Chocolate Girls (45 page)

While Frances was away visiting the Congo, Edie had received the first letter she had had from Janet which was addressed only to her. Before, Janet had written to the two of them together, but this time she was able to write with a frankness she had never allowed herself before.

Edie frowned on reading this. She just about remembered these details. Janet must have made light of it in her letters.

With more affectionate greetings she signed off.

Her letter had allowed Edie to write back with more candour concerning her feelings about David at that time, which was a great relief. Janet replied, gently advising her to ‘give him a long rope’, as she put it. He needed time to adjust to his new sense of himself. Ever since, their letters had been closer, more confiding, and Edie found comfort in this with David gone.

She waited with great expectation for letters now. They heard from Marie Falla occasionally. Marie and her husband had settled in Walsall and had three children, but Marie usually wrote when the family visited Guernsey on holiday. But Edie heard nothing from Ruby any more, though she wrote to her from time to time, and though a little hurt, took this to mean that Ruby had settled into American life as if born to it. However, it was David’s letters to which she looked forward most. When the first one arrived she was trembling with impatience as she opened it, and after reading with pleasure and surprise, handed it to Frances, saying, ‘How is it I never noticed before how
funny
Davey is?’

‘Yes, his sense of humour comes out in letters.’ Frances peered at the closely written lines. ‘You’ll have to read it to me. I’ve left my reading glasses upstairs.’

As Edie read, she and Frances laughed at his light-hearted depiction of Kibbutz Hamesh, which meant Kibbutz Five, near Tiberias, and his tedious, back-breaking work of clearing fields, strewn with rocks and scrubby bushes, for cultivation. He described his workmates, especially a girl called Gila, a year his junior, whom he portrayed as an utterly terrifying Amazon.

And he wrote about some of the linguistic misunderstandings that kept cropping up in a community peopled with occupants from all over the place.

‘I have now been enrolled on an Ulpan,’ he told them. ‘I’ve heard so many languages here – Polish, Russian, German, French – so this is the course used all over Israel for immigrants to learn Hebrew. It’s not too difficult, and especially as we’re all trying to struggle on and speak it together. But life is full of mistakes. We have big breakfasts here – bread and cheese, yoghurt, salad. This morning at breakfast I asked someone to pass me a cucumber and had evidently asked them for a screwdriver instead!’

‘Well,’ Frances said at the end. ‘He sounds happy, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Edie sighed. ‘He does. And I suppose I’m glad!’

David went to search for his father for the first time at the end of March. Back in the winter, Mr Leishmann had entered into a brief but tantalizing correspondence with the authorities in Tel Aviv, and after a delay of some months, during which time his letter must have passed through a number of different hands, they received a reply. Of course, more than one Hermann Mayer appeared in their records, but there was one who appeared to fit, given the details of age and former place of residence, and who had spent the required number of weeks in the Absorption Centre for new immigrants in Tel Aviv. There was a forwarding address in Haifa.

On reading this letter, David had felt pulses of strange emotion. Part of it was like the excitement of a hunter tracking an animal. Haifa! So he knew which town the man had gone to. Perhaps he was getting closer to finding him . . . But there was also a chill of fear. Was this Hermann Mayer his father? And if so, would he ever be able to meet him, find out about his blood family? Supposing it all felt wrong – that the man didn’t feel like his father at all? In part, he wanted to run away and hide from all this. Sometimes he didn’t want to know his name was Rudi Mayer. It would be far easier to remain plain English David Weale.

He had not told Edie, then, that he had discovered the possible whereabouts of his father, and when he and Joe Leishmann composed a letter to the address in Haifa and waited in anticipation, there was no reply. Perhaps Hermann Mayer had died or moved house, or didn’t want to know about a son who he had never seen. David asked himself why he should pursue this stranger and insist he take on the role of father.

But as soon as he had been in Kibbutz Hamesh for just a few days, had met other kibbutz members who had lost most or all of their families in the Nazi death camps, he knew for certain that he must go and search for Hermann Mayer. There were so many dead, so many families destroyed and lost to one another. His father and aunt were very likely to be alive and living somewhere in this small country. How could he stay here and not try to find them?

