Bells of Bournville Green (16 page)

‘But for you,’ he started to protest.

She would not hear of it. ‘I am all right. I have help. Just now I need a doctor who has already passed all his exams!’ She twinkled at him so that he did not take offence.

‘You come back and see me soon – all of you, when it is over. That would make me very happy. Now, you will want to see him. He may be sleeping. He mostly sleeps now.’

She led David to Hermann Mayer’s room. David realized that in all the times he had visited the little third-floor apartment he had never been in his father’s bedroom, and he felt like a nervous intruder.

The room was of a modest size and cramped. Hermann’s bed lay under the window, which looked out from the side of the apartment on to the buttery stone of the apartment next door. Close to it was a very large armchair which took up much of the room. It was upholstered in a heavy, brown hessian, and its arms and the place where the head rested were threadbare and slightly greasy. There was little else in the room except some clothes folded on a wooden chair in the corner, and a little table by the bed which held the staples of Hermann’s life: the radio, his glasses, a folded newspaper, medicines. There was a strong smell of eucalyptus oil, which overpowered everything else.

The first thing was the sound of laboured breathing. The figure on the bed looked very small. Hermann was covered neatly by a sheet and a light brown blanket, his chin resting on it as if the bed had just been tidied. What remained of his hair was white, his cheeks sunken and the skin so thin that the purple forking veins could be seen through it. It was the face of an eighty-year-old: Hermann was in fact fifty-three, younger than Annaliese.

‘Come – just sit by him for a while,’ Annaliese encouraged him. ‘Take this chair. He may not wake – but you can take your leave of him, darling.’ He heard her voice catch, despite her attempts to be matter-of-fact.

She slipped out of the room and David sank into the big brown chair.

He felt a sense of awe in the face of the enormous, quiet event unfolding in front of him. Hermann’s death, he realized, did not feel sad. What tore at him was the life his father had endured. Death had been this close before, when Anatoli, Edie’s husband, then in the British army in 1945, had gone with the liberating forces into Bergen-Belsen transit camp. He had rescued Hermann from among a pile of the dead and taken him to the camp hospital, where he survived malnutrition and typhus.

As he watched his father struggling for breath, David tried to see him in his youth, a gifted scientist in Berlin who had married his love, a beauty called Gerda, the mother he had never known. What followed in his young life then was Theresienstadt concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and even one further camp after the liberation. These years of brutality broke his health, mental and physical, and it was Annaliese, reunited with him after the war, who had looked after him ever since.

He listened to his father breathing, thinking of all the places he had breathed before.

‘I don’t know you . . .’ David whispered. ‘I shall never know you.’

Tears filled his eyes for a moment, but he wiped them fiercely away
I am crying for myself,
he thought angrily.
Out of self-pity!
Then he was less hard on himself.
No, I am crying for you too, for the suffering of your life.

Hermann Mayer had reacted with pathetic emotion when he first realized his son was still alive, and David had visited him regularly ever since. He remembered the warning of the lady who had directed him to Hermann Mayer before he had met him:
You should not expect too much of your father.
It had been the wisest of advice. He and Hermann had met, both needing and wanting, but finding themselves to be like two planets that pass and never touch. It was too late for anything much, for a real father. But at least, after all those years of uncertainty about his background, David had met and known Hermann. For that he was grateful.

For a moment he leaned over and gently brushed his hand over the wisps of white hair. Hermann’s scalp gave off a dim, papery warmth.

‘Rest now,’ he whispered. ‘Be at peace. Shalom,
abba,
shalom.’

He stayed talking for a short time with Annaliese before she shooed him out to catch the bus back to Jerusalem.

‘I do not think he will regain consciousness,’ she said solemnly. ‘Go, boy. Live your life. Study hard and be a great doctor. I will let you know when the end comes.’

And she kissed him fondly and waved him down the steps of the apartment block. She was watching, smiling, as he turned again to look at her.

Chapter Nineteen

David expected to receive news of his father’s death almost immediately, but several days passed and there was nothing.

