The Day the Flowers Died (16 page)

“You have to pull this latch back before the next frame.” He
laid his fingers over hers as he directed her.  She played
with the latch and then focused the lens over Eli as he returned to
the banister and she took the photo just when a breeze blew his
long brown scarf into the air and he smiled.

“Got it!” Rebecca swayed over to Eli and dangled the camera in
front of him.  Her sky blue eyes intensified in his stare and
he took the camera out of her hands as they returned to the
bedroom.

* * *

Friday morning, June third, hundreds of demonstrators from the
Communist party crowded Berlin.  People shouted and waved
their angry fists in the air.  The country was torn between
opposing parties of Communism, Socialism, the Nazi’s National
Socialist German Worker’s Party, and Democracy.  The country
was failing and so was the parliament of Reichstag.  People
wanted leadership that could provide jobs, security, and
change.  The angst for this change, mingled with the vehement
resistance to the growing Nazi party, led many of the communist
demonstrators to violence.

Eli and Rebecca arrived in the midst of these streets.  He
pulled his Audi into a back road and walked with Rebecca,
exercising their disagreement with the changing politics.  Eli
felt it was their civic duty, their obligation to his country to
fight against the threats that strangled it.  Roslyn, Robert,
Jacob, and Aaron met them in the back street and the six of them
joined the crowds and threw their fists while walking through the
streets of Berlin, though Rebecca’s fists were not as tight as the
many around her.

The crowds grew loud.  Their clamorous cries demanded to be
heard, demanding justice.  Aaron and Jacob ambled side by side
like brothers, though they had not known each other very long,
introduced through their mutual friend Eli.  Their common
Jewish heritage and struggles through the web of German Nazi
propaganda bound them.  Eli tightened his fists with his
friends, chanting alongside the protestors.  Rebecca watched
this new side of Eli, a side that walked in the face of danger and
welcomed the fight.

She had seen Eli argumentative before, with his lawyer’s
instinct for debate and diplomacy often seeping into their lives,
but in this rally he was different.  This time, he added
actions to his words, not behind a courtroom desk, but on the open
vulnerable streets, opposing the politics of the country. 
This side of Eli she did not want to see again.  She admired
his courage, but in these streets in this crowd, a rush of chills
ran through her body and she grabbed Eli from behind.

“Eli, I want to go home.  I don’t like this.  Can we
go?” She implored, her eyes begged.  Rosalyn gestured to
Rebecca with a shrug and without words, asking, what’s wrong?

“Rebecca, nothing is going to happen.  It’s just a
demonstration.” Eli reassured her with almost a chuckle, but she
couldn’t believe it would end peacefully.  Marching on the
streets, the sounds pounded and permeated throughout the city,
alerting everyone not marching that something paramount was
occurring in Berlin.

Many who opposed the two marching parties shouted along the
sides of the streets, throwing fruits, bottles, cans. 
Demonstrators retaliated, throwing items in return to the discord
of the disapproving observers.  Groups of Nazis hidden in
common German clothing took offense to this protest and threw
punches at some of the people who passed.

One Nazi, no older than twenty, with perfect teeth and short
blond hair like that seen in the military, lunged at Eli when the
six turned a corner and continued up the street.  He wrestled
Eli to the ground, smacked him across the face with a locked fist,
and knocked Eli’s face against the hard ground.

Rebecca gasped.  “Eli!”

Aaron pounced on the Nazi and pulled him off with the help of
Robert.  Aaron held him while Robert threw two fists at the
young man, busting his nose and splitting his strawberry lip.

Two more Nazis sprinted out from behind a corner and leapt on
top of Aaron and Robert.  Soon the streets flowing with
peaceful marches erupted into brawls.  This violence incited
more angry spectators and protestors to fight and retaliate, and
soon much of the street became disordered.  Eli, Aaron, and
Robert rolled over the ground with three young men who, from a
disconnected society and a city of turmoil, had turned to a party
that offered hope.

Jacob joined in the disturbance, pulling a stronger attacker off
of Aaron.

The four of them, after bloodied faces and ripped clothes,
finally thwarted the three young men and they ran off behind the
corner from where they came.  Jacob wanted to retaliate, but
Eli yanked him back, almost in a wrestle like fashion.

