Ellis Island & Other Stories (16 page)

I liked these children. They seemed somewhat effete, and sheltered, but I knew that this was because I was used to the adolescents of our collective, who were much older than their years, and that these young people were the products of an ultra-refined system of schooling. I knew that, if protected during this vulnerability, they might emerge with unmatched strength. I had been through the same system, and had seen my schoolmates undergo miraculous transformations. I knew as well that they were destined for a long and terrible war, but, then again, so were we all. Yes, I liked these children, and I enjoyed the fact that I had left those years behind.

I have not described everyone at that table. One remains. She was the daughter of my host, the eldest, the tallest, the most beautiful. Her name was Tamar, and as I had turned the corner she had seemed to rise in the air to meet me, while the others were lost in the dark. Tamar and I had faced one another in a moment of silence that I will not ever forget. Sometimes, on a windy day, cross-currented waves in the shallows near a beach will spread about, trapped in a caldron of bars and brakes, until two run together face to face and then fall back in shocked tranquillity. So it was with Tamar. It was as if I had run right into her. I was breathless, and I believe that she was, too.

I immediately took command of myself, and did not look at her. In fact, I studied every face before I studied hers—black eyes; black hair; her mouth and eyes showing her youth and strength in the way they were set, in the way they moved, not ever having been tried or defeated or abused. She wore a rich white silk blouse that was wonderfully open at the top, and a string of matched pearls. For a moment, I was convinced that she was in her twenties, but when she smiled I saw a touching thin silver wire across her upper teeth, and I knew that she was probably no more than seventeen. She
was
seventeen, soon to be eighteen, soon to take off the wire, soon (in fact) to become a nurse with the Eighth Army in Egypt. But at that time she was just on the verge of becoming a woman, and she virtually glowed with the fact.

As soon as I saw the wire, I felt as if I could talk with her in a way that could be managed, and I did. Unlike the four red-headed cousins, she was fearless and direct. She laughed out loud without the slightest self-consciousness, and I felt as if in our conversation we were not speaking but dancing. Perhaps it was because she was so clear of voice, so alert, and so straightforward. She was old enough to parry, and she did, extraordinarily well.

“Tamar is going to Brussels next year,” volunteered one of the red-haired girls, in the manner of a handmaiden at court, “to study at the Royal Laboratory for Underzek and Verpen.”

“No, no, no,” said Tamar. “What you’re thinking of, Hannah, is called the Koninklijk Laboratorium voor Onderzoek van Voorwerpen van Kunst en Wetenschap, and it’s in The Hague.” She glided over the minefield of Dutch words without hesitation and in a perfect accent.

“Does Tamar speak Dutch?” I asked, looking right at her.

“Yes,” she answered, “Tamar speaks Dutch, because she learnt it at her Dutch grandmother’s knee—Daddy’s mother. But,” she continued, shaking a finger gently at Hannah, though really speaking to me, “I’m going to Brussels, to study restoration at the Institut Central des Beaux-Arts, or, if Fascism flies out the window in Italy between now and next year, to the Istituto Nazionale per il Restauro, in Rome.”

When she realized that her recitation of the names of these formidable institutes, each in its own language, might have seemed ostentatious, she blushed.

Emboldened nearly to giddiness, the fat boy interjected, “We went to Rome. We ate shiski ba there, and the streets are made of water.”

“That’s
Venice, stupid,
” said one of the red-haired girls. “And what is shiski ba?”

“Shiski ba,” answered the fat boy, guilelessly, “is roasted meat on a stick. The Turks sell it in the park.”

“Bob,” I offered, by way of instruction. A silence followed, during which the poor boy looked at me blankly.

“Richard,” he said, sending the four cousins (who knew him well) into a fit of hysteria. Tamar tried not to laugh, because she knew that he hung on her every gesture and word.

To change the subject, I challenged Tamar. “Do you really think,” I said, “that you will be able to study on the Continent?”

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled in a way that belied her age. “I’ll do the best I can,” she answered. “Even if there is a war, it will have an end. I’ll still be young, and I’ll start again.”

My eyes opened at this. I don’t know exactly why; perhaps it was that I imagined her in the future and became entranced with the possibility that I might encounter her then—in some faraway place where affection could run unrestrained. But I wanted to steer things away from art, war, and love.

