Sea Music. Sara MacDonald

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       Chapter 13

      The rain has stopped and the Berlin night is quite still except for the muted sound of traffic out on the autobahn. He wakes in the dark and for a moment believes he is back in his childhood. He can smell the roses from his mother’s garden, but stronger still is the smell of horses and things he does not wish to remember. He can hear his heartbeat loud in the dark and the overpowering silence closes in on him. Why, after all these years, do the memories come flooding back? He has buried the past. He has buried it deep.

       That was that life. This is another.

      He can remember the first time he saw the little girl clearly. She had long, shiny black hair he wanted to touch. She was tiny, like a little doll, and she was afraid of horses. But she was not afraid of him.

      Mutti was furious with his father. She did not want him to go into practice with a Jew, and she stood in the garden that day, unsmiling and icy. She called him to her and whispered loudly, ‘Ugh! How I hate the darkness of them.’

      He pulled away from her. Kicked out at a garden chair because of the sickness in his stomach, and the gardener’s puppy lying underneath shot out with a squeal … I shiver at the memory of her eyes. Close my mind against the echo of her laugh.

      All his childhood Mutti told him stories, terrible fairy stories of a race who ate their own babies, who were inferior, but a threat to all good Germans. After he met the little girl his heart told him something quite else.

      How lonely they were, he and that fearless little girl. There were no other children nearby and only a hedge and a lawn between them. He defied Mutti, refused to think of her as Jewish. He and the girl were friends. They were friends.

      Although he was older, she was the one with the imagination. They made small dens in the rambling garden on the edge of the forest, like nests, with old horse rugs and straw as linings against the cold and damp.

      They always made more than one den to outwit Mutti. The girl seemed to know exactly where his mother would send the nurse or gardener to look for them, and where, in a tangle of dried fir branches, close under the branches of overhanging trees, grown-ups never ventured, if you stayed very quiet.

      He was the practical one, carefully lining the small floor of their tree caves with layers of warmth. Pinching food from the kitchen and old coats from the hook in the stables so they would not freeze. Tying torn pieces of cloth to the trees so that they would know which way they had come.

      In the depth of winter, when it was too cold to play in the garden, they often hid in the little tack room in the stable block. It had a small fire, and they played board games or drew pictures or read. The groom and the stable boy used to warn them when Mutti was on the warpath.

      His mother knew perfectly well he played with the girl and she hated it. He could not take her into the house when Mutti was home, and even when his mother was out or away, the girl was so nervous she jumped at every sound, hated being inside his house.

      His mother could not ban the little girl from the house and garden. She could not stop them playing together or from being friends, because of his father. He adored the child. She amused him. He also admired her mother, who was gentle and extremely well read.

      Mutti was much too clever to dislike the family openly or show her jealousy and prejudice in front of his father. She enjoyed the money and lifestyle that the new clinic engendered. Instead, she made life difficult for the children, and any social interaction beyond the polite interchanges between the two families impossible.

      This was neither unusual nor a surprise. Initially, the two families knew exactly where they stood and the conventions were strictly adhered to, in front of her. Jewish families kept to their own, lived amongst each other, not with Poles or Germans. As far as Mutti was concerned it should stay that way. Behind her back, the boy visited the girl in her home and so did his father.

      As the years went by Mutti’s jealousy of the girl and her mother, combined with her prejudice, became all-consuming, obsessive. Fuelled by politics, the papers, her friends, Polish and German, it seemed to his mother that she had waited all her life for the time that was coming.

      As his father’s marriage disintegrated, as Poland began to prepare for war and indigenous Germans waited for their chance to seize coveted houses and jobs, as houses became empty and the trains overflowed with refugees fleeing while they could, his mother would beat him with his horsewhip for even talking to the girl.

      He and the girl were like brother and sister. Until he changed schools. Until the company of his peers became more exciting. Until he began to understand the threat to the purity of the German race. Suddenly, they were children no longer and it was not possible to be friends.

      He was a German. She was a Jew.

      I shut her out. I shut out the memory of those haunting dark eyes. I shut out what I did and what I became. I close my eyes against the coming day, the boy I was. Against the sick endless knowledge of my own betrayal.