The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  The key turned in the latch. Mac was home. Eva covered her face with her hands. Mac, disheveled and remorseful, appeared in the kitchen door. His sorrowful eyes, well drowned in good English beer and split milk, were riveted on Eva.

  “Good evening, Mac,” I said.

  He did not appear to hear me but rushed past me to the empty chair beside Eva. He grasped her hands and kissed her fingers. She began to weep and threw herself into his arms. The two embraced and kissed as I cleared the table and padded upstairs to my room. Behind me I could hear Eva as she apologized in a gush of unstoppable Polish for whatever verbal gaffe she had made when addressing the prime minister.

  “It’s okay, my darling. My darling Eva. No. No. Please. It doesn’t matter to me. My fault. My fault entirely. Please, my darling…”

  I climbed into bed as the sound of the Rudy Vallee tango pursued me. Muffled voices seeped under my door. Covering my head with the pillow, I must have slept a little.

  I wasn’t sorry when the air-raid siren sounded some hours later, and I bumbled out of the house and into the shelter.

  23

  The air-raid siren sounded again as I crossed Regent’s Park on foot the next evening. I did not believe the danger could be real. How many times had pilots from the German Luftwaffe flown harmlessly above London on their way to industrial targets in the Midlands?

  The lovely parklands had been dug up—subdivided into allotments for vegetable gardens among the ack-ack guns. A small portion of the rose garden near the Open Air Theatre remained intact.

  As the warning siren screamed, irritated Londoners hurried to shelter. I found a park bench and sat beside a glorious plot of white roses. Fragrant red roses bloomed nearby.

  I thought that soon the shrill warning would fall silent, and I would be alone above ground in a deserted world. If a bomb tumbled on my head, I thought, then I would be in heaven with Papa and Mama and Varrick. So much the better. I was not afraid of anything.

  Sighing with contentment, I looked up at the ripening colors of twilight. Silence dropped like a curtain. I could not see the enemy planes, but after some minutes I heard a distant drone of aircraft engines. By and by the crack of fighter plane machine guns popped above the clouds.

  I prayed for the brave British pilots, so outnumbered and outgunned. I knew they were sure to be victorious because they were fighting against the most profound evil in all of history. Surely God was paying attention. No doubt there were angels soaring above England.

  Then my thoughts went to the German boys I had known before Hitler stole their minds and ravaged their hearts. Were any of my neighbors or schoolmates dropping bombs on England now? I prayed for dying Nazi pilots who, spiraling to earth in burning planes, would feel the fires of hell even before they reached their final eternal destination.

  Could young men be fighting for their lives? It seemed impossible. The sky above me was so beautiful. Such beauty made me hate the war more fiercely. Young men should not have been dueling and dying on such a night as this.

  I rummaged in my handbag, removing Eben’s photographs and the white rose poem. On my knee I balanced the image of me smiling beside Papa. Once again I scanned the words inscribed on the thirty-six roses: Sweet…familiar…scent…embrace…me…before…I…see…you….

  In the quiet of a city waiting breathlessly for destruction, I heard the plaintive call of a nightingale perched on the limb of an elm tree. Glancing up I saw a middle-aged woman with a pleasant, close-lipped smile observing me from a park bench across the path. She was dressed in a shabby blue dress, at least two decades out of fashion. Her gray-streaked, tawny hair was tied back and tucked beneath a straw boater-style hat. Her shoes were low-heeled and scuffed. Her hands were folded in her lap.

  “Good evening,” I said when she did not look away from me.

  “Good evening.” She looked up at the pink-tinged thunder-heads. “Such a beautiful sunset tonight.”

  Far off, perhaps up the river in Richmond, the anti-aircraft cannons boomed. “Are those bombs, do you suppose?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t say,” she answered, standing and coming to sit very close beside me. She leaned in to examine my photograph. “This is you. And your father and mother, is it?” she asked me.

  “A long time ago. In Switzerland.”

  “You look most like your mother here. The lips. But I see your father in your eyes. Much alike.”

  “I never thought I looked like him. He’s dead now. Nazis.”

