Deep Sea (11 page)

Today there is no bicycle leaning against the boathouse. Stephie makes the long walk across the island, with only the ringing church bells to keep her company.

At the house, she finds Aunt Märta in her Sunday dress, sitting in the rocker and reading the Bible.

“Stephie? Today? What a surprise!”

Stephie doesn’t explain why she’s there. That’s between her and Nellie.

She rides her bike over to Auntie Alma’s that afternoon. Nellie, Elsa, and John have just returned from Sunday school. They’re sitting in the garden with Auntie Alma, drinking berry juice.

“Nellie,” says Stephie. “I need to talk to you.”

“What is it now?” Nellie asks grumpily.

“Come on,” say Stephie. “Let’s take a walk.”

“I don’t feel like it,” says Nellie. “We just got home.”

Stephie doesn’t know what to say. She wants to talk
to Nellie alone. But if she starts out upset, she’ll never get her to listen.

“Nellie,” says Auntie Alma in a gentle tone of voice. “You go with Stephie now. She may have something important to tell you.”

Nellie gets up reluctantly. They walk in the direction of the little beach.

“You know Mamma and Papa are in a camp, right?” Stephie begins. “We don’t know very much about what life is like there, but I’m sure it’s very difficult.”

“I know that,” Nellie says impatiently. “You’ve told me a hundred times.”

“I imagine Mamma and Papa worry a lot,” Stephie goes on. “Papa worries about Mamma, I know that.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don’t you think the least the two of us can do is not to worry them even more?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Stephie takes out Mamma’s card from her dress pocket and shows it to Nellie. Nellie reads it and hands it back. She stares stubbornly at the ground.

“Well?”

“I do write,” says Nellie. “Sometimes.”

“Nellie,” says Stephie, “don’t you see?”

Nellie looks up at her, her eyes flaming. “They sent us away!” she shouts. “They didn’t want us. Why should I care about them?”

Nellie’s words threaten to drown Stephie. If feels like
when she’s at the beach and a big wave throws her off balance in the water. She can’t see; she can’t hear; all she can taste is salt. Stephie struggles for a foothold.

She can’t get an answer out. Can’t explain what they both know. Mamma and Papa sent them away to keep them safe. All she wants to do is cry, cry as she did so long ago, their first evening on the island.
Mamma, come and get me. Come and get me or I’ll die
.

But at the very moment the wave of grief threatens to overwhelm her, it turns into coal-hot anger. She slaps Nellie—slaps her so hard, her sister shouts out in pain.

By the time Stephie has pulled herself together, Nellie is gone. She’s running up the path to the village, her long black braids flapping behind her back.

“Nellie!” Stephie calls out.

But Nellie doesn’t turn around.

The palm of Stephie’s hand is burning. Her cheeks are burning, too, as if she were the one who was slapped. She has only been slapped once in her life, and that was by Aunt Märta, the time she came home with a rip in her dress.

Mamma and Papa never hit them.

How could that have happened? How could she have slapped Nellie?

S
tephie writes another long letter to Mamma. She says Nellie has actually written several times, but the letters must have gotten lost in the mail.
Maybe she wrote the address wrong
, she lies.
Or forgot the stamp. If the letters are returned, we’ll send them again
.

She hates lying to Mamma. But she can’t tell the truth. It’s too awful. Just like that very first letter she wrote to Mamma and Papa back in Vienna, when she and Nellie had just arrived on the island, the letter she never sent. The truth is that she has been lying to them ever since she got to Sweden. Perhaps not as blatantly as now; now she has invented pure falsehoods to cover up Nellie’s refusal to write. But she has been altering the truth, exaggerating the good things and keeping silent about the difficulties and sorrows.

She begins to wonder what Mamma and Papa think of her. Do they imagine that she is as happy as she sounds, or can they see through her words? They certainly ought to know her better. But it’s been nearly four years. When she left, she was a twelve-year-old child. Now she’s nearly sixteen.

Another thought comes to mind: What if Mamma and Papa are doing the same thing? What if they’re not telling her the whole truth? What if they don’t want to upset her? What if that nameless German doesn’t let them tell the truth? What if everything is much worse than she thinks?

By the time Stephie seals the letter, she has a painful lump in her throat. She mails the envelope on her way to school.

Two weeks later the letter comes back.

“What was stamped on it?” Judith asks. “Did it say
Adressat abgereist
?”

“No,” says Stephie. “Just
Return to Sender
.”

“That’s all right, then,” says Judith. “Your mother may have moved to a different barracks. Or there may have been some mistake with the mail. I can’t say for certain. But I’m sure your next letter will reach her.”

Abgereist?
Stephie wonders.
Departed? What did Judith mean? Where would Mamma have gone?

