Jaffa Beach: Historical Fiction (31 page)

As she was about to turn off the light, Samira heard the gate unlock. She ran to the window. She saw Musa’a shape slip by. A few minutes later there was a light knock, and without waiting, Musa entered her room.
It’s after midnight, what is he doing up at this hour?

“Salaam Aleikum
, Samira,” Musa said, “I saw a light, and I guessed you weren’t asleep yet. Since your return I have wanted to talk to you.”

“Sit down, my boy. Though you are a father now, you are still my boy,” Samira said affectionately.

Musa took her hands, “Samira, I don’t want to beat around the bush. I am worried. Since her arrival my mother hasn’t once mentioned Na’ima. I saw she received a letter from Amina, but she found an excuse to hide it from me. I know my mother confides in you. What’s happening?”

His reddened eyes prove how much he cares, thought Samira.

“I really shouldn’t talk, but you are now the head of the family. Things are not good at Na’ima’s. She must have had wrong notions about marriage.” Samira sighed, “Mahmood is a strong man, too strong for her. He says that she’s lazy by day and not willing by night.”

Musa nodded. “I had a bad feeling about him from the very beginning.”

“Once when he returned home at dawn, while your mother filled his
nargilea
with water, we heard him say, ‘Tonight I shot into the air. You should’ve seen how scared those Yahudim were! But next time I’ll shoot straight at them.’ Later, Fatima said that Mahmood was right, good for him, he’s not waiting for others to make decisions for him; he’s taking the law into his hands.

‘And he’s doing the same with Na’ima,’ I answered. ‘Last night I heard him beat her.’ To that your mother had no answer.”

“This is breaking my heart, especially knowing that I am unable to help her,” Musa got up and started pacing the room. After a while he whispered, “What was in Amina’s letter that made my mother refuse to show it to me?”

“When Na’ima was taken to the hospital, the night of her miscarriage, she wrote a letter to Amina and asked one of the nurses to mail it. If Mahmood were to find out about it, he would kill her, Na’ima said. That’s why Amina addressed it to your mother, yet mailed it to Abdullah. When he showed up, Abdullah explained to Mahmood that the reason for his unexpected visit was to lend your
mother the bank’s limousine. He was afraid, he said, that we might encounter trouble on the way from Deir Yassin to Jaffa. It calmed Mahmood, who is suspicious anytime Abdullah visits. Abdullah slipped the letter into your mother’s hand.”

“Na’ima! It was a mistake that my mother agreed so fast to her marriage.”

”Fatima read the letter in the car. She looked sad and put it aside without telling me much. Maybe she was afraid Nur was listening.”

“Do you know what Amina wrote?” Musa asked.

“A few days ago your mother was less distraught and said now she could read the letter to me. To tell you honestly, I understood only the parts about Na’ima and what Amina asked your mother to do. The other things she wrote went a bit over my head.”

“Would you please tell me what you know?”

“It sounds like a crazy idea. Amina wants Na’ima to leave Mahmood, take her baby and come live with her and her husband in England. She begged your mother to understand Na’ima’s unhappiness and not to judge her harshly. No woman, she wrote, should submit to her husband’—and here I try to remember the word, but I can’t—it sounded like sodo or sodm. Your mother cried. She said that everyone has his own fate and that must be Na’ima’s.”

Musa pressed his hands to his temples. He gestured to her to go ahead. Samira whispered the words she had memorized. “Bring Na’ima to England with her little Faud, the bearer of our father’s name. We’ll raise him together. George fully agrees with my plan and urged me to ask you to do it sooner rather than later. Please don’t wait until November.”

Samira stopped. “Does it matter which month? Why November,’ I asked your mother.’ In November’ she said, ‘Palestine’s future will be decided.’ Amina mentioned something about war. ’War is a terrible thing’, she wrote; three years after it ended, the British still suffer the aftermath of the European war.”

“Thank you, Samira,” Musa said, while his fists were locked locked from tension. “You did well to tell me.”

Samira kissed Musa’s forehead, “You’ll not solve anything this minute. We are all in Allah’s hands.”

