Finding Sophie (2 page)

M
andy calls for me as usual on Friday – our film-going night. This time next week, I'll be fourteen.

“Don't forget to keep the wireless on, Aunt Em. The war may be over before we get home.”

“I hope you won't be that late, girls. Have a good time.”

There was a long queue outside the pictures – there always is. The film was
Cover Girl
, with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly.

Mandy and I had long ago settled on our favorite male dancers.

“No one is as elegant as Fred Astaire,” I insist.

“Can you imagine Fred jitterbugging? Gene Kelly invents a whole new style. By the way, Soph, has Nigel said anything to you yet?”

“About what?”

“About the Youth Club Victory Dance.”

“I know there's going to be one – a costume dance as soon as Victory's announced. I'm helping with the decorations.”

Mandy's left eyebrow goes up in the mysterious manner she's been practicing. It makes her look a bit like Harpo Marx. I don't comment.

“Swear you won't tell, but the other night when Mum was working the late shift, Nigel asked me to teach him how to waltz, and sort of mumbled that he might ask you to go with him to the dance.”

“In that case I will decline any other invitations that might come my way,” I say grandly, and we both burst out laughing.

“Do you remember when we were about eight, we swore we'd live in the same house when we were grown up, and I decided you'd have to marry Nigel as I couldn't?”

“You were always a bossy boots, Amanda Gibson. By the way, what did you cook for supper tonight? It was your turn, wasn't it?” I changed the subject deliberately – learned how to do that from Aunt Em.

“I opened a tin of unknown species of fish and we had it on toast. Nigel gave his to next door's cat. What did you have?”

“Aunt Em's Woolton pie, our Friday night special – anything that's left over from the week's meals baked with potato on top. I'm famished. Do we have enough money to buy chips on the way home?”

We pool our resources.

“If we share. We'll have to hurry after the show; they sell out early on Friday nights. When the war's over,” Mandy says
dreamily, “I'm going to live on bananas. With custard, or ice cream, or mashed with sugar, or sliced on white bread and butter.”

The
GI
standing in front of us in the queue turns round and winks. “Can't have our allies starving,” he says, in that wonderful slow American drawl. “Here, have some chocolate.” He offers us a bar each.

Riches!
Mandy and I look at each other hesitatingly. We're getting a bit too old to accept sweets from strangers.

“Go ahead, my intentions are honorable, right, hon?” The blonde girl with him puts her arm through his possessively.

“Thank you very much, Sergeant.”

He turns away with a smile.

The
Pathé Gazette
news comes on after the big picture and before the cartoons. It shows English and U.S. forces liberating concentration camps. Dead bodies in heaps. Living dead. Bones barely covered with bits of striped rags, or huddled under shreds of blankets. Eyes staring from skulls peering through tiers of bunks, or pressed against barbed wire fences. I don't want to look, but can't turn away.
Are they real, or are they waxwork figures like those in the torture chamber at Madame Tussaud's?

We leave before the cartoons. Mandy won't look at me. We hold hands all the way home, the way we used to when we were little. Neither of us speak.

I let myself in and hang up my mackintosh.

“I'm in the kitchen, Sophie,” Aunt Em calls out. “You're home early.”

“I'm not feeling very well,” I say, and slump down beside her at the kitchen table.

“Shall I get you an aspirin, dear?” Aunt Em measures the sleeve of the cardigan she's knitting.

“Don't fuss, Aunt Em, I'm all right.” I sense her looking at me as if she hadn't noticed that I'd snapped at her.

“I'm going to make some cocoa before I go to bed. Would you like a cup?” she asks.

I burst into tears.

Aunt Em rolls up her knitting and puts it away neatly in the old prewar tapestry knitting bag. “Do you want to tell me what's wrong, Sophie?”

I blow my nose. “Mandy and I were larking about in the queue, complaining about our starvation diets, and an American sergeant gave us chocolate. Oh, Aunt Em, it was awful.” I put my half-eaten bar on the table.

“The chocolate?”

I'm not in the mood for jokes.
“All those people dead, or dying in ways I haven't even heard of. They showed camps. Concentration camps – Belsen and Buchenwald. I'll never forget their names, or what's there.”

“Yes. I heard a war reporter on the
BBC
earlier.”

Aunt Em measures the cocoa powder into two mugs, adds a dash of milk and a bit of sugar, stirs, and pours on boiling water.

How can Aunt Em stand there and make cocoa?

She continues quietly: “I remember a broadcast I heard many years ago. It was given by Lord Baldwin in 1938. He was trying to
get help for children in danger from the Nazis. Children who were Jewish or half Jewish, or whose parents were politically opposed to Hitler. He wanted English people to give homes to those children.”

“Like you did?”

