A Man Lies Dreaming (36 page)

In the camp’s various Joy Divisions, what we may also term
Lagerbordell
or camp bordellos, the women are branded with
Feld-Hure
on their chests, field whores they become in service of the guards and some favoured inmates, man after man they must satisfy, relentlessly, and any failure means immediate dismissal, and that in turn can mean only the ovens, preceded of course by the showers and the gas.

Women die like air. They are consumed like oxygen. They are as transient as breaths. And in what was once fields, men dig mass graves into which they themselves will fall.

And so Shomer builds doors, while Yenkl stands beside him, watching, as insubstantial as smoke. Moons traverse the sky from horizon to horizon and fall and rise, the planet turns, the trains arrive, and Europe is slowly running out of Jews.

And so Shomer builds doors, until his entire world is contracted into one rectangular shape, always hovering before his eyes, calling out, an impossible promise, until he reaches out to the handle just attached, and pulls.

The door opens, and Shomer steps through.

*    *    *

Into a house at rest. A hushed Shabbat calm descends when he enters. Avrom in his starched white shirt, Bina in her Friday dress look up at him across the table where the Shabbat candles burn. Fanya at the oven straightens with the loaf of bread in her hands, and smiles. ‘
Nu
?’ she says. And he takes his place amongst them like a man still dreaming – already the details of that other place, that other time, are fading. And he blesses the wine as though in a dream.

And Shomer goes to the sink and fills a cup with water. He transfers the cup to his left hand and pours on his right, three times. He then transfers the cup and repeats the process, until his hands are washed clean. Returning to the table he ruffles Avrom’s dark locks, kisses Bina’s porcelain cheek. Touches the back of his wife’s hand, briefly. ‘
Baruch ata adonai
,’ he says, ‘Blessed be, God, king of the world, for bringing bread out of the earth.’ The cobwebs clear from his mind with the prayer. He tears a piece of cholla, dips it in salt, takes a bite. Tears more pieces, dips them, passes them on, to his children and his wife.

They eat.

Peace descends on Shomer; it engulfs him; almost he wishes to leave the dining table and go to his sanctuary, his little office where the typewriter waits, to feel once more the keys beneath his fingers.

The children chatter. Fanya brings out chicken and potatoes from the oven. The smell makes Shomer’s mouth water. He carves the chicken and Fanya distributes potatoes to the children. ‘… But I want the thigh!’ Bina complains, and Avrom says, ‘No,
I
want the thigh!’ and Fanya tells them to hush. Shomer thinks of a book he was going to write, something new and full of light. When they are done he sits back and the candles flicker and cast shadows on the wall and one shadow, disturbingly, resembles a door. ‘Look, Papa!’ Bina says, pointing. She pushes back her chair without asking, her little face lifted in excitement. ‘No, no,’ Shomer says, an unknown fear makes him tremble. ‘No, Bina—’

But she doesn’t listen and the shadows deepen and etch on the wall a door. Shomer jumps up, his chair crashes to the floor, Fanya and Avrom are shadows at the table. ‘No, don’t—’

But his little girl reaches for the handle and she
pulls
—

The door opens and Shomer throws himself at her, knocking her away from the shadows, for a moment this place feels to him as warm as an oven. He stumbles and loses his balance. He totters on the threshold of this shadow door. Only darkness beyond.

He falls.

…

And steps into the streets of a city at peace. It is silent, he is somewhere in an English town, London, perhaps, in the deep time of night. To his left is a river. On the ground are buntings, beer bottles, discarded cigarettes, flags, the remains of fireworks, yesterday’s newspaper in yesterday’s grease, some chips still left poking out cold and oily.

He picks up the newspaper. 22nd November 1939. The
Daily Mail
. ‘Mosley Projected to Win Election’. Shomer looks at it in wonder, lets it drop again. A cold wind. He walks along the Embankment. No, he thinks. This isn’t it, either. He spots a door ahead and opens it.

