Carry Me Page 35

  When we experienced such feelings, our instinct was to hide. To get rid of ourselves, at least temporarily. Music helped. What do you think swing was all about but shucking off gloom? The best dancers and musicians were never normal people. I remember lying in my berth, near dawn, wide-awake, with my cabinmates snoring—three strangers, sharing a cabin in the bowels of the ship. Deep inside, the ship always smelled of warm paint. My stomach felt as if it had been packed with wet cement, and I seemed to be whirling, faster, faster. Maybe this was a new version of what my father had experienced, what he and my mother called his barbed-wire disease. It wasn’t just lethargy or passivity. It was curdling, discomposing fear deep in the belly.

  If I remained in my berth, my outlook only grew more bleak, but once I forced myself to get up—no matter how pointless that seemed—things eventually got better. So I began getting up earlier and earlier. The same with her. We’d meet in the ship’s galley, a cavern, bright, warm, and bustling where the Javanese cooks were busy preparing breakfast for three hundred and fifty. Cheerfully they’d offer mugs of coffee with delicious cream.

  We were at sea in more ways than one. She was pregnant and of course oughtn’t have been drinking any alcohol, but we didn’t think that way then.

  Am I trying to apologize on her behalf? Idiot. She owes no one any apology.

  Our third night at sea, there was a supper dance in the second-class saloon. First class and tourist class invited. Music courtesy of the Calamitous Collegians.

  Karin wore a green frock. I’d not seen it on her before, but she must have rescued it from the heap on the sidewalk in Charlottenburg.

  After all that time on the illicit dance floors in Berlin, we were good together, familiar with each other’s moods and rhythms. Her mood that evening was buoyant, I would say. Carefree. Sans souci. Three days out from Europe, three more to New York. We were headed directly for the future.

  “Billy, old thing, give me a cigarette.”

  She’d been dancing with one of the college boys, and he had brought her back to our table. We’d all had a lot to drink. It turned out my cigarette case was empty.

  “I’ll fetch some from my cabin,” I told her. Cigarettes were sold duty-free on board, we each had a couple of cartons of Chesterfields stashed away.

  “No,” she said, “I’ll fetch mine. I want a bit of fresh air.”

  Throwing on her wrap, she headed off. She could have followed the stairways and passageways inside the ship, but I saw her head out on the boat deck instead, where it was cold and icy, but also magical in a certain way. We were in the middle of the Atlantic, in winter, between two worlds. American jazz was spooky and true and making our bones jump. All evening people had been stepping out on the deck to peer at the cold stars and remind themselves of the size of the universe.

  A few minutes later the trumpeter from Maine was just biting into one of his hard solos when a deck officer approached my table and leaning down to speak in my ear said there had been an accident, and might I follow him, please?

  While the music jumped and wailed, I trailed him out into a white passageway where he informed me that Mevrouw von Weinbrenner was in the ship’s infirmary. A pair of stewards had carried her there after finding her in a heap at the bottom of an icy ladderway between the saloon deck and boat deck.

  I followed the Dutchman and his squeaky rubber soles along the passageway. The smell of warm paint was nauseating, and I could feel the ship beginning to twist and roll in a heavy sea.

  Karin was being examined in a small surgery room. The Dutch head nurse sternly ordered me to sit down and wait. So I sat in one of the blond wooden chairs screwed to the floor. Nurses and doctors were authority figures.

  It’s not easy for me to connect myself to the obedient young man I was then. That midwinter passage marks one of my divides. Then and now. Europe and America. Before el llano, after. Prewar, postwar.

  There was never a time in my life before Karin. She’s in me from the beginning. We’re born in the same room, after all. Different years, same season. Same sea, same quality of light. Curtains flopping and bouncing in the same afternoon onshore breeze. She’s always there, always an element in my thinking, my construct of the world.

  Sanssouci.

  I used to wonder if we’d been born two parts of the same person, neither of us complete without the other; something always missing. Yet the only photographs of us together are a couple taken by the ship’s photographer. I haven’t seen them in a while; they’re tucked in an envelope stuck in a shoe box along with a sheaf of old passports. Black-and-white images not much bigger than a good-sized postage stamp. We’re lying on deck chairs, wearing overcoats, under blankets, basking in the sun.

