The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  In a half-waking, half-dreaming vision, I saw him cup my face in his hands and kiss me as I fell into the embrace of his eyes. The mask played no part in the image at all.

  After no more than an hour’s sleep, Judah went out again before dawn seeking transport for us, but without success. When day approached, I insisted on going with him. Perhaps I thought I could plead with the British officers to save the lives of the children and my sister and nephew.

  Even though Judah tried to describe for me the scene on the beaches of Dunkirk, nothing he explained prepared me for the reality. He had said a hundred thousand men awaited rescue from Blitzkrieg, but the number had no physical counterpart for me until I saw it for myself.

  Up and down the dunes, as far as could be seen—all the way to the billowing clouds of dense black smoke that marked the port of Dunkirk—the sand was covered with the figures of men.

  Immense spirals of soldiers, like coils of living rope slowly unspooling toward the waves, awaited deliverance. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of British troops were in each curling figure. “And this is no more than half of them,” Judah said. “The rest are embarking through the fires of Dunkirk.”

  Just as the dunes were alive with men, the Channel was bustling with ships. Every sort, every kind, from coal carriers to twenty-foot runabouts, plied the waves off the coast. The shallower draft vessels came up until their keels touched. Forty men scrambled aboard, and the craft pushed off again to ferry the fortunate few to larger vessels waiting beyond the breakers.

  On this shore the tide receded immensely far out, exposing an expanse of wet sand that seemed to stretch halfway to England. Each ampersand of soldiers was crowned with an exclamation point formed by a makeshift pier: trucks, jeeps, passenger cars, all these had been driven onto the beach and muscled into place to form arms binding the land to the sea.

  “When the tide returns,” Judah explained, “the men leap from car roof to truck bonnet. Then bigger ships come in further and more soldiers can get off the beach more quickly.”

  It was the blueprint of a fantastic machine cobbled together by a mad scientist.

  A plane flew overhead. Judah pushed me down, but I contrived to watch just the same. All the men fell to the ground and burrowed into the sand, as if they could cram their entire bodies under their helmets.

  Though a few men remained upright, futilely firing their rifles at the intruder, this time the plane neither dropped bombs nor strafed. It winged its way out to sea and out of sight.

  “A spotter, looking for bigger targets,” Judah said. He gestured toward the Channel.

  Far out on the horizon cruised the biggest vessels in the rescue flotilla: British war ships. “Those would make the biggest prizes for the Germans,” Judah said.

  “And in all this there’s no place for us?” I know I whined as I asked it. It seemed impossible to me that amid the hundreds of boats I saw bobbing on the waves there was no room for the nine of us.

  “Rescuing the army so it can fight again is the first priority,” Judah said with resignation.

  “Not for me,” I returned.

  Another plane arrived overhead, and this one had attack in mind. We ducked again as the bomb whistled down.

  It struck in the damp sand halfway between two coils of men and exploded with a sodden thump.

  No one was killed or even injured. The British soldiers, jumping to their feet, shook their fists and jeered at the pilot. “How’d y’manage to miss us all, you near-sighted Nazi?”

  “They should all be saved,” I admitted, acknowledging the heroism and bravado. “But so should we.”

  “Let’s get back,” Judah said.

  We tucked in and out of sight among the hillocks of sand and beach grass. In this game of hide-and-seek with the buzzing planes we almost missed our salvation.

  A curl of rocks forming a tiny cove presented a question mark amid the chaos. And floating upside down in the pool, so far unnoticed, was a lifeboat.

  I spotted it before Judah. “Could we use that?” I asked, pointing.

  “Brilliant,” he said, hugging me.

  We ran toward it. “It’s intact,” he said. “We’ll row out.”

  “Stay here,” I urged. “I don’t know how you’ll do it, but don’t let anyone else take it. I’ll get the others.” I shouted these words over my shoulder as I sprinted inland. I gave him no chance to argue.

  “Come on!” I shouted to the seven in the basement. “We’ve got a boat,” and, “Where’s my knapsack?”