  “The resolve in his expression. Yes. Very similar.”

  “Thank you. I hope I may be as wise. He saw all this. What was coming.”

  “What is the saying? A sach mentshen zehen, nor vainik fun farshtai’en.”

  “Yiddish. You are a Jew?”

  “Many people see things, but few understand them.” She translated the proverb as she picked up Eben’s poem and scanned it.

  I was neither offended nor surprised. “What is your name?” I asked her.

  She did not answer. “A lovely poem. For you, my dear?”

  “From a friend.”

  “White roses. Like the photograph.”

  “Are you from London?” I asked, suddenly curious.

  She continued to study the paper. “Thirty-six roses. See here. Hebrew words embedded with the pattern of each rose.”

  Startled by the revelation, I leaned in close, following her finger as she traced the pattern of Hebrew writing that rimmed the edges of the petals of the blossoms.

  “I didn’t see them. What does it mean?”

  “Have you not heard? Everything means something. Thirty-six. Twice the number of Life. The number of Lamed Vav. There are thirty-six ancient righteous ones who live among mortals in this world.” She raised her gaze to meet mine. The intensity held me riveted. Deep blue eyes were clear like water flecked and rimmed with gold. In the soft light her face glowed like the page of an illuminated manuscript.

  I meant to ask her name again, but instead I whispered, “Who are you?”

  She reached out and plucked a rose, placing it on my lap. “White roses behind you.” The nightingale sang again. She seemed very pleased. “Dusk. There and here. Then and now.”

  My rose tumbled onto the paving stones beneath the park bench. I bent to retrieve it. “Where are you from?” I spoke as the all-clear siren suddenly erupted behind me. Turning away for a moment I regretted that my chance meeting with the Jewish stranger had been interrupted.

  When I turned back, the woman had vanished.

  Leaping to my feet, I spun around. The gravel paths wound away into shadows. I could not see her anywhere. For a moment I doubted my encounter. Then, straining my eyes, I glimpsed a flash of pale blue hurrying into the shadow of the plane trees. As Londoners emerged from the slit-trenches and shelters, a chill coursed through me. Was my encounter real? Had I been dreaming? I stared at the distinct Hebrew writing encoded in the petals of Eben’s roses. The hidden words rimming the petals were not my imagination.

  Gathering photograph, poem, and white rose, I made my way toward Primrose Hill.

  Seven Sephardic Jewish schoolboys from Holland were brought to St. Mark’s in the middle of the night. Twelve years old, of bar mitzvah age, they had sailed across the stormy English Channel in a tiny fifteen-foot sailboat.

  Lieutenant Howard of the Tin Noses Brigade escorted them. Since his return to England he had been helping with wounded, shell-shocked soldiers. When the refugee boys were presented to him, he remembered hearing of my work at St Mark’s and brought them to me.

  Hermione’s shrill voice had an edge of panic when she rang the flat and woke me up out of a sound sleep. It was almost dawn.

  “I don’t know why they were brought to us here. They do not seem to speak any known language. No language any of us can understand. Little Jew boys. Bare feet and terribly sunburned. I cooked scrambled eggs and bacon. Bread and butter. They won’t eat anything I set before them.”

  I dressed quickly and caught a taxi t
o St. Mark’s.

  I greeted Lieutenant Howard with a hug and a questioning look, but then Hermione took over the explanations. Hermione, blearyeyed and wrapped in a tattered bathrobe, led me to the offending tribe of Israel, where they had been sequestered in a classroom.

  Tin plates heaped with Hermione’s non-kosher rations were untouched on a study table.

  “The waste! The waste!” she cried.

  I suggested she take the food away and reheat it for others as the sun was coming up. She did so under the surly stares of the boys.

  I greeted them in Dutch. “Are you hungry?”

  They looked at me with interest. They spoke Ladino and Yiddish well, but the most mature-looking boy answered me in Dutch: “We can’t eat that.”

  “Would you eat plain bread?” I asked. “Until we can get this sorted?”

  “We keep kosher. Plain bread. A little butter would be good.”

