The next day, the fifth since our arrival in Havana, the temperature hit the hundreds even before breakfast. The air was humid and heavy. Well-wishers maintained their shipside vigil, but neither their messages of support nor their gifts, passed up to us by the policemen, brought comfort. The policemen’s very amiability aroused our suspicions. With one hand poised over their holsters they prevented our leaving the ship while, with the other, they delivered presents and purchases and played games with the children. Luise came to lunch wearing a policeman’s cap, which my mother’s fiercest protests could not induce her to remove.
In spite of police concern, the children were bearing up well, even relishing the adventure, although the sight of captive Jewish boys throwing coins for their Cuban counterparts to retrieve from the seabed was deeply disturbing. It was the adults, among whom without qualm or qualification I now included myself, who were hit hardest by our confinement. With not even Frau Loewe permitted to enter Havana, we made our visits ashore vicariously. In our family’s case, they were through Helmut, who returned from an afternoon’s leave to relate how the esplanade had been turned into a vast fairground, where musicians, acrobats and animal trainers entertained the crowds who had come to gape at the ship. ‘They’ll make money out of us one way or another,’ I said, holding the Cubans in a contempt which, to the dismay of my English friends, has persisted to this day. Helmut himself, who was less and less hopeful of our chances of docking in Havana (or, he implied, in any friendly port), was determined to rescue Sophie. To which end he devised a plan, more practical if less camera-worthy than mine, whereby two Cuban stevedores would hoist her off the ship in an empty crate. When she dismissed the idea out of hand, he enlisted my help to persuade her. I admired his ingenuity but was alert to potential disaster, with either the crate dropping and Sophie plunging to her death or else its being stacked at the bottom of a pile, leaving her to a fate of slow suffocation. Helmut swore that the men were a hundred percent reliable (and well-bribed), but Sophie overruled us both, insisting that her misgivings were not to do with the escape but with her future life in Havana.
‘What am I supposed to do? Rent a room and wait for the St Louis’ yearly visit like some local goodtime girl?’ Pride at being treated as an equal partner in the discussion prevented my asking her to explain goodtime girl, a term as complex and confusing as joyboy. Although Helmut promised to join her in Havana the moment that his current tour of duty came to an end, Sophie remained unconvinced. ‘I’ve already turned my back on my real family. Must I do the same with my adopted one?’
‘You can’t spend your life taking care of everyone else,’ Helmut said. ‘It’s time to put yourself first.’
‘Oh believe me, I am.’
Infected by the prevailing gloom, I begged Sophie to accept Helmut’s offer, since it was vital that one of us at least should be saved.
‘You just want to get rid of me,’ she said, but her eyes told a different story. Helmut became increasingly agitated, fearing that the stevedores would steal his plan and sell it to someone else. So, against Sophie’s express wish, he appealed to my mother, who backed him up as vigorously as he had hoped.
‘You mustn’t make another mistake,’ she urged Sophie.
‘Is that what living with you has been?’
‘If we’re not allowed to disembark in Havana, we’ll head straight for America. You can join us there.’
The flaw in my mother’s argument, which must have been as obvious to Sophie as it was to me, was that, if she stressed how easy it would be for us to land in America, there seemed to be no reason for Sophie to go to such lengths to escape. On the other hand, if she stressed the danger of our returning to Europe, Sophie would refuse to abandon us. In the end, the argument proved to be academic, since the new surveillance methods in place on the ship, together with the random searches conducted on the quays, made the plan so risky that even Helmut was obliged to let it drop.
He protested that Sophie did not love him enough. Part of me – the old Berlin part – held her vacillation to be only natural, given the few weeks in which she had known him compared to the eight years in which she had known us. The other part – the part that had grown up on the St Louis – held that love made all such concerns irrelevant. When I was with Johanna, feelings which had been as fixed as points of the compass were subject to a new and more powerful magnetism. Sometimes its force was so strong that I seemed to have no being outside it, neither memory nor past, but I was happy since my one wish was to exist in the present, with her. The ruthlessness of my desire made me wonder what decision I would have made had I thought up an escape plan as effective as Helmut’s. Would I have placed my love for Johanna above that for my family? Would I have deserted Luise at a time of peril? Far from relishing my newfound freedom, I shrank from the burden of the choice.
As we spent our sixth day at anchor, I felt as though my brain had also come to a standstill. The endless delay combined with the merciless heat to plunge the ship into a state of torpor. I was as listless as a lizard. Even when Johanna and I kissed, it was more to maintain contact than to make love. We whiled away the time studying the small craft clinging to the hull like tick birds to a hippopotamus. Several contained film crews, anxious to find a new angle for both their cameras and reports, and yet, as they yelled out questions to every passing passenger, they returned with dismal regularity to the subject of Herr Loewe. The nine hundred people incarcerated on the ship were deemed to be of less consequence to cinema audiences around the world than the one who had jumped off. Johanna and I shared a rare moment of animation as we fabricated a story, featuring an anarchist who had planted a bomb on board and issued the Captain with a thirty-minute warning, and a middle-aged woman who had given birth to twins, Johanna vetoing quads on grounds of cruelty. Our plans were overtaken, however, by the arrival of a launch, whose lone occupant (I have no idea if he was an official, a journalist or a sympathiser) called out the news through a megaphone that negotiations between Hapag and the government had failed, and the St Louis been ordered out of Cuban waters.