  When Mijnheer Dokter stepped out of the surgery room his smock was soaked in bright red blood. He was lighting a cigarette when he noticed me. He had eyes like poached eggs. “Well, well.”

  “How is she?”

  “Not so good. Your friend was pregnant, yes? Well, that is over, unfortunately.”

  They only let me see her after the sedative had taken effect. There were six beds in the little ward, but Karin was the only patient. Her face was white, haggard. Everything was white, even the floor. The SS Volendam was really being tossed about by then, and in the surgery I could overhear Mijnheer Dokter at work on another patient, a college boy with a broken arm, consequence of high jinks out on the icy saloon deck.

  Another nurse, prim and young, sat by Karin’s bed, movie magazine open in her lap. Karin was asleep. When I looked down at her, I saw her father in his bed, and it made me queasy. Or that might have been the ship tossing about.

  I found my way back to the second-class saloon—I needed the music, needed the company. But the party was over. Stewards were cleaning up the detritus. So I bundled up in my overcoat and scarf and went out on deck and managed one complete turn around the ship. I was remembering the Irish Sea and my mother about to throw herself overboard. Perhaps I’d been wrong about that. Perhaps it had been my delirium, scarlet fever coming on, my brain on fire. Perhaps it was all in my mind, along with my great fear of losing her.

  After drawing the sheet over her father’s face, Karin had telephoned his lawyer with the news.

  “Herr Kaufman says there must be a proper Jewish funeral,” she reported. “Only I’m going to bury him here, which is what my father wanted. Poor old Kaufman is not going to like it.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m living a new life,” she said. “I’m not the same person I was, not at all.”

  “It’ll come back.”

  “What will?”

  “You’ll get through this. You’ll get over it. Everything will pass.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “I’m going to take a bath. I want to get death off my hands.”

  An hour later Kaufman and my parents arrived together in Otto Stahl’s taxi. As soon as he’d offered condolences Kaufman began arguing for burial in the Jewish cemetery on the Fischerfeld.

  “But my father wished to be buried here,” Karin told him. “Here at Walden, Herr Kaufman, next to his son.”

  “Your father was a good Jew. He was always in his heart a Jew. He was persecuted as a Jew. He must be buried as a Jew.”

  “As a Jew, yes, but here in his own ground.”

  “But they’ve stolen it from him, haven’t they? If you bury him here, God knows the swine will disrespect his grave.”

  “Walden was my father’s ground,” she said firmly. “He never gave it up. We’ll bury him here.”

  Kaufman groaned and sat down heavily in the baron’s leather desk chair. I wonder what had happened to Weinbrenner’s Iron Cross (First Class and Second Class) which used to be displayed on the desk. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe he’d thrown it away.

  “He must be buried by tomorrow,” Kaufman said. “This is the custom. Will you respect this, at least?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Kaufman said he knew a young rabbi who might a
gree to perform funeral rites at Walden as long as a car could be sent for him; it wasn’t safe for Jews to travel on trams. And a proper Jewish coffin had to be ordered immediately.

  My father, Otto, and I carried the baron’s body upstairs, bundled up in a bedsheet, like a collection of dirty laundry. He weighed almost nothing. There was a mood of excitement, disruption, upendedness. My mother and Herta must have washed the body—I don’t remember, but there was no one else to do it. Maybe Karin helped, but I doubt my mother would have allowed that.

  I remember Karin in the kitchen, sitting in a chair near the range, holding a cup of coffee with whiskey in it. That’s a scene I still have, half a century later, a few frames of mental footage: a young woman, thick messy chestnut hair and a winter-pale face, sitting in a chair close to the warm stove and lighting one cigarette from the butt of another. She’s inward, swimming in her own thoughts. Herta meanwhile is upset, nonstop tears—poor woman, she doesn’t know what’s to become of her; she expected a pension from the baron, but the money’s gone. Nonetheless she’s hard at work, making cauliflower soup, cutting sandwiches.

  Me, I’m excited. I’m trying to contain the exuberance and confidence I can feel welling up inside. The door has suddenly swung wide open, and in a couple of days we’ll be sailing for New York.

