My Family for the War (15 page)

Dr. Shepard sat on a stool next to his film projector and waved at me after I had closed the box office. He had probably saved a place for me too, and was dumbfounded when
I waved back and then continued up the center aisle, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, toward the front where an older boy eagerly gestured to the seat next to him.

“Mensch, Ziska, what are you doing here?” Walter gave me an excited little shove in the side.

The light went out, a quiet murmur swept through the rows, and a crackling came from the loudspeakers. “Dr. Shepard is my foster father,” I whispered to Walter. “The Winterbottoms didn’t come to get me. Maybe I should write them a letter thanking them for it!”

“Definitely! To luck into a cinema, unbelievable!” Walter agreed.

“And you?” I asked. Loud music began and names scrolled across the movie screen.

“Not so fun, unfortunately,” he replied. “I work in the same tailor shop as my father, twelve hours a day. I dream about zippers! I’ll never learn English at this rate.”

“Hey, you two!” A boy sitting behind us tapped me on the shoulder. “Could you stop putting your heads together? I can’t see anything!”

Walter and I jumped apart, and my cheeks got hot. Putting our heads together! What an idiot! If I had known the right words, I would have rained them down on his dumb head!

And of course, that was the moment when all the hundreds of things occurred to me that I would have loved to ask Walter: whether he believed there would be war against Hitler, what he thought of England. It was odd to be friends with someone you didn’t really know at all yet. But even in the dark and without talking, it was lovely to sit next to him.

“Well, how was the film?” Dr. Shepard asked an hour and a half later, while the other children streamed out of the gym talking and laughing. He placed the film rolls back in their silver cases and glanced at Walter, who stood behind me, with curiosity. Dr. Shepard smiled at me as he took in my amazed look, and it was a few moments before I recovered enough to say, “Dr. Shepard, this is Walter Glücklich. He was on my kindertransport.”

Walter and Dr. Shepard shook hands. “You must visit us sometime, Walter!” Dr. Shepard said in a friendly tone. He pronounced the name the English way, like “Wolter.” “Any friends of Frances’s are always welcome!”

Walter looked a little confused. Either he understood English much worse than I did, or he was wondering who Frances might be. “Well, I guess I’ll be going…” Walter said awkwardly in German.

“Wait!” I held him tight by the sleeve. Something like panic was rising in me. We had only just found each other again, and that was it already? “Give me your address! How can I invite you if I don’t know where you live?”

Dr. Shepard gave me a pencil and one of the papers announcing the next movie showing. But Walter hesitated to write down his address for me. “Where do you live, anyway? I’m sure it’s too far away for me. Why don’t we just say we’ll see each other in two weeks at the next movie?”

“In two weeks? And what if something happens in the meantime? No, I have to have your address! You haven’t even left it at the Café Vienna.”

“At the Café Vienna?” Walter suddenly had to grin. “Don’t tell me you actually went there?”

“I’m a regular,” I answered with a quick glance at Dr. Shepard, but since he didn’t understand any German, my little secret wasn’t in danger of being revealed.

Walter thought for a moment, then laughed and wrote his address on the back of the cinema flyer. But when Dr. Shepard offered to take him with us and drop him off at home, he politely refused, even though it had started raining hard outside.

“I suppose I don’t have to ask you if you’ll come with me the next time,” Dr. Shepard said in the car with a wink.

But I wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore. I sensed what Walter had really wanted to say to me: That even if I didn’t care that he lived in London’s poorhouse, it bothered him, and I could understand that too.

We drove through the darkness and suddenly it was as if Walter was sitting behind us on the backseat observing us as we left behind the East End with its filth and the stink of factories, how the streets became brighter and livelier, and as we arrived at clean, orderly Harrington Grove, where in this weather everyone sat contentedly in their living rooms, ate supper, and listened to the radio. It was as if he watched us step into the warm, comfortable house, where it already smelled like the pancakes we were having for dinner.

Dr. Shepard greeted his wife with the words: “Amanda, just imagine, Frances met a friend from the kindertransport. A nice young man named Walter Glücklich!”

Mrs. Shepard’s face lit up in a spontaneous smile so warm and beautiful that it hurt to look at her. “Walter Glücklich
… ?” she repeated, enchanted. “That is the loveliest name I’ve ever heard!”

Tears welled in my eyes, and I ran up the stairs to my room and threw myself on the bed. How I wished that I didn’t have pancakes to eat, a soft bed to sleep in, and nice foster parents. I wished, with all the misery out there, the struggles of Mamu and Papa, of Bekka, and Walter, who sewed zippers all day long and still wore a tattered coat, that I at least had the decency to be poor too.

After a while there was a knock at my door and Mrs. Shepard came in. I had expected her to come see me; she wasn’t the kind to let someone go to bed without supper and be sad for reasons she hadn’t yet uncovered. There was even a little pamphlet in Mrs. Shepard’s secretary with the title:
How Do I Take Care of a Refugee Child?

Mrs. Shepard placed a plate with two pancakes on my knees and a cup of milk on the nightstand. I reacted by pushing away the plate and grumbling, “I haven’t washed my hands.” With greatly exaggerated gestures I pantomimed the motions of the Shepards’ ritual, tipping a pitcher of water over the lower arms. Instinctively I held my breath, because my gestures came across as more insulting than I had intended. But Mrs. Shepard’s refugee pamphlet must have included a bit about unjustified attacks too, and she stayed totally calm.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and put the plate back on my knees. “You walked through the rain, and that counts too.”

“I don’t have to wash my hands anyway,” I responded, tearing off a big piece of pancake and stuffing it in my mouth. “I’m not even properly Jewish!”