  “You are Sephardim?” I asked, unsure if I had pronounced the word correctly.

  Dark, curly heads bobbed in the affirmative.

  “I will call Rabbi Brown at Bevis Marks synagogue. Sephardic. East London. You will be right at home.”

  “That’s the ticket,” Lieutenant Howard said enthusiastically. “I knew you’d know what to do.”

  “How are you keeping, Lieutenant?”

  Even the tin mask could not hide the pleasure coursing through my Tyne Cott friend. “I was dead wrong about my family. I screwed up my courage and went to see them. Once they got over the shock that I was alive they can’t stop loving on me! I was wrong to stay away. So wrong! Love should never be avoided, should it?”

  By nine o’clock that morning, Rabbi Brown arrived. He was a jolly, imposing, rotund rabbi with a grizzled beard and thick spectacles. His pleasant, mild-featured wife was at his side. By 9:05 the future of the happy boys was all arranged.

  “Of course they will live with us!” declared the rabbi’s wife. “Seven sons of Israel. A blessing!”

  Rabbi Brown instructed, “These are good boys. Intelligent fellows. Sailed the little boat through twenty-foot-high waves to escape. HaShem was surely with them!”

  Hermione’s expression of relief was too obvious. They were “too Jewish” for her comfort, an expression she used often.

  As the boys prepared to leave, Rabbi Brown said to me, “Any more like this, you must remember us. Better our children are with our own kind. You know.”

  So we were too Gentile for Rabbi Brown.

  At the last moment before their departure, the puzzling words on Eben’s poem flashed in my mind. Perhaps Rabbi Brown could shed some light on their meaning.

  “Rabbi Brown!” I fumbled in my handbag for the paper. “Please! Can you help me decipher a bit of Hebrew?”

  He smiled at me curiously as I extended the paper. Adjusting his glasses, he did not seem to read the English writing at all but instantly saw the Hebrew words that gilded the petals of the roses. Eyebrows instantly went up with astonishment, then furrowed into a deep frown.

  “A copy…clearly. Young woman,” he spoke in a barely audible voice, “where did you get this?”

  “A friend gave it to me.”

  “A Jew? Someone who escaped the Nazis?”

  “One who helped others escape.”

  “I cannot—this is…extraordinary.” He pressed his lips together in a way that let me know he would say no more.

  I had to take the chance. I blurted, “Thirty-six…The Lamed Vav.”

  “If you know of the Thirty-six Righteous ones, you need not ask me.”

  “Who are they? These Lamed Vav?”

  He stared at the paper. “Their names… They are righteous ones who live among us. They, the presence of the Thirty-six, hold back the judgment of HaShem against the earth.” He paused. “This is, well, a legend. There are among them…Guardians of Israel. They witnessed the fall of Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Their names, upon the roses, as you see.”

  “Eben?” I asked as he placed the sheet in my hands.

  He pointed to the Hebrew letters. “Eben. ‘Stone.’ He was a cantor in days of old. And his name read in reverse means ‘prophesy.’ So it is written the stones will cry out and proclaim the coming of Messiah.”

  “Thank you.” I refolded the treasure.

  “I suppose such copies will surface as our people take flight in these last days. We will know the truth of the end if Israel, by some miracle, is again a nation. As this says…White Rose.”

  My legs were weak as the rabbi gathered his flock and drove away.

  I read Eben’s poem, word-by-word, gathering phrases into bouquets, like the thirty-six roses I had chosen so long ago for Frau Helga at the White Rose Inn. Closing my eyes I remembered the haunting song of Eben as he sang the ancient blessing at the moment of Shabbat.

  The Cantor.

  Who was Eben Golah?

  “…tenacious promise full bloom lavish expectant you raise your face shine beautiful epitome revealed fulfilled…”

  As the Germans bombed the southeast coast of Britain, ranks of new evacuees swelled our numbers. In all of London rumors of imminent German invasion grew, and the ripple of terror moved through our congregation of refugees.

  Eva, her ivory skin flushed with the heat of the London tube, hurried into the schoolroom where Hermione and I were assembling bunks. A small crowd followed her, packing the stuffy chamber. An official government leaflet fluttered in her fingers.