  Without stopping to explain, I led the way up the stairs and out of Nieuport. Gina was on my back, Susan on Lieutenant Howard’s, and Judith on Sergeant Walker’s. Jessica carried Shalom.

  Halfway to the edge of town a string of explosions sounded behind us. “Good timing,” Howard asserted. “Germans are shelling Nieuport.”

  The last detonation, the closest of the set, drove me to my knees. As Sergeant Walker helped me to my feet, I looked back: the post office had taken a direct hit. It had tumbled in on itself, forming a crater of bricks and mortar.

  “Lousy aim,” the sergeant noted.

  It took all of the adults to heave the boat upright, then we bailed it out and loaded the children. There were only two oars that remained whole, and these were wielded by Judah and Lieutenant Howard. The rest of us seized broken fragments of boards with which to paddle.

  We had been rowing for about an hour. It seemed as if we might have to row all the way to England. If true, that necessity was fine with me. The more space we put between us and the Nazi-dominated continent, the better I felt.

  At last we entered the shipping lanes. The crews of a pair of fishing trawlers, inbound for Dunkirk, waved and shouted to us, but Judah waved them off. “Pick us up on the way back,” he yelled.

  A mile farther out in the Channel was a cruising British destroyer. As we watched in horror, a squadron of German planes pounced on the ship.

  Lightning bolts of anti-aircraft fire streaked upward from the warship.

  Lethal eggs tumbled out of the bombers.

  One of them at least must have struck the destroyer amidships. There was a mighty crash, a whole series of additional explosions that made us duck our heads, and then the British vessel folded up on both ends. It settled into the waves, sirens screaming. A fireball rose from the hulk, then a torrent of oily fumes oozed across the water.

  The breeze pushed the strangling vapors toward us.

  But not fast enough.

  A circling bomber, satisfied with the destruction of the ship, spotted us. It dove toward our fragile ark, guns blazing.

  We burrowed into every makeshift cavity, girls and baby beneath, Jessica and me next, men atop the heap.

  A line of splashes marched directly toward us as the bullets ripped into the sea. One shattered the sternpost of the lifeboat, another splintered the gunnel near my head, and the third struck Sergeant Walker.

  Throwing up his hands toward his head, his body jerked upward and toppled sideways into the water.

  Without hesitating an instant, Judah dove in after him.

  A fist of smoke wrapped greasy fingers around us, shutting out vision.

  “Captain!” Howard called urgently. “Sergeant!”

  “Judah,” I yelled. “Where are you?”

  We paddled in circles, heedless of whether the plane would renew the attack or not.

  No trace of either man did we locate.

  We drifted for a long time after that, unable to find the heart to row.

  Eventually Lieutenant Howard roused himself. “Let’s pull ourselves together,” he said with difficulty. “There’s a boat. Let’s make for her.”

  The rescue craft coming to our aid was a French canal boat. Already crammed to the rails and rigging with scores of the rescued, including many children, a broad-faced woman shouted to us, “Just a moment. I’ll toss you a line.”

  And that was how we reached port in England: in a rowboat towed from the stern of an aging canal barge
.

  But I thought little of this at the time. It seemed incredibly unjust that Judah and the good sergeant, who had accomplished so much and brought us so far, should have died so near to safety.

  One small tragedy among thousands during those grim days, it still left me feeling bitter and angry.

  PART SIX

  A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

  A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

  ECCLESIASTES 3:4

  17

  LONDON

  JUNE 1940

  It was nearly time for the evening service at Westminster Abbey—the hour when we gathered in the deep gloom of that ancient house to sing prayers for all the brave boys fighting the Nazis in France.

  Like many other refugees in London, Jessica and I had not missed attending a service since we arrived from the miracle of Dunkirk.

  We were about to be late. Thunderclouds gathered above Regent’s Park, and I had misplaced my umbrella. Jessica was impatient as I searched the flat we shared with another young refugee named Eva Weitzman. I was irritated. Had I left it on the bus? Was someone walking around London protected from the impending rain by my umbrella?

