The Nature of Blood (8 page)

Then Mama suddenly stopped, her face knotting before my eyes into a painful grimace. She turned from me. I left Mama and went into my cold room and locked the door. I sobbed all night. And then, in the morning, I began to keep a journal, but within a week I gave it up, for I could no longer summon the energy to maintain the daily pretence that I was writing to my sister.

I saw less of my friend Rosa. When I did see her, she seemed
to be physically shrinking as the days became shorter. If her aspect could
be used as a barometer of our general condition, then we were thoroughly exhausted.
Out in the streets, the hostile noises and barked orders had begun to grow
even louder. One morning, I looked through the high kitchen window as the
bulky sewage wagon rumbled by. These days, it was pulled by men who were wrapped
like mummies. The fresh snow and weak grey light made these thin figures appear
ghostly, a state to which they would soon be reduced. There was no longer
water in the standpipes, so people cleaned themselves in snow. And there were
no tools to bury the dead in this frozen earth, so it was now acceptable for
people to simply lie where they fell. By the time the spring arrived, we knew
that our streets would soon be sealed. It was over. We were to be sent away
on the trains, for we were needed elsewhere. The rumour was that, by the end
of the spring, the whole district would be reduced to rubble. I wanted to
discuss this with Rosa, but after the long hot summer I seldom saw her. My
friend's increasingly reclusive behaviour, and her obvious physical decline
on the few occasions that I did glimpse her, disturbed me greatly. I could
not understand what was happening to her.

Towards the end of the summer, I had sat with Rosa in the kitchen
and told her about Margot. About her being in hiding. About my sister, who
was a year older than I, and who looked like them. (Apparently, according
to Mama, I bore the stamp of Jerusalem.) I asked Rosa that if, by any chance,
she should change her mind and decide to leave, would she please find my sister
and be sure to tell her that Eva loves her and is thinking about her. Rosa
clasped her bony hands around mine and whispered, 'Of course.' And the longer
I talked to Rosa, the more I found myself speaking to her as though her leaving
were inevitable, her discovery of Margot only a matter of time, her reclamation
of her old life a certainty. Yet Rosa said nothing further. She simply listened
as I retold tales of Margot's escapades, and of how I was sure that my sister
was harbouring a boyfriend named Peter, and I talked on until I noticed the
sad smile on Rosa's face. And then I fell silent in embarrassment. And then
again, Rosa squeezed my hands between her own. 'Don't worry,' she whispered.
'It will be all right.'

This turned out to be the last conversation that I ever had
with Rosa. At nights I heard her walking around her room, and during the day,
although I stationed myself in the kitchen so that I might see her should
she venture out, Rosa seemed determined to be by herself. And then, one late
spring day, we received the fateful news that at six-thirty the next morning
we were to report to the train station with clothes for a journey. All valuables
were to be surrendered, and all who failed to report would be punished. I
watched as a defeated Mama and Papa prepared themselves in silence. I could
see the terrible truth in Papa's dead eyes. His flame of hope had gone out
long before the arrival of this latest gust of wind. And Mama, having reluctantly
removed her wedding ring and her mother's antique necklace, simply sat with
her head bowed.

But my thoughts were not with my parents. I wondered about
Rosa. Had she truly been abandoned? I turned my mind back to that first afternoon
nearly two years ago, when Rosa caught me standing on the wooden crate, a
shaft of light illuminating her face, a young woman waiting for her husband.
And I remembered how, after she had gone back to her room, I had again looked
out of the window. However, unable to concentrate, I had climbed down and
sat at the table and simply stared at her closed door. When Mama and Papa
arrived back, they were extremely angry to find me sitting in the kitchen.
Papa stormed off into their room, but Mama stayed with me. I explained in
a low voice about Rosa, and how wonderful but frightened she was. And Mama
listened. Then, having heard me out, Mama looked in the direction of Rosa's
room and spoke quietly, but firmly. 'She married outside of her people.' Mama
spoke as though she wished me to understand that this was the greatest crime
that a person could commit. Then she smiled at me, rose to her feet, and left
me by myself. It was our secret. I had no idea that Mama possessed such attitudes.
That night, I lay in bed and listened to the immensity of the silence coming
from Rosa's room. Nearly two years later, the same silence.