  And Kaufman—I see him sitting in the baron’s chair in the library with an old Hebrew volume, one of the few spared from the fire, open on Admiral Spee’s desk, and his index finger skimming the page, right to left, right to left, like a Talmud scholar.

  In the autumn of 1942 they arrested the old lawyer and dragged him aboard a train for Theresienstadt where he died the following winter after an operation for gallstones performed in abysmal conditions.

  After searching the stables, Otto and I located a pair of spades. The stables still had a lingering scent of horse. It was cold, getting dark, probably four o’clock in the afternoon. Rain was beginning to freeze on bare birches. The woods were still autumnal, still smelled of ground, but soon the ground would be locked under a freeze.

  As we walked along the narrow, quite overgrown bridle path, Buck said, “It is hard to think now what a refuge the old place was for us thanks to that man, who made it so.”

  And Otto Stahl remarked, “If you’d seen the behavior I have seen on the streets of our Frankfurt!”

  That remark struck me, for I’d had my hand in this pogrom, urging the death of an old man so I could scamper safely out of Germany. I suddenly felt like throwing up. But I didn’t. Otto had his spade sloped on his shoulder like an infantryman. Rain ticked on trees and spattered crisply on the ground. Brown burrs stuck to our clothes.

  In the clearing the taxi driver and I started by shoveling through a mat of dead leaves, then a stringy layer of black soil, then brown earth and gray-blue clay mixed with sand. Buck stood watching us, the brim of his homburg tipped forward, coat collar turned up against the rain. Eventually he went back to the house and returned with a flask of tea and a flashlight, and we kept on digging until it was done.

  Her father’s death surprised no one; it was his fierce clinging to life that had been the surprise.

  Out in the stables Otto and my father located a couple of fir planks, and some lumber, from which they knocked together a pair of trestles. They assembled a sort of rough bier in a cold upstairs bedroom, and the baron’s body, wrapped in a linen bedsheet, was laid out.

  “A shroud without pockets,” Kaufman intoned. “We take nothing with us when we leave this world.”

  And the body must not be left alone. Someone had to sit with it at all times, Kaufman insisted. A watchman, a shomer. So during the night each of us, including Otto the taxi driver, took a turn. Otherwise we stayed in the library where my father and I kept a good blaze crackling. We had cups of tea, cigarettes, tiny crystal glasses of Irish whiskey from a bottle Buck had brought. Karin dozed on our pallet of rugs near the fire, and I told myself we’d given her father his death, which under the circumstances was the best gift possible.

  I pictured us crossing el llano under wide blue sky. I wanted us both to become new people.

  Early the next morning Otto Stahl drove into Frankfurt to collect the rabbi and a proper Jewish coffin, which Kaufman had ordered from a carpenter in Sachsenhausen.

  I went for a last walk in the woods with my parents. These were the woods, possibly this was the path, where they had courted, where Buck proposed marriage and where Eilín bolted like a startled deer.

  I was still in my twenties, still carrying almost everything and everyone important along with me. Life so far had been a process of accumulation, people and experiences, layer by layer. Everything held on to; nothing lost.

  “Well, I don’t know what’s to become of it all,” my father said.

  We didn’t go near our old Newport cottage, too painful. The paddocks were shaggy; the white fences needed paint; pigeons roosted in horse stalls. Bushes and saplings had sprouted on the yearling track that once cut through the woods; you couldn’t gallop young horses down there anymore.

  We were on our way back to the big house when we met the taxicab coming up the drive with a pine coffin strapped on its roof and a rabbi in the backseat.

  The rabbi, in his tailored overcoat and pearl-gray homburg, looked like any brisk Frankfurt businessman. The Jewish coffin had no screws or nails, no metal whatsoever, no handles. Kaufman looked it over carefully, then nodded his approval.

  My father and I brought the coffin upstairs, lifted the body in, and closed it. With the help of Kaufman and the taxi driver, we carried the coffin downstairs and started along the bridle path. Without handles it was awkward to carry; we had to bear it on our shoulders. A gray, blowy morning with a whiff of snow. Seething clouds, not one scrap of blue sky. Poor old Kaufman was panting and stumbling, and my father made us pause, set the coffin down, take a breather.