All at once the ship was plunged into a silence of biblical proportions, which was followed with equal abruptness by a cacophony of cries, shrieks and wails. Passengers, desperate to assert themselves, plied each other with questions to which they knew that there was no answer. The Cuban policemen took refuge behind the language barrier, while our own officers professed to be as bewildered as we were ourselves. I refused to believe that the Captain, who had always treated us so fairly, would give up without a fight. As if in confirmation, Johanna spotted him, looking even smaller without his uniform, hurrying down the accommodation ladder and into a launch that spirited him across the harbour. Rumour, filling in for fact, held that he had secured an audience with the President or his wife or even the elusive General Batista. While the popular consensus was that his mission would fail, I felt an unshakeable confidence in his powers of persuasion. I remembered his kindness towards me on our first day at sea and his interest in ornithology. That, in turn, served to remind me that I was leaving Cuba without so much as a glimpse of a bee hummingbird, as though the entire voyage had been nothing more than a field trip. On the other hand, I worried that the Captain’s very decency might have put him in danger, leading him to jump ship rather than return to Hamburg to be branded a Jew-lover. Johanna, whose dismissal of my ‘fantasies’ was disturbingly close to my mother’s, insisted that he was simply giving the ravening journalists the slip.
In the early afternoon, my worst fears seemed to be realised when, with the Captain still ashore, the St Louis began to shudder. Without warning, the crew had started up the engines. The sound tore through the ship like a knife through canvas. The deck filled with passengers howling that we were being sent home. Johanna and I dashed to the prow, eager to escape the panic. We were standing alongside the accommodation ladder when a dozen or so women made a concerted attempt to storm it. Raising their fists and shouting that they would not be transported
like cattle, they marched on the startled policemen, who fled down the ladder. For a moment it seemed as though the assault would succeed and the policemen be forced into the sea or, at least, into their waiting launch, leaving the rest of us free to follow them into the many small boats moored nearby, but they regrouped with remarkable speed, pushing the women back up the ladder and stationing themselves at the top. Their hardened attitude became clear when one of the women tripped and they not only refused to help her up but aimed their guns at anyone who tried. As the women retreated screaming, the onlookers waited in horror for a massacre that we were powerless to prevent. The crack of a shot seemed to signal its onset, but Johanna quickly assured me that it had been fired in the air. The policemen’s intention was merely to unnerve us and, judging by the ensuing pandemonium, it had worked. No longer the honorary uncles who gave piggybacks to Luise and lost races to her friends, they wielded deadly weapons and were willing to use them. Meanwhile our own men, humiliated by the attack on their wives and daughters, shook their naked fists at the guns. The First Officer and several of the crew intervened with an appeal for calm, finding themselves once again caught up in a conflict over which they had no control.
An uneasy truce prevailed, with neither side giving ground. The deadlock was ended by the arrival of the Captain, who stepped out of his launch and climbed wearily back on the ship. He gazed in consternation at the scene that awaited him. After a brief word with the First Officer, he ordered the policemen to lower their guns. They could not – or would not – understand him, but his subsequent mime left no room for doubt. Satisfied with their surly compliance, he turned his attention to the passengers, insisting that we would do no good by remaining on deck and urging us to return inside. When somebody asked if we were about to set sail, he replied that the proper forum for such questions was the Passenger Committee, which he would shortly convene. Then staring straight ahead, as though to betray any doubt of our assent was to impugn his own authority, he made his way to the bridge. His strategy succeeded; the tension was defused and the crowd dispersed.
I crossed off the minutes until dinner, when we could expect to receive an account of the Committee’s deliberations. By the time we sat down, however, the Professor had yet to appear, and we were forced to endure his wife’s report of the afternoon’s events, which would have been more suited to a Sturm und Drang drama. I was particularly offended by her description of a woman ‘in an interesting condition’, as though I were a six year-old placing a sugar lump on the windowsill to greet the stork. So I asked her what was so interesting about throwing up in the morning and feeling hot and heavy for the rest of the day. I braced myself for a sharp rebuke from my mother but, instead, was rewarded by ill-concealed smiles from both her and my father and only the mildest tutting from Aunt Annette. The Professor’s wife, on the other hand, pushed away her plate as though my coarseness might induce her to a similar bout of nausea. Her husband’s arrival coincided with that of the fish. To my dismay, he was more intent on feeding his own hunger than ours, and I gave thanks, yet again, that I was not one of his students. Eventually, he put down his knife and fork long enough to inform us that the Captain had indeed gone to the presidential palace but had been refused admittance – I set aside my own concerns long enough to feel a surge of sympathy for a man whose status on the ship dwindled to nothing the moment he stepped ashore. Convinced that there was no further possibility of our disembarking in Cuba, he planned to sail at ten o’clock the next morning towards any port that would take us. Where that might be was unclear, but he remained confident of guidance from the Joint Distribution Committee in New York, which was working day and night on our behalf.