“You’re right, I had almost forgotten,” replied Mrs. Shepard. “Would you like to invite someone to Passover anyway? Pesach is a holiday that no one can celebrate alone.”

“I can invite Walter, but he definitely won’t come,” I said haughtily, and without any explanation of what I meant by it.

Mrs. Shepard apparently wasn’t as interested in Walter as I thought, because she just asked, “And you don’t know anyone else? Someone who might be alone otherwise?”

My food suddenly stuck in my throat. I did indeed know someone who was all alone, but unfortunately it was someone that no one could find out about. “I don’t know anyone else here who’s Jewish,” I replied, thinking to myself,
I’m sorry, Professor Schueler…

“They don’t have to be Jewish.”

Mrs. Shepard just wouldn’t give up. Other than Mamu, I didn’t know anyone who was so persistent.

“The others aren’t interested in Passover,” I said with disdain.

Mrs. Shepard raised one eyebrow. “Now listen. You can’t mean to say that you don’t find us entertaining!”

And without any warning, a grin began to spread from within to my face, and I had to fight hard to keep the corners of my mouth from turning upward. “I do! Especially all the fuss at the table and the macken in the kitchen, or how the men in the synagogue all sway at different speeds.”

“Go ahead,” said Mrs. Shepard. “Let me have it. Althought I should point out that you just used the word
macken,
a revealing and very Yiddish word.”

“I just want to make sure you understand what I mean.”

“Do you now! That’s not as hard as you might think.”

“Not if you read the right pamphlets.
How Do I Take Care of a Refugee Child?
.… What’s written in there?” I asked suspiciously.

“Among other things, it says that you need contact with other children,” Mrs. Shepard said, taking my empty plate. “We would be very happy if your friend ‘Wolter’ came to visit. It isn’t good for you to only be with the younger children in school.”

“Walter won’t come. It’s too far.”

“Then we’ll have him picked up. There’s always a way.”

“He won’t come because he’s poor,” I said glumly.

“You mean because he’s proud,” Mrs. Shepard corrected me.

I sighed. “All right then, I’ll invite him,” I replied. “Let him decide for himself what he is.”

But of course I was right. Walter didn’t come, even though we extended the invitation to include his father. He didn’t even answer my short, awkward letter. Instead, I received a letter from Mamu in the days before Passover. Her letter didn’t make a single reference to the carefully formulated little warning I had sent her the last time.

“Apparently you haven’t had a chance to do anything for us yet,” she wrote. “But Papa felt much better when he could read how much fun you’re having in England.”

Chapter 9

The little tube in the doorway to my room looked harmless enough, but I still waited until I was the only one upstairs. What was the big deal? I boldly stretched out my hand and just for a split second tapped the mezuzah. Then I raced triumphantly downstairs, plunked myself down in my usual spot at the table with a loud “Good morning,” downed a glass of orange juice in one gulp, and took a deep breath.

Millie and Mrs. Shepard looked at me with surprise. They had no idea what had just happened! I briefly thought about telling them, but I would have had to explain too much that I barely understood myself. So I concentrated on eating my breakfast as fast as possible so that I could watch the sale of our food before school.

The night before, I was convinced the whole thing was a joke, but one look around the kitchen made it clear that I had understood correctly. A basket with bread, cake, and a box of flour stood on the sideboard. As soon as I finished eating, Millie would buy all of these things from
the Shepards, along with the rest of my breakfast, so she could take them home with her and keep them for a week. Then the Shepards would buy back their own food for the same price. When I came home from school at midday, there wouldn’t be a single crumb of anything leavened in the house anymore.

We had made sure of that the night before. Armed with candles, Mrs. Shepard sent me and her husband off in search of anything leavened, which she had hidden around the house just for us to find. There were exactly ten little pieces of bread, and after we finally found all of them, Mrs. Shepard put them in a paper bag to be burned later. I giggled the whole time, but Dr. Shepard took it very seriously. “This is a test, I have no idea what there is to laugh about,” he said. “If we miss even one piece, we might have bad luck… or worse, my mother could find it!”

He said that with a quick, wry smile, and for a moment I thought I saw a shadow pass over Mrs. Shepard’s face. But I must have been mistaken, because she answered lightly, “I’m sorry, I can’t remember where I hid that tenth piece! You’ll just have to keep looking until you find it, Matthew.”

Then Dr. Shepard said a prayer and we swore to banish everything leavened or fermented from our thoughts for the next seven days. That was the end of my giggling for a while, because I knew that this vow was about more than just food! For me, it meant my negative thoughts, my secret grudges against Mamu, and the unanswered questions between Jesus, my parents, and me about how Jewish I wanted to be. And so I woke up that morning knowing that I had until
noon, when everything leavened had to be out of the house, to make my peace with the mezuzah.

I had been so scared of it, but it seemed as if someone was whispering the answers to all my questions.

You don’t have to kiss it, you can just touch it, and then you’ll remember every time that you all belong to the same God, Jews and Christians, and that he’s there.

There was a sudden brightness in me, a light and floating sensation, as if I was happy to be me. I was convinced other people must be able to see a change in me, but Mrs. Shepard and Millie were so busy with their preparations, they didn’t even notice!

“Now, Millie,” said Mrs. Shepard. “Shall we say two shillings, like last year?”

When I came home from school that day, a fat envelope lay next to the telephone, and Mrs. Shepard and Millie shot out of the kitchen as if they had been awaiting my arrival for hours. “Frances! You have mail from the prime minister!”

They stood so close that I felt like I was completely surrounded. “I know,” I said as indifferently as possible, but secretly I was weighing the letter in my hands and trying to figure out what its heft revealed about its contents.

The responses I had received from the Refugee Committee and the church had been very friendly.