A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

  The Rabbi’s cough thrust us back to the present. Marrying discretion (‘you mustn’t think I disapprove’) with firmness (‘this is a place of worship after all’), it sent us rushing out on deck. As we walked though the ship, Johanna claimed that, in spite of everything, we owed a debt of gratitude to Hitler, without whom we would never have met. I refused to accept that such a momentous occurrence could depend on chance of any kind, let alone the whim of a tyrant, so I declared that, in happier days, she would have come into Frankel and I would have shown her a tray of diamond rings.

  ‘I could never have afforded one.’

  ‘I would have sneaked it out when the other assistants had gone home. I’m the boss’s grandson; they trust me.’

  ‘Is that what you want to do for a job?’

  ‘Be a thief?’

  ‘No, stupid! Work in a shop?’

  ‘If my grandfather hadn’t died, he might have opened another store in New York and I’d have had to take it over. Or at least he’d have asked me to. Now there’s no danger. I want to be an ornithologist.’ Her blank look prompted me to a discreet elaboration. ‘There are about two thousand species of bird on the North American continent, twice as many as in Europe. I shall make it my life’s work to study every single one.’

  ‘In swamps and deserts?’

  ‘Or the ice-caps of Alaska, where it’s too cold for snakes.’

  ‘What?’

  I deflected her question by asking what she wanted to be, at which she ran through as many options as in a guessing game: nurse; teacher; tennis instructress, before adding that she would be equally content as a farmer’s wife with ten children and a herd of cows. I asked tentatively whether the cows might be replaced by birds, and she giggled.

  ‘Do you think it’s very feeble of me not to have more definite ambitions?’

  ‘I think everything about you is perfect,’ I replied, and she confirmed it with a heavenly kiss.

  I grew aware that we were attracting attention, all of which was friendly, though I detected an air of condescension behind the desiccated smiles. Johanna was more sanguine. She held that people were simply feeling happy, for themselves as much as for us. The sun had lifted their spirits. I suggested that that was because it was the climate for which we had been created. All the coldness and cruelty in human nature arose when we migrated north. Pressed to elaborate, I cited our origins in the Garden of Eden. ‘You mean you still believe that?’ she asked, as astonished as if I had cited the Man in the Moon. I played for time. I knew, of course, that we had evolved from monkeys, just as I knew that matter was made up of atoms, but our animal past seemed as fanciful when I gazed into her eyes, as our molecular present did when I stood on the hardwood deck. The story of Adam and Eve might be a myth, but it was a far cry from Günther and Brunhild. Their fate made perfect sense of my own contradictions: how I felt at times that I could do anything to which I put my mind, and at others that nothing I did would ever work. Whereas the notion that we were monkeys who had lost our tails made sense only of my negative side; although I had to admit that it totally explained the Nazis. Since, however, I was more concerned to earn Johanna’s good opinion than my own, I assured her that, when I had said the Garden of Eden, I had meant the Middle East.

  We lay on two recently vacated deckchairs, pooling our revulsion at their residue of warmth. I ordered us both fruit cocktails, exotic concoctions as notable for their foliage as their flavour, and worried about my diminishing supply of shipboard marks. The obvious solution lay in my grandfather’s wallet, which remained in the drawer by his bed, but I was less inclined to appropriate his cash than his cologne. Determined to banish the clouds from my mind, I pulled a protesting Johanna to her feet and led her to the rail. As our legs brushed, I felt a perverse nostalgia for short trousers. Powerful sensations surged through me, but they no longer seemed shameful now that I had found someone to share them. Rather than pressing my suit on an imaginary woman whom I had assembled like the collage on Johanna’s card, I was standing beside a real person whose heart beat as fast as mine. She made even the most monkey-like part of myself feel pure. I longed for us to stay like this forever, and it was clear that she felt equally happy for she made me promise that, whatever else might occur, we would meet again in ten years’ time.

  ‘Won’t I see you till then?’ I asked, unable to conceal my horror at the prospect of such a wait.

  ‘Of course. But just to be sure. So many things … unpredictable things, might happen.’ The urgency with which she spoke made me wonder whether she had had a premonition.

  ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘On a liner in the middle of the Atlantic ocean?’

