by Maisie Mosco
“Perhaps,” said the lad, “that is what, in addition to its functions, the Berlin Centre is. A testament to a new beginning I wish that my parents had not made!”
“You speak very good English,” Marianne remarked while he simmered down.
An untoward warmth then lit his expression. “But it is Hebrew that I wish for my language and before too long I hope never again to speak what is unfortunately my mother tongue. I have been accepted to study the Torah at a seminary in Israel and there I shall remain.”
They had paused on the corner before parting and Marianne noted the boy’s uncovered head. “In the Centre you were wearing a yarmulke –”
“And you are wondering perhaps why now I am not? I could not be more orthodox. I am also forgetful. Today I was late to see my dentist and in the hurry I forgot to put on my hat –”
“Please don’t bother explaining to us,” Marianne said with a smile, “I ought not to have passed the remark I did.”
He went on nevertheless, his horn-rimmed glasses enhancing his earnest expression. “I am never without a yarmulke in my pocket, but to walk in the streets of Berlin wearing a skull cap I could not bring myself to do.”
“What do you suppose would happen to you if you did?” Laura asked.
“I am not afraid, please do not think that. In some districts it is not impossible that I might be abused, with words or fists, but it is not that.” He paused as if carefully considering. “It is just that in Germany we do not draw attention to ourselves.”
He shook hands with them and departed.
“I wouldn’t like to live with the implication of that,” said Jake as they joined the throng enjoying the spring sunshine on Kurfürstendamm.
“It could be all in his mind,” said Laura.
“Exactly,” said Marianne, “but what we live with in our minds is liable to be damaging. And if that lad is an example of his generation of German Jews I’m sorry for the lot of them and not surprised he’s escaping to where he can be himself.”
A contemplative silence followed, and Marianne was briefly assailed by a sense of isolation amid the bustle. Aware of the pedestrians, young and old, going about their daily business, the traffic and its accompanying sounds, all about her the vibrance she had expected of Berlin and a brashness she had not expected. She was here for just a few days. Did the Jewish Berliners and those elsewhere in Germany live day in, day out, with the feeling the boy had put into words? Keeping it locked inside themselves?
“What’s the betting,” said Jake, “that there’s no middle ground in the younger generation’s attitude? That they either decide to make their escape, like that youngster has, or try to forget they’re Jewish and live accordingly.”
“That last bit would be history repeating itself,” Laura replied, “and if that was how Karin came to marry out, I’d say there’s a lesson in it.”
“But what I suggest we do now, girls,” said Jake, “is stop looking for significances and try to enjoy ourselves. It isn’t like my wife to walk by store windows without pausing,” he joked to Marianne.
“I was about to do so, love.” Laura steered Marianne towards a display of elegant fashions. “Could this be where Karin gets her marvellous suits from?”
Marianne glanced towards a section of the Kurfürstendamm reminiscent of Oxford Street. “Well, she doesn’t get them from off those rails!”
“Nor will Howard, now he’s in her father’s business,” said Jake.
“You may not have noticed it, but Howard’s suits are tailor-made,” Laura rebuked him.
“I was speaking figuratively, my sweet. Howard’s lifestyle has changed in more ways than one.”
Laura said as they strolled on, “He told me he got a shock the first time he came to Berlin and realized quite what a wealthy family he was marrying into, that Karin is what the tabloids would call an heiress. Do you think she deliberately kept that from him, Marianne?”
“I shouldn’t think money entered either of their heads.”
“And Karin,” said Jake, “doesn’t wear her bank balance on her sleeve.”
“Any more than you do, love,” said Laura. “I too got a shock when I learned what yours was!” she added with a smile. “But it isn’t just money we’re talking about. Like you said about Howard, it’s lifestyle and we don’t live like the landed gentry, some of whom you could buy and sell. I understand that Karin’s family do.”
They halted at the Café Kranzler, situated on a busy corner, the pastries they coveted well in evidence on the plates of those seated at the outside tables.
While casting his eye in search of an unoccupied one, Jake said, “If I were Howard, the day after I became a family man again I’d apply for Ben’s custody. I can’t wait to meet that kid, by now he’s like an off-stage character to me.”
“And as every playwright knows,” said Marianne dryly, “a character never seen on stage is often responsible for much of the action.”
“Lest that was too subtle for my husband,” said Laura, “what Marianne means is that were it not for Ben, none of us, including Howard, would now be in Germany. Howard wouldn’t have met Karin, would he? But don’t you go suggesting to him what you just mentioned, Jake. It has to be his and Karin’s decision.”
Marianne laughed. “If she’d lived long enough, it might have been Sarah Sandberg’s carefully contrived decision! And I doubt that she’d have seen fit to take a child from its mother. Shall we see if there’s a free table inside, instead of standing watching others guzzle?”
“Inside there won’t be the same atmosphere,” Jake opined, leading the way.
He could not have been more right.
After mounting a spiralling wrought iron stairway, its appearance a freshly painted white, it was as though they had been transported backward in time to the thirties. The waitresses, deferential and clad in brown, their organdie aprons and caps a discreet beige, seemed as if preserved from that era, as did the aged clientele.