Life could have been so beautiful, Musa mused, remembering the day he first saw Suha asleep on the beach. He was only nineteen years old. His future looked like Jaffa’s azure sky, no blemish on it. Now, four years later, he felt a terrible weight on his shoulders. He wished he had a close friend to unburden to and receive counsel. He couldn’t talk to Suha! To Abdullah, yes, Abdullah, their perennial protector! He’d have to leave soon for Jerusalem.

4 2

H
ow cozy it felt to sit around the dining-room table, covered with a starched white damask tablecloth, sipping the strong Turkish coffee and nibbling from the Cremshnitt torte, a product of Charlotte’s skilled hands. Only one month had passed since they moved from Jaffa, but to Otto it seemed much longer.

“Willkommen
, welcome to our little German colony, and you must call me Lotte,” Charlotte Gruber had greeted him on the day he came to see the Bauhaus building on Yehuda Halevi Street, where an apartment on the third floor was available for rent.

Sigmund Hochmeister, the double-bass player and a friend from their days in the KuBu, informed him about it. He lived across the street and had nagged Otto, “Nowadays those apartments are in such demand, they go like hot bagels; you’d better hurry.” At the front door of the balconied building, Otto met Bruno Herbst, an oboe player and an acquaintance from the Leipzig Conservatory who, besides teaching oboe, had a job on the side as a real-estate broker.

“The rooms are spacious,” Otto said after visiting the apartment, turning his hat in his hands, visibly embarrassed, “but I doubt that
my wife could walk the steps to the third floor. She is not well.
Entschuldig
, I am sorry to have bothered you.”

“
Warten
,” Charlotte Gruber who followed them upstairs shouted, “Bruno wait! Not long ago I heard you say that you’d love to have a view of the entire city of Tel-Aviv. Here is your opportunity. Switch with Herr Schroder. He could take your apartment on the second floor while you move up to the third.”

“I would never impose,” Otto started, but Bruno Herbst laughed and stopped him in mid-sentence. “A woman’s brain works much faster than ours. Welcome to our building, Herr Schroder. Have your movers take my furniture up before they move yours in.”

The Schroders didn’t own much furniture. Otto had sold the piano. It had been paid for with Gretchen’s jewels at a time when he still hoped she’d play again. But now he needed money for
schlisselgelt,
the initial deposit, and the only way to have such a large sum was by selling the piano. Otto promised himself that as soon as he acquired more students he’d buy an upright. Anyway, the stairs couldn’t have accommodated a grand.

“Herr Schroder,” the gentle voice of Hugo Gruber woke him from his reverie, “we haven’t heard your opinion. You’ve been very quiet this evening.”

They were again discussing politics. And Otto knew that they’d continue to talk until late at night.
What’s the need? Didn’t I participate in intellectuals’ discussions in Germany
?
And where did that lead? These talks don’t serve any purpose
, but his European manners stopped him from speaking his mind.

“Excuse me,” Otto arose, “I’m worried about Gretchen. I left her asleep two hours ago. I must go upstairs to check on her. She doesn’t sleep more than two hours at a stretch.”

“I could go,” offered Charlotte, moving her chair aside.

“You are doing too much for us as it is, Frau Gruber. Please sit,
Danke Schon
.”

As he closed the door behind him, he heard Charlotte say, “I pity him so much, I pity both of them. It’s terrible, they move like living cadavers.”

True, Otto recognized. But since moving to Tel-Aviv, he observed the beginning of changes in Gretchen, changes for which he was grateful to Lotte. Charlotte Gruber was keeping his wife company while he was at rehearsals or concerts. Gretchen wasn’t yet part of the colony’s evening meetings, but the fact that they spoke her language gave her sustenance and to Otto, new hopes.

Maybe I was mistaken when I chose to live in Jaffa. Why did I think my co-religionists would be unkind to Gretchen?

Gretchen was peacefully asleep, but Otto tossed from side to side, on the broken sofa in the living room. He began the habit of sleeping alone after his nightmares intensified. He could hear himself howling, the same long howl he had heard from his daughter that fateful night when she was dragged away by that monster Heinz,” Muti, Muti, help me!”