…

Emerging into a wide corridor lined with unmarked doors on all sides. He opens one and finds himself in another corridor. He tries another door, walks through into another corridor. Another door and another corridor, and another, and another: Shomer is opening and shutting doors.

‘No, that’s not it. That’s not it either.’

In this other time and place, Shomer searches for an exit.

*    *    *

Dawn found Wolf at the Greenwich docks. How he got there he couldn’t say he knew. He walked aimlessly, had walked for hours through the night as Big Ben ticked away the hours, the sound growing fainter and fainter until it disappeared altogether and with it the outline of the city, too, had been erased, and Wolf found himself in a liminal space, a twilight world of ship hulls, boatyards, shuttered pubs and empty streets, the river first on his right, before he crossed, it must have been at Tower Bridge, though he could recall nothing of this transition from north to south, only the call of ravens, ancient stones, the passing of a barge laden with refuse from the capital, down below, as silent as a ghost, with ghosts in its wide wake.

The Thames on his left as London was abandoned behind and he entered a land less populated, empty pastures, factories silent in the pre-dawn dark, chimneys rising like admonitions into the sky, the river widening, the Isle of Dogs in its midst, the call of seagulls and the sour tang of tar, boats looming in the fog, a whole flotilla of them.

And as he walked he was no longer alone. Wolf was joined in that ur-moment between night and dawn by others. Silently they appeared, walking beside him, behind him, ahead: silent haggard figures, faces pinched and drawn, carrying suitcases and holdalls and babies and things: the detritus of lives, hastily packed together; and everything that couldn’t be carried was left behind. In a sombre, ugly mood, they flowed along the banks to Greenwich: to the place where the meridians start. All about him they congregated and the fog parted before them, these exodii, and Wolf amongst them, one of them now: one of us, one of us.

At last then they came to Greenwich and through the sleeping town they went like the coming tide, flooding the narrow streets until they came at last to the river bank again and there, in silhouette against the sky, were the ships.

The largest of the ships was named the
Exodus
and it was a packet steamer, almost one hundred metres in length. Its name had been hastily changed: stencilled underneath the lettering was her old name, the SS
President Warfield
. Beside it were two smaller ships: the
Salvador
, flying the Bulgarian flag, and the
Taurus
, flying the Greek colours. The
Exodus
itself flew the Honduran flag, blue and white. There were men and women in uniform clothing waiting for them by the quayside and they guided the crowd as best they could, and all in silence, families with their luggage and their life at their feet waiting in the cold dawn of the docks to flee this island with a hope that had no guarantees. Amongst the officials Wolf saw a familiar face: Eric Goodman, the man from the Jewish Territorialist Organisation. Next they were divided into queues, though not in an overly ordered way. Wolf saw men of His Majesty’s Immigration Branch standing around, and port officials, and sailors smoking and eyeing these refugees with pity or disdain or indifference.

For refugees is what they had become, Wolf realised, as is the way of their people, and he in their midst, a wolf amongst the sheep, such as it were. Slowly the line progressed, in a makeshift booth before each ship there stood one man, one woman, each one holding clipboards and pens, slowly, slowly the line moved on.

Dawn came, the sun rising sluggishly, the fog like spider webs melting in the morning air. The honk of a steamer cut through the morning, the call of gulls, a baby cried nearby and was shushed.

Wolf shuffled forward with the rest. A little boy with a Jew’s pinched, hungry face sidled up to him. He pulled at Wolf’s sleeve. Wolf looked down. The boy wore overalls and a mop of unruly ginger hair. ‘Mister, mister,’ he said. ‘Are we going to Palestine?’

‘Fuck off, you little twerp.’

The boy grinned, revealing buck teeth. ‘You ain’t nothing, mister,’ he said. ‘You ain’t worth shit.’

Wolf went to clout him but the boy hared back up the line, grinning cheerfully as he went.