  ‘At this precise latitude?’ She laughed. ‘No!’ Then, with a nod to her new homeland, she said: ‘In New York, at the top of the Empire State Building.’

  Looking at my watch, I said: ‘It’s a date: 3.47 p.m. on 25th May 1949.’ She suggested that, for simplicity’s sake, we made it 4 p.m. Then we sealed the promise with a kiss or, to be more accurate, we signed it, sealed it and tied it up with red ribbons. It was a far more lingering kiss than those that I had observed with such distaste earlier in the week. As we broke off, we found ourselves being gaped and giggled at by Luise’s two playfellows, but I didn’t care.

  We met at nine the next morning for the second Shavuot service. Although we were once again forced apart, I felt as close to her as if we were sitting side by side. The focus of the prayers was on the dead (in the Rabbi’s words, ‘the departed’) and, for the first time, I was reconciled to the loss of my grandfather. As we gave thanks for our forefathers and for all the blessed ones of Israel, I felt his passing to be a part of life rather than an affront to it. The chanting of the lamentations was intensely moving, imbuing the service with a beauty and a resonance that it might otherwise have lacked. The readings were unfamiliar and largely incomprehensible but, in his sermon (thankfully, in German), the Rabbi explained that, as was traditional at Shavuot, he had read from the Book of Ruth. Later, when I filled out the story for Johanna, who was as hungry for our history as our customs, she was captivated by the Moabite woman who left her home, threw in her lot with the Jews and went on to become the great-grandmother of King David. I was exhilarated by her suggestion that, of all the Bible passages that might have been chosen, it was one with a special application to her. My exhilaration grew even stronger with the announcement over lunch that all passengers should collect their landing cards from the Purser’s office during the afternoon, in preparation for our arrival in Havana. Freedom was no longer a dream.

  My happiness would have been complete had it not been for the fancy dress ball to be held that evening. By rights, I should not even have thought about going in the week of my grandfather’s death, but the unique circumstances of the voyage supplied a dispensation. Moreover, I felt an obligation to Johanna, who had made her attendance contingent on mine. As well as guilt at abandoning my mourning, I felt at a grave disadvantage among people who had been designing their outfits for days. A ball was a frightening enough prospect without having to wear something witty. On top of which, Johanna’s casual ‘Don’t forget to shave. It tickles,’ had knocked me sideways. I was as mortified as if she had told me that I smelt. As I ran over and over her words in my mind, I longed for the salvo of prickles which, at least, suggested strength. Tickles was ineffective as well as unpleasant. What I wouldn’t have given for a smooth skin! I thought back to the boy at school who’d had a disease that had made all his hair fall out. Baldness was a small price to pay for an uncompromised body…. Then I remembered the rumours that he’d paid a far higher price when he vanished abruptly in the middle of term, and even the boys who hadn’t laughed at him never heard from him again. I swiftly resigned myself to my moustache.

  My dining companions did not share my qualms about the ball. Even the Professor’s wife took more interest in the costumes than in the food. Depending on their degree of preparation, people either pleaded secrecy or offered tantalising hint
s about their characters. My first suggestion was to drape myself in sheets like a Roman toga, but my mother, who anticipated a glut of indolent emperors, decreed it to be banal; my second was to borrow some chains from the engine room and go as a tortured prisoner, which would have the added benefit of restricting my dancing, but that was universally deemed to be in bad taste. Aunt Annette proposed that I wore Uncle Karl’s uniform, which my grandfather had reverently preserved, and, to my horror, my mother concurred. Gripped by a vision of a tattered battledress, punctured by bullet holes, stinking of combat and, worst of all, stained with my uncle’s blood, I insisted, with all the delicacy at my command, that it would swamp me. ‘You’re not a little boy any more, Karl,’ Aunt Annette said proudly. ‘You’re almost as tall as your father.’ The association intensified my gloom.