So, while constantly fending off the quixotic charges of the woolly-haired boy (without ever really looking at him), I told a long story about Palestine. Because they were children, more or less, I told them anything I wanted to tell them. Until long after the adults had left for the living room, I spoke of impossible battles between Jews and Bedouins, of feats of endurance which made me reel merely in imagining them, of horses that flew, and golden shafts of light, pillars of fire, miracles here and there, the wonders of spoken Hebrew, and the lions that guarded the banks and post offices of Jerusalem—in short, anything which seemed as if it might be believed.

Tamar alternated between belief and disbelief with the satisfying rhythm of a blade turning back and forth over a whetstone. She was weaving soft acceptance and sparkling disdain together in a tapestry which I feared she would throw right over my head. She did this in a most delicate cross-examination, the object of which was to draw out more of the tale for the sake of the children, to satisfy her own curiosity, to mock me gently, and to continue—by entrapment and release—the feeling we had that, though we were still, we were dancing.

“Why,” she asked, “did you not get water from the Bedouins that you captured, if you had already gone without it for ten days?”

“Ah!” I said, holding up my finger in the same way she had done with Hannah. “I was only able to capture them because they themselves had run out of water, and were thirstier than I was. And I did not capture them with a gun but by giving a graphic dissertation on European fountains; they were especially taken with my description of the Diana fountain in Bushy Park, and I believe that they would have followed me anywhere after I told them what goes on in the Place de la Concorde.”

“What is it like to be a British Jew in Palestine?” asked Hannah, earnestly, and with such
Weltschmerz
that it was as if an alpine storm cloud had rolled over the table.

“What is it like? It’s like being an Italian Negro in Ethiopia, or”—I looked at Tamar—“like living in a continuous production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ” I had meant the allusion to “Romeo and Juliet” to be purely illustrative, but with a life of its own it turned Tamar as red as a throbbing coal, and I, a generation apart, nearly followed suit. I was caught in my own springe, enchanted—yet never really in danger, for not only did her father come to fetch me back into the world of adults but I had run those rapids before, and knew the still and deep water at their end.

I recall exactly how the children were sitting when I left them, poised to explode in gossip as soon as I had disappeared—it is likely that in my absence I was cut to ribbons by the woolly-haired boy, and perhaps deservedly so. As Tamar’s father and I climbed a broad staircase to the library, where we would discuss business, I remembered the opera singer with whom I had once fallen in love. Her voice was like liquid or a jewel. I have not since heard such a beautiful voice. But she was, oddly enough, almost unknown. I went to Covent Garden to find out in what productions she would sing. Her name was Erika, and when I inquired of the old man at the ticket office I found that he, too, was in love with her.

“I’m too old,” he said, “and you’re too young.” I knew that this was true, and I must have looked pained, because he grabbed me through the ticket window and said, “Don’t you see, it’s much better that way!”

“I see nothing,” I said. “If that’s better, then I’m sorry to be alive.”

“Wait,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll see. It’s sweeter, much sweeter.”

I went to the opera that season two dozen times just to see and hear Erika of the liquid voice. I wanted, despite the fact that I was fifteen, to marry her immediately, to run away to Brazil or Argentina, to take her with me to the South Seas, etc., etc., etc. It had been unspeakable torture to watch her on a brilliantly lighted stage, singing in a way that fired up all my emotions.

But by the time I met Tamar, I knew that a lighted stage is often best left untouched, and I knew, further, that all connections are temporary, and, therefore, can be enjoyed in their fullness even after the most insubstantial touch—if only one knows how. I was, that night, in a dream within a dream. I was young again in a room of bright colors and laughter; and all the time the dark image of a smoky continent called me away and threatened to tear me apart. I did not know then that there is no contradiction in such contradictions; they are made for one another; without them, we would have nothing to lose and nothing to love.

Tamar was the most lovely girl—and had it not been for that delicate and slim bit of silver wire, I might not have known her as well as I did. Her father agreed to the scheme, but then the scheme collapsed, and the world collapsed soon after. Six years of war. Most of the Jews did not survive. Most of the paintings did. In six years of war, there was probably not a day when I did not think of the time when I had had to sit at the children’s table, in a world of vulnerable beauty. Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

In January, when the sea is cold and dark, crossing the Atlantic is for the brave. Seen from land during the day, the ocean is forbidding, but it is nearly unimaginable at night in a storm, far north, where the ice tumbles down gray wave troughs like tons of shattered glass.