“Yes. I wrote down what he said: ‘It's not an earthquake, not a famine, not a flood, but an explosion of man's inhumanity to man.’ I wanted to help. It wasn't enough, obviously. How could we let it happen?” She sighs and puts her arm around me for a moment. “War and its atrocities.”

I have a feeling she was thinking about that other war – the First World War.

“If you don't mind, I'll take my cocoa upstairs with me, Aunt Em.”

Does Aunt Em realize how mixed up I feel? How can she? I can't even explain it to myself.

Every time there's been an air raid, every time someone in school hears of a brother shot down over enemy territory, or a father wounded or missing, I feel sad – guilty, too. Sometimes in Assembly when the headmistress says, with a sorrowful note in her voice, that something's been stolen from the cloakroom, or broken, and she hopes the guilty person will do the honorable thing and own up, I always go red, even though it's nothing to do with me. The trouble is, this
is
to do with me – I was born on the enemy side. Owning up's not going to change that. If only the war would end, if only we could forget all about it. …

I wish I'd been born right here in this narrow old house with its tiny back garden, almost too small for our vegetable patch,
where we grow carrots and brussels sprouts. Where the apple tree's wormy and the blackberries have to be picked from the bush the minute they are ripe, or birds and hungry little boys eat the lot.

My bedroom's next to Aunt Em's, and there is a tiny spare room next to it, for a visitor or a maid. There isn't a maid, though. There's old Mrs. James, who comes in now and again to give everything a “good turnout.”

The visitor's room is full of boxes of pamphlets and Red Cross supplies: blankets and patched sheets and secondhand clothes that Aunt Em collects for people in hospital or for blitzed families. She's been a member of the Women's Voluntary Services since 1939.

I love my room. The ceiling slopes down towards the bed and the window's opposite, set back in an alcove and crisscrossed with tape, in case of splintering glass. Sometimes at night, before I go to sleep, I draw back the blackout curtains. Not for long, though, because I'm afraid I might fall asleep, and wake up in the night and switch on the light and give enemy planes a target to aim for.

The walls are painted yellow to make the room look sunny. We're lucky to have walls. Incendiaries fell at the other end of the street, homes collapsed, people we know were hurt, and there was a lot of fire damage.

Aunt Em gave me her old desk – the one she used when she was my age, at her home in Suffolk. There are a couple of little cubbyholes for anything really private. I don't keep a diary –
drawing's easier for me than writing. I'm down to my last decent pencil. It's almost impossible to get good drawing pencils. I use mine to the last stub. Wish I still had one of those shiny ones. Can't get them anymore; everything's utility.

There's a print of Van Gogh's bedroom on one wall. It inspires me. Every line means something – tells me about the artist and the character or object he painted. A simple wooden bed covered with a red quilt, two chairs, bare floors, and shuttered windows.
How does he get that quality of light?
Uncluttered and complete.

My other picture is a watercolor called the
Post Office, Clovelly.
It shows a village painted by English artist Arthur Quinton, who lived in London till he died in 1934. I wonder if Clovelly was his favorite holiday place? The streets are cobbled. Two little girls in long dresses covered by white pinafores and wearing sunbonnets are walking up the hill. Behind them is the sea. There are railings in front of the houses. In London railings were given away long ago for the war effort. There's a striped awning over the post office, which has postcards for sale outside. A man leads a donkey, weighed down by panniers, toward the sea. A fishing boat bobs in the distance. Most nights this picture makes me feel safe and calm.

Aunt Em teases me because I can go to sleep anytime. She says the first time she saw me in Liverpool Street Station, I was asleep.

Tonight I can't stop thinking.
What if I hadn't been one of the children brought to England before the war? Where would I be? Where are my parents? Does my father have to wear a yellow star like some of those people on the news?

The last and most important “where” – the one I keep pushing aside and which won't go away – is,
where am I supposed to belong? Where am I going to live when the war's over? Here with Aunt Em in my real life? Or with my parents, who are practically strangers, whom I can hardly remember?

E
very time I close my eyes, I imagine I hear my wardrobe doors opening. Inside are rows and rows of dead bodies stacked up – one on top of the other. Skeletons wearing striped jackets, with six-pointed stars sewn over their hearts.

I get out of bed, make sure the blackout's in place. Then I switch on the light. The Van Gogh looks as if it's shifted a bit on the wall. I take it down. The nail's come loose. I'd better not hammer it back tonight. I put the print on the table next to the cocoa – there's skin on top. I drink it anyway. Can't bear to waste something with sugar in it. Actually, cocoa's not bad cold.

I sit cross-legged on my bed and look at the clean square of yellow paint – much brighter than the rest of the wall – where the Van Gogh normally hangs.

