Out of the Ashes

by Maisie Mosco

  The games had caused a public outcry heartening to Howard, but the authorities had failed to find out who the programmers were. As for the content – a “Hitler lives’ theme summed it up, with all that implied, calculated to turn the erstwhile Führer from the monster he was into a national hero and the Jews again into scapegoats.

  “Like me to have a word with your headmaster?” he asked Ben.

  “No thanks, Daddy. That wouldn’t do me any good with the other boys.”

  “Whatever you think best. But remember that you’re not fighting your battles alone. I’m supporting you.”

  “Now I’ve told you, I feel better. Can I change my mind and have some Apfelkuchen and ice-cream?”

  Howard got him a large helping of both.

  “I used to like Uncle Ernst, but I don’t anymore,” Ben said while eating his dessert.

  But it would be some years before he saw the old man and others of his ilk for the truth twisting self-deceivers they were. By then most would have gone to their graves and still saying, “Heil Hitler!”

  Meanwhile it was more than possible that some were putting their money where their mouths were, financing those “Hitler lives” computer games. Who was it who said that the evil men do lives on? Probably Shakespeare. And there were those in Germany, as elsewhere, trying to ensure that it did.

  When a few days later Hess’s death in Spandau prison was revealed to have been suicide, Howard could have had no more chilling a confirmation of his fears. Neo-Nazis from far and wide, young and old, had begun crawling out of the woodwork to pay homage alongside their German counterparts to the “martyr” of their creed.

  Chapter 6

  Nathan had not been to London since his great-grandson’s Brith, and Carla had asked Laura to let her meet his train, a rare opportunity for her to have her grandfather to herself.

  She watched him slowly make his way up the steep incline to the ticket barrier at Euston Station, where she was waiting with David, now a toddler, in her arms.

  “That lad is some weight for you to carry!” Nathan joked after they had greeted each other and were walking to where Carla had parked her car.

  “Talking of weight, why don’t you carry David and I’ll take your suitcase, Grandpa –”

  “That would be no hardship for me,” he said. “How often do I get to hold him?”

  When they had swapped loads, Carla said lightly, “Do doctors ever get themselves checked up?”

  “When this one last did he was told he had angina, which he already knew. But nobody needs to worry about him. His little pills for an emergency are always in his pocket. So what’s new with you, Carla? Is Alan still set on going where Reform rabbis aren’t recognized? Why, after all his years of studying, would he want to go and bang his head on a brick wall?”

  “I’ll let him tell you himself.”

  “He doesn’t have to, it was a rhetorical question. A challenge was always what that boy relished.”

  “There’s more to it than that, Grandpa. Many Israelis now want to live the Reform Judaism way. What I’m saying is that Alan feels called to go where he is needed. Some Reform rabbis already there have more than one congregation apiece to cope with, though they don’t yet have synagogue buildings. One day they will be recognized –”

  “I hope you’re right. But with the ultra-orthodox ruling the roost in Israel, it will take a lot more people standing up for their rights than seem to be doing so now.”

  Carla gave him a smile. “You were the Reform pioneer in our family, weren’t you?”

  “And oh, the wrath it brought on my head! Marianne was the first to follow in my footsteps and we were made to feel like partners in crime, I recall.”

  “Some of the things I’ve heard about Marianne when she was young imply that she was what you might call before her time.”

  Nathan laughed. “Independent was always the word for her.”

  But it’s my uncomplicated granddaughter who’s ended up a Reform rebbetzin, he reflected, eyeing Carla affectionately as she put David into his car seat and buckled the belt.

  Nathan had heard she was making a good job of her congregational duties. She was the sort to whom it came naturally to lend herself to what her choice of husband requires of her.

  An old-fashioned girl and there weren’t too many of them around. Sensible too, and this was Nathan’s opportunity to get her impression of what was going on at Laura’s.

  “When did what’s happened to Bessie begin?” he asked her.

  “The dieting? Or what Alan and I think it’s all about?”

  “You’ve discussed it between you, have you?”

  “Everything concerning everyone gets discussed in our family, Grandpa.”

  “It always did,” he said dryly, “and often behind the person concerned’s back! Whenever my ears burned I knew why, and now it’s Laura’s turn again, which it hasn’t been since her marriage. It once occurred to me that a family is a web of intrigue.” And at the time Nathan had viewed Sarah as the mother spider enmeshing those over whom she ruled.

  When had he had that thought? On a train. On the way back from London after lending himself to Marianne’s marrying out – secretly marrying out and he the sole family representative at her wedding. What was that, he reflected in retrospect, but my showing them I wouldn’t let them do to her what they’d done to me? Something I didn’t then have the guts to express in words.

  “But in addition to yours, Marianne’s is the opinion we all value,” Carla went on.

  And given the past, what a joke that was.

  “Marianne doesn’t know if she’s coming or going at the moment,” Carla told him, “what with one thing and another I don’t know when she finds time to work. Or to see the boyfriend none of us has met.”

  Once the family met him, Marianne’s private life would be private no more and Nathan didn’t blame her for keeping it so as long as she could.

  “You still haven’t answered my question about Bessie,” he said to Carla.