  Jessica stood, impatient to leave our flat in the tall Georgian house at the foot of Primrose Hill. The three girls and baby Shalom were already in the below-ground flat where our landlady, Arlice, baby-sat for us.

  The BBC radio news blared the reports of the Nazi Blitzkrieg sweeping through France. Our prayers seemed more important than ever.

  And so was our need for comfort. Tyne Cott had been overrun. We heard Papa was killed in the last bombardment just before the final Nazi onslaught. I was numb with grief.

  Where was my umbrella?

  Those of us who had escaped from Europe and made our way to freedom knew that the great, unnumbered mass of human suffering was made up of individual stories. Even one single refugee child strafed and killed by a Luftwaffe fighter along the road from Belgium to France was too many. I could not think of one child left dead along the highway. The story of one was too painful, too real. Better to hear the estimates of the numbers of dead and dying and forget that each one had a story. There were too many innocent victims to memorialize in one BBC broadcast.

  Where had I put my umbrella?

  The world as we knew it was coming to an end, yet I could only think of myself. It was as though there was no tragedy—no story but my own. There was me, selfish and self-absorbed…and then were those hundreds of thousands of refugees all lumped together into one tragedy. I knew, because Eva had told me, entire populations of Jewish villages in Poland were machine-gunned and dumped into mass graves.

  I could only think of my husband, Varrick, out there…some-where. There was no story but him and me. Holding onto the belief that he still lived and would join me in London was my one prop. Our love was the hub around which the universe revolved.

  “It’s going to rain. I’ll have to buy another umbrella.” I sighed.

  The knock at the door and the sad-eyed messenger boy with the telegram signaled the end of my hopes and dreams.

  “Missus Kepler?” He did not look into my face.

  Jessica stood at my shoulder. I felt her firm hand on my arm as I took the wire and closed the door. “Steady,” she said.

  My own voice, distant, as if it belonged to someone else, panted Varrick’s name, praying: “Oh! Not Varrick! Please God, not Varrick.”

  Eva, silent and pale, stood in the doorway of the sitting room as I tore open the telegram. Her bright blue eyes brimmed with tears. Her beloved Mac McGrath, a news photographer with the Trump European News Service (TENS), had sailed off with the flotilla of little ships to rescue the desperate British Army at Dunkirk. She knew Mac might not return. We all knew. Yet in this moment, Eva’s fears were all focused on me and the dreaded envelope in my trembling hands.

  The typewritten words on the yellow slip of paper blurred for a moment, then came into sharp focus. The air around me became heavy, too thick to breathe, as I stammered aloud the curt, matter-of-fact message about my husband…

  “Deep regrets STOP your husband Varrick Kepler killed STOP Heroic action near Cambrai STOP Deepest condolences.”

  Jessica groaned. Eva gasped and rushed to my side.

  The telegram fluttered like a dry leaf from my fingers. The world spun and darkened as my knees buckled. I collapsed slowly to the floor.

  I do not know how long I was unconscious. A cool damp cloth dabbed my face. I did not want to awaken to the nightmare of reality. Squeezing my eyes tight, tears escaped and trickled down my face.

  “No. No. Can’t be.”

  Jessica’s voice said, “Lora? Maybe it’s a mistake. This is all they sent? No explanation?”

  Eva whispered, her words tinged with a Polish accent, “The world collapses. Chaos in France. How can we know what is certain?”

  Jessica said, unconvincingly, “We’ll pray. They could have got it wrong.”

  Eva said, “I will ask at the news office. Surely TENS reporters will have some way to check the list of casualties.”

  I opened my eyes. Jessica’s worried face hovered above me. Eva stooped and held a glass of water to my lips. “Drink, Lora. Drink.”

  The cool liquid on my tongue pulled me back toward consciousness, but I did not attempt to sit up. “Jessica, am I…is it a dream? Varrick?”

  She did not answer at first. The telegram lay beside us on the black-and-white-checkered foyer tiles. The handle of my umbrella stuck out from behind the coat rack. I fixed my gaze on it and thought, if only I had found it earlier, we would have been gone and missed the telegram.