  “Lora!” Eva was breathless. “Look! Here it is!” She thrust the paper into my hands. The heading was ominous.

  Hermione leaned over my shoulder and read, “If the Invader Comes.”

  The faces of our charges gathered around me, anxiously staring down. As I read in English, the message was translated into various languages: “If the Germans come, by parachute, aeroplane, or ship, you must remain where you are. The order is, ‘Stay Put.’…”

  Eva interjected, “This is because of what happened in France. The refugees so clogged the highways that the army could not move.”

  Nods all around from those who had witnessed the chaos of Nazi strategy using civilians as weapons against the Allies.

  I read on:

  “Do not believe rumors, and do not spread them. When you receive an order, make quite sure it is a true order and not a faked one. Most of you know your policemen and your ARP warden by sight. You can trust them. If you keep your heads, you can tell whether a military officer is really British or only pretending to be. If in doubt ask the policeman or ARP warden. Do not give the Germans anything. Do not tell him anything. Hide your food and your bicycles. Hide your maps. See that the enemy gets no petrol. Remember that transport and petrol will be the invaders’ main difficulties. Make sure no invader will get your car, petrol, maps, or bicycles….”

  Every face was riveted upon me. Eva said to a small group of girls, “Of course we have no cars, petrol, maps, or bicycles. That is not the point. The point is that the British believe the Germans are coming.”

  One teenaged Polish girl with her young siblings gathered around her began to weep. “Stay put? We have seen what the Nazis will do to us Jews. Our parents! The village,” she exclaimed. Others in the group were flooded with the despair of shared memories.

  I held my hands up for silence as I continued.

  “Be ready to help the army in any way. Do not block roads until ordered to do so by the military or LDV authorities. In factories and shops, all managers and workmen should organize some system by which a sudden attack can be resisted. Think before you act. But think always of your country before you think of yourself.”

  Silence fell over us. I considered this instruction. Though we were neither a factory or a shop, I was a sort of manager. We must organize and train our people to help defeat the enemy as best they could.

  I looked up from the muddled and confusing government document. Puzzled expressions ringed me.

  Denise asked, “What does it mean?”

  “What can we do?
” Irene asked.

  “How shall we prepare to stay put?” Cheryl queried.

  There was also the issue of discerning whether a soldier was British or only pretending to be. The Allied soldiers rescued from the beaches of France were French, Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and Belgian. Among us were a few from tiny Luxembourg.

  Hermione cleared her throat. “My dears, it is clear that this was written by someone in the government who has two heads.”

  Eva sighed with relief. “Well, at least the cat is out of the hen coop. They want us to stay put, and do nothing, because they do not know what to do.”

  “But that is what we shall never do.” Hermione held up a regal and instructive finger. She looked at me. “What shall we do?”

  I thought a moment before I spoke. “Perhaps something is coming which may break our hearts, but they will not break our will. We will stand firm, as Mister Churchill has said.”

  My admonition to stand firm sounded very noble even as the daily reports of Nazi coastal bombings poured in. In London, British civilian women put away silk stockings and lipstick and donned fashionable uniforms. Our refugees of St. Mark’s, as eager to defeat Hitler as any beings on earth, lived under a cloud of suspicion. They wore cast-off clothing and were left to wonder how they might help England to persevere.

  We continued to arrange evacuations to the countryside for women and children. British and German dogfights raged high above our heads, yet London remained relatively calm and unscathed. The Nazi assault heated up against English convoys, ports, and manufacturing. We wondered if anywhere in our island haven was safe.

  I received a heavily redacted letter from Jessica in Wales, telling how she and Madame Rose and Cousin Elisa could hear the crump of bombs falling on an unnamed target. They watched the fires set by German incendiary bombs burn a village through a long, long night.

  Did we dare send any more orphans to Wales since the attacks seemed to be everywhere?

  I took a night off, looking forward to discussing some possibilities over supper in our flat. Eben, bringing his own daily ration of butter and meat, joined Eva, Mac, and me.