  I was greatly relieved when, on our return to the cabin, Aunt Annette unwrapped the braided uniform and sash of a Heidelberg university drinking club. It struck me that my uncle might have joined any number of worthier groups, such as bird-watching or stamp-collecting or photography, but I was grateful for the pristine state – and smell – of the clothes. After my aunt’s comment on my size, I was too embarrassed to take off my shirt in front of her and retreated to the bathroom, although, to spare her feelings, I left the door ajar. I hobbled back into the room, clutching a bunch of excess material at the waist, which made my spindly frame feel more freakish than ever, but Aunt Annette, recklessly applying pins to the trousers, told me not to worry: tailoring was in her blood.

  Scarcely had she taken away the uniform for alteration than the fitting room was turned into a magic grotto by the arrival of Luise, sporting a wire-and-towelling tutu with a pair of cardboard wings and a crepe-paper crown. She waved a peacock-feather wand beatifically as she lurched around the room, transforming us into creatures from her unfathomable imagination. I complimented Sophie on the effect, but she immediately gave the credit to the other member of Luise’s retinue. ‘Your father made everything. I just put it on her.’ For all my surprise, I thought it only right to repeat my praise. I watched Luise clinging to him and felt a pang of jealousy. I wondered whether, instead of my pitying her, it shouldn’t be the other way round. Given the many problems that my intellect had brought me, her lack of it might even be a blessing. Then, just as I was succumbing to this sentimental vision, Luise waved her wand and toppled over. She let out the familiar moan and began banging her head. As always it was unclear whether she were punishing herself or the floor. My father looked so appalled that I was tempted to take his hand. He hovered ineffectually while Sophie and I calmed Luise. My tapping her nose with the wand had the desired effect, and Sophie led her away to attend to the very unfairylike bruise on her forehead. My father and I were left alone for the first time in eight years. He asked about what he termed Luise’s ‘outbursts’, which I explained were regular but unpredictable. The crucial thing was to ensure that she did herself no harm.

  ‘You’ve no idea how much I long to turn back the clock,’ he said, a doubly futile sentiment under the circumstances. The fairytale world had been exposed as an illusion. Time could not move backwards any more than cardboard wings could fly. ‘But though we can’t rewrite the past, let’s at least put it behind us. I know that I’ve destroyed your sister’s life. I couldn’t bear to think that I’ve destroyed yours as well.’ He looked as though he were about to cry, shocking me not just with his own vulnerability but that of his sex. I never knew that men could show grief. I thought that they had to be both controlled and in control like my grandfather, which was what prevented my joining their ranks. Before I had a chance to reconsider, I asked if he would show me how to shave. He looked as proud as if I had given him a medal. He moved towards me and I recoiled; I didn’t need to be shown how to hug. Chastened, he led me into the bathroom where, strangely shy of my grandfather’s shaving brush, he whipped up a lather and applied it to my upper lip. Then he passed me the razor and, placing his hand on mine, led me through the movements, only to tremble so violently that he had to let go. I attributed the trembling to anxiety, since there was no hint of anything untoward on his breath. His instruction became purely verbal and I succeeded in removing the hair without a nick. I washed off the excess foam and stared at myself in the mirror, transfixed by the new-found definition of my upper lip. It felt as though a shadow had been lifted from my face.

  Aunt Annette returned with the altered uniform, which I put on while she sought out my sternest critic to judge the final effect. To my surprise, Mother endorsed both the fit and my fitness to wear it. I longed to know more about the drinking club, whether it had involved a skill such as wine-tasting or been sheer self-indulgence, but neither my mother nor my aunt wished to discuss it. I ascribed this reluctance to the presence of my father, whose edginess made me wonder whether membership of a similar club in Frankfurt might have been the origin of all his troubles. So I shifted the conversation to their own costumes, at which they became as irritatingly evasive as when they offered me a cup of wait-and-drink tea.

  The Professor’s wife’s insistence on ploughing through every course had never been more insufferable than it was at dinner. While other tables had long since escaped to change, ours sat watching her guzzle the cheese. She announced that she would not be dressing up, since ‘You probably think me peculiar enough already, don’t you Karl?’ Not even Aunt Annette’s emphatic elbow could prompt me to deny it. The Professor remarked that he planned to go as an absent-minded Professor who had left his costume at home, which caused widespread mirth. His wife suggested that he would probably prefer to have left her at home, which fell flat. Her selfishness meant that, by the time I had re-emerged from my cabin, the party was in full swing. The social hall had been totally transformed since the morning service. Although most of the greenery remained, it had been supplemented by streamers and Chinese lanterns. The dais, which had held the makeshift ark, was now occupied by the ship’s band, looking dapper in white dinner jackets. Hordes of children – or rather, princes and princesses, elves and fairies, and my own favourite, a goggle-and-flippered frog – frolicked, without any regard for either rank or role. Many of the adults wore simple evening clothes but, even as I deplored their lack of effort, I recalled that they had had so little occasion to wear them in recent years that it must feel like fancy dress.