After they had ordered coffee and chosen their pastries, Laura voiced their mutual impression. “I wish I had my camera with me. This has to be a slice of pre-war Berlin set in amber.”
“And there’s something about it that’s giving me the creeps,” said Marianne.
“Since you mention it, me too.”
“But we mustn’t let it put us off our nosh,” said Jake.
There was in the genteel atmosphere, enhanced by the women without exception wearing hats and the equally formal attire of the men, a sense of time for them having stood still, though they themselves had grown old, thought Marianne.
Since one thought leads to another, she found herself thinking, This is the generation that let Hitler do what he did, who got on with their own lives while people like Karin’s parents were dragged from their homes and dispatched in freight trains like animals to the slaughter, to the camps where death was the fate of the majority.
Fifty years later, here this lot were, smiling and chatting as if their consciences were clear. Did they ever let themselves remember that what was once a sizeable Jewish population was largely gone to dust at their nation’s hand?
The coffee and pastries were brought to the table, but Marianne continued musing. Laura and Jake too had fallen silent. Matters more pressing than the past would not fail to make their mark upon Howard, she thought, watching Jake heap sugar into his cup and recalling her own horror when she had read in The Times – or was it in the Guardian? – about a board game called Dachau being on sale here. That the heinous history of that concentration camp was serving as a cosy family entertainment in some German homes.
Eventually, it was withdrawn from the market, and no doubt on government orders. Successive German governments had since the war fallen over backwards to ensure that their country was seen to be trying to make amends for the unamendable.
But there are times, thought Marianne, when that seems no more than a cosmetic exercise. How could it not when the pus kept seeping from a still festering boil?
An analogy not conducive to enjoying the custard in the mille-feuille on her plate. Nor was it just her unfortunate choice of imagery that caused her to put down her fork. She had had her fill of what the senior citizens blithely feeding their faces represented for her.
“Whenever you two are ready, I’ll be happy to leave,” she said to Laura and Jake.
“And there’s no need to say why,” Laura replied.
That evening the three were transported in style to Karin’s home. Her father had sent his Rolls to fetch them, the chauffeur’s uniform a matching shade of grey.
The house and grounds too lived up to their expectations. What the estate agents back home could genuinely describe as designed for gracious living, thought Marianne as the car glided along a broad, curving drive bordered by tall trees and halted outside a mansion reminiscent of the country hotels in which she and Ralph had sometimes spent weekends.
The white-haired couple who greeted them did not have the aura of nouveau riche, which Marianne had half expected. There was something about Walter and Lili Schulmann that told you the lifestyle they enjoyed now was that from which events had horrendously removed them.
Though both were survivors of the camps, the experiences neither would forget had left no outward mark upon them, Marianne observed while sipping a glass of excellent dry sherry and participating in the pre-dinner conversation in a tastefully furnished drawing-room, its colour scheme muted gold and pastel blue, and a vast Chinese carpet underfoot.
She was conjecturing how many years it must have taken to weave the carpet when she heard Ben say doubtfully to Howard, “Is the lady in the red dress really my great-aunt, Daddy? I didn’t know I had an English one.” Ben then glanced at Laura and Jake. “And are that lady and gentleman really my cousins?”
Howard laughed. “You can take my word for it, Ben. Though Jake is not your blood relative, he became related to you when he married Laura.”
A qualification that rendered the little boy the more bemused his expression denoted.
“You haven’t forgotten how to speak English like we do,” Marianne said to him with a smile. “I expected you to have a foreign accent.”
“Now I see more of my daddy I get more practice,” he replied, smiling up at Howard.
Marianne exchanged a glance with Laura. What more than that did Howard require to make his own uprooting from England worthwhile, and Karin was a bonus any man would value. She and Laura had hugged Ben when they arrived, such was their emotion.
For us it was a reunion with the kid we remember, Marianne thought. For him, though, we were strangers and he was entitled to back away from us.
Five years was a long time in a child’s life. But Ben was still the image of the great-grandfather dead before he was born. Marianne’s dad. On that account alone she would always feel drawn to him but given his set-up could not expect it to be reciprocal. He would never, like Bessie sometimes did, pop in to say hallo to Marianne on his way home from school.
Nor, though Howard and Karin were to set up home in Munich, would he live with them, Marianne wagered. Howard would not go back on his decision not to try to part him from his mother.
She watched Ben join Karin’s children on a sofa beside the hearth, where they were seated playing what looked like the German version of Scrabble. The mellow afternoon had preceded a chilly April evening and a log fire lent cheer to the room, casting its glow upon the three small faces bent over the board game.
Tomorrow, Ben would become a stepbrother to Magda and Rudy. Would the time come when he would resent their living with his father, while he did not? If so, it would be one more heartache for a child for whom life had never gone smoothly.
“Why not draw a family tree for Ben?” she suggested to Howard. “Then he’ll know where he is with our lot!”
All three children glanced up at her, their expressions puzzled.
“I should like please to know what type of tree is that,” said Rudy.
“Does our family in England have an orchard?” Ben asked Howard.