I discovered the body. We were packed and ready to go. By now, my parents possessed little of value that had not been hidden, or confiscated, or sold. Just their wedding rings and the necklace. Papa decided to hide these treasures, although I don't believe that he truly expected to reclaim them. However, at the darkest hour of the night, a floorboard had been lifted and carefully replaced. But it was futile. Even I knew this. And was it worth the risk? They had promised that for every item discovered, one hundred would be killed. But these days. One hundred. One thousand. Who was counting? As we stood with a suitcase each, I asked Papa if I might say goodbye to Rosa. Quickly, he said. Quickly. I knocked and then carefully opened the door. I sensed immediately that it was rat poison. Rosa was fully dressed and lying on the bed. Beside her lay her suitcase. She was ready to leave. Then, at the last minute, she couldn't leave. Abandoned. She stared at me from her deep, long-suffering eyes. Then I felt Papa's hand on my shoulder.

'Come, Eva. We have to go.'

In the sky, there shone a solitary morning star. The three of us joined the flood of people pouring down the street towards the train station. A human river of shattered lives, and at eighteen I now understood how cruel life could be. The men who lined our way with their machine guns and angry dogs were unnecessary. All of us knew that at this stage we had little choice. I gazed up at the church clock. It read five o'clock. It was the same clock that I could see from the kitchen window. For almost two years, it had read five o'clock. Here, among these houses which had become our prisons and our tombs, there was no midnight, there were no bells, there was no time. I looked around at the miserable and crumbling buildings, knowing in my heart that those who were hiding would soon be found. And killed. Buildings would be looted, contraband discovered, and whole streets burnt. In time, there would be no evidence that any of us had ever lived here. We never existed. According to Papa, we had followed the advice of our prophets. 'Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.' But it appeared that there would be no end to the indignation. Mama and Papa marched on with grim resolution, and I scurried to keep up with them. My suitcase was heavier than theirs, for it was filled with books, but I was determined that I should carry it myself. I knew that they did not want to talk to me about Rosa. For them, Rosa was already a thing of the past. My eyes were full of tears. Their eyes were firmly trained on the future.

DURING the winter when we sorted through our family belongings,
in order to prepare for the move from our four-storey house to the small apartment
on the other side of the city, Margot and I came across the old photograph
album. The black one with the gilt trim and the specially reinforced edges.
Mama kept it on the top shelf in the drawing room, where she imagined that
it was out of our reach. Well, it used to be. Mama had forgotten that Margot
and I had grown up.

Mama took it from us and then swept her hand along the shelf to make sure that nothing else was up there. Then, instead of stuffing it into a suitcase or a bag, or leaving it on the huge pile of materials whose fate was yet to be decided, she set it down on the drawing-room table and dusted its cover with a cloth. Beneath the skin-like layer of dust, a new object appeared. Mama opened it, and Margot and I gathered at her side, eager to see who or what it might reveal.

There were pictures of people we had never seen before. Old formal portraits, with photographers' names embossed at the bottom of the print. Portraits of old ladies perched on the edge of white wicker chairs, profiles of bearded men, people about whom, when Margot and I asked after them, Mama simply shook her head. They must belong to your Papa. The fact that she could remember neither these people nor their names clearly disturbed her. She looked particularly closely at a yellow-edged photograph of an old man in a suit. He had a doughy face, and an ugly sack of flesh which swelled beneath his chin, yet he insisted on leaning against a cane in a dandyish manner. No, she couldn't place him, either.

In the photographs of Margot as a child, I noticed that she always flirted with the camera. Head thrown back, eyes deliberately bright – she played the coquette.

'Look at you, you show-off,' I said. 'Always looking up at the camera.'

In my photographs, I had a tendency to look down. My head was always lowered, but my eyes looked up, as though I were framing a timid request. Such a contrast in manner.

And then we saw the photographs of Uncle Stephan. He was tall
and strong, and he stared confidently into the camera with his soft eyes.
Seeing him again sent my mind spinning back six years to when he visited the
house. I was about to speak, when I felt the outside of Margot's shoe scuff
my ankle, and I knew that I should not comment upon these photographs. Five
of them spread across two pages. Uncle Stephan. Always on his own. Always
staring directly into the lens of the camera. Always standing.

Uncle Stephan was Papa's only brother. He had journeyed to the British colony of Palestine, for he wanted to defend the new Jewish settlements against attacks from the Arabs, and to prepare the land for large-scale settlement by Jews of all ages and backgrounds. However, his journey was made all the more arduous by the fact that in order to visit this so-called promised land he had to leave behind a young wife and child, and break off from his medical studies. If I think now of Uncle Stephan, I can see a man who, if truth be told, did not know how to handle us children. There was a part of him that was secret and inaccessible, and we could always sense this. Children are able to pick up on such weaknesses and they can be ruthless. As time went by, Uncle Stephan learnt to protect himself against his nieces, although he never held himself distant from either one of us. He had about him a warm detachment, which must have been his way of enduring the pain of his life, but I suppose the truth is that we girls did not really know him. But then again, we did not make much of an effort.