Judith presses her lips together and refuses to say any more about it.

The two girls are taking a walk; it’s a lovely early summer evening. The lindens in the lane are in pale green bloom, and the flowers on the chestnut trees shine like white candles. They walk down to the moat that circles the old town. They sit on the edge, dangling their feet.

“I see you’ve picked up your spring shoes from the shoemaker,” Judith says, looking at Stephie’s feet.

“I have.”

“I actually thought you were lying about them,” Judith tells her. “You gave me such a funny look when you told me they were being resoled. What are your foster parents like, really?”

Stephie does her best to describe Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert. Judith listens attentively.

“Swedish people are so strange,” she says when Stephie is done. “You’d think they were as thick-skinned as elephants and had no feelings.”

“Oh, they do have feelings,” says Stephie. “Only they show them differently.”

“I just wish the war would end and I could go to Palestine,” Judith says. “Where will you go?”

“Home, I imagine,” says Stephie.

“Home?” Judith asks. “We don’t have homes anymore. They took away our homes. They took away our right to live.”

“But after the war,” says Stephie, “when the Germans are gone, don’t you think things can be like they were before?”

“Things will never be like before. Never!”

Stephie considers. Judith may be right.

“We lived in Leopoldstadt,” says Judith. “I’ll never forget when they blew up the synagogue on Leopoldsgasse. Huge blocks of stone flew yards and yards up into the air. It looked like a war zone.”

Judith lies down on the grassy edge of the canal, her legs extended straight out over the dark surface of the water. She clasps her hands behind her head and stares up into the sky.

“I hope it will all be gone,” she says. “Every single house, every single church, every single street. I hope they bomb it all to rack and ruin. All of Vienna. I hope no one will be able to make a home there again. Never ever.”

Stephie looks down at Judith’s lovely face surrounded by her curly angelic head of hair. Her blue eyes gleam with hate.

She tries to imagine Vienna leveled to the ground. Her school in ruins, the house where they lived crushed by a bomb. The beautiful streets with the shop windows black gaping holes, the tram tracks torn up. The big Ferris wheel in Prater Park a distorted steel skeleton.

“No,” says Stephie. “I wouldn’t want that.”

Then she sees that Judith is crying.

Stephie is unable to get Judith’s words out of her mind.

We don’t have homes anymore
.

Until now, she always imagined that when the war was over, things would be like before. That Mamma, Papa, Nellie, and she would return to their big apartment near Prater Park and that they would be a family again.

But other people live in their apartment now, people who aren’t Jewish and therefore have the right to live normal lives. Unless the house has been bombed, as Judith wishes.

And can they ever be a family again? Is it possible to be reunited just like that, after four, five, or six years, and live together as if nothing had happened? If the war goes on for a couple more years, Stephie will be an adult when it ends. Nellie, her little sister, will be an obstinate teenager who feels more at home in Sweden than in Vienna.

The thought of Nellie makes her stomach seize up. They used to be so close. Now they live separate lives. It’s as though they’re not even sisters.

The memory of slapping Nellie burns Stephie’s insides. She doesn’t want to think about it.

It will work out
, she persuades herself.
We are a family. We love each other. It may take some time, but we will have a good life. If only the war will end
.

We
has a different meaning to Stephie and Judith. To Stephie,
we
means “my family.” To Judith, it means “all Jews.”

Before the Germans came, Stephie never thought of
herself as a Jew. Being Jewish simply meant going to synagogue a few times a year, the same way her Christian friends went to church at Christmas and Easter. It was the Germans who separated her and Nellie, Mamma, and Papa from the others, made them members of a particular group, forced them to move and forced the girls to change schools.

The Germans made her a Jew. When she came to the island, she became a Christian. A member of the Pentecostal church, “redeemed” and baptized. But always filled with secret doubts. With a feeling of not belonging, a feeling of pretending.

Judith seems so sure of who she is. Sometimes Stephie envies her that, even though she knows the war and persecution have caused Judith more problems than they have her. But Judith’s
we
is broader and less fragile. And she has brothers in Palestine, as well as her dream of joining them there.

What do I have?
Stephie asks herself.
Who am I? Who am I going to become?

A
fter the end-of-semester gathering in the auditorium, Stephie and her classmates go to their homeroom. The atmosphere is solemn. They have been together for three years, and now they are going to be split up. Some will stay at the grammar school for a fourth year and come out with a junior secondary degree. Others will go on to the high school in the same building. A few plan to change schools.

Miss Björk passes out their report cards. She calls each girl up to the front of the room, saying a few personal words to every single one.

“May,” she says. “You and math don’t get along so well. But after this semester, you’ll never have to see each other again. And you’ll be able to devote yourself
to the things at which you are good. I wish you the very best of luck.”