The ship was gripped by a sense of foreboding. As we filed docilely into the room, we were reminded not just of the conditions we had left behind in Germany but that we ourselves remained on German territory until we disembarked. My own fear was more specific. The Doctor’s inclusion of ‘the idiot or insane’ in his list of those forbidden to enter the country made me tremble for Luise. A stranger might fail to grasp that her perceptions were not so much impaired as idiosyncratic. My fear appeared to be justified when, on approaching the Doctor’s desk, she caught sight of his assistant. ‘She burnt! She burnt!’ she screamed and began to shake. I presented our vaccination certificates with my most winning smile, giving thanks for the language barrier that cut across the officials’ comprehension. Meanwhile, my mother and Sophie tried desperately to reconcile Luise to her first black face. The Doctor wearily waved us through, with barely a second glance, even at Luise. My relief faded with the realisation that the entire exercise had been a sham: the Cubans were taking a leaf out of the Nazi handbook on humiliation.
The charade over, we went back outside and gazed across the still waters of the harbour. I cannot begin to convey the depths of our frustration. Think of longing to escape from a tedious lesson or lunch (or perhaps, by the time you read this, from a stifling job or relationship), multiply it by a hundred, and you may have some idea…. By mid-morning, the city was so distinct that I could make out toy-town cars and even figures on the esplanade. It was like staring at the window of a shop that remained closed – or rather, closed to Jews. Even the old were filled with a nursery impatience as they watched the growing bustle from which they were excluded. A group of Cuban policemen came aboard and lined the rail as impassively as an opera chorus. With their refusal to respond even to the Spanish speakers among us, we were left studying them as intently as the other landmarks. Meanwhile, several small craft had drawn up alongside the ship. The occupants’ faces bore a reassuring resemblance to our own, as was confirmed by the shrieks and tears and airborne kisses with which people all around me greeted their relatives. I gave thanks that our family had no welcoming party to provoke such a spectacle. Although both the din and the distance contrived to conceal the visitors’ words, the gist was far from encouraging. They insisted that everything would be resolved and we were not to worry, which of course made us worry all the more. Until then, we had supposed the delay to be purely administrative: a case of what we – who of all people should have known better – described as ‘native mentality’. In fact, those natives showed remarkable presence of mind: within an hour a further flotilla appeared, turning the harbour into a makeshift market. Passengers tossed down coins (it appeared that even shipboard currency was acceptable) in exchange for bananas, pineapples and a range of exotic fruit, which were handed up to them by the policemen, who were happy to have found a role, however menial. My desire for a star fruit was vetoed by my mother who, finding the whole exchange undignified, promised me a plateful of them as soon as we reached the hotel.
Our visitors’ fears looked to be misplaced when an official launch drew up, scattering several smaller boats in its wake and discharging a group of immigration officers. Oozing self-importance, they strode up the accommodation ladder to be met by the Purser, who ushered them out of sight. Our hopes of a speedy departure turned rapidly into resentment when we learnt that they had sat down to a meal but, as a sympathetic steward brought us word of the ever more lavish courses, Aunt Annette cannot have been alone in concluding that the delay was a small price to pay for securing their goodwill. The traditional German sausages and sauerkraut (we had devoured the menu as eagerly as they had the food) must have had the desired effect, for, after brandy and cigars (which struck me as taking owls to Athens), they moved to the social hall to process our documents. Shortly afterwards, the Purser broadcast a request for passengers whose names began with A or B to assemble outside. Meanwhile, a small crowd of the alphabetically less advantaged gathered nearby to gaze at the R stamped on their landing cards as reverently as if it had been inscribed by God. Once processed, the As and Bs proceeded to the accommodation ladder to wait for the launch. Among them was Viktor, who dashed over to shake my hand. His mother screamed at him to return, terrified of his taking the least step out of line. I managed to tell him the name of our hotel as he rushed back to his place. Banishing my horror of goodbyes, I waited to wave him off, but the opportunity never arose. Instead, as the launch returned, yet another official came aboard, pushing brusquely past the passengers and disappearing below deck. Moments later, the immigration officers emerged and, without a single word of explanation, descended into the waiting launch, leaving those of us from C to Z without even the regulation R.