“Let it go.  This has gotten way out of hand,” Eli shouted
over the loud noises from the crowds.  “I should have listened
to Rebecca.  We need to get back to Munich.”

Aaron, a logical mind like Eli, could see there was not much
advancement to be made since violence had broken out, and he
stepped behind Eli to follow him away from the street.  Eli
tried to coax Jacob into coming with them, but Jacob shook his head
and pulled away.

“We’re staying to fight!” Jacob shouted to Rosalyn and
Robert.

Robert and Rosalyn, though appearing delicate to the eyes,
pushed forward as if fire burned behind them, shouldering through
the crowds and shouting out for their freedom and for the politics
of the Communist party.  Eli grabbed Rebecca’s hand and, with
Aaron behind him, retreated off the streets onto the sidewalk,
staying close to the buildings until they found Eli’s car.

“What about our friends?” Rebecca inquired to Eli, “Aren’t they
coming?” Her voice shook from the violence in front of her.

“They’ll come in Robert’s car when they’re finished.” Eli turned
his motor on and as he backed up, a wild, blond young man sure to
be another Nazi jumped over the hood of his car with a glass bottle
in his hands.  He threw it through the windshield and Eli
accelerated, thrusting the boy off the car.  Eli whisked
through the back streets back to Munich.  He drove up to his
apartment building and shook the bottle out of his car window
before he, Rebecca and Aaron escaped into his room.

No one tended to the broken windshield, frantic from the recent
events and both Eli and Aaron wanted to wash the blood off their
faces and change their spoiled clothes.  Rebecca tended to
Eli’s wounds with a wet towel from the kitchen sink and Aaron
washed in the bathroom.  Her gentle hand caressed the rough
wounds left on Eli’s face that marked his political resistance.

“Those bastards,” Rebecca almost lost her temper.  Her face
burned red.  “I told you we needed to get out of there. 
You can’t protest like that without getting involved with the
Nazis.”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to scare you.  If I had
known, I never would have taken you there.” He whimpered with hard
honesty as Rebecca calmed the bleeding.

“None of us could have known,” she whispered, wiping the blood
under his nose, patting it like she had been taught in nursing
school.

The next day brought more deplorable news when Hindenburg
dissolved the Reichstag and called for new elections by the end of
July.

However, the next week passed quietly for Eli and Rebecca and
they were glad for it.  With pressures mounting and tensions
escalating in politics, they didn’t want any more discord in their
lives.

But in the middle of the following week, on Wednesday, June 15,
the country altered for the worst.  As a result of Hitler’s
backhanded maneuvers with Schleicher — promises of sympathy to his
conservative national party — Schleicher awarded Hitler the ban to
be lifted on the SA and SS, essentially allowing Nazi violence to
prevail on the streets.  Murder and violence soon erupted on a
scale never seen in Germany.  Patrolling groups of Nazi
Brownshirts walked the streets, singing Nazi songs, searching for
brawls.

In an attempt to sooth Rebecca’s worries, Eli found himself
hiding away in their rooms most of the month.  Even Eli’s
father closed down the office for the last few weeks in an effort
to prevent violence befalling any of his Jewish employees. 
Rebecca spent most of her time between Eli and the hospital,
bandaging up victims from the venomous attacks.

As she walked up to the hospital from the curb she would often
hear the rumble of song from the Nazi storm troopers and cringe:
Blut muss fliessen, Blut muss fliessen! Blut muss fliessen
Knuppelhageldick! Haut'se doch zusammen, haut'se doch zusammen!
Diese gotverdammte Juden Republik! Blood must flow, blood must
flow! Blood must flow as cudgel thick as hail! Let's smash it up,
let's smash it up! That goddamned Jewish republic!

The month of Eli’s sequestering left him feeling out of place in
a country where he once always felt a part. The sting, like a
scorpion striking his pride, kept him in the most dismal of
dispositions and, apart from Rebecca’s returning home from work and
sharing time with him, he began to feel disconnected from the world
outside.  Germany grew more and more into a country he did not
recognize, leaving him unsure if he even wanted to belong to it
anymore.

