miss her more.

  ‘In which case, why have you been avoiding me?’

  ‘You flatter yourself,’ she replied (and the opposing team came within an ace of equalising). ‘I was stuck in my cabin with cramps.’ I found it hard to reconcile such a long confinement with my own five-minute agonies, until she specified that they were stomach cramps. I knew somehow that these were peculiar to girls and felt strangely moved. As we strolled to the prow, I sensed her reluctance to come too close to me. Eager that she should not lump me together with Sendel, I explained that I had stopped washing out of respect for my grandfather. Thrown by her look of surprise, I added that it was an age-old custom, not a personal quirk. She asked if it were widespread, and all my resentment of my mother spilled out as I described how it was the rule in more devout families that, for a week after a parent’s death, they would not leave the house, or wash or shave (the last injunction made me acutely self-conscious) but sit on a low stool and mourn. Twice a day, ten men would come to say prayers. There had to be ten to make up a minyan.

  ‘But you don’t have ten?’

  ‘Not even one. Just smelly, inconsequential me.’

  ‘People grieve in their own ways.’

  ‘Yes. And, tucked up at night, Hitler reads the Torah.’

  She urged me not to become bitter, claiming that, in the past, what she had most disliked about the Jews had been their negativity: the way that they were forever harking back to long-ago persecutions or harbouring grudges for some thousand-year-old slight. On the St Louis, however, she had formed a very different picture: one of kindness, resilience and laughter. She would hate me to convince her that her original view had been right.

  I was conscious of a new responsibility: to my people as well as my cause. I realised, however, how much ground I’d already lost when she asked why I’d lied about my father. ‘I didn’t want you to connect us in any way,’ I said lamely.

  ‘He’s a very handsome man,’ she replied. For the first time, the connection seemed to work in my favour.

  ‘People say I look like him.’

  ‘Is he also a very vain man?’ Even as I despaired, I knew her contempt to be justified. Then she laughed, and I realised that with girls, unlike boys, tone of voice mattered as much as words. I expressed my fear that he would cast a shadow over our friendship (a last-second substitute for relationship). She replied that I had encouraged her to make her peace with her mother and, while the change of surroundings might have played a part, she was already seeing her with fresh eyes. I insisted that the cases were very different. Her mother’s offence had been youthful folly. My father’s wilful crime was harder to forgive.

  ‘But for how long?’ she asked. ‘It’s years since your sister was born.’

  ‘But only days since he came back. I can’t just wipe out the whole of Luise’s life – and half of mine.’

  With nothing more to say but no wish to end our conversation, I led her towards the stern where, to my horror, I spotted my mother poised at her easel in a smock as splattered as her palette. She summoned me with a wave, which I had no choice but to acknowledge for fear that Johanna should accuse me of disowning both my parents. My mother radiated charm, complimenting Johanna on her hair, her clothes and her smile (all things that she purported to find trivial), while mortifying me with her request that I stand downwind. Johanna responded by quizzing her on the picture, whereupon my mother warned her that she ran the risk of alienating me. ‘Karl,’ she declared, ‘feels threatened by my creativity. He lacks vision. He wants to circumscribe life.’ She spoke as though I could appreciate nothing in a gallery but the frames. Johanna ignored the warning, lavishing praise that made my mother blush. She insisted that it was a mere sketch, adding that it was the first time she had picked up a brush in months. Johanna, whose attention to the canvas went way beyond the call of duty, expressed particular approval of the sea, claiming that she had never thought of its being yellow before but would no longer be able to see it any other way. If I had not known her better, I would have suspected her of sarcasm. As they discussed the finer points of Art, with an earnestness worthy of the capital, I grew increasingly disturbed by their complicity and feared that I might have identified the wrong parent as the potential threat. Anxious to reassert myself, I asked my mother whether painting were permitted in the first week of mourning. A cloud passed over her face.

  ‘My pictures celebrate life. I know your grandfather would approve. He loved them.’