The escalating tension was interrupted by lunch, although the Professor’s wife’s routine protest of lacking an appetite for once appeared to be genuine. Our premature goodbyes congealed like leftovers. Only Luise was cheerful, seizing the unexpected freedom to make a bread-roll doll. Even the waiters were surly, which Sophie, with her privileged information, explained by the crew’s blaming the passengers for the Captain’s cancelling all shore leave, a response that seemed as irrational as the Nazis blaming Grandfather for burning down his own store. On a happier note, she declared that the Captain was convinced that, if we were forbidden to land in Cuba, we would be welcomed in America, which would work to our advantage by enabling us to jump the queue. Everyone agreed, apart from the Professor’s wife, who fretted about alerting the friends who were waiting for them in Havana.
‘You can send them another telegram,’ her husband said kindly.
‘What with?’ she asked. ‘I’ve spent the last of our shipboard marks.’
‘I can give you some,’ I said, adding that they were really my grandfather’s, in order to avoid any show of gratitude. The Banker, meanwhile, assured us that our fears were unwarranted. He had been able to elicit from the least impassive policeman that we would simply have to wait on board another two days until the end of Whitsun.
‘It’s understandable that they don’t want us landing in the middle of such an important religious festival.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It isn’t one they blame us for, like Easter.’
I shall skip over the endless rumour and speculation that gripped us for the rest of the day which, in time-honoured fashion, we filled with talk to give ourselves the illusion of control…. Nowhere have I felt the danger of losing your interest as acutely as here. Our progress, which I suspect has long been too slow for your spaceship tastes, now grinds to a halt. We lay at anchor, prey to every morbid anxiety, as I found for myself the following morning when I awoke to the sound of gunfire. Convinced that the Cubans were shooting at the ship, I ran next door to Luise and Sophie, cloaking my alarm in an offer of protection. While I was helping Sophie to lift Luise off the floor where she had curled up in a ball, my mother entered to assure us that there was nothing to fear. The harbour cannon were firing a salute to greet an American warship that had just sailed in. I was outraged by the difference in our welcomes.
I returned to my cabin, dressed and went down to breakfast, where I found my father deep in conversation with the Professor’s wife. As I took my place, he explained that he had been up for hours to escape his roommate’s snoring, a veiled reproach which I pretended not to grasp. She, meanwhile, informed us all that the Professor was currently meeting the director of the Jewish relief committee in Cuba, who had come aboard to help resolve the impasse. Although I joined in the general enthusiasm, I had little faith in the intervention of a fellow Jew. I was more encouraged by the seven passengers who had been allowed to disembark the previous afternoon, which showed that the process, however protracted, had begun. The Banker, bereft of his religious consolation, declared bluntly that four of them were Cubans and the other three held valid visas.
‘We hold valid visas,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen them myself.’
‘I think you’ll find that they’re landing permits,’ he replied.
‘Wh
at’s the difference?’ I asked.
‘The right signature and about a thousand metres of sea.’
The explanation was all too plausible. I longed for someone to blame, but the only candidate lay buried at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing more clearly revealed the effects of his incarceration than that, having spent a lifetime poring over contracts, he should have committed such an oversight. The future had never looked so bleak. I hurried out on deck, to find that the original flotilla of small craft had doubled in size, their occupants desperately shouting up messages to their relatives on the St Louis. Two of the most enterprising had secured loud-hailers, so intent on making themselves heard that they didn’t care how widely their intimacies were shared. Meanwhile, Sendel sauntered up to me as if we were conspirators meeting in a city square. My customary unease in his presence was increased by the feeling that he relished the universal despair. While he likened the scene to prisoners talking through a fence, it put me in mind of a medieval Judgement Day although, out of consideration for his delusion, I kept the comparison to myself. We stepped aside to allow the woman who looked after Luise’s two friends to bring them to the rail, where she pointed out their father holding up a placard scribbled with their names. When both girls declared themselves unable to see him, she lifted the younger one up, only to be shoved back by a policeman, who seemed to suspect her of planning to throw the child into the waiting arms below. A second attempt at identification, where she crouched at the girls’ level and pointed out their father through the grille, met with no greater success, until the older one claimed to have spotted him, echoing my own childhood subterfuge when I had peered through my father’s telescope and pretended to see Mars.