  The officers were all in uniform, which I presumed to be a company regulation. Seeing no sign of Schiendick, I decided that he must be the Devil, sporting a red silk-lined opera cloak and eye mask, with two papier-mâché horns on his head. I determined to keep him in my sights for fear that he should take the impersonation to heart, but my attention was diverted by Helmut, who had jettisoned Sophie in favour of a fellow sailor. I was appalled. I thought that it was only Orthodox Jews who danced with other men; although they would never have shown such passion. Praying that Sophie wouldn’t notice, I scoured the hall in a bid to find and distract her. Then the music stopped and I realised that Sophie had not only noticed but that she was the sailor in question. Beating a hasty retreat, I bumped into Aunt Annette, who had been transformed by my mother’s smock and palette, my own cap, worn back-to-front, and a cotton-wool moustache and beard, into a Parisian painter. Even that was less disturbing, however, than my mother’s metamorphosis into a belly dancer. Dressed – albeit barely – in diaphanous veils, with a giant emerald stuck in her navel, she threw herself into her character, waving her arms and wiggling her hips at the surfeit of sheikhs, one of whom, having ignored her ban on bedspreads, was my father.

  Mortified by the spectacle (and emboldened by my uniform), I ordered a beer from a sweating steward, who brought it with gratifying compliance. Sipping its sweet sourness, I resumed my scrutiny of the room, this time in search of Johanna. The closest I came was her mother, dressed as a schoolgirl in her daughter’s gym-slip, with her hair tied in pig-tails and lipstick freckles dotted on her cheeks, although, given her youthful looks, it scarcely seemed like a disguise. She had attracted sever
al admirers, among them the Professor, who addressed her with rare animation, while a vast gypsy woman, wearing curtain-ring earrings, a table-cloth skirt and size twelve slippers, whom I took to be the courting chemist, stood by and glowered. Fleeing the eccentricities of my elders, I ran into Viktor, with a sheepskin rug flung over his shoulders, his glistening face smeared with what appeared to be boot-polish and four pipe-cleaners hanging from his nose. When I asked him what he was supposed to be, he replied with an air of resignation, ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’. I contrived to look impressed. Joel, meanwhile, had managed with minimal fuss to come as an accident victim on crutches. I praised his skill at having seized on the telling detail whereas most of us had opted for the broad effect, only to find, to my embarrassment, that he was suffering from a genuinely sprained ankle as a result of racing round the pool: ‘acting the goat’, in the newly enfranchised Viktor’s phrase.

  Johanna’s arrival was well worth the wait. Wearing a painted egg-box headdress, carrying an inverted plunger torch and draped in a red-and-white striped tablecloth pinned with forty-eight paper-napkin stars, she made a stunning Statue of Liberty. Her freshness and beauty combined with the simplicity of her materials to turn her costume into a universal symbol of hope. Although I was irked by the stream of people who came up to compliment her (and intrude on us), I was grateful that her determination to keep her torch aloft until the final judging relieved me of any need to ask her to dance. In the event, the Captain, dazzled by the tawdry charms of a mermaid who had simply sewn herself into a pillowcase and worn next to nothing on top, awarded Johanna the second prize, an injustice which I felt more acutely than she did. I suggested that we should escape out on deck and, with a knowing smile, she agreed. We stood at the rail and gazed into the gathering darkness. There was no sound other than the distant strains of the band. We spoke little but, as I clung to my personal Statue of Liberty, I felt that I had both Johanna and America within my grasp. Johanna, now determined to see only the best in the very people of whom a few days earlier she had thought the worst, was full of admiration for the spirit of improvisation expressed at the ball.