  Jessica held me in her arms, as Mama would have done. “Poor darling. Loralei. Dear Lora.”

  So, it was true. How many months had it been since I saw him last? Six? Eight? More? I couldn’t remember. But always I had thought of him as being somewhere…alive. Yet even as the Nazis rolled over Europe, Varrick, my beloved, had been killed.

  Twenty-two years old and already a widow, my life seemed finished before it had begun.

  Jessica brushed back my blond hair from my eyes. I lay with my head in her lap. Yet we were now more than sisters. We were two women, widows, united by grief at the loss of our husbands.

  “So,” Jessica said, as our tears mingled, “it has come to this. Papa warned them all. It seems so long ago now, yet it has come, just as Papa said.”

  I wondered how many other women would receive the confirmation this week that missing sons and husbands would never come home again. The large tragedy—the imminent fall of France—suddenly fragmented into hundreds of thousands of shards that tore my soul.

  “No more!” I cried, covering my ears.

  With a nod, Jessica asked Eva to switch off our radio.

  Eva turned her eyes away from our grief. I heard the front door close behind her. She was going to the Abbey—one soul among thousands of Londoners, praying a miracle for the fighting men and the women who waited for them. Then she would return to the TENS news office where all the news from France would be grim.

  Jessica and I did not attempt to rise. I closed my eyes as she gently stroked my cheek.

  Jessica did not move or attempt to rouse me as I slept where I had fallen. The tile was cold and hard. I opened my eyes. Jessica’s head leaned against the wall as she dozed. Lightning flashed through the still open blackout curtains. She started and awakened. The sitting room was like a photograph, washed in monochrome silver.

  Thunder followed like cannons. The downpour pounded on the roof, cascaded down the windows.

  “The rain,” Jessica said.

  “I knew it was coming.” I wondered about the men fighting in France. Were they cold? Was it raining there?

  I regretted I had not gone to the Abbey to pray with Eva.

  “What time is it, Jessica?” I croaked.

  Just then the clock chimed nine times.

  “Nine o’clock.” She shifted her position.

  I sat up slowly but did n
ot rise. We sat together on the tiles, resting our backs against the wall of the entry.

  The house was dark. The city was dark. But London did not sleep. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements crowned the brow of Primrose Hill Park. Members of the Home Guard kept watch over the great city. Air-raid wardens prowled the streets in search of even a glimmer of light escaping from behind blackout curtains.

  The clock, like Jessica’s steady heartbeat, measured my life in time before and after the telegram. How many seconds, minutes, hours, since Varrick died? All the time I had been living, I had imagined him alive too. He had not died when the first rumor of his death reached me. I had been right not to believe that.

  During the long months of our separation, I thought of him thinking of me, desiring me in the night, and I had been content in a restless sort of way. I could not imagine my beloved’s blood spilled out on a field. Hadn’t Papa taught us that righteousness and truth are stronger than evil? I had been certain happiness would win out in the end. It had to be. Life for me was still the stuff of fairy tales before the message.

  I had been happy not knowing the truth, hadn’t I? My ignorance had left me with reason to carry on.

  False hope had, in the end, laid me out flat. He had not died when first I heard it, but he had still died!

  What hope remained to give me purpose?

  Every twilight we had gathered in the great echoing stone hall of Westminster. How many times had I looked up and thought I heard the agonized prayers of generations now beyond their earthly grief? The ancient ones who had whispered heartache before I lived were now reunited in heaven with the men they had prayed for and lost. When the harmony of the Psalms died away, had I not heard their voices echo in the vaulting? Someday, I thought, another generation would sit in the Abbey and hear my prayers emerging from the stones. What truth would a generation yet unborn hear in the echoes of my life?

  For me, Varrick’s death had not taken place in France. My husband had perished this very night before my eyes.

  How many others would die before this night ended? Evening prayers were no longer about me and Varrick. I had crossed over the line of demarcation…into another life.