  ‘He certainly bought them,’ I replied and explained my emphasis by repeating what he had told me in strictest confidence, an injunction that had weighed heavily on me for years but which I felt sure had lapsed at his death. ‘In an attempt to please you, he paid agents to buy up the paintings in all your exhibitions and kept them locked up at the store. There was no myste
ry about the mystery collector. It was him.’ I felt a chill wind on my neck like the breath of ghostly displeasure. He had divulged the secret in order to make me more sensitive to her needs and I was using it to punish her for her insensitivity to mine. Nevertheless, I was determined to press my point. ‘It wasn’t your paintings he loved but you. Some parents try to protect their children.’

  ‘And some children try to destroy their parents.’

  Seeing her downcast face, I wondered if truth really were a higher virtue than compassion. Her refusal to challenge me owed less to a belief in my honesty than to a lack of faith in herself. ‘Now you must leave me to work.’ She flashed Johanna a brave smile. ‘It’s very good to meet you, my dear. I hope we’ll have many more chances to talk. But I must press on before I lose the light.’

  We left my mother picking up her brush in spite of the stacks of unsold canvases cluttering her view. Halfway down the deck, Johanna abandoned me, her studied silence a more eloquent comment on my conduct than the most vehement reproach. I returned to my cabin wondering why, when in the right, I so often felt as if I were in the wrong. My yearning to reach Havana was intense. I felt less like a passenger on a luxury liner than a prisoner in a rotting hulk. I tried to read but was mocked by the purity of Ivanhoe’s love for Rowena. I buried myself in the bed, only to be roused by Aunt Annette, who entered with a knock as token as a steward’s smile. She announced that she had spoken to my mother, to whom, confounding expectations, she had grown closer since my grandfather’s death, and had come to see if she could mediate.

  ‘Doesn’t it ever get wearing,’ I asked, ‘always trying to keep the peace? You’re not even one of the family.’

  ‘Are you out to hurt me too?’

  ‘I’m not out to hurt anyone.’

  ‘You were very hard on your mother. She’s suffered a great loss.’ I sniffed. ‘Yesterday, when I explained about your grandfather and your uncle, I didn’t tell you everything.’ I stared at her, both exhilarated and appalled by the prospect of further revelations. ‘They were estranged even before the War. Karl despised what he called his father’s “money-lined world”. He longed for a simpler way of life.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘He was a lot older.’

  ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t behave like one…. Your grandmother, of course, believed that her son could do no wrong – like all mothers.’ The parenthesis was inaccurate but well-meant. ‘She raged at your grandfather for forcing him to fight, vowing that she would hold him to blame should Karl suffer the least injury. In the event, she never forgave him for his death. A few months later, she killed herself … oh no!’ she added in the face of my unconcealed horror. ‘There was no gun or poison. She simply withdrew from life. She saw no one. She ate nothing. She refused to speak even when the hunger became intolerable. Indeed, she seemed to welcome the pain as her last link to her son before they were reunited.’

  ‘So my grandfather had two deaths on his conscience?’

  ‘And not only on his. Your mother loved your grandmother – let there be no mistake about that – but she didn’t always show it. She was quick-tempered and headstrong. They clashed over many things.’

  ‘Let me guess: would one of them be her art?’

  ‘Your grandmother felt that your mother should paint the way that she herself worked on her crochet. There was never any question of her going to the academy where she might have to take …’

  ‘Nude drawing?’

  ‘Life classes. Amalia rebelled, not as effectively as her brother, who was hundreds of miles away in Heidelberg, but more persistently.’ I said nothing, trying to absorb the new slant on a relationship that had been held up as exemplary. ‘Even when your uncle died, she found it hard to console her mother. I suspect (I don’t mean this as any kind of accusation) that, in among the tears, she felt an element of relief to be out of his shadow, which in turn increased her guilt. She told herself that she was not the one her mother wanted, until the smallest word of comfort felt like an intrusion on her grief. Then the chance to speak was lost forever, leaving your mother and grandfather doubly bereft, bound together by guilt. And guilt is a more powerful emotion even than love.’

  Her revelations did not stop there. My vision of my grandparents as a latter-day Abraham and Sarah was shattered when she confessed that she had been far closer to my grandfather than to my grandmother even before the latter’s death. She had not, as I had been led to believe, sacrificed her life with Gretchen-like devotion in order to care for her best friend’s husband and daughter but had hoped to marry the husband herself. My mother, however, protested so strongly that any such hope was dashed. She was prepared to accept Aunt Annette as her father’s companion but not as his wife. My grandfather, unable to contemplate the loss of a second child, bowed to her wishes. Aunt Annette had no choice but to accept the position or leave.

