The Night of the Burning (17 page)

For one reason, I actually enjoyed the long walk to and from Caledon Street. On the way home I always rested for a while in my favorite place in Cape Town, which was called simply the Gardens. The Gardens was a park mainly composed of a gracious, long, wide pedestrian avenue
through the heart of the city. Huge oak trees formed a cool arch above the avenue, and many people of different colors sat on the benches and chatted or dozed.

I loved the Gardens mainly because of the squirrels. The first morning that I walked along the avenue, I was startled to see a little creature peering at me from a grassy side path, balancing on its hind legs and wrinkling its nose in a thoughtful way over raised front paws.

I stopped and stared. The squirrel stared back. I blinked. The squirrel blinked, too. I laughed out loud. I was shocked to hear myself laughing. What if someone noticed me? I hurried off down the path toward school. When I dared to look back, only the squirrel was watching.

As soon as school ended that day, I hurried back to the Gardens, to the same spot, and sat down on a bench. Almost immediately, a squirrel scurried past and scrambled up a tree. Then another—a beautifully glossy squirrel—stopped to consider me, dug furiously for a few seconds, and carried the booty he had retrieved to a spot right under my bench, almost touching my legs. Delighted, I peered through the slats of the bench. He was eating a peanut in a wrinkled crunchy shell. I remembered seeing a vendor selling those peanuts in little paper cones at the entrance to the park. Were they meant for people or for squirrels? I wondered.

The next day I brought a few coins, knotted up in a corner of my handkerchief for safety, and timidly I purchased a cone of peanuts to feed the squirrels. It was
the first time I had bought anything in my life, the first time I had had my own money. It came from the small allowance Mr. and Mrs. Kagan insisted on giving me each week.

“Got to have a few pennies,” Mrs. Kagan had said genially.

“I don’t need anything,” I said awkwardly. It was embarrassing enough to take the clothes Mrs. Kagan bought for me. I reached out to return the money.

But Mr. Kagan pressed it gently back into my hand with his sweet smile.

“Thank you very much,” I stammered.

Mrs. Kagan smiled proudly. “S’all right, dearie. Buy yourself some chocolates tomorrow, I’m sure, hey, dearie?”

But I kept every penny hidden in a box under my bed. What if things became bad again and there wasn’t enough food? What if South Africans turned on the Jews as the Poles had done? What if I needed to get Naomi to a safe place?

The box was starting to feel wonderfully heavy. When I finally opened it to take out a few coins, I carefully subtracted the amount from the total I’d scribbled on a little piece of paper.

Today, in the Gardens, I had an offering for the squirrels, to thank them for the gift of their dark, steady eyes and the S-curve of their fat gray tails. And, I admit, to entice them closer.

One afternoon, as I was feeding the squirrels, a girl
walked past, then stopped and sat at the far end of the bench. When two squirrels bumped noses in their eagerness to reach a single peanut, I heard a soft laugh join my own giggle. I looked up. The girl was wearing the same school uniform that I wore and she seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember her name.

“Hello,” she said shyly, pushing her short blond hair behind her ears.

“Hello,” I answered. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You’re one of those orphanage children from Europe,” the girl stated.

She said it without unkindness, but I had to correct her. “I don’t live at the orphanage. I live with the Kagans, in a flat.”

“I live in a flat, too. We moved to Cape Town from Oudtshoorn last month,” she offered, pushing her hair back again, although it was clearly too short to stay there. “My name’s Monica Meisner.”

“Mine’s Devorah Lehrman.”

Another awkward silence. We both turned to the squirrels.

“There are more squirrels than people here,” I noticed suddenly, and we both started to laugh. Monica wasn’t perfectly pretty, but when she laughed, her healthy white teeth showed and her brown eyes crinkled and her hair escaped, and she made me want to laugh, too.

“Maybe this is squirrel country and we are the ones
who are the visitors,” Monica said.

“And maybe the squirrels should buy chocolate at the café and throw us tiny bits with their claws,” I added.

“And we’d have to pick up the chocolate with our teeth!” Monica giggled. Then she stopped. “Hey, that makes me hungry. Let’s walk to the bakery and I’ll share a raisin bun with you.”