Magda, two years her brother’s elder and as fair as he was dark, then wanted to know if it was perhaps an apple orchard, or did the trees bear pears like the one in her grandparents’ kitchen garden.
The adults were unable to hide their amusement.
“They are laughing at my English,” Magda said to Rudy, “and it is unfair. I am only nine and do not speak it often.”
“But from now on you will,” said Howard, “and you’re doing very well. So is Rudy. It was what you and Ben said about the family tree that made us laugh.”
Karin smiled at the guests. “If you will please for a moment excuse me, I shall explain to the children in German what is a family tree.”
So intrigued were they, the board game was abandoned, and a questioning session began.
“When was our tree planted?” Ben asked Howard.
“Shall I begin with Sarah and Abraham stepping off the herring boat, Marianne?”
“Given all that’s happened since, I’d say that was far back enough.”
But not for Ben. “Who were Sarah and Abraham and where did they come from?”
“It was they who put down new roots,” Howard told him. “They were your great-great-grandparents, Ben, who left Russia in 1905.”
“But why did they travel on a smelly herring boat?”
“When people have to run for their lives, they’re not choosey about how they travel, son.”
“Why did they have to run for their lives?”
Howard’s brief resumé of how the Sandbergs had fled the pogroms, and his explanation of that word, had a sobering effect upon the children and a moment of silence followed.
“But our name is not Sandberg,” said Ben. “Did what you told us also happen to the Klein family?”
Howard shook his head. “They came from Vienna.”
“Because of Hitler?” Rudy inquired.
“Long before anyone knew there’d one day be a Hitler,” Howard replied, “when the worst that was then happening to Viennese Jews was getting their windows broken, that sort of thing.”
“Jewish people have too often had to run for their lives, and it is unfair,” said Magda.
Her grandfather, on his face a reminiscent expression, emitted a long sigh. “We have learned not to expect what is fair, Liebchen.”
“But the time when we had to accept that was our lot is over,” said Marianne.
“A sentiment now being forcibly expressed by the black South Africans,” Jake put in. “I’d prefer the force not to be necessary, but more strength to their elbow is how I feel.”
“How could you not?” said Laura, toying with the jade necklace that matched her pleated silk dress. “You’re one of the other scapegoat race, aren’t you? But the worst of it for us is now, we hope, in the past.”
“Hope isn’t enough,” Marianne declared, “and certainly not with what has again begun happening. Austria is an alarming example, and I’m reminded by what Howard told Ben about our Viennese forebears that they were wise to make their exit while the going was good.”
“What are forebears?” Ben wanted to know.
“The people from whom we’re descended,” she explained, adding to the adults, “It seems an impersonal way to describe one’s grandparents, but they died years before I was born.”
“I remember my English grandparents a little,” Ben said, “and I was sorry to hear that my grandfather had gone to heaven, even though my mother told me he will now have no pain.”
A moving moment for Howard and about to be the more so.
“He and my English grandmother were very kind,” Ben went on. “I once picked most of the flowers from a border in their garden to give to my mother. After I’d done it, I wished I could put them back and expected to be scolded.”
“They would certainly have scolded me,” said Howard.
“But they weren’t even angry, and I still got the sweets they’d promised I could take home
. When will you draw me the family tree?”
“You’ll have it before Karin, and I leave on our honeymoon.”
“You must now explain to us in German what is a honeymoon,” Magda said to Karin.
When the adult laughter had again subsided Karin replied, “I shall leave the three of you to learn what it means in due time.”
The butler then appeared with a second tray of canapés and Laura slapped Jake’s hand when he helped himself to four.
“I don’t get caviar and pâté de fois at home!” he said, giving Marianne a wink. “Do Sainsbury’s stock such delicacies?”
“If I thought Bessie would eat them, I’d find out.”
Laura’s expression had shadowed. Jake’s too. Your kids can cast a blight on your pleasure in their absence no less than they were liable to when you were with them, thought Marianne. Lucky for me in some ways that I only have one!
The private exchange between Laura and Jake had taken place while the sherry glasses were being refilled and a light-heartedness in keeping with this being the eve of a wedding replaced the sober conversation that had predominated, engendered by Frau Schulmann recounting an amusing incident when she last visited her Israeli grandchildren.
“It would be nice for me to have my brother and his family here,” Karin said when her mother had finished speaking, “but he was unable to get leave. His unit it is being kept increasingly busy on the West Bank.”
Karin was standing beside the fire and gazed unhappily at the leaping flames, her small figure in a flimsy cream dress seeming suddenly pathetic.
“My sister-in-law, she will not come to Germany,” she went on, “nor allow her children to do so. And Howard, he now has a problem with his sister –”
He went to put his arms around her. “We mustn’t let any of this spoil our wedding day, Karin.”
How could it fail to? thought Marianne, listening to another eloquent sigh from Herr Schulmann, a man of few words. The light-heartedness hadn’t lasted long, but such was Howard and Karin’s situation – Howard paying the price of his decision and Karin no doubt blaming herself for the rift between him and Kate. Whether or not he would have come to live in Germany solely on Ben’s account was now purely academic. The die was cast.