Escaping the crush, I ran into Johanna, standing with her mother who was scouring the boats for the familiar face. ‘How can you hope to recognise him?’ Johanna asked. ‘You haven’t seen him for fourteen years.’ Instead of replying, Christina shot me a glance which revealed a long history of clandestine meetings, but it was not her betrayal that alarmed me so much as my own, since I knew that, in order to spare Johanna pain, I would be forced into a compromising complicity. I suggested that he might be holding up a placard, like the father of the two little girls, at which Johanna shuddered, making me realise how difficult she found the meeting, even without the attendant brouhaha. She insisted that, if her father were the distinguished figure of her mother’s account (the accuracy of which she clearly doubted), he would never allow himself to be part of such a scrum nor, for that matter, would his wife. Christina, blushing at this public airing of her private life, reminded her of the wife’s postscript to her husband’s invitation in which she assured them that she bore no ill will. She then appealed to me for support.
‘It’s no use asking Karl,’ Johanna said. ‘You might as well ask Hitler to learn Hebrew. Karl’s totally unforgiving. An eye for an eye and all that.’ I wanted to tell her that I was no longer so doctrinaire, but I was afraid that she might think me fickle. In any case, her mother jumped in, reminding her of the Commandment to honour your father and mother.
‘How can I honour him?’ Johanna asked. ‘I’ve never even met him.’
‘Think of everything he’s doing for you. He didn’t have to send for us … you: it was you he wanted, not me. He could have turned his back on what was happening in Germany. He could have rebuilt his life with his family here in Havana. But no, he told them the truth. He risked appearing as guilty in their eyes as in yours.’ ‘Fine! I’m being unreasonable. He’s the one who’s suffered.’
‘That’s not what I –’
‘If only we could leave the ship and get it over with. It’s all this hanging about I can’t stand.’
I was tormented by the thought that she was the one person on board who was more afraid of what would happen when we were allowed to land than if we were forced to set sail. As a distraction, I invited her for a cocktail, reluctantly extending the invitation to her mother, who shamed me by her effusion of gratitude. My indifference to using up my shipboard marks had at least ensured that the delay would not leave me destitute. The air of despondency that clung to the ship seeped into our every exchange. Johanna insisted that the drink, which I found indistinguishable from its predecessors, had been watered down as a sign of the crew’s now open contempt. She pushed it away, at which Christina alternately chided her and apologised to me, thereby doubling my embarrassment.
Making an excuse that at once amused Johanna and appeased her mother, I returned to my cabin, to be confronted by chaos. Both my own and my grandfather’s cases had been prised open, their contents strewn about the room. We had clearly been robbed, which, in line with the prevailing prejudice, I blamed on the Cuban policemen. After a desultory attempt to match up a pair of cuff-links, I made my way to my mother’s cabin, where a similar sight awaited me, although the delicacy of the scattered garments made the violation seem even more cruel. The thieves, moreover, had ransacked my mother’s paintbox and left a bestial pile of ochre in the centre of the floor. I scooped it up in a rag and, taking the symbol for the reality, flushed it down the lavatory. I returned to the bedroom to find Sophie, who informed me that we had not been robbed but subjected to a thorough search along with the rest of the ship. It was then that I noticed the Shirley Temple doll hanging limply in her hand. One of a batch that my grandfather had imported from America, it rapidly became Luise’s prize possession, surviving even her most intemperate rages, only to have its neck broken by a clumsy – or callous – customs officer. Far more than all the human misery, it alerted me to the gravity of our plight.