Our hearts were suspended and we held our breath. We tiptoed around, trying not to make too much noise, so that we would not upset the sea or overturn the ship with a sudden movement. We felt that if we ourselves were silent and orderly, the sea would follow our example, and so mothers repeatedly hushed their children, everyone sat with a peculiar stiffness, and many a conversation was left dangling when the ship rolled way over to one side and paused there as it decided whether or not to return.

The quieter we became, the more the sea grew wild. In nocturnal storms from Iceland to Newfoundland, it seemed as if the world were lit up by the electricity of the sea itself. Snow batted down against the ship’s windows, and white dragons leapt into the air as breakers struck the bow. When lightning bombarded the waves through the driving snow, its fractured light illuminated the shadowed snowflakes and made them seem like endless numbers of angels propelled and directed in a dreamlike war.

I was offered money to read prayers, but I refused. The Talmud and the body of prayer, by their own decree, must not be used as a spade to dig in the ground, and, besides, when the ship swayed in storms, reading made me dizzy.

“If you won’t read prayers for money,” some of the passengers asked, “will you read them for free?”

I told them that I never ask God for anything whatsoever, since I assume that He will give me exactly what He sees fit.

“Isn’t there a prayer for those who are lost at sea?” they wanted to know.

“Certainly,” I answered. “There are scores. I myself know about a dozen.”

“Well then say them!” they screamed.

“No,” I said, “I won’t.” And I didn’t.

Somewhere in the North Atlantic we encountered a storm that smashed windows on the upper decks, tore away half the lifeboats, and sent seawater cascading down the companionways. We heard bolts snap and we saw metal beams free themselves from their attachments. The lights went off, and though at times we were nearly upside down in the dark, no one spoke or cried out. We began to think of America, still several days off, as a wild concoction of physical laws where we would have to live permanently on raging seas in the flash of lightning and the swirl of snow. We imagined that if we built houses there, they would blow away, that we would spend our lives holding on as the floor tilted and the lights went out, that America was a place of large dark rooms in which several hundred people lay frightened to death with their eyes as wide as small plates. When suddenly the lights blinked, I saw momentarily a field of bodies—men in sheepskin coats and furs, women with shawls over their heads, sleepless children lying perfectly still in imitation of their elders—and everyone was looking at the ceiling, waiting for the water to burst through.

But it never did, and during our approach to America the sea grew calmer and calmer, as if by sailing into the lee of the continent we profited from its benevolence. The sea moderated, and the land sent out signs—not doves, but gulls as white as wave crests, who came to join us days before our landfall, and followed on vibrating wings that seemed unsteady but had been strong enough to carry them, through winter air, across hundreds of miles of sea. I was sure that I could smell land, until one of the sailors told me that the land was frozen and I would not be able to smell it even if I were standing on it. But a day from port I saw a cloud bank that seemed anchored in place over all of North America. Only on the sea was the sky clear, in patches of the palest blue, and the sea itself was as flat and glassy as oil. Then there was nothing but cold fog and blasts of the whistle. The officers doubled their watches, standing outboard on the flying bridge, listening like hunting dogs or men who are awaiting a miracle. The first time our blasts were answered, they lifted their binoculars and peered out to sea. They closed their eyes like symphony conductors and strained after the sound. The echoing blast came closer and closer, our ship veered slightly to starboard, and then the many restless passengers on deck were stunned by the sudden appearance of a huge white warship heading northeast, deliberately seeking the storms that we had labored to leave behind. Black smoke and sparks flew from its stacks; it was sharp, steady, and flooded with guns; and it passed us so fast that we would hardly have known it was there but for the American flag flying from its stern, warm as fire. As the flag glided by, I thought to myself that it was the first color I had seen in the New World. It ran from us in the sea of white, until it was the size of a rose, and then a pencil stroke; and then it disappeared. I began to search again, as did the watch officers. The water was calm, we were close to shore, and we probed steadily deeper and deeper, looking for color. But everything was white.