He worked hard at the medical school, returning exhausted from his long day of classes to the cramped apartment and the pleasures of his little family. In the evening Gila always had food ready, baked aubergines or mutton, and chopped salads of tomatoes and small fat cucumbers. He loved the return home to what felt like safety.

One afternoon though, a week after he had been to Haifa, there was an extra anatomy class that he did not need to attend and he came home early. He was restless, finding it hard to concentrate on his studies as he waited for a telegram or letter from Annaliese.

The apartment seemed very quiet as he pushed the door open. If Shimon’s voice could not be heard laughing and chattering he must be napping, David knew. He closed the door very carefully and peeped into the living room. Sure enough, Shimon was sprawled on his back on the old sofa, arms flung out and his closed eyes fringed by immensely long lashes. David stood smiling down at him. The sight of his son always melted him. He longed to pour over him all the safety and love he had never had from his real parents: to heal the wound in himself.

He realized Gila must be resting too and thought to join her. Sure enough, she was lying on the bed, and thinking her asleep, he sat down gently on the edge to take off his shoes. As he undid his laces he felt her stirring and heard a sob.

She was lying curled on her side, hands over her face.

‘Hey, my sweetheart. . .’ He knelt over her, a little afraid when he heard her weeping. What on earth could have brought on such emotion? He dared to touch her shoulder. ‘What is it my love?’

She gave way to her tears then, curling up more tightly. Only when he lay beside her and held her against him did she turn to him.

‘Oh, Doodi – you’re going to be so angry with me!’

‘Am I?’ he was trying to humour her a little, because there was a wildness in her expression which disturbed him. ‘Why’s that? What have you done that’s so terrible?’

‘I’m bleeding,’ she said, weeping even harder.

He stared at her, trying to make sense of this.

‘I had to go and see Dr Hirsch this morning. He said I am losing again – a child. It is not very heavy now, but if it gets worse I should go to the hospital. . .’ She looked fearfully at him, her face seeming very young and vulnerable.

‘But . . .’ David put a hand to his forehead. ‘I don’t get it. You were taking the pills – I mean, you weren’t pregnant. . .’

But Gila was shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry Doodi – I’m so sorry – but I was.’ Tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘I just wanted – I don’t know . . . It was for Shimon. I need to do my studies, but I wanted to have another baby so badly. I have not been truthful with you, that is the worst of it.’

David looked at her, feeling his face set into a stony expression. ‘When did you stop taking them?’

‘A while ago – three, four months? I don’t remember.’

Ablaze with fury he removed his arms from round her and rolled off the bed, to go and stand by the window. For a moment he wished that he smoked. It felt as if the harsh scrape of cigarette smoke across his throat would be soothing. He looked out at the row of cedars, the hazy sky over the apartment blocks, sickened by its rudimentary ugliness. Gila was crying softly behind him.

‘Doodi,’ she said eventually. ‘Don’t – don’t be so hard. Please come back here.’

His anger flared. ‘What – for you to tell me more lies?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I am not having a child. So there is something for you to celebrate.’

The words cut through him. He was furious and very hurt at her deceiving him, but he knew how much she longed for it, as he did. For a moment he felt like weeping himself.

‘Are you in pain?’ he asked, more kindly.

‘A bit – not too bad.’

He went and lay beside her again, their faces almost touching, but he did not reach out for her.

‘You didn’t have to be so sneaky. Are you afraid of me?’

‘No, of course not.’ She looked into his eyes, grief and longing in hers. Sometimes she looked so lost and bereft, this woman who he had thought was all strength. ‘Only you’re always working so hard and I know I should be finding a way to work and study as well. But then there’s also something in me – something that takes over. I just felt as if we had to make a baby.
Had
to!’

He reached out then and pulled her tenderly to him, stroking her head, then laying his hand on her belly, aware of the tearing process taking place in there.

‘Should we have a child now? Are we wrong?’ he said.