  “I can’t tell you anything definite, Grandpa. But Alan and I do have our theories.”

  Carla halted in a line of vehicles held up at the traffic lights on Golders Green Road. “Sorry to bring you this round-about route to Laura’s, but she asked me to pick up some pickled brisket from Bloom’s.”

  “Remembered I like it, has she?” A moving moment for a man growing too sentimental with age! Surprised to find himself taking the pride in his family he did.

  Nathan watched Carla toy with a lock of her hair, as she had as a child when immersed in thought. Around her neck was the silver watchchain that had once adorned the portly frontage of her paternal great-grandfather, Sigmund Moritz. She had worn it at her son’s Brith, as Marianne habitually wore Sarah’s brooch.

  Such were the mementoes people passed to their descendants, bric-à-brac of one kind or another meaningful to them in their own lifetime. Also the bits of themselves that Nature passed down. Abraham Sandberg’s colouring was still going strong in the family. And Nathan’s great-grandchild – well, nobody could say that David isn’t the image of me.

  “The London traffic is terrible!” said Carla after crawling to the lights in time for them to change to red yet again.

  “That I can see for myself, love, but it doesn’t help me to get a preview from you about Bessie. Your telling me whatever you know could help with the detective work I’m here to do –”

  “It isn’t what I know, Grandpa, it’s how things seem to me – that Laura just got married to Jake and took it for granted that they and their kids would then live happily ever after. But family life isn’t like that, is it? Everyone under the roof is an individual with their own needs and their own thoughts. And I’m sorry for Laura now her bubble has burst.”

  Bessie’s first words to Nathan after greeting him were, “If you’ve come to stop me from dieting, I’m not going to.”

  Nathan began as he intended to continue. “I didn’t know you were on a diet, love. When
your mum and I chat on the phone we have more important things to discuss.”

  “Well it’s all anyone ever talks about around here.”

  Something would have to be done about that. Nathan changed the subject and followed Laura to the kitchen. “Taken any interesting photographs lately?”

  It was Bessie who replied. “My mummy is too busy worrying about me to take photographs and making cakes I won’t eat.”

  About that too.

  “We haven’t been away for a holiday this year,” Bessie told him while he and Laura were drinking the coffee percolated and awaiting his arrival.

  “It isn’t quite freshly made, Uncle,” Laura apologized. “I forgot about the detour I asked Carla to make.”

  “My mummy gets absent-minded because of me,” said Bessie.

  Did Laura know what a shrewd little monkey Bessie was? No, anxiety had blinded her.

  “And we didn’t go on holiday, Uncle Nat, because I have to keep seeing my analyst.”

  We’re living in times when the vocabulary once associated with Hollywood films issues naturally from the mouths of babes and sucklings, Nathan registered. And oh, the desperate lengths this child had gone to to prove her own importance. Why was it necessary for her to prove it? Not just to those around her, but to herself. Bessie’s emaciated appearance wasn’t the only pitiful aspect of her plight.

  Laura offered Nathan the biscuit barrel. “I know you like shortbread. Don’t be shy!”

  “Don’t bother asking me to have one, Mummy.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  Bessie looked taken aback and left the room.

  A silence followed her departure, then Laura mustered a smile. “It’s good to have you here, Uncle Nat.”

  “But you are going to have to change your tactics.”

  “I got the message! Didn’t you notice? But it’s going to take more than that, I’m afraid.”

  Laura then relayed to Nathan the psychoanalyst’s shattering pronouncement.

  His response was delivered with asperity. “How much did it cost you to find out that insecurity is responsible? This isn’t the first time I’ve had cause to think myself in the wrong field of medicine!”

  “If you get Bessie right, I shall think you a miracle worker, and Jake that you’re a witch doctor,” said Laura.

  Chapter 7

  Though for some Aids victims the disease is slow in tightening its grip, Matthew was less fortunate. He had, too, turned a blind eye to the symptoms and was now paying the extra price of his own procrastination.

  The truth was that Pete’s infidelity, not his, was responsible. But that knowledge was theirs alone. Matthew would not have it added to his father’s hatred of Pete, who would gladly have swapped places to make amends.

  Meanwhile Matthew’s worsening condition continued to hover over the family like an ominous cloud. He had several times been hospitalized, and Pete had abandoned his own career to be with him when such crises arose and take care of him when he was discharged.

  Driving home after visiting Matthew, Marianne reflected that love had many faces. Pete was now displaying one of them. But perhaps the only all-enduring and selfless love was that of a mother for her child. Lyn rarely left Matthew’s side.

  Arnold, though, had picked himself up and gone on being Sir Arnold Klein, MP, saved from the disgrace he had feared by the press not having done their worst. Given that Matthew was a well-known actor, and the ferrets employed by the tabloids, Arnold must somehow have managed to pull the right strings.

  If my brother hadn’t had his public life, he would now be in pieces, thought Marianne. What but his parliamentary obligations had helped him put himself back together, and that wasn’t just due to his being the man he was. It was the difference between a mother and a father. Lyn’s impetus was solely her son’s need.

  But unless he was out of London, a day never passed without Arnold’s dropping in to see Matthew. They were playing a hand of gin rummy together when Marianne left that evening, and Arnold had accepted Pete’s invitation to stay for dinner, evidently no longer scared of catching Aids from the crockery and cutlery, and that was something!

  Marianne negotiated a bend in the road and instructed herself to stop being unkind to her brother. People couldn’t help being how they were. And Arnold, like Lyn, had to be putting up a brave front, silently screaming with pain behind the smiling façade, watching Matthew slip away and powerless to halt the slide.

  One day there might be a cure for the deadly disease, but it would come too late for Matthew. This bleak, English summer, if summer it could be called, matched Marianne’s feelings as she slowed her car in yet another deluge of rain, in the traffic jam on Hampstead High Street.

  She had lost count of time since the night she learned that her nephew was doomed, and Simon’s proprietary words, even though lightly spoken, had rung that warning bell in her mind. It hadn’t stopped their affair from blossoming, though, for such in the full sense of the word it now was.

  And my life the more complicated because of it, she thought. There are now three compartments instead of two. Work, family, and Simon.

  Compartments? Well, I’m certainly keeping Simon in one. Trying to avoid his meeting even Laura. Perhaps because he’s something I’ve never had: a haven I can escape to, she let herself accept while garaging the car.

  She had put the kettle on to boil and was in her bedroom changing into a comfortable housecoat when the doorbell rang.

  That couldn’t be Simon; he was in New York. And A.P. had a key.

  “Martin! What a lovely surprise.”

  “You might not think so when you hear what I’ve come to tell you.”

  More trouble. Marianne watched him hang up his raincoat. “I know you only live round the corner, but in weather like this I would’ve expected you to drive here –”

  “I felt like a walk and the hell with getting wet. A.P. isn’t here, is he?”

  “He doesn’t drop in as often as he used to.”

  “Well, he’s reached the age of discretion, if only in some respects. That has to account for it.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Come off it, Mum! He knows his gran’s got a boyfriend and far be it from him to play gooseberry.”

  Marianne led the way to the kitchen, so Martin would not see her blushing.

  “In case you think I mind, I don’t,” he told her.

  “That’s very big of you!”

  “Isn’t it time I met the guy?”

  “You’re my son, not my father!”

  “You think I do mind, don’t you?”

  Martin watched Marianne get a couple of mugs from the dresser and pop a teabag into each of them. “Look, Mum –”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about this, but since we’re on the subject, let me tell you what you once told me. All I want is for you to be happy. Having said that, well, your life is your own.”

  Marianne was lifting the kettle and put it down again. “Since when, Martin?”

  He eyed her silently while she resumed making the tea. “You’re right. In many ways it never has been. And I suppose that makes what you’ve nevertheless achieved the more remarkable.”

  “But I, Martin, have never seen myself in that light. I just do what I have to do and somehow get through it. How I do sometimes see myself is as an expert juggler!”

  “And about your boyfriend, I’d be lying if I said the idea of my mother having one didn’t amuse me in one way and sadden me in another.”

  Marianne brought the tea to the table. “Believe it or not I am able to understand that. If my mother had remarried, I’m sure I should have had mixed feelings. As for your amusement, at your age I also thought people of my parents’ age were over the hill –”

  “You, Mum, are never going to be over the hill. You can still run circles around the lot of us.”

  “But I sometimes wish I didn’t have to. And when I said over the hill,
I was referring to the relationships young people think their elders are no longer interested in, or capable of.”

  Martin surveyed his mother, still an attractive woman, her dark eyes glowing – and not just her eyes. There was about her a new radiance. He’d been too immersed in his own misery to notice that the air of resignation she had worn with a smile since his father’s death, as if the aspect of life she had just described was over for her, was gone.

  “You’re in love with Simon Newman, aren’t you? It isn’t just an affair.”

  “We care a great deal for each other, Martin.”

  “Matthew told me he’s a nice guy.” Martin gave her a cheeky grin. “So when’s the wedding? And who’s going to give you away? Me? Andy wouldn’t expect me to welch on that commitment, to fly to LA for a meeting that comes to nothing.”

  “You’re letting your imagination carry you away! Marriage hasn’t been mentioned and if it were I don’t know what my answer would be. Drink your tea and tell me why you’re here.”

  “To let you know that my marriage is over.”

  Martin’s tone was as final as his words and Marianne, distressed though she was, knew she must accept the inevitable.

  “Psychoanalysis is helping Moira sort herself out,” Martin revealed, “and I hope for her sake she’ll end up a normal person again – if there is such a thing! She’s now able to talk to me about her obsession. The root of it, Mum, is a guilt problem about marrying out.”

  “Did her analyst say so?”

  “They never do, you’re not better until you see for yourself what’s wrong with you.”

  “Bessie’s analyst told Laura his findings –”

  “And I heard on the family grapevine what they are. In the case of a child he’d require the parents’ co-operation in the healing process, wouldn’t he? But he wouldn’t have told Bessie even if she were old enough to understand.”

  Martin paused reflectively and drank some tea. “I find it remarkable that my lad seems unaffected by the insecurity he’s lived with for most of his life. It doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s Bessie, one of a happy family. A.P. on the other hand –”