The Gathering Storm (5 page)

All the guests at the White Rose celebrated the news that the black American sprinter, Jesse Owens, beat out Hitler's Aryan athletes at the games.

The events of the Olympic Games in Germany I relegated to unreality. Nothing mattered but my plan to find some moment alone with Eben so I could tell him I loved him.

I noticed that every morning he strolled a mile into the village to buy a newspaper. As summer drew to a close, I realized I was nearing my last opportunity to confess my feelings for him.

I rose early and, ahead of Eben, hurried up the lane. About halfway to the village, I found a shady spot beside a pasture where Hafflinger mares grazed with their foals. I sat down to wait. After a half hour, when he still did not come, I became entranced by the sight of the colts galloping across the field. I did not hear Eben's step behind me.

He spoke my name. "Lora?"

I blushed. The warmth of desire uncoiled in me. I felt my heart pounding. Everything I wanted to say fled from my mind.

"The horses," I said, gripping the fence rail.

I felt him come near. "Beautiful," he said in a wistful voice.

I turned. My voice caught. "Eben..." I faltered. "I love you."

He lifted his hand, as though he would touch my cheek. He smiled down into my eyes as if he had never known an unhappy moment. "White rose. So beautiful. So young."

"Not so young."

"Centuries too young, Lora."

"You aren't yet thirty. I heard Papa say so," I protested.

When he held me in his gaze for a long moment, I knew he had thought about me. "You are a memory, Lora...so familiar. Another lifetime. Another place. A different world...it might have been."

"Why not now, Eben?" I threw myself at him.

He plucked my arms from around his neck and stepped back. "Go home now, or I shall tell your father." Turning on his heel, he strode off angrily.

I wept in the forest for the rest of the day.

On Friday afternoon, Frau Helga Thoenen made preparations for a Shabbat meal. Her dinner was an elegant affair. Long tables were set up on the lawn of the White Rose Inn. I helped her spread white tablecloths and set her fine china. Sterling silver gleamed in the golden sunlight of the late afternoon.

With a smile she inspected our work and said to me, "Soon it will be the rose hour." She held up an instructive finger. "But where are the roses, my dear?"

I blinked at her. Three vases positioned as centerpieces were empty. "I'll gather them."

She placed a basket and shears in my arms. "Three dozen precisely. Thirty-six white roses. Mind the thorns."

I examined the flowers, choosing only the most beautiful blossoms on the rose tree. Perhaps I took too much time at my task. A string quartet was already setting up their music stands when I arrived back at the tables. Frau Helga wore a beautiful sky blue frock, while I was still in my work clothes. Other guests, elegantly dressed in party clothes, began to emerge from the cottages.

Frau Helga seemed pleased with my selection of blooms. "Well done, Lora. I'll set them out. You'll want to wear your prettiest dress tonight, I think."

Eben drew my attention. He was wearing white linen trousers and a blue pinstriped jacket with a red tie. I was certain his clothing was chosen as a salute to the American and British athletes in the Olympic games. He leaned against the railing of his porch, gazed off at the still water of the lake, and inhaled deeply.

I had never seen any man so handsome.

Frau Helga noticed my wistful look toward Eben. "He will sing for our company tonight."

"Eben sings?"

"Eben is a nightingale, my dear. He sings like an angel. You'll see."

I grinned stupidly. My schoolgirl adoration must have shown like a spotlight. "He does everything well."

"And you are his white rose, it seems."

I did not understand what she meant. "Eben calls me his White Rose."

"You know the legend, the one of the white rose and the nightingale, surely?" she asked, arranging the flowers. "My favorite story. I named the inn
White Rose,
because I love the tale so much."

I shook my head, wishing I knew more. "I'm sorry. No."

"An ancient legend. Would you like to hear it?"

I nodded eagerly and trailed after her, passing her roses one at a time.

"From a high mountaintop in Eden, a Nightingale fell in love with a beautiful White Rose. White Rose called to him each day as the sun set, and he sang to her through every night. Then one day, the serpent came into the garden and decided that he wanted White Rose all to himself. He wound himself around her trellis, threatening to choke her into submission. She called out in terror. Nightingale flew to save her. He battled the serpent, flying at him again and again. At last the serpent struck him, sinking poisonous fangs into his brave heart. Nightingale fell, singing his last song, as his blood dripped onto the White Rose. With every drop of Nightingale's blood, a thorn suddenly grew up to surround and protect the White Rose. When the serpent tried to claim her as his own,
he could not penetrate the hedge of thorns. Nightingale fell dead at the foot of the White Rose. And where he lay, next spring, a red rose tree grew up. The white and the red roses grew side by side; two became intertwined."

"A lovely story," I said, gazing at the vases as the quartet warmed
up with Mozart. "But sad."

"Sad? No. A happy ending, yes? So the two bloom together for eternity in Eden."

"But what about the nightingale?"

"He sacrificed himself to save the white rose. He gave his life for
hers. By the shedding of his blood, the white rose was given life. A picture of Christ, some say."