My mouth watered. Mrs. Kagan sometimes bought those buns for tea. They had plump, squishy raisins inside and liquid sugar dribbled on the top. My hand went into my pocket to feel the precious pennies there. I probably had enough if we were going to share. “Let’s go,” I said.

By the time Monica and I parted, we had agreed to walk as far as the Gardens together the next day after school. And after that, it was simply understood that we would leave school together every day. The Gardens was our giant hideout, an enormous private club where we were the only human members, or at least the only ones we noticed.

“Other kids have a tree house; we have a whole park!” Monica said one day when we lay at the foot of our favorite old oak. As we gazed up into the different world of leaves and branches, my hair ribbon slipped off and I sat up and began capturing my long hair into a neat braid.

“Why do you always tie your hair back so tightly?” Monica asked. “If I had waves like yours instead of my thin straight hair, I’d show it off all the time. Here, have a look in my pocket mirror. See how pretty it is hanging loose. Especially with your dark eyes.”

I peeked in the mirror. My cheeks were rosy and healthy and my eyes were framed by rich, flowing locks. Why had I never noticed before? Where was the strained, drawn face that used to look back at me? I grunted self-consciously and returned the mirror. The sun was warm on my back as I leaned comfortably on my elbows with my chin in my palms and looked down into the lawn. Between the green blades I could see cool, damp earth.

“God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!”

“What are you mumbling?” Monica asked.

“Nothing really.” I laughed. “It’s just a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I like. Hey, look at this beetle. I’m forcing him to turn left or right, but he’s so cautious that he can’t decide which way to go. So he’s stuck!”

“I know someone as cautious as that,” Monica said mischievously. “I’ve even seen her looking over her shoulder sometimes.”

“I don’t!” I protested.

“Oh, so you’re admitting it’s you,” Monica teased. “Well, only occasionally. Like once an hour.”

I had to laugh at the exaggeration. I still felt anxious at times, scared of a danger I couldn’t predict. But with Monica I felt much safer. It wasn’t simply that she, too, was Jewish. It was that Monica gave me the feeling she would help me out just as I would help her, if need be. Before, I’d
been taking care of my sister. Now I had a friend.

Then came visits to Monica’s flat. It was a home like no other I had ever been in, and I was a different person there, laughing and chatting easily in the friendly chaos. Monica’s adored older brother, Max, and her easygoing parents, Mr. and Mrs. Meisner, lived in an extraordinarily untidy, noisy, and warm space, with a puppy, two parakeets in a cage, a goldfish tank, which was Max’s pride, and a large cardboard carton holding Monica’s two white mice and their nine offspring.

“Nine,” Mr. Meisner had groaned when they dragged him over to see the tiny, bare morsels, blindly nudging at their mother. “Do you realize that means I’m supporting eighteen creatures in this household and that doesn’t even include the goldfish? Eighteen! No wonder mouse fathers eat their babies!”

“They don’t!” I protested.

“It happened when my friend Tony’s mice had babies a few years ago,” Max confirmed, and Monica turned to him. Monica trusted everything Max said.

“How can we stop the father from eating our babies?” she asked.

“I’ll move the father to another box for a week or two,” Max offered. He reached for a cardboard carton that was lying under a table and casually dumped out of it a pile of newspapers and a mess of coins, pencils, and keys. “Here, cut some newspaper into thin strips and we’ll make
another bed for him.”

In a few minutes the papa had been separated from his new offspring, and the living room floor was covered with fine snippets of newspaper.

Monica stroked the father mouse crouching at the bottom of the big box. “He looks a bit lonely,” she said doubtfully.

“Why don’t we draw a few mice on the box walls for him to look at?” I suggested.

“Good idea,” agreed Monica. “It’s like hanging a mirror in a birdcage to keep the bird company.”

Mrs. Meisner offered to find paintbrushes and a box of paints for “the young interior decorators.”

“Daddy, you hold the father mouse while we paint,” Monica demanded. Mr. Meisner took the creature gingerly.

“Man-to-man,” Max joked.

“Can I try painting?” I asked. “I’ve never used a paintbrush before.” There was a moment’s silence as the Meisners looked at one another in apparent disbelief and then Monica passed over the brush quickly.