He occupied his idle time with phone calls to his parents and
quiet readings from some of his favorite poets and writers, curled
in the bed or sitting on the porch.  Rebecca offered solace
and she found herself wishing she could take away all his pain, but
her small hands and thin arms could never be strong enough to hold
up a crumbling country.  They both knew they would have to
somehow endure while the country fell apart around them.

Sunday, July 17, 1932

Rebecca readied herself for work. Eli, unwillingly put on room
arrest by Rebecca until the violence stopped, stayed in bed. 
She had seen Jewish store windows smashed and shattered glass all
over the streets.  She heard the Nazis yell out slurs,
“Germany awake!” and “Kill the Jews! Heil Hitler!”

The words stung her young ears.  Rebecca requested Eli to
not go outside until the intensity settled, because of Eli’s
descript Middle Eastern Jewish features.  Rebecca was sure he
would become the target of a Nazi stampede and she could not bear
it to see him bloodied and bruised again.

Eli obliged while she held his face in her palms and admired his
jagged nose, heavy brows, and hint of color in his
complexion.  To her, everything that the country was being
taught to hate she adored.  He lay in bed, watching her roll
up her nylons over her long, lean legs.  “C’mere,” he called
out to her with passion in his eyes.

“No, I have to get ready for work.” Rebecca tugged the nylons
and straightened out her white hospital skirt.

“Please,” he used sympathy as a childish ploy.

“I can’t.  I’ll be late.”

“Call in and let them know you’re running late.” He used all his
lawyer tactics.  He slipped off the bed and, in his socks,
made his way to her and rubbed her shoulders from behind.  Her
body collapsed at his touch and she felt herself giving into him
with each impassioned kiss.  She called into the hospital and
Eli waited for her on the bed.

She arrived at the hospital an hour late, but the front desk
expected it and the secretary smiled when she walked in. 
Patients flooded the hospital.  Several young boys sat in the
waiting room with scrapes and bruises over their faces and
arms.  An elderly man walked around the room with a limp
needing usual care.  Two older men had been escorted to the
back room for stitches from gunshots.

Strolling from the lockers to the front office, she noticed the
patient rooms were all taken and Rebecca soon found her hands full,
assisting doctors, filling out paper work, and ushering the
wounded.  Her white hospital skirt and top blended with all
the other nurse uniforms which provided a sense of solidarity,
binding them as a team.  Many nurses were German, some
Austrian, a few French, and one Jew.  Rebecca wondered if Ms.
Eppes’ fate would soon befall the only Jewish woman working in the
hospital.  The thought took her to Eli and her worries for him
cooped up in the apartment alone.

Ezekiel told Eli to take off whatever time he needed under the
violent circumstances that engulfed Germany.  His main concern
was for his son’s safety, not for the law firm.  Ezekiel said
he would give Eli’s work to some of the other staff until attacks
in the city abated.

Rebecca was grateful to Eli’s parents for their understanding,
except in the case of her.  She wished her own mother could
support her the way Eli’s family supported him living in Munich and
helping with everyday needs.

If Rebecca had chosen to live at home and marry according to her
mother’s wishes, Rebecca would be doted on by her father and mother
alike.  If she wanted a trip to France, her mother would not
hesitate to arrange it. Instead, Rebecca decided to go to Munich,
study an unapproved profession, and be with a man who displeased
her mother.  This overt disobedience came at a cost and, if
Rebecca wanted to follow her own will, she would also have to
arrange her own life.

Sometimes when Eli slept, Rebecca wandered to the photo of her
as a baby in her mother’s arms.  She tried to remember how
wonderful and secure that feeling must have been, knowing her care
was certain.  Now, she still longed for her mother’s
acceptance, but refused to pay the high costs to acquire it. 
She gave Eli up once and she would never make that mistake
again.  Nursing and Eli were her life, a life that took her
four years to create in Munich and she didn’t want to regret
it.

As she bandaged and tended chipped teeth, abrasions, cuts, and
broken limbs, she knew this was where she needed to be, helping the
people who could not help themselves.  She was called into one
of the back rooms to assist the doctor whom she had aided once
before with the convulsing old man.  She slid on her gloves
and took out the doctor’s supply kit filled with instruments for
cutting and sewing.  She clutched each instrument, waiting for
the doctor to complete each cut and stitch, switching instruments
as the need arose.