I determined to right the wrong done to my sister, refusing to settle for clearing up the mess like the men and women forced to scrub the streets with their toothbrushes after Kristallnacht. I was a bona fide passenger and, for all that we remained on German soil, I felt sure that there must be some maritime law that afforded me protection. I resolved to put my case before the Captain and pushed my way defiantly past the No Entry sign into the crew area. Once there, I was plunged into confusion. On my previous visit, I had been guided by a steward; now, faced with the stark corridor and unmarked doors, I had no way of knowing if I were even on the correct deck. Trusting to chance, I descended a clanging stairway into an atmosphere so foetid that I could barely breathe. A sickly-sour smell, more elephant house than changing room, was a sign that I had moved from the officers’ quarters to the men’s. I made to retreat, only to be checked by a mocking cry of ‘We have a visitor!’ from one of the Gestapo firemen. True to form, they hunted in packs and, as I hovered uneasily on the steps, I was confronted by their leader, who ambled back and forth, snapping his fingers in my face. Feigning confidence, I elected to stand my ground.
‘So what’s a good little boy like you doing creeping around like a spy?’ Schiendick asked.
‘I’m not a little boy,’ I said, praying that my voice would back me up.
‘No, I can see that,’ he replied with a grin, ‘you’ve brought your dolly.’ He grabbed it from my hand.
‘Give me that,’ I shouted and tried to pull it back, but he dangled it just out of my reach.
‘Naughty, naughty!’ he replied. ‘Hasn’t your mother ever told you that it’s rude to snatch?’
‘I’ll report you,’ I said, finding myself back in a classroom of Jew-baiting schoolboys.
‘Oh, I’m so frightened,’ he said, with pantomime shudders.
Assuming an air of authority, I explained that I was on my way to the Captain to complain about the ransacking of our rooms. Their derisive hoots revealed that they and not the customs officers were the culprits. Schiendick leapt up beside me on the precariously narrow step. He thrust his face into mine and I felt a gust of disconcertingly sugary breath. Laying an equal emphasis on every word, right down to the ‘and’s and ‘or’s, he informed me that he and his fellows had conducted a search for any firearms or explosives that might have been smuggled aboard. Given the current tension, they couldn’t leave the crew
exposed to an attack by anarchists and subversives.
His description of my fellow passengers was so patently absurd that I found it hard to conceal my contempt. Even so, I insisted that my objection was not to the search itself but to the manner in which it had been carried out. ‘Do you really think that my mother hid bullets in her paint-tubes or my sister had sticks of dynamite sewn into her doll?’
‘Why not? You Jews are masters of deceit.’
His logic was on a level with Luise’s. So, making a last-minute switch of article, I asked him to give me back the doll and direct me to the Captain. His smile thinned, and he told me that I was much mistaken if I thought that that Jew-lover enjoyed the ultimate jurisdiction on the ship. It was he, Schiendick, who spoke for the Party. ‘Schröder may have Hamburg behind him, but I have Berlin.’
I turned to go, but he jumped two steps to block my path. I panicked as he also claimed the right to search suspicious passengers, a category in which he now placed me, flinging me down the stairs into the arms of his companions. Mocking my cries for help, they spun me around like a top. Then someone suggested upending me to see what was hidden in my clothes. Gagging my protests, they grabbed me, flipped me over and shook me by the legs. To my lasting discredit, I was concerned less about any damage they might inflict than that I would shame myself by being sick. They jiggled me up and down like a pestle, driving my head ever closer to the ground. Then, just when a collision appeared inevitable, a voice at the top of the stairs ordered them to stop. They dropped me unceremoniously to the floor, from where I looked up to see Helmut. Defying Schiendick’s warning not to interfere, he denounced them all as bullies and cowards and threatened to have them sent off the ship in Havana. His righteous anger cowed them into submission, and he swept them aside to pick up the doll (now Marie Antoinette rather than Shirley Temple), as well as the wallet and penknife that had fallen from my pockets. He handed them all to me, along with instructions to return straight to the passenger decks. I scurried up the stairs in a welter of emotions. Gratitude for my rescue mixed with humiliation at my helplessness. I was mortified that, like some weakling in a Western, I had had to be saved by the sheriff.
A Sea Change Page 19