It wasn’t like drawing with a finely sharpened pencil or even with a crayon; the first stroke didn’t go at all where I expected. The brush was hairy and clumsy and it smeared color against the cardboard. I bit my lip in frustration. Then I dipped just the very tip of the brush in the paint again and tried making finer brushstrokes. That was better. Carefully, I brushed the outline of a round mama mouse standing in front of her babies, her claws raised to protect
them from a tall, scary father mouse. I made the father’s teeth disproportionately large and gave the plump mama an apron.

The Meisners’ exclamations of praise made me blush. I suddenly remembered the man on the ship who’d told me I was talented.

“You’re a very good artist,” Max said.

I memorized his words. Later, when I was alone in my bedroom, I’d be able to mouth them, and maybe I’d even make up a scene in which he said what he’d said, and I would answer him very cleverly, but casually, of course, and then he would laugh as he bent over me, in order to look at the painting, of course, and I would smell his clean, boyish smell and admire his warm, lopsided smile from very close.

“Hey, dreamer,” Mr. Meisner teased me. “Sign your initials in the corner and then go and wash that paint off your hands. It’s nearly dark, so I’ll drive you home.”

1923

School was different now. Or maybe I was different. There was one girl I had always been careful to avoid. Her name was Heather Smith, and I was never sure why she made me uneasy; she just seemed surly. Then one day I nearly tripped over her when I was hurrying out to recess. She had bent down to tie her shoelace and I didn’t see her and stumbled right into her back. “Sorry!” I said as I hopped clumsily to the side. She’d been knocked off her precarious balance, pitching forward onto her knees, not hard, but clearly enough to rouse a sudden fury.

“You’d better be very sorry, you bloody Jew,” she said.

I took a step back immediately. Here it was, Poland again, pogrom again, fear again. But this wasn’t Poland, it was my new place, and she was just Heather Smith, and suddenly I was angry. “What did you call me?” I asked in a voice that started off strangled and low.

“Bloody Jew. You’re a bloody Jew,” she repeated. And I
understood she had been wanting to say it for a long time.

“You say that again and I’ll slap your face.” The words just came out, and my fists went up in front of me.

“What’s going on?” a familiar voice asked behind me.

“She called me a bloody Jew,” I repeated to Monica as I glared at Heather.

In an instant Monica was squarely at my side. “Who do you think you are, Heather Smith?” she said. “You think you’re better than we are?”

Heather seemed to size Monica up, then turned back to me. Her mouth was sneering, but there was a hint of uncertainty in her eyes. Her outburst had been interrupted and she’d lost a little steam, but she wasn’t out of the ring yet.

“My dad says you’re a bunch of dirty immigrants and our country shouldn’t have to give you free education,” she said.

I opened my mouth, but someone beat me to a reply. “Dirty immigrants?” a boy named Lenny Friedman shot back at her from just behind me. How had he come up so quickly? And he wasn’t alone—he had three friends with him, Shlayma from the orphanage and two South African Jewish boys. “Take a look at your filthy fingernails, Heather. And how about washing your hair this month?”

One of the South African boys weighed in. “As for free education, you’re going to be repeating this grade just like you repeated the last one, so don’t talk to us about costing the government money.”

I was buoyed, surrounded by support. Everyone wanted to say something, to shout after Heather as she slunk away. My strength was no longer needed. But I knew I had it.

One Saturday I returned home from an afternoon with Monica, feeling energy bubbling in me. I had cut my hair to shoulder length the previous week—just short enough that I didn’t have to tie it back—and I shook it every now and again to feel the swish of freedom. Mr. and Mrs. Kagan listened as I told them about Monica’s new puppy, Goldie.

“Goldie suddenly saw the neighbor’s cat and he ran toward her. He was so excited to have a friend. And then she hissed, and she arched her back into the air, and all her hair stood on end. She must have almost doubled in size. Well, Goldie skidded to a halt. He fell over his big paws and he yelped. Then he turned around and came charging back to us as fast as he could. He was squealing like a pig! And he wouldn’t climb out of Monica’s arms until we were back inside their house.”

Mrs. Kagan had been smiling at me while she knitted. “Our Devorah seems like a new child,” she said to Mr. Kagan proudly.

The approval in her voice helped me muster the courage to make a request. “Would it be—May I—Monica says I can have one of her mice to take home if it’s all right with you.”