A Perfect Madness (15 page)

***

TEN

Scotland and England, 1940

M
rs. McFarland, a
stout and stoic Presbyterian with gentle manners, opened the front
door to her small cottage the moment the three women turned from
the road onto the stone pathway leading to the cottage. Rising
early to tidy the rooms and prepare a makeshift nursery for Anna,
she had sat reading and knitting by the living room window for
hours, anxiously awaiting her arrival. Childless and a widow of
World War I, Mrs. McFarland’s life consisted mostly of small
farming and the church and gossiping, which was not a sin in her
eyes. It was a Christian way of knowing your neighbor’s hurts and
needs, she would say, even though they might be personal. As a Scot
and Presbyterian, Mrs. McFarland believed that man by nature was a
mess, though she thought of herself as a good woman. Attending
Wednesday prayer meetings and Sunday services and any other time
the church doors were open, Mrs. McFarland tried to make sure she
wouldn’t be forgotten when God’s grace was passed out among the
Presbyterians in Scotland. Besides, the saintly John Knox had
preached twice in the small stone church she attended. What could
be a better reference for getting into heaven than that?

When the call went forth from the
government for Scottish homes to house children from cities in
southern England targeted by Germany’s deadly bombers, Mrs.
McFarland’s doors swung open wide and never shut until the war
ended. But Anna would be her only child, and from the moment she
lifted Anna from Julia’s arms she loved her. Watching from her
front window, she saw Eva and a Red Cross worker, followed by Julia
carrying Anna, come into view as they topped the long, winding road
up from the small village below. At Julia’s insistence, all three
stopped to inhale the beauty of the surrounding green hills and
glens below sprinkled with grazing sheep and tiny brooks that
looked like moving ribbons of silk. “Mt. Sinai couldn’t be any
closer to God than this,” Julia whispered to Eva as they moved on
to Mrs. McFarland’s cottage.

Neither Julia nor Eva could speak much
English then, but words weren’t needed when Mrs. McFarland reached
out with her strong arms to embrace Julia. Seconds would pass
before either one would release the other. Later, riding back on
the train to London, Julia would recall the strangeness of Mrs.
McFarland’s embrace, telling Eva it was as she imagined God’s would
be, should He have real arms to hold her. Placing Anna in Mrs.
McFarland’s arms became a gift then, a moment wrapped in a burst of
joy she couldn’t explain. Eva only smiled and nodded and felt good
too because Julia did, but she knew the pain of separation would
not be far behind.

Later in the evening, back in London,
Julia began to cry the minute she opened the door to her apartment
and saw Anna’s empty crib.

“
What have I done, Eva?
God will never forgive me.”

“
For what?”

“
The sin of bringing Anna
into this world out of wedlock and then giving her
away.”

“
You’re talking crazy
now.”

“
No, no, it’s as if Anna
was a sacrifice to God that shouldn’t have been made. I’m not sure
He will trust me anymore.”

“
It will pass,” Eva said,
deciding to humor Julia.

“
God hasn’t always been
gentle with Jewish people. You know that, Eva,” Julia said, sobbing
quietly.

“
Yes, but she’ll be living
with a Protestant, that should soften Him up some. Just think, a
Presbyterian and a Jew under the same roof.”

Julia frowned at Eva’s words, her eyes
widening as if expecting God to strike them both down at any
moment.

“
Luther was a Protestant,
too, and he burned ten thousand Jews,” she protested.

“
Luther wasn’t a
Presbyterian, he was a German,” Eva responded, trying hard to keep
from laughing at her friend’s silly chatter, but her resolve
quickly gave way to loud guffaws that shook the room.

Julia laughed, too, and felt clean
again. Anna would be fine with Mrs. McFarland. They both had the
same God, didn’t they?

Later in the evening, after Eva had
left, Julia pulled Anna’s crib next to her, and began singing
softly to the emptiness before her.