‘Well, we know my body is tricky and choosy with babies,’ she said bravely. Shimon had originally been a twin, but Gila miscarried the other child. ‘So something is saying to us that the time is not right. Maybe I should put away this crazy idea until later on.’ She was reverting back to being brisk and practical.

They lay for some time, gently holding each other, discussing what they must do for the future. Things felt warm and right again. David hated quarrelling.

It was only when Shimon woke from his nap that he got up, leaving Gila to rest, and made a drink of juice for his little son, full of thanks for his existence.

Despite his frailness, Hermann Mayer did not hurry into death. It was not until ten days later that David received the letter from Annaliese, telling him that his father had slipped away in his sleep. He had been kept heavily sedated and had never come to full consciousness again. She told him that Hermann would be buried in one of the Jewish cemeteries in Haifa and she would take David to pay his respects when he next came to see her, but he was not to disturb his routine by travelling there again now.

On hearing the news David abandoned his studies for the afternoon and caught a bus into Jerusalem. Entering the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, he wandered through the narrow streets and bazaars of the western side of the city, which was Israeli: the eastern side was in Jordan. The streets were lined with stalls selling round soft breads, tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines and bunches of mint. When the sun was sinking low in the sky, he found a place to climb up on to the walls and stood looking over the pale stones of the city, its domes and towers and minarets and the golden glow reflecting from the Dome of the Rock. A church bell tolled somewhere, and as evening came the call to prayer would go up from the mosques – yet still he knew he was standing in the beating heart of Jewish Israel, its very purpose,
Yerushalaim,
founded back in the very earliest history by the Canaanites. His people, he told himself, the home of the Jews, where he belonged. But as he looked across the hot, bustling city with its alleys and markets, its spice sellers and donkeys, its peoples gathered from Vilnius and Odessa, from Paris and Berlin, the Yemen and Warsaw, he asked himself how close he really felt to the Canaanites or to the history of this torn piece of land. It was not even the land of his parents: it would have been quite foreign to them. Was he not just as close in his heart to Edie, who had brought him up, to the place he had once called home? For a moment he longed to hear the soft, familiar tinkling of bells across the leafy spaces of Bournville.

He felt a shock of emptiness, almost of panic. With his father’s passing he had lost one of his very few links with his real blood family and their history, tragic as it had been. Now there was only Annaliese. Without her, he was cast adrift in this country of refugees. At this moment, being a part of the land did not seem enough.

With powerful longing he thought of Gila and Shimon, and a passion filled him. They were his all, truly his home! He was making a place to belong, with his loved ones, his family. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Why had he been so angry when he found out Gila had been pregnant? She had deceived him of course, that was the real reason for his hurt. But why should they not have more children and build a family? Wasn’t that what he really longed for? And the state of Israel wanted lots of healthy Jewish babies. He pushed all the difficulties aside in his mind. They would manage, somehow. They would have children – lots of them! – and they would flourish and belong, all children of the state of Israel and he the father of the household. They would be both his roots and his branches.

He hurried down the steps from the walls and through the shady alleyways of the city, longing now to be home, to tell Gila his thoughts, to lie with her, holding her close in his arms, and share this vision of what home could mean.

Chapter Twenty

‘Doodi – I have been thinking.’

He had come home bursting to talk, but decided to wait until Shimon was in bed, since conversation with the child around soon became like a pile of shredded paper.

Gila had cooked his favourite dinner of chicken with tomato salad and he knew she was pampering him because of his father’s death. She fussed round him and insisted he rest while she helped Shimon wash and prepare for sleep. Tonight she seemed brighter and energetic.

The living rooms of the apartments gave out on to tiny balconies with just enough room for two chairs close together, or for a rack of washing. These spaces, cut into the mass of the building and enclosed by railings, ran up the side of the block like a row of missing teeth. David sat in the balmy darkness holding a glass of mint tea, listening to the sounds of older children playing and to other voices: the high nagging of the Lithuanian lady in the apartment below, and occasional grunts of reply from her husband, the raucous Yemeni family sitting outside by the main entrance, a baby crying somewhere further along the block. In the room behind him, Gila was humming softly to Shimon.