He looked out with intense interest from the smelly, rumbling old bus as they left Tiberias and travelled west. They passed through small towns and villages of square little houses where dogs and chickens scattered out of the bus’s path and children stood staring. He saw young plantations of date and banana trees, bare stony fields where rows of women bent over hoes, tilling the earth. As they left Nazareth clouds piled in the sky and there came a harsh downpour, rain beating the windows and, for about twenty minutes, making it impossible to see anything outside at all. Eventually the clouds passed, leaving watery sunshine and the smell of the wet earth blowing in through the windows. It felt strange to be out on the road again after the enclosed, intense life of Kibbutz Hamesh, and he welcomed a chance to be quiet, away from the raucous, argumentative kibbutzniks.

When they reached Haifa he drank in the sight of it. In fact it was quite a disappointing prospect: a sprawl of industry surrounding the port of Haifa, its scooped-out bay formed by a little protuberance of land in the otherwise straight Israeli coast.

It was early afternoon when David climbed down from the bus, and the sun was shining. Amir, the land foreman, had given him a day and a half off to make the trip, when David told him what he needed to do. When he’d left, after that morning’s chores, the tanned, wiry-legged Amir had said, ‘Shalom – and good luck, Daveed,’ with unusual tenderness.

Standing in the blast of blue fumes as the bus moved off again, David realized foolishly that he didn’t even have a map of Haifa. He took out the slip of paper he had pushed into his pocket. He would have to keep asking until he found it.

Setting off along the busy road, he asked directions several times and was guided by pointing fingers and the usual Israeli mix of languages. It seemed that the address was in the old city, close to the industrial zone. He started to feel hungry and thirsty, hot now the sun was out, and rather jaded. Haifa was mainly a Jewish city, he had been told. Most of the Arabs had left when the State was established. In his idealistic mind that had made it sound fine, a jewel of a place, but in reality it seemed like a large, cacophonous building site. There was the oil refinery, and all the cranes and industrial buildings of the port, and on all sides blocks of sandy-coloured apartments were going up, spare and hollow-eyed without their windows in. He stopped at a café on the busy Allenby Road, with lorries roaring past, for a drink of coffee and a sticky slice of apple cake which put him in a better humour. By the time he found the address, in a crumbling, ochre-painted building in the old city, it was already three o’clock.

As he stood outside the heavy brown door in the shade of the buildings, the situation seemed absurd. Here he was, some English boy, with a light tan and stronger muscles from a few weeks’ work on the land, standing at a door he had never seen before and expecting to find his father behind it. A father he had written to but who had never replied to his letters at all, let alone with enthusiasm! He felt incredibly foolish and vulnerable.

He forced his hand to take the old brass knocker and banged it hard, twice. There was a long silence. The house felt deserted. As he looked up he saw that the paintwork was in a far worse state than the houses around it, all the shutters were closed and the ones near the top seemed to be covered in bird mess. Perhaps the place had stood empty for years? He pictured inside the hallway, filling up with letters that were never answered. Perhaps his letter was there, in a deep drift of lost correspondence? But then he saw there was no letterbox: instead there was a metal container attached to the wall, with a slit in it. He thought about trying to look inside it, but before he could move, the door of the adjoining house opened and he saw an old woman looking out at him. She was tiny, clad completely in black with a shawl round her shoulders, her grey hair in a bun, tiny black mules on her feet. Her face was as lined as a desert wadi.

‘You want someone?’

Her voiced had a cracked note but the Hebrew was quite clear. She did not leave her own doorway though, hovering as if ready to scuttle back inside, and David went over to her, arranging his newly acquired Hebrew sentences in his mind.

‘Is anyone inside?’ He pointed up at the other house.

‘
Lo.
’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘Not now.’ She made signs to indicate that the inside of the house was very bad. It seemed one of the floors had collapsed. ‘Who you want?’

‘I am looking for a man called Hermann Mayer. I think he lived here when he came from Germany.’

‘Hermann Mayer?’ She did not have to think for long. Although she appeared so old she was completely alert. ‘
Ken!
Yes – he was here.’ She nodded, but without much animation. ‘Hermann Mayer . . .
Ken, ken
. . . I remember him.’ He expected her to be more curious. In England people would be nosey and want to know what you were about. He supposed that here most people’s lives were disjointed. Everyone was looking for someone.