All love is of one thing, a
singularity, Erich had told her one night while they lay together
among the graves in the Old Jewish Cemetery. “You can’t separate it
into two parts, any more than you can divide the basic matter of
the universe,” he had said. Such heady chattering was always too
much for Julia, especially when wanting to make love to him. The
idea of love was simple and shouldn’t be cluttered up with the
heavy baggage of philosophical conjectures. Yet listening to his
distant voice now gave hope to Julia that such idle talk might be
true. Mrs. McFarland could be singing to Anna this very moment,
gently rocking her, too, covering her with the same love they both
possessed. Sleep came easy then to Julia, a deep and welcoming
sleep that left her rested in mind and body for all that was to
come tomorrow and the tomorrows after.

Disappointment damned Julia and Eva
when they first offered their services to Colonel Moravec, the
Czechoslovak intelligence chief who had escaped Prague. Their
expected early return to Prague was quickly squashed by their total
ignorance of the English language and Eva’s somewhat dismal German.
Nonetheless, they were happily welcomed and initially assigned to a
unit of the Czech government in exile that had begun working
closely with British Intelligence. For twelve weeks, beginning
every day at dawn till dinner, they were unmercifully subjected to
a pounding of English into their tired brains, branding the mind as
if hot cattle irons had been used so nothing would be forgotten.
Sunday was the day of rest, not Saturday, their Sabbath. But Eva,
who had long figured that God, at this particular moment in
history, didn’t give a rat’s ass, jokingly convinced Julia that
Moses certainly didn’t stop looking for food on the Sabbath when he
had all those hungry Jews bitching at him for being lost in the
wilderness. So Sunday became a day of rest. For Julia, Sundayswas
also when she had the joy of writing short nursery rhymes in Czech
to Anna, singing along as she did, as if Anna were there with her.
Whether Mrs. McFarland could pronounce the rhymes properly, brogue
and all, was of no matter to Julia. It was the love that she would
bring to Anna’s young soul that emboldened her heart. In time,
though, the rhymes turned into broken English, then a wholeness as
Mrs. McFarland sang them to little Anna with a sweetness and joy in
her voice that any mother would envy.

At first, Julia would not write a
letter to Mrs. McFarland until it was proper and correct, believing
she might think her ignorant and poor as a mother. Only short notes
penned by the Red Cross worker asking Mrs. McFarland to recite the
rhymes the best she could went to her. On the day Julia chose to
write the first of many letters to come, one hour would pass before
she accepted the first page of what she had so meticulously put
down. By comparison, Mrs. McFarland’s letters, which arrived
regularly on Wednesdays, were always short sentenced and folksy
simple, filling Julia’s mind with bright, colorful images of what
Anna must look like.

Twelve weeks into Julia’s absence from
Anna, a letter arrived from Mrs. McFarland inviting Julia to spend
the approaching Easter holidays with her. She need not concern
herself with the Christian festivities of the weekend, and would
have two glorious spring days to be with Anna, Mrs. McFarland
wrote. So Julia went, choosing to leave on Friday afternoon.
Arriving alone late in the evening this time, and trudging up the
long, sparsely graveled road to Mrs. McFarland’s cottage, she
stopped to rest. Looking across the rolling hills and deep valleys,
made mysterious by the night, Julia felt for the first time a
lightness of being, the insignificance of her own existence. How
can we live in so many distant and disconnected worlds, she sang
out loud to no one. Erich’s, Anna’s, her family’s—all separate from
hers. It’s in these moments that wonder comes along, she believed,
when we must live beyond time, where all that we are arises with
our thoughts.

A distant dog’s barking startled
Julia, shaking her from the moment she was in, and she moved on
quickly towards Mrs. McFarland’s cottage. Within seconds, a light
marking the cottage appeared at the rise of the road, breaking
through the thick blackness surrounding her like a lonely harbor
light. An eerie quietness returned as she reached the stone path
leading from the road to the cottage. Standing on the door stoop,
cradling a restless Anna in her arms, Mrs. McFarland fired the
chilly spring night with her radiant smile as Julia
approached.