The Professor’s speech was met by a silence so unsettling that I filled it with the clatter of cutlery which, for once, didn’t seem to rattle peoples’ nerves. My mother, having barely mentioned my grandfather all week (‘out of respect for our feelings’ – Aunt Annette; ‘out of guilt about returning to Father’ – Karl), assured us that he would have secured our release with a single telegram to his American associates. My father, shamed by his own lack of influence, doubted that it would have had any effect since he had heard whispers that several former concentration camp inmates on board had sworn to kill anyone who was given preferential treatment. The Professor’s wife, more suspicious of my father than ever, accused him of talking nonsense. ‘No Jew would murder one of his own.’
‘A Jew committed the very first murder,’ I said, only to realise with a pang that the same Jew must be the source of my father’s information.
‘Not so,’ the Professor said. ‘Since he lived before Abraham, Cain can’t have been a Jew. In any case, he didn’t live. The Genesis story is a myth.’
‘A myth is even truer than history,’ I replied, appropriating my German teacher’s comment on Siegfried. ‘A story is the truth about one man; a myth is the truth about every man.’ Even as I spoke, I saw that I was blurring my own distinction between Sendel and Cain. My words cast a pall over the table and, in a bid to lift it, I offered to take bets that we would land in America by the end of the week, which only drew attention to the shortage of shipboard money. So I quickly asked the Banker how long it would take to travel from Florida to New York.
‘A lifetime,’ he replied, refusing to play the game.
After dinner, Johanna and I went out on deck to take our farewell of Havana, the ribbon of lights promising a warmth and a welcome that would never be ours. We barely spoke. I pondered the irony wherein a ship which had held out the promise of freedom had been turned into a prison, albeit one closer to the house arrest afforded some vanquished general than the forced labour endured by my grandfather and Sendel. My musings were interrupted by the arrival of a launch bringing a fresh contingent of Cuban officials. Johanna asked what I regretted most about their refusal to let us land, only to be taken aback by the bee hummingbird. In return, she cited the chance to visit the dance halls. I reminded her of the guide book’s warning that no lady was safe to go to one alone. ‘I didn’t want to go alone,’ she replied, ‘I wanted to go with you.’ Then to my amazement, not least in view of her reluctance to exchange so much as a kiss in public, she suggested that we dance together on deck. I thought with horror of my clog-like feet, which would be even more exposed without a musical accompaniment.
‘What will people say?’ I asked.
‘That’s the problem with being rich. You imagine people are talking about you all the time.’
‘I think it’s the problem with being Jewish,’ I replied, more confused than ever by her change of attitude.
‘I know! We’ll pretend we’re in a film. In films, lovers are always dancing to the music inside their heads. Is there no music inside your head?’ Her voice was so plaintive that I could not bear to disappoint her. ‘Now we just have to hope that we’re hearing the same beat.’ Fearful that she would view my clumsiness as a sign of a general ineptitude, I placed my right hand on her waist and my left hand in her right and, for the first time, felt more conscious of my own body than of hers. As we swayed to and fro (only the most cynical ballet teacher would call it a waltz), I was taken back to the children’s game where I had to transfer an orange from under my partner’s chin to my own. The memory relaxed me and I began to enjoy myself, even bowing to an elderly couple who might have been applauding their younger selves. The harmony, however, was shattered by the arrival of Christina who, without drawing breath, insisted that Johanna go straight down to the cabin since her father had come aboard.
‘All my personal things are laid out on the bed,’ Johanna replied, as if their exposure were the most threatening aspect of his presence. Grabbing her arm in a rare display of self-assertion, her mother insisted that there was no time to lose since the Purser had told her that he would only have half an hour on the ship.
‘Please come too,’ Joanna begged me. ‘You must!’ I was as reluctance to accede as Christina was to involve me. I was no longer her daughter’s eligible friend but
an intruder at a family reunion. I could not, however, ignore the appeal in Johanna’s eyes. To abandon her now would be less like refusing to dance with her than leaving her to walk down a street lined with stick-wielding Nazis. So I clasped her moist hand and accompanied her to the cabin. Along the way, she bombarded her mother with questions: ‘What does he look like? Does he look like me? Is he alone? What if I call the wrong man Father?’ I realised that, for all the pain of my father’s absence, I at least had had the balm of memory, whereas she had had only a wound. Christina did her best to reply, but Johanna paid little attention, showing that her greatest need was for the reassurance of her own voice.
The cabin door was ajar, which eased the transition. On entering, I drew back as befitted an outsider. I felt uneasy sharing Johanna’s first glimpse of her father, a man to whom, by rights, she should have been introducing me. Subjecting him to the scrutiny which was also a father’s prerogative, I saw a man of middle age and middle height, wearing a white suit (although his body was built for black), with a close-cropped beard, a pince-nez and a sinister gold-toothed smile.
‘You must be Johanna,’ he said to his daughter, who gazed hopelessly at her mother and me, as if to indicate the fatuity of the remark. ‘I’m overwhelmed,’ he added. ‘You don’t know how long I’ve waited to see you.’
A Sea Change Page 21