Chocolate Girls (46 page)

‘There was a lady,’ she added. ‘Miss Annaliese. Two, maybe three years they were here.’ The woman saw he was a beginner in Hebrew, and explained slowly, with accompanying gestures, that she had been a sort of concierge for both the houses for many years, but now, given the state of the other place, for only one.

David felt his blood pulsing hard round his body. They had been here – they existed! He was so close!

‘I wrote to them,’ he said. ‘Did you send letters to them?’

‘Ah—’ The old lady made a sorrowful gesture. She drew a line back and forth in the air with her hand. ‘
Lo.
Herr Mayer was a bitter man. He said no letters. Nothing good could come to him so to throw anything which came. He thought there would be nothing.’ He saw her respond to the pain in his eyes as she spoke. It was lost, he was thinking. He’d never find him now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You know him?’

It was his turn for an emphatic, ‘
Lo.
’ He shook his head. ‘But I believe he is my father.’ Sadly, he asked, ‘Do you know where he is now –
b’vaka’sha
? Please?’

‘I have not seen him,’ she said. Her tone was gentle. ‘But I think they went to live on the Carmel. Michaelangelo Street. I do not know which house.’

David smiled, renewed in hope. ‘Thank you – you are very kind. What is your name?’

‘Mrs Spielman,’ she told him. ‘And yours?’

He hesitated. ‘Rudi Mayer.’

She reached out and for a moment he felt her warm, wizened hand on his wrist. ‘Perhaps you should not expect too much of your father. But I wish you good luck, my boy.’

I can’t go tonight, he thought. The day was waning, and already seemed to have gone on a long time. He was tired and felt stirred up and unready, needing time for these new fragments of information from the old lady to sink into his mind.

The kibbutz had given him the address of a very cheap hostel he could stay in at the foot of Mount Carmel. It was rudimentary but clean, and he was to share a dormitory with five others. He gathered from them that the hostel was used mainly by Israelis on trips to look round the country, and idealistic young people, often American, on their way to try out life on a kibbutz. Keeping his canvas bag containing his few possessions with him, he went out again to explore further. Not far from the hostel one of the steep, zigzagging roads led up the Carmel and he began to climb. The evening was cool, scented with flowers and pleasant for walking, and when he had climbed a good way up he was at last rewarded with views that provided the sense of pride and exhilaration he had hoped for. Panting, he stood at a bend in the road and looked down over the gold dome of the Bahai shrine and the chaotic sprawl of the city where evening lights were coming on, twinkling in the dusk. Beyond these lay the wide sweep of the bay, lamps strung along the coast road like a necklace, and beyond them the dark sea. David smiled. Excitement welled up in him.
Eretz Yisrael.
He formed the words with his lips, proud of the feel of Hebrew. It seemed to require more energy and fire to speak than English, forcing out those sounds from the throat and teeth. And he would learn it until he was fluent like Amir and the others. Like Gila! The thought of her excited him, even though she seemed untouchable, almost another species. He took a deep breath of the sulphurous evening air. What a place this is! he thought. Our land. My people. What we can make here!

And behind him, somewhere on this hill with its apartments and gardens, were some of his family. For those moments of exhilaration he chose not to think of the old woman’s words:
perhaps you should not expect too much of your father.

He breakfasted on hard-boiled eggs with pure white shells, cucumbers and yesterday’s stale
pittot
, the pockets of bread into which he stuffed the eggs, and with it, weak black coffee.

Refreshed, and nervous, he was ready to leave at an hour far too early to call on anyone. The day was warm, with hazy strips of cloud, and he decided to use up some of the time by walking up the Carmel once more instead of looking for a bus. It was Saturday tomorrow, he realized, the Jewish Shabbat. The religious Jews would go to
Shul
. He felt a pang for a moment. Had he been wrong to disappoint the Leishmanns and not to go to a religious kibbutz? Gila and the others at Hamesh showed no sign of wanting to go to
Shul
or anything else involving a synagogue. ‘In Israel we are free to be Jews,’ he was told. ‘We have the land – we do not need a synagogue.’ And he knew that he was finding a sense of his belonging as a Jew in this way as well. Here he could stop being Davey, an odd, trying-to-oblige mixture of Quaker and Jew, beloved son yet cuckoo in the nest. He could learn to be himself.