“
I thought maybe, my dear,
you would like to put Anna down tonight yourself. She’s been
waiting up a long, long time to see you, you know.”

Taking Anna into her arms and kissing
her, Julia burst into tears, crying openly. “I know, and I thank
you for that.”

Later that night, with Anna fast
asleep, Julia listened for hours to the first of many stories she
would one day tell Anna, stories about her infant years and a kind
and gentle woman named McFarland who loved her and raised her and
who just happened to be a Presbyterian and not a Jew. For each
visit, Mrs. McFarland carefully wrote the stories on sheets of
faded stationery, giving them to Julia to put with the ones that
would someday come from Julia about Anna.

As the evening passed, neither one
seemed willing to end the day, passing back and forth their own
life stories until each felt they had known the other a lifetime.
Julia had come to wonder how such a small house, empty of family,
could hold so much love. Her own had been greatly different, full
of family voices whose echoes would long be heard in the silence
after they were gone. Perhaps it was so with Mrs. McFarland. Three
years of marriage can become a lifetime of love, when that’s all
you are given. Entering the Great War at nineteen years of age,
Robert McFarland died somewhere on the fields of Flanders face down
in a rain-soaked crater with the back of his head blown off. Mrs.
McFarland never married again, nor cared to be in the company of
single men. “Surely if I did,” she would say when asked why,
“there’d come another war or two and take him from me. And I want
no more of that kind of sadness.” So the love she kept within for
Robert burst forth like a nightingale’s song the moment she first
took Anna in her arms. Julia knew then that when the day came for
her to take Anna back, Mrs. McFarland would die once more
inside.

Morning brought more unexpected
surprises to Julia, though not altogether pleasant. Sitting down to
a late breakfast, Mrs. McFarland placed before her a small, warm
bowl of haggis, smiling as she did.

“
A good breakfast is that
you need, dearie, if you are to walk the hills with me this day,”
was all she said.

“
Would I be rude to ask
what it is?”

“
Not at all, most people
do. A full meal is what it is—oatmeal, onions and sheep mixed
together and cooked. That is all you need to know.”

Later during their walk to the nearest
neighbor and beyond, Julia asked again what it was she had tried to
eat but couldn’t. When the truth came, Julia smiled.

“
I can understand now why
the Scots fought as much among themselves as they did against the
English, eating such a meal.”

Then realizing she might have offended
Mrs. McFarland, Julia stopped smiling and quickly apologized for
her rude remark.

“
Nae, you needn’t say
you’re sorry. They would’ve fought the same without the haggis,
just to be fighting. Battling flowed through their veins, not
blood,” Mrs. McFarland said, putting her arm around Julia,
laughing.

But then she grew silent for a moment,
watching a young spring lamb trying to steady itself and suckle
from its mother. Julia noticed the beautiful moment, too, but also
the small tears in Mrs. McFarland’s eyes.

“
I am afraid the hills
will be full of widows again,” she said. “Most of the young men,
and those fit to fight among the older ones, have already gone. But
you know that, with your Erich gone.”

Julia felt ashamed. She had not told
Mrs. McFarland the full truth about Erich, or Anna’s birth out of
wedlock, or the terrible night of her rape. No one knew outside of
Eva and never would.

“
Will you be leaving
tomorrow for London?”

“
Yes, but after you have
gone to church to celebrate your Easter.”

“
Come with me then, you
and Anna. We will sit together.”

“
Have you forgotten, I am
Jewish?”

“
Aye, today is your
Sabbath and tomorrow is mine, and I’m sure the good Lord doesn’t
care which is which.”

“
Your neighbors might. No,
I will sit with Anna and talk of God to her and wait for you.
Besides, I know nothing of your service and would feel foolish,”
Julia said, yet fascinated with Mrs. McFarland’s suggestion. What a
wonderful story, though, it would be to tell her good father and
mother someday. Sitting and singing and praying on Easter Day in a
Christian church, and a Presbyterian one at that.