I remember the day when I returned home from school and saw the fancy leather valise in the hallway. Hanging from a peg was a strange khaki-coloured coat. We had a visitor. In the drawing room sat a tall sun-tanned man, delicately holding a cup of coffee between his broad hands. Papa sat opposite him, the two men engaged in an animated conversation. When I walked in, Papa looked up and Uncle Stephan turned to face me.

'Ah, and here she is. Little Eva. Eva, do you remember my brother, Stephan?'

Of course, I didn't. I smiled nervously.

'Uncle Stephan has returned to us from Palestine.'

After dinner that evening, Mama dressed Margot and me in clean white dresses and we were ceremoniously marched into the drawing room. Twice before, Papa had insisted on parading his daughters in this manner, and on both occasions we had cried and begged him not to humiliate us in this way. This time, Mama said, it was different. It was just Uncle, and we could play as little or as much as we wished. As we walked into the cigar-smoke-filled room, Papa cried out with delight.

'Margot! Eva!'

He slapped a knee and jumped to his feet. Then he turned from us to his brother.

'Margot is quite a little pianist. Eva, however, is a newcomer to the violin. You must forgive her mistakes.'

The shock of this betrayal chilled my blood. I looked across
at my sister, who, to my dismay, was beaming.

That summer, my parents seized the opportunity of Uncle Stephan's visit to go to the east for a short vacation. Uncle Stephan was left in charge of Margot and me, plus three of our friends. It was understood that we would study in the mornings, and then be free to play for the rest of the day. However, we contrived to turn the mornings into a nightmare for poor Uncle Stephan, who was constantly labouring up the stairs and encouraging us to stop shouting and return to our books. Once he had left, Margot and I would begin again to make up stories about him for our three friends. One day, he might be a pirate who sailed the seas of the world looking for treasure; the next day, an African explorer. We transformed poor Uncle Stephan into anything we thought appropriate, and when we became bored with our games, we simply shouted at each other in order to make him climb the stairs so that we might giggle at him. But he never raised his voice, or left us without a small, if somewhat tired smile.

I know you're good children.'

And then the door would close in, and we would listen to the thumping of his feet as he made his weary way back down the stairs.

During those long hot summer evenings, Margot and I would sit
with Uncle Stephan and question him about fashions, and movies, and movie-stars.
But he knew nothing. He had seen nothing. He had never seen a Valentino picture,
or even a Chaplin picture. Margot knew more than I did, therefore her sense
of disappointment was greater than mine. I simply followed where she led,
sighing after her, throwing my hands into the air a moment after hers, and
letting them come to rest a few seconds after hers had settled. Uncle Stephan
would reveal little about where he had travelled, or what he had done, except
to confess that he had been in Palestine and that it was hot – hotter
than even our hottest days. His reticence only served to add to his mystery,
and yet Margot and I grew very fond of our strange uncle. And then, in the
morning, our friends would arrive with their books and papers, and the five
of us would again conspire to produce a kingdom of chaos at the top of the
four-storey house.

After Mama and Papa returned from their vacation, things were
never the same again. In the evenings, Papa and Uncle Stephan would sit together,
their conversation growing louder and more heated as the evening wore on.
It was so hot that Mama allowed us to keep the doors to our bedrooms open,
which made it a simple matter to follow the tide of argument that flowed up
the stairs. Papa was adamant. Uncle Stephan had given up on his medical studies,
discarded a wife and daughter, and gone off to fight for what? Why create
another home among these Arab people? His wife was right to refuse to uproot
her life and expose her child to these barbarians. Papa and he could set up
in medical practice together. The brothers Stern. They might become the richest
doctors in the country. Why had Stephan suddenly become a fool who evaded
his responsibilities? Let some other idiots risk their lives for this self-styled
new country. Uncle did not like being a called a fool, and this epithet generally
produced a vocal storm which raged and bellowed as long as the pair of them
had the energy. Had Ernst forgotten that they were Jews? That they remained
the only people on the face of the earth without their own home. Did he know
this? Papa would eventually drag his tired body up the stairs towards his
bed, but he always remembered to stop by and give his girls a kiss goodnight.
I usually pretended to be asleep, but sometimes the unusual smell of alcohol
disturbed me and my eyes met those of my Papa.