David climbed and climbed, physical exertion a distraction from the fear of what lay before him. Unlike last night, the old woman’s warning now nagged in his mind. What exactly had she meant? What had happened to Hermann Mayer? There were so many horrible possibilities that he could not even bear to guess.

I must do this, he thought, pushing down hard on his legs on the steep road. I must see him and offer myself as his son. I need to know him – and perhaps he needs to know me, that I exist. But if he doesn’t want me I mustn’t be disappointed. At least I will have seen him for myself. After all, I already have a family . . .

Michaelangelo Street was high on the central Carmel, a quiet side street lined on one side with eucalyptus and bushes of pale blue plumbago flowers. On the other were sandy-coloured apartment blocks of two or three floors in the traditional style with stone steps running up the outside. They made David think of the pictures of Bible villages he used to draw as a child. From somewhere he could hear the low humming of an electric generator.

Mrs Spielman had not been able to tell him the number of the apartment, so he had prepared himself to ask. When he went to the door of the first apartment block, however, he saw that the name of the occupants was written above the bell. Kauffman. He wouldn’t need to knock on doors! He climbed the stairs. Hirsch, Aron. On to the next block: Weisz, Eisner, Perlmann. He moved quietly up and down the stairs, absurdly nervous in case anyone came out and challenged him on the doorstep. Would he ever find his father like this? It seemed too ridiculously simple to suppose the name would just be there, among these others. Perhaps he had even changed his name?

He reached the fourth block: first floor, Rubenstein, second floor, another Hirsch, third floor, Mayer. There it was, in neat black letters, in front of his unbelieving eyes. MAYER!

From inside the apartment he could hear a voice, then realized it was too fast and fluent to be anything but a radio. He was standing trying to take in the implications of what he had to do next, when he heard someone coming up the steps behind him, the slapping tread of someone wearing mules. A broad-faced woman in her thirties appeared, hair tied back in a scarf. She gave David a curt nod and immediately rang on the Mayer doorbell. David, unable to get past without rudely pushing her, shrank back into the corner.

The door opened. Over the sound of the radio David heard a guttural female voice say
bocker tov
(good morning), in a tone which suggested the visit was expected, and the woman in the scarf disappeared inside. The door began to close, but the occupant evidently caught a glimpse of him standing out there. It swung open again and David saw a middle-aged woman, her greying hair pinned softly up in a bun. She was scarcely taller than five foot, and dressed in a frock made from a rather shiny mauve material, a cream cardigan and low-heeled black shoes, a little scuffed at the toes. There was something smart, imposing, about her, though her clothes were obviously not new. Her face was very lined, the eyebrows plucked thin and their shape retraced by brown eyebrow pencil. Her demeanour was kind and intelligent, though her expression was temporarily clouded by suspicion. In Hebrew she said sharply, ‘What do you want here?’

David was paralysed. He simply didn’t know where to begin, and what he felt like doing most of all was running away. But he forced himself to move closer.

‘I . . .’ Stumblingly he organized some Hebrew words in his mind, then reminded himself to greet her. ‘Shalom . . . Are you Annaliese Mayer?’

She frowned. ‘
Ken
. . .’

Oh, God help me
, David thought.
This is it.

‘I am from England,’ he said slowly, his gaze never leaving her face. ‘My mother escaped to England from Berlin in 1939. Her name was Gerda Mayer. The name she gave to me was Rudi. I am Rudi Mayer.’

The woman just stared at him, eyes wide. Seconds passed. He could almost see the functioning of her mind. Then one hand went to her mouth, the other groping for the doorframe, and she took a step backwards, shaking her head.