  Karin wore a mourning ribbon, a scrap of some black material, pinned to the sleeve of her Harris Tweed overcoat.

  “ ‘O thou that lives in the covert of the most high and in the shadow of the almighty.’ ”

  While the rabbi recited psalms, we gently slipped the coffin down into the grave using two leather longe lines Buck found in what had been the tack room. The rabbi had a thin voice that was hard to hear with the wind buffeting the tops of the spruce trees and trying to sweep his words away.

  Karin stood between my mother and Herta, staring down into the grave. The wild wind was scuffling dead leaves. I could feel how isolated she was. Her aloneness, orphanhood, were like a fog around her.

  As soon as the rabbi indicated it was time to start filling the grave, my father and I reached for the spades, but Kaufman protested.

  “Rabbi! It is for the Jews to bury Jewish dead!”

  My father held out his spade for Kaufman, but the lawyer wouldn’t take it from him directly. Buck had to place it on the ground, then Kaufman allowed himself to pick it up, and while the rabbi recited psalms in German and Hebrew, the old lawyer began weakly scraping soil into the grave. It took him a long time to fill it, but no one dared interfere.

  A very cold December noon, bright sunshine, and here was the Statue of Liberty and a wild traffic of ferries, shipping, tugboats, etcetera. Passengers lined the boat deck. Silent. Impressed, awed. Intimidated, actually.

  “Wow!” said Karin.

  “Wow?” I said.

  She’d never “wowed” before.

  But we’d not been in America before, either. She laughed, pleased with herself.

  A launch slewed alongside the ship, and customs and immigration men scampered up the gangway. From the Fifth Street pier at Hoboken our taxi charged through the Holland Tunnel. Speeding up Broadway, Karin wept. Emotional overload. Too much to handle.

  The Commodore Hotel, beside Grand Central Terminal. Six dollars per night. Pretty expensive, but no one at the desk inquired whether we were married. I tipped the freckle-faced bellhop a whole dollar—“Thank you, sir!”—because I couldn’t so
rt out the American coins.

  “Yippee!” Karin cried.

  Yippee.

  Two enormous beds and an enormous bathtub.

  “Pretty damn plush,” I growled, trying to sound hard-boiled.

  We wanted to sound American, put ourselves in the American picture.

  That evening, drinks in the bar. Old-fashioneds. Filet mignon, wonderful. More drinks. A kiss in the elevator.

  Tears before bed.

  Next morning, breakfast in bed, coffee in cups—“As big as birdbaths!” she declared. Bread, despicable—steerage class. Butter, not so very good, tourist class. Marmalade rather too sweet—second class. Orange juice, first class all the way.

  How did I track Mick McClintock down? I’d not heard from him since his stay at Walden eleven years before. My aunt Kate, writing with the news from Sligo, had once mentioned that Mick McClintock was making a great success of his career with the New York police and had married an Irish girl.

  There were a dozen M. and Michael McClintocks listed in the Manhattan phone directory. And if he were still in New York, and if he had a telephone—not everyone did, in those days—it seemed just as likely he could be living in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx.

  I went down to the lobby and located a Brooklyn phone directory with an array of M. McClintocks listed, but only two Jeremiah McClintocks, one on Ditmas Avenue, which a bellhop assured me was in Flatbush.

  When I rang the number, a girl answered. It turned out she was Mick’s cousin and gave me the telephone number of the apartment on Linden Avenue, also in Flatbush, where Mick and his wife lived.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning. A woman answered the phone. I introduced myself and told her I was in New York on a very brief visit. Mick was asleep—he’d been working a night patrol—but she went to awaken him.

  A minute later, a male voice came over the line. “Who is it?”

  “ ‘Down goes the pony,’ ” I said.

  Pause.

  “Billy?”

  I told him that I had left Germany, probably for good, and was emigrating to Canada. When I told him Karin was with me and we were about to buy a car and strike off across America, Mick insisted we meet for lunch and named a French restaurant on Lexington Avenue he said was not far from our hotel.