A long time ago there was a cream-colored wall in another room. …
A little girl sits cross-legged on the floor and looks for hours at a picture of a horse standing on the edge of a yellow cornfield, surrounded by emerald green hedges. The horse is red and tosses its blue mane, flicks its blue tail. The girl's papa gave the picture to her mother when they got married. It hangs on the wall of their living room.

At school the teacher says, “Draw something beautiful, so that the Führer will be proud of you.” Herr Schmidt always walks up and down between the rows of desks. His breath smells of tobacco. His fingers are stained yellow as though he's been painting. He stands at his table and the pointer makes a singing noise in the air before it hits the edge. When he does that, someone's in trouble.

“Zoffie Mandel, bring your picture to the front. Turn around and face the class; show them your drawing.”

The girl curtsies and does as she's told.
Her picture is beautiful. No need to be afraid.

“What is this a picture of, children?”

“A horse, Sir.”

“A horse. What color is this horse, children?”

“Red and blue, Sir,” the class responds.

Has she done something bad? The colors aren't smudged. She hasn't gone over the lines.

“Who has seen a red and blue horse before? No one. Good. What color are horses, Magda? Yes. Black. Peter? Brown. Very good. Mathias? White. Excellent.”

Her arms are getting tired. She needs to go to the toilet.

“Tell us, Zoffie, what color is
your
horse?”

The children scent trouble. They're glad it's someone else and not them.

“Speak up, I can't hear you.”

The girl whispers, “Red and blue, Sir.”

The class explodes into laughter. The pointer sings before it hits the wood.

“Silence! Hand me your picture.”

The girl watches him tear it in half and throw it into the wastepaper basket. It is not over yet.

“This picture is an insult to the Führer. This is a bad picture. Where did you see this horse?”

“In a frame, Sir, in a room.”

“What room, may I enquire?”

Even then, at six, she knows she must not tell the truth.

“I can't remember, Sir, just a room.”

“Hold out your hand. Liar!” The pointer sings loudly before it stings her fingers. “Stand in the corner for the rest of the morning. Tomorrow, move your things to the back. Next to Samuel Bermann.”

More laughter. Fingers pointing. The girl stands facing the wall.
She can't hold out much longer.

After the bell rings for the end of school, some children chase after the girl, chanting, “Zoffie Mandel wet the floor. Zoffie Mandel sits with Jews. She's a dirty Jewish …”

She doesn't know the last word they call her.

When the girl gets home, she curls up on her bed. Papa built the bunk for her in the living room. He said it was like a bed on a ship. Her own little room inside the big one. She draws the curtains and falls asleep in the half-darkness of her bunk.

After Mama comes home from work, she tells her what the teacher said. Mama takes the picture down from the wall. There is a big clean patch where the horse used to be. When Papa comes home, Mama shouts at him: “Give it away, burn it. Suppose it's on the banned list? I've told you over and over we have to be more careful. The child talks. What is to become of you? Of all of us? We are a target.”

“What shall I buy you instead? A picture of the Führer?”

“Are you deaf and blind?” Mama's voice quivers.

The girl covers her ears; she does not want to hear her mother crying. She wishes she could hide in the yellow cornfield.

After supper, Papa goes out. He takes the horse away, wrapped in newspaper, and the photograph of his family, whom she has never met.

Next day, when Mama comes home, she carries a big mirror in a gold frame. Four fat little gold angels decorate each corner. Papa hangs the mirror on the wall. He's tired from cutting the hedges outside the big houses along the Grunewald pine forest. He lies down.

“Doesn't the mirror look beautiful, Zoffielein?”

“Yes, Mama.” The little girl misses the red horse.

“Listen carefully. This mirror was a christening present from your Grandmother Weiss.”

“Grandmother? I have a grandmother?” the girl asks her mother. “Why doesn't she come to see me?”

Mama says, “You've forgotten. I told you about her. She lives far away in Dresden – she can't come to visit.”

The girl wants to ask, may she send her a letter? Perhaps her grandmother will write back. Papa appears in the doorway, puts his finger on his lips. The girl does not ask any more questions.

Later, before she goes to sleep, Mama reminds her, “How long have we had this mirror, Zoffie?”

“A long time.”

“Good girl,” Mama says. “Do you remember who gave it to us?”

“The grandmother who lives far away.”

I reach for my sketchbook. Only two clean pages left. Aunt Em gives me a new one every birthday. As soon as paper began to get scarce, she must have bought a supply of sketchbooks for me.

I draw the horse, color in the red body and blue mane and tail. Then I rough in the hedges. My green isn't quite the right shade, but close enough. The yellow cornfield gleams like the sun. I sign my initials.
S.M.

Zoffie doesn't exist anymore. I'm Sophie Mandel. I draw the way I want to.

I switch off the light and go to sleep.