Had she seen her hidden behind the bushes? The look in her eyes told him that she did. She screamed, “Papa, Papa,” though she was told not to ever mention his name. Yes, she probably saw him. A little girl of thirteen whose cowardly father
, coward, coward, coward
, heard the ugly laugh of his brother-in-law
, “Mieschling
, mongrel, your father cannot hear you. He’s rotting in jail, or already in hell, the dirty Jew.”

The train took a grieving Gretchen and a petrified Otto out of Germany to freedom, to Switzerland, in a dangerous escapade with false passports, obtained at the last minute with the help of Wolfgang Schultz, the cellist’s brother, a Wehrmacht general. But Otto could see only Ruthie’s eyes and hear his inner voice,
coward, coward, coward
, ringing in his ears.

Ruthie was never found. Otto visited many survivors who arrived in Palestine straight from the DP camps. He asked, he begged, but they had no answer. Otto even got an appointment
with Chief Rabbi Herzog, who headed the search for displaced families, to no avail.

“Ruthie,” Gretchen sighed.

Otto’s body arched, ready to jump. It was a false alarm. His thoughts returned to his neighbors. Yes, it was a good move. Nice people, Hugo and Charlotte Gruber. Doctor Hugo Gruber, former professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Dresden, a man without a profession in Eretz Israel. They and their twin boys arrived in the early thirties and enthusiastically joined a kibbutz. “We loved it,” Charlotte told him, “we were old Zionists; it was our dream come true. Not for one moment did we think of Hugo’s asthma. Even after he got sick, we still didn’t want to leave. It was our home, though it was difficult for the
Frau Doktor
,” she pointed at herself,
”
to clean the toilets.” Everybody has a job to do,’ I told Hugo, who wanted to protest. When his cousin offered Hugo to keep the books in his haberdashery, we moved out. Our boys cried.”

“But I understand they live on a kibbutz now,” Otto said, a bit confused.

“After high school they returned
livnot uleibanot
.” She translated, “To build and be rebuilt, physically and spiritually. But we are worried now, after they joined the Palmach.”

Otto remembered the ardent conversations between his friends. Sigmund’s son joined the Irgun, an underground and very aggressive organization.
Why couldn’t all Jews, for once, be on the same side of the fence?

The one who regularly tried to make peace between the friends was Bruno Herbst, a lanky man, whose German wife had divorced him shortly after she became a member of the National Sozialist
Partei.
A former cabaret dancer, she was inflamed by the Nazi propaganda about the purity of the German race. “You Jews should go to Palestine,” she told him. Without malice, he repeated it to his friends saying, “It was her best advice.”

Mazal was Bruno’s girlfriend, a Moroccan with luscious copper skin, eyes like two black pearls, and kinky hair in which no comb could make its way through. She wore big golden hoops in her ears and laughed wholeheartedly, showing her small regular teeth, when she tried to teach her
Yekim
friends the correct Hebrew pronunciation. The two women, “the
Shwarze
” as Charlotte called Mazal, and Charlotte, competed as to which of them could help Gretchen recuperate faster.

4 3

I
t would take a knife, Shifra felt, to cut the tension building around her. Lately Musa had acquired a new habit almost every evening; closing himself up in his mother’s house and conferring with her. When Shifra asked him what was happening, his mouth was as closed as a bank vault. He became impatient even with Selim.

“Selim, not right now, I am tired,” she heard him say when the child chimed, seeing his father return from work, “Abu Selim, Abu Selim, it’s time we play!”

She knew how much Musa loved to hear his darling son call him “Selim’s father.”

If he wasn’t busy with his mother, then he was at the
chaikhana
, the tea house, or at meetings with the
mukhtar
. When he returned home frowns furrowed his forehead. Shifra still felt elated when Musa’s arms tightened around her body, his warm breath on her nape, thrilling her as at the beginning of their marriage. But his attention to her had changed. Gone were the poems he recited while his eyes watched her like two burning coals. Gone too were the long caresses which made her body shiver with pleasure. He was always in a hurry.