  ‘It was easier than I thought … at least it became so in time. I established a strategy for coping. It was the little things that hurt: not being able to straighten his tie when we were out; never being the one to say “Bless you” when he sneezed; then, yesterday, not being required – or even allowed – to perform keriah.’ I sensed the aching heart beneath the immaculately pressed blouse. ‘It’s so hard talking like this, but I know you’re grown-up enough to understand.’ I resented her blandishments and longed to retreat into a nursery-world full of cuddly shapes and primary colours. Yet, just as she felt that it was essential for me to know the truth in order to understand my life, so I feel that it is essential for you children to know it in order to understand my story … ‘I hope you won’t think any the worse of me,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t add me to your list of enemies.’ I assured her that no one could make an enemy of her. ‘No, I suppose that I’m no threat.’

  She explained that my uncle’s death had claimed a further victim, my father. He and my mother were distant cousins and their parents had pledged them to one another at an early age: the family tie making up in my grandfather’s eyes for the financial imbalance. Whether out of affection for my father or obligation to her own, my mother astonished everyone by agreeing to the match. My father, for his part, was expected to feel nothing but gratitude. He had left university with a yearning to write, which he would henceforth have the means to pursue. That all changed, however, with my uncle’s death and my grandfather’s need to groom a successor. My father’s utter unfitness for the role was evident to everyone except for my grandfather, who believed that he could mould a man as easily as clay. Conscious of his failure, my father took to drink, thereby giving his wife and father-in-law fresh cause for complaint. So he drank more in order to escape their censure, caught in both a vicious circle and a downward spiral, which my grandfather, who abhorred any form of confrontation, chose to ignore. Aunt Annette begged him to buy my parents a house where they could set up on their own, but he was desperate not to lose hold of my mother, insisting on the need for families to stick together in such troubled times. My father’s drinking, meanwhile, took a turn for the worse. He would disappear for days, only to return full of remorse. Then, after one such bout, he came home spoiling for a fight. My mother locked her bedroom door, but he broke it down and forced himself on her. It was then that Luise was conceived.

  ‘Forced?’ I interjected. ‘I think the word you want is raped.’

  ‘That I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean you won’t say.’

  ‘The next morning he disappeared. He lived … well, we heard later that he’d been living in a doss-house.’ For my fastidious aunt, that seemed to be the most painful detail of all. ‘He came back once, about three years later.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure? Why don’t I remember?’

  ‘I don’t suppose he even knew that he had a daughter. He must have done – but how …? We’d finally learnt the truth about Luise’s condition. Not even your mother could hide behind words like placid and slow forever, so she’d taken her t
o see the top specialist in Berlin. His diagnosis was unequivocal. Her brain had been damaged before she was born.’

  ‘And Mother felt that my father should accept his responsibility?’

  ‘Not so much your mother as your grandfather.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I loved your grandfather very much, but there was a part of him – a small part, mind – that was grateful not to be the only one to have split his family. He told your father what the doctors had told us. Georg was completely distraught. We were afraid he might do some harm to himself, or even …’

  ‘To Luise?’

  ‘No! No, of course not … I don’t know. But only out of pity. Because he couldn’t bear to see her in pain.’

  ‘She wasn’t in pain. All the whirling and the head-beating came later. She just lay there, inert, barely focusing her eyes.’

  ‘To your father that was pain. Not being able to express oneself was pain. Your grandfather made him a generous allowance – generous in size, that is, not in spirit – on condition that he had no further contact with any of us. And he didn’t. Until your mother brought him back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her. Or rather … Perhaps she couldn’t bear to think of him suffering in Germany. Or perhaps she felt that, in a new country, they might make a fresh start.’

  ‘Don’t you think she might have mentioned something – just an odd word – to the other interested parties?’

  ‘Your mother was schooled by your grandfather. She believes, and I don’t mean this as a criticism (at least not a serious one), that she knows what’s best for her children. Just as he tried to safeguard her, so she’s trying to safeguard you.’