After a week of acrimony and raised voices, Uncle Stephan crossed a bridge and passed into the world of himself. He spent long hot afternoons sitting on a wooden bench in the garden, simply staring at the trees as though introducing himself to nature. He would sit perfectly still in the searing heat, nothing on his head, barely blinking, until the daylight had faded and the trees had begun to blacken. Somehow Margot acquired a map of Palestine and, one afternoon, we went together to Uncle Stephan and asked him to show us exactly where he had been. He looked at the map, then drew his finger aimlessly across it, pausing at various places, and then he continued to drag his finger this way and that, as though he were touching some precious object. Then he squinted up at us, the sun obviously causing his eyes some difficulty.

'Thank you.'

Margot and I glanced at each other. Thank you for what? we thought. Then a frustrated Margot asked him.

'But Uncle, what were you doing there?'

Uncle Stephan fed his own enigmatic personality by simply smiling and shaking his head. He had no desire to share with us the secrets of the world to which he was committed. Margot was exasperated.

'But Uncle Stephan, why won't you tell us?'

What neither of us fully appreciated was that poor Uncle Stephan
was not talking to anyone. For him, there had already been enough talking.
Papa had told him that unless he returned to his wife and child, Papa would
help them to leave and settle in America. Uncle Stephan's wife had written
her husband many letters, all of which confirmed that she remained adamant
that she would not live in the desert with Arabs bearing down on her from
all sides. At least, in America, she and her child could begin anew. And so
Uncle Stephan decided not to return to his wife and child. He loved them dearly,
but he feared that his resolve might break were he to see them again and try
to settle this issue face to face. Papa laughed at his brother, and then spat
in disgust. Sitting on the wooden bench in the garden, and these days simply
staring at the yellowing grass between his feet, Uncle Stephan tried to minister
to his broken heart. He had made his decision. He would be returning to Palestine.

Uncle Stephan was carrying the same khaki-coloured coat, and standing beside the same fancy leather valise, that I had noticed when he first arrived. Mama and Papa stood with him in the drawing room. Uncle Stephan seemed rested, serene even, and he smiled at the two girls who stood together in the doorway. Perhaps the sight of his nieces caused him some further regret, as he imagined his own child growing up without ever knowing her father. It turned out that his wife had written to him and informed him that she understood from his silence that he preferred Arabs to his own child. To her mind, the serious responsibilities of family were incompatible with the responsibilities of this self-proclaimed new life of his. This being the case, she had no desire ever to see him again. She was respecting his choice, and she asked him to respect hers.

Papa flagged us into the drawing room, where we were encouraged to say goodbye. Uncle Stephan gently stroked the top of my head, and then he let his hand slip down on to my shoulder. And then he did the same to Margot. We stood on either side of him, but he said nothing. It was Papa who spoke.

'I shall walk with my brother to the end of the street.'

I cannot remember any formal leave-taking, any shaking of hands,
or kissing or embracing. I do, however, remember Margot and me peering out
of the drawing-room window as Papa and his brother emerged from the house.
For a moment they paused, and Papa glanced up at the window. And then they
turned and began to walk away from the four-storey house. Tall Uncle Stephan,
with his long strides, and a frustrated Papa scurrying along beside him. Papa
liked to have his own way. Even as I watched the pair of them walking, I sensed
how much pain his brother's departure was causing Papa. But Uncle Stephan
walked with a firm step. A decision had been made.

Once Uncle Stephan returned to Palestine, he disappeared without
trace. The police would occasionally visit and ask after him, and Mama would
always make these men coffee and offer them cakes. I remember Papa's patient
tone. Everything was polite and civilized while they were here. No, he had
still not heard from his brother. Yes, he would most certainly let them know
if he did hear. But after these men had gone, Papa would fly into a rage at
the thought that his brother could place him in a situation that required
the police to visit the house. And then there were the men who turned up either
early in the morning or late at night, and who invariably needed a bed for
a night or two, a meal, a bath and some money, before they went on their way.
Neither Mama nor Papa ever turned these idealistic young men away, knowing
full well that they were either on their way to, or on their way back from
Palestine and Uncle Stephan. However, when asked, none of them ever delivered
any news of Uncle. They were being schooled in the same methods of evasion
which Uncle Stephan had mastered, yet they remained pupils. Uncle Stephan
would never have shrugged his shoulders as these men did. He was both more
skilled and kinder.

And then, some two years after Uncle Stephan's departure, a gaunt-looking man arrived one morning while we were still having breakfast. He was inadequately dressed for the cold, in a thin jacket and with a long scarf wrapped three or four times around his neck. His eyes were watering and his cheeks seemed to have been hollowed by the wind. He stood at the door to the kitchen, grateful that some warmth was seeping into his bones. Papa asked Hannah first to give him a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, and then to show him to the spare room where he might sleep.