The queue shuffled on. At last Wolf reached the makeshift booth. ‘Your papers?’ the woman said. She was short and stocky and had long brown hair in a bun. Wolf took out the identity document. ‘Wolfson,’ he said, emptily. ‘Moshe Wolfson.’

The woman carefully wrote down the name in her list. She had neat, small handwriting. She noted the date and country of his birth. Smiled at him distractedly. At last, gave him a ticket, a grubby piece of cheap paper, stamped hurriedly with ink that had already begun to run. ‘Good luck,’ she said, softly. Wolf nodded. Then he followed his fellow Jews up the ramp and on board the
Exodus
.

Ship’s Journal, 23rd November 1939

We left for sea at 10:25 at high tide. The
Exodus
led the way while the two smaller ships followed. A damp, unpleasant breeze. London receding in the distance. I won’t miss the damn place much.

The ship overcrowded. Thousands on board. Number of latrines limited. The river opened on all sides, the banks seemed as distant and exotic as those of some unexplored land, filled with danger.

We move so slowly. No one has attempted to hinder our progress but the river is filled with traffic. Listened to the wireless, Mosley taking office at Number 10. The damned man has been nothing but a nuisance.

So many people. It is hard to breathe. Sat on the deck watching England roll by. It rained, then stopped. Played cards with a group of men, friendly enough. There are all sorts on board this ship, a Babel of Jews: black-clad chasidim mix with East End roughs and German refugees, and genteel English Jewry looking bewildered at this sudden change. I won three shillings. We all carry our money on our person at all times. Many children running around; they seem to regard this as a holiday.

Ship’s Journal, 24th November 1939

Friday. An odd thing. When darkness fell many of the men were gathered in an impromptu minyan, the women grouped separately, praying and welcoming in the Shabbat, or
Shabbos
in Yiddish. Cholla bread was divided amongst us by the committee. These are the men and women who are behind all this. It is a well-run organisation, the plan must have been in preparation for a long time. They wear blue shirts to distinguish them from us passengers. Listened in on a Hebrew class. ‘
Shalom. Shalom
.’ It means hello, or welcome, or peace.

Yesterday we cleared out of the Thames Estuary into the North Sea. We sailed along the coast, going past Margate to Dover, then made the crossing to France across the Channel. Now we sail hugging the coast still, the French countryside on our left, the Celtic Sea beyond.

I have been given some clean, though not new, clothes to wear. My blood-caked clothes are being washed. No one said anything. I was not the only one bloodied that night, evidently. Dozed below decks as the night was very cold.

Ship’s Journal, 25th November 1939

Bay of Biscay. The
Salvador
and
Taurus
chug behind us with their own cargo of Jews. I miss my books. I thought of Alderman and how he seemed so impassioned about his cause. It all feels very distant now. Played cards but lost this time: two shillings.

Hebrew word of the day is
tapuz
. This means the orange fruit, which we are told is plentiful at our destination.

Seen by a doctor. Expressed surprise that I was still alive, considering the various bruises. I explained it has been a difficult month. He nodded sympathetically, patted me on the shoulder and moved on to his next patient. I took that as a good sign.

It’s the Shabbat. Strangely peaceful. Several of my fellow passengers had brought a book or two each with them, and a makeshift library was organised. Success! Obtained Agatha Christie’s
Death on the Nile
.

Ship’s Journal, 26th November 1939

‘I can’t believe Jacqueline was the murderer!’ I told the man who came to borrow the book after me. ‘I did not see that coming at all.’

He glared at me and snatched the book from my hands. ‘You bloody bastard,’ he said.

How rude!

The steamer is making good time. We have passed the French coast and entered Portuguese territorial waters. No way to escape the ship – we dock nowhere.

Last night a woman gave birth to a baby boy; the whole thing carried out quite garishly in the open. I miss having a dog. Food is uninspired but adequate: we have supplies for two weeks. Air is clear. There is something peaceful about the movement of the ship, lulling me into the first instance of calm I have felt in years.