‘
Nein . . . Mein Gott, nein!
’

His schoolboy German was still better than his Hebrew, and like her he reverted to it.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I have come to look for you, and for my father.’

She stared at him still. ‘But how . . .?’ She shook her head. ‘You died!
She
died . . . The place was bombed. We made enquiries after the war and they said everyone in that house was dead.’

‘They thought so. But I did not die. I was rescued.’

Annaliese’s face had gone pale. He could hear her short, sharp breaths. She moved towards him, cautious as if he might vanish at her touch like a soap bubble, eyes fixed on him in wonder. She reached out her hand and hesitantly David took it, feeling its cool, fragile skin.

‘You are truly the son of Gerda? Gerda’s little baby . . .’ She just couldn’t seem to take it in. David nodded, feeling a lump rise in his throat.

‘My father—’ His voice was husky. ‘Hermann – is he here?’

Her face crumpled for a moment, and, still holding him with one hand, in a guarded way she reached round and closed the door of the apartment.

‘Rudi,’ she whispered. ‘Little Rudi. She wrote us so very much about you. Gerda’s darling child.’ All at once he was clasped in her arms, and both of them were weeping. Annaliese kept pulling back to look at him, her tears flowing, reaching up to cup his face in her hands, to wipe his tears away, stroke his cheeks and hair, his strong arms and shoulders.

‘You are so tall, such a grown-up boy. I should have known when I saw you standing there,’ she told him through her tears. ‘You are so very like her – the eyes, the hair.’

David struggled to keep up with her German, but he understood from her gestures. ‘I have been told that.’ He tried to smile. This felt unreal, as if he was acting in a play.

‘Who told you this?’

‘The Jews who knew her in Birmingham.’

Annaliese nodded. ‘She told us that many people were kind to her.’ It took her some time to collect herself. At last, wiping her face with her handkerchief, she said, ‘You think I am strange not taking you inside. But Elena is doing a little cleaning, and Hermann, he is . . . Ah, but in fact, this is a good time now.’ She opened the door, cautiously and beckoned David inside. ‘He is listening to his radio programme. Come in. Come! You must tell me everything!’

The apartment was cool inside, and smelt of stone, rather like an English country church. David found himself standing on a small landing with doors leading off it. The sound of the radio came from a room to his left, and from somewhere else, probably the bathroom, he could hear water swishing and realized it must be the cleaner. The stone floor was partially covered with a red rectangular rug, and on the one available wall space was a painting in a gold frame of a beautiful building, its roof topped by three ornate domes.

‘Beautiful,
ja
?’ Annaliese said. ‘This was painted by my uncle in the 1920s – it is the Synagogue Fasenenstrasse, a place your mother knew very well.’ She gave a painful sigh. ‘It was burned in the
pogrom
in November 1938. All the beautiful roof – gone.’ She touched his back gently. ‘Come into the kitchen – you will have coffee and some cake?’

The kitchen was small and quite bare, with a sink, two metal chairs pushed under a table topped with pale yellow Formica and a very large refrigerator. Annaliese ordered him to sit at the table while she made coffee.

‘We have a while yet – his programme will end at eleven o’clock.’

The kitchen clock said twenty to eleven. David was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the kind of reference he had heard so far to his father. The thought of coming face to face with him seemed frightening.

Annaliese paused for a moment, in the middle of spooning coffee. Her agitation was obvious.

‘I wonder if you should go away. If I should take a little time to prepare Hermann. His health is not so good, you understand? Could you come back tomorrow?’

David explained that he had to return to Kibbutz Hamesh that afternoon.

‘I see.’ She poured boiling water. ‘Then we shall do our best.’

Sitting opposite him she handed him the rich coffee and offered a plate of
lebkuchen
.

‘So you speak German?’

‘I learned a bit at school – I am not good at it, as you can hear.’

‘No – you speak very well. And Hebrew?’

He took one of the little cakes from the plate. ‘I am on an Ulpan. Just a few weeks. So German is easier.’