I was both fascinated and terrified by the thought that Eben might be my nightingale. How would I go on living if anything ever happened to him? I was also mildly disturbed that he might believe I needed saving from something sinister.

As I skipped off to wash and change into my party frock, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. His gaze followed me as I ran to our cottage.

I was the last person to be seated beneath the stars. Candles were lit, and we welcomed the Shabbat.

Eben sang a Jewish blessing over our meal in a clear baritone that I thought must surely call angels from heaven to listen. It was strange, ancient music I had never heard before. It stirred my heart, which for a little time took my mind off myself, and made me turn my eyes toward the stars. Just for a few moments Eben was my Nightingale, and I was his White Rose.

It was to be our last journey as a family before we returned home. Papa and Eben and several others from the White Rose Inn had a meeting in Rome with Jewish Agency leaders. All had a passion to remove Jewish children from Hitler’s persecution.

Papa and Mama had a private compartment on the train from Switzerland, but I preferred to ride in the observation car. I carried two volumes, which Frau Helga had loaned me. One was a thin volume of Keats poetry, and the other was the Jane Austen novel,
Pride and Prejudice.
I finished the romance novel early in the journey. Then, reading Keats' verse, I imagined I was Elizabeth Bennet, and that Eben Golah, austere and remote and handsome, embodied the character of Darcy

We wound slowly southward through the great mountains.

In the dining car, Eben stopped for brief conversation with Papa and Mama. He did not look at me at first, until he noticed my copy of the poems of John Keats.

"Is this yours, Lora?" he asked with a sort of wonder in his voice.

"Frau Helga loaned it to me." I blushed at his attention. How I hated to blush. "I read the poem about the nightingale."

"Ah, did you? And do you enjoy the poetry of John Keats?" Eben
thumbed through it. He found a verse he recognized and, to my astonishment, recited it rather than read from the page.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'dgrain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'dface,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink."

"Bravo," Papa said.

Eben's perfect lips curved slightly upward as he wistfully scanned the page. "I got it right, I see. After all these years." He closed the book.

I said quietly, "I understand the meaning of the words, but not the nuance."

Eben reared back a bit. "Keats' poetry is all nuance. John Keats' grave is in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Perhaps you and your mother should visit. It's in the guidebooks. A lonely place. He insisted there be no name carved upon his marker, just an epitaph:
Here lies one whose name is written on water.
He left his life in England and the girl he loved. Not yet thirty, he vanished from his world. Keats did not believe his poems would be ever be read and appreciated by a lovely young woman in a distant generation."

I answered, "I think his name should have been written in stone, not water."

"Perhaps in this generation his name is stone at last." Eben replaced the book beside my water glass and, with his characteristic bow, moved on to his own table at the opposite end of the car.

1937

While other Christian pastors ran from trouble, my father faced it head on. Papa accepted a temporary position as the pastor of a church in Berlin. Mama's American citizenship offered us some protection, but all the same, it was a dangerous time to be an outspoken Christian.

It was in the fall of 1937 when I first met Varrick Kepler. We both attended the recently and loftily renamed Reinhard Heydrich Unified Academy in Dahlen, formerly known as the Dahlen School. I'm quite sure Heydrich, a rising star of Hitler's SS, had no knowledge our little school had been named after him, nor would he care. But the new school administration agonized over the renaming for months. They held a formal ceremony at the beginning of the term.

Because of my nationality, I was fortunate to attend this model university prep academy. Most of the nation's schools segregated male from female students in the principal subjects, but ours did not. While young men were being taught their lessons, young women worked silently alone...but I was always listening to what the other sex was being taught. I knew the reverse was true for Varrick as well.

The papers' insistence that indoctrination was not occurring was for the benefit of non-Germans. The state-controlled media was ordered to allay the fears of a war-weary world. The Germany that was rising again, less than twenty years after the end of the Great War, was an amiable neighbor and not quarrelsome.

Of course, we also recognized the frightening implications of such reports. If newspapers were making claims on behalf of the government, claims we knew to be false from firsthand experience, then it stood to reason their other denials were actually a kind of "reverse inventory" of what the Nazis were, in fact, doing or planning.

The papers proclaimed:

Lebensraum, the supposed intention of Germany to expand beyond the borders established in the Treaty of Versailles, is not being taught in our schools. But an accu
rate history of geography will not be hidden from our youth.
Should we lie to them? Should they be told that Germany was not once....

And,

This government has no intention of wasting money imprisoning individuals who've committed no crime. Law-abiding Jews are free to live their lives and conduct their business in peace, so long as that business does not conflict with....

And,

Chancellor Hitler was very congratulatory of the Negro American Athlete Jesse Owens. Rumors that Hitler
remarked on the Negroes' supposed lack of intelligence and
sub-human origins are false....

It was after a "science" lecture related to this last event that my newfound admiration for Varrick occurred.

"Without question," Herr Schmidt remarked, "the Negro is an inferior species to the Caