Out of the Ashes

by Maisie Mosco

Henry went to gaze through the window at the night-time suburban scene: the leaves of a laburnum, soon to be shed, lit by a street-lamp; a mellow glow suggesting cosiness within, behind the drawn curtains of the houses opposite; a couple strolling past, arm in arm.

  “Why didn’t you marry Julekha, Henry?”

  “Do I have to answer that question?”

  “Let me do so for you. Settling down is the last thing you want, isn’t it? The responsibilities that are the price of marriage. The aggro that children dole out along with the pleasure they bring.”

  He turned to look at her and Leona saw that his fresh complexion had paled. But it was time that someone gave it to him straight.

  “There’s only ever been one woman for me,” he said, “but by the time I realized I loved her she was my brother’s wife. I’ve spent my life staying away from you, Leona, lecturing for a pittance, in this country or that, burying myself in the political scene wherever – Heaven help the world, there is still no shortage of evils to fight – filling my time in the only way I know how. And kidding myself that I’d got over you.”

  Leona was thankful that she was sitting down. Oh dear God…

  “When Frank got that virus on the eve of Carla’s wedding, and I let him down after promising I would give Carla away,” Henry went on, “you no doubt thought me a callous bastard –”

  She had.

  “I got as far as the airport, but I couldn’t bring myself to fly to Manchester and stand beside you under the chuppah during the wedding ceremony. Stand in Frank’s place, when it’s where I yearned to be and still do. I had no intention of ever telling you this, Leona –”

  “And oh, how I wish you hadn’t,” she replied. “You see, Henry, life has played on you and me one of its little jokes. And somehow that makes how I’ve spent so many years despising you – and myself for wanting you – now the more painful to bear.”

  They looked at each other with the length of the room between them, in a silence fraught with a danger both recognized.

  It was Henry who broke it. “We are going to have to forget that this conversation took place.”

  “But we never shall,” Leona replied, “and in a way, what each of us now knows is comfort, if of the cold kind.”

  “If you were married to anyone but Frank –”

  “But we can’t do the dirty on your brother, can we? Nor on the loving husband Frank has been to me.”

  Chapter 10

  Henry’s young guests were not due in Paris until later in the month and were meanwhile shedding some of their preconceptions of Germany.

  Both A.P. and Jeremy had expected to experience the wariness and repugnance expressed by their elders. Instead, it was for them no different from arriving in any of the foreign countries they had visited on family holidays in the past.

  “There must be something wrong with me,” said A. P. as they stood beside a carousel at Munich Airport, their eyes glued to the luggage whizzing towards them. “According to my gran, my skin should have prickled when I stepped off the plane on to German soil.”

  “It wasn’t soil, it was tarmac, and you can shake hands with me,” said Jeremy.

  “I’m relieved to hear it. I thought it might be because I’m only half Jewish. I see my rucksack coming –” He grabbed it. “And there’s yours, Jeremy –”

  They walked from the luggage hall in thoughtful silence, overtaking a well-dressed woman with two bulging Harrods bags atop the suitcases on the trolley she was pushing. Ahead was a mother who had seated a small boy on her trolley, walking beside her an older boy carrying her duty-free goods.

  While absently observing those around him, A. P. was trying to make sense of Marianne’s personal reaction to arriving where he now was. His gran was a highly intelligent woman, not a hysteric like her cousin Shirley, who let off steam about everything and had said that nothing would persuade her to go to Berlin for Howard’s wedding.

  A. P. and Jeremy were present when Shirley had a row with Laura about her and Jake going. Laura had said she had overcome her feelings a few years ago when offered an assignment to take pictures in Berlin and would do so again for Howard’s sake.

  While they waited in the queue to show their passports, Jeremy said with a grin, “Didn’t you even get half of a skin-prickle?”

  “You were entitled to a whole one!”

  “And I’m asking myself now, what’s the big deal?”

  “I have to conclude,” said A. P., who at times displayed a ponderousness of speech Marianne attributed to his Kyverdale connection, “that it’s pointless to apply logic to how the older people in the family tick in this respect.”

  “Well,” said Jeremy, “feelings don’t spring from the mind, do they? But in this case they do have some factual basis. Could be that the difference between us and them is we weren’t around when the Nazis did what they did –”

  “Nor was Laura. She wasn’t born till after the war – well, not unless she’s older than she looks –”

  “She’s forty-two.”

  “As old as that? She looks about thirty,” A. P. opined.

  “I’ll tell her you said so! But I’ve met Jews no older than thirty who feel like Laura and my dad do about Germany.”

  “So did I, until today. You said that feelings don’t spring from the mind, Jeremy, but that isn’t necessarily so. There are some that can be all in the mind and we’re here to prove it.”

  “An important factor in what we’re discussing,” Jeremy replied with the assurance of his generation, “is that people of our age group are more open-minded than our elders ever were.”

  “Indubitably,” said A. P. “Another factor, if I may say so, is that our lot is farther removed from the events that made our elders’ blood run cold. In my view they’ll never get it out of their systems. In that I include Laura though she’d have been a babe in arms then, and the thirty-year-olds you mentioned are similarly afflicted. They’d still have been imbibing hatred of Germany and Germans with their mother’s milk, wouldn’t they?

  “And it isn’t only Jews who find all things German repulsive,” A. P. added. “My Grandma Kyverdale lost her brother in the war. Grandfather wanted to buy her a Mercedes for her sixtieth birthday, but she refused to have a German car.”

  Jeremy absently watched the little boy carrying a duty-free bag transfer it from one hand to the other, as they shuffled their way towards the officials in the booths.

  “What you just told me, A. P., sounds more like a matter of principle than of revulsion,” he said.

  “Whichever. I thought it was only our people that sort of thing went on with.”

  Jeremy said after a pause, “You feel Jewish though technically you’re not, don’t you?”

  “But believe it or not that doesn’t give me any problems.”

  “How could it not?”

  “That’s a question I used to ask myself, but I think I now know the answer.”

  Jeremy had to wait to hear it until they had shown their passports and proceeded through the barrier.

  “Once again we’re talking about feelings,” A. P. went on, “and my feeling Jewish has to have come from sharing in the traditions, and all that, of my dad’s family. My mum doesn’t have a big family. Christmas and Easter at the Kyverdales’ is a different experience from the noisy Chanukah parties and Seder nights I don’t have to describe to you.”

  A. P. smiled reminiscently. “To call the Kyverdale get-togethers sparse and formal would be an understatement. When we sit down for Christmas dinner – well, Grandfather would have to slide the condiments several metres to my grandmother at the other end of the table, if there weren’t also a salt and pepper set beside her place! Get the picture, Jeremy?”

  “But it doesn’t quite clarify what you’re saying.”

  “What I’m saying is that my Catholicism, though I’m a true believer, doesn’t permeate the whole of my life. Judaism, on the other hand, though it isn’t my religion, seems to have done so. I’ve tried to exp
lain to you how that’s happened, since it can’t, scientifically, be a case of one half of my blood – the ethnic half – being stronger than the other. Conditioning has to enter into it.”

  “It might have been a different story, though,” said Jeremy, “if your mother had come from an ordinary Catholic family.”

  “I’m absolutely sure it would have been,” A. P. replied. “I want to be a journalist, as you know, and lose no opportunity to gain experience. All grist to a writer’s mill, is what my Grandma Marianne calls it. Once, when she mentioned she was going to a wake when the father of a Catholic friend of hers had died, I persuaded her to take me along. Except for the whisky swigging, the atmosphere – all those aunts and uncles and cousins together in one big room, not to mention the friends – reminded me of some of our family gatherings. As you said, Jeremy, if my mum’s background had been ordinary, I’d probably be subjected to what you might call an inner tug-o’war that began in my childhood and wouldn’t let me alone for the rest of my life.”

  They had proceeded through customs, rucksacks on their backs, though some other young people were halted for theirs to be inspected.

  Howard was awaiting them, his face alight with pleasure, Ben by his side.

  “Talking of inner conflict,” said Jeremy, “there’s a kid unlikely to be as lucky as you in that respect.”

  Before coming to Germany, the two lads had stayed for a few days in Cornwall, where Jeremy’s gentile girlfriend was working in a hotel during the summer holidays. It was for this reason that he was unable to phone home, since hitch-hiking to St Ives for the purpose he had was not with his parents’ knowledge. A. P. too was thus constrained to lie to Martin and Moira, rather than let down his friend.

  Though one lie is known to lead to another, Jeremy had been unable to bring himself to call London and pretend he was in Munich. Why does my dad have to put me in the position he has? he thought, as they walked with Howard and Ben to the car park. He and Laura don’t refuse invitations to mixed marriage wedding receptions. Why is Dad’s inflexibility about marrying out only applied to his own children?

  He would not have that problem with Janis; there’d never be anyone but Kurt for her. Jeremy wouldn’t be thinking of marriage for years. Lindsey was just a girl he’d met at a party. All right, so he was highly attracted to her. Next month, though, Jeremy would be off to Oxford and she to Leicester University. Attraction was all it was. Had Jake Bornstein never been young! How on earth did a woman like Laura live with him?

  Since Jeremy knew nothing of the confrontation that had taken place between Jake and Laura, the stand he then determined to take, that he be allowed to live his own life, would prove less difficult than he imagined, though Jake would not metamorphose into the opposite of “Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street” overnight.

  Meanwhile, he managed to ignore the aftertaste of the deception imposed upon him and listened, en route to Howard’s home, to the plans his hosts had made for him and Jeremy to meet some young people.

  “We have a very active Centre here,” Howard told them.

  “Magda and Rudy – they’re my stepsister and stepbrother – go there,” said Ben.

  “There’s no need to tell them who Magda and Rudy are, they know,” Howard said with a smile.

  “Do they also know I have other brothers and sisters, Daddy?”

  “Since you now have so many, Ben, there must be times when you yourself have to count them on your fingers!” Howard lightly exaggerated.

  “I’m not that bad at arithmetic.”

  Christina now had a baby son in addition to the twins. And Karin had recently given birth to a girl whose red hair pinpointed her as a descendant of Abraham Sandberg.

  “I’d like to go with Magda and Rudy to the Centre sometimes, but my mother prefers me not to,” said Ben.

  Reminding A. P. of his own childhood, and how thankful he was that that part of his life was over. This kid, though, was still living through it. “Don’t let that get you down,” he said ruffling Ben’s shock of dark curls.

  “Please don’t do that,” said Ben, “it’s what my mother is always doing, and I don’t like it.”

  Because it was she who did it? A. P. conjectured. Though I’ve never felt subjected to a religious conflict, always felt certain about that part of me, there was a time when Mum wouldn’t let Dad take me with him up north and I resented my mother so much I couldn’t bear her to touch me. Dad eventually won that battle though, and I’ve ended up feeling sorry for Mum because she didn’t have the sense to see what she was doing.

  He glanced at Ben, seated beside Howard in the front of the car. Looking back you saw things differently and were able to find compassion. While you were little and it was happening to you, though… “Like you, I’m only half Jewish,” he told Ben, “and I too found that in some respects difficult.”

  The little boy turned to look at him. “How do you find it now you’re a grown up?”

  “If you like, you and I can have a chat about it while I’m in Munich.”

  “Could we have one today? I’m only at my dad’s house on Sundays, but I could come on my way home from school tomorrow if that would suit you better –”

  “Don’t worry, Ben,” said Howard, “the chat will be fitted in.”

  “It’s nice for me to have some of my English family here. I’ve been looking forward to it,” Ben said to A. P. and Jeremy. “Daddy said you’re both going to Oxford University when you get home. I’d like to go there, too –”

  And maybe he will, thought Howard. Who could foretell the future – well, certainly not me! Meanwhile, the rapport established in a trice between Martin’s son and mine is something good to be going on with. Ben could have no better role model than A. P. who had come through his own traumatic childhood more intact than Martin could have hoped for.

  That evening, A. P. and Jeremy found themselves in an ambience their preconceptions could not have allowed them to imagine might exist in Germany.

  The Munich Jewish Centre was a hive of activity that reminded Jeremy of the venues in which he had sat at meetings with Janis and Kurt in London. Posters on the walls, announcing communal functions, and people folding and putting into envelopes mimeographed information, enhanced the atmosphere.

  They were introduced by Howard to a group of boys and girls of around their own age and invited to join them at the table where they were drinking coffee.

  “Is British Jewry as concerned as we are about what is now happening in Israel?” a sloe-eyed girl of buxom build inquired. “It is what we have been discussing.”

  Howard had told them he had yet to meet a young person at the Centre who did not speak good English and so it was to prove.

  “I should think it’s worrying to Jews everywhere,” Jeremy replied.

  “You would like coffee or a Coke?” one of the boys asked.

  “We’ll have what you’re having,” said A. P., “and by the way, I’m not technically Jewish.”

  “Technically?” said the pretty blonde seated opposite him.

  “My mother is Catholic.”

  “Oh,” she replied with a smile, “the wrong half! I also have had that problem, but I have converted. My sister, though, she does not wish to know of the blood we have inherited from our father!”

  “Isn’t she as entitled to her choice as you to yours?” A. P. answered.

  The boy getting A. P. and Jeremy their coffee from a nearby counter returned with it to the table, and said crisply, “It is not just those like Helga, children of mixed marriages, who when they reach our age make the choice that Helga’s sister has. Many who are fully Jewish, like me, have chosen to go the way of much of Germany’s pre-war Jewish community. Hitler, of course, eventually reminded them that a Jew, no matter how he denies it, remains a Jew.”

  “Even,” said Helga, “if they have only a drop of Jewish blood in their veins, that may one day be used against them. How is the neo-Nazi situation in your country?”

  A. P. left it t
o Jeremy to put her in the picture.

  “The repercussions of Hess’s suicide were alarming for us,” she said when he finished speaking.

  “For us, too.”

  “But for German Jewry there is of course an added dimension,” said the boy who had brought the coffee. “My name, in case you did not catch it when Howard introduced us, is Karl. Howard is my boss; did he tell you? I work for the Schulmann Optics Company at their Munich office. My father also and he has made friends with Howard.

  “Our community is not as large as those in Frankfurt and Berlin –”

  “But you seem to keep active,” Jeremy cut in.

  “If I did not have this place to come to, until I emigrate to Israel, I do not know how I could go on living in Germany,” said the sloe-eyed girl. “That is how many of us feel. And for me it is even worse. Since my parents, they are not of German origin, their family was Turkish, they are not among those who returned, as Karl’s family did.”

  “My grandmother could not take the climate or the insects in Israel,” Karl said apologetically to Jeremy and A. P. “It was where she and my grandfather intended to stay, when they settled there after the camps. Both had survived Dachau –”

  “And how they can bear living now so close to it I fail to understand,” said Helga.

  “Would you expect when they returned to Germany they would not choose the city where they grew up?” Karl flashed, his tone now defensive rather than apologetic.

  Do they have this sort of contretemps all the time? Jeremy wondered. If so, he was sorry for his German Jewish counterparts. What a complex situation theirs was.

  He listened to the ensuing list of reasons which accounted for those at the table with him and A. P. having been born where they would rather not have been born. The latter was more than plain, though some seemed to feel constrained to defend their families and others to bitterly blame them.

  The girl who had said she was of Turkish origin was among those who held no brief for their parents being here.

  “I said that for me it is worse, and I shall tell you why,” she capped the conversation for the visitors’ benefit, her mature bosom heaving with emotion under a white sweater that made it the more eye-catching. “My parents came to Germany only for business reasons. Money is all that my father is concerned with. Karl, like some others at this table, comes here often with his family. My family does not wish to be part of the Jewish community and I am ashamed of them. My brother is no different from Helga’s sister. They are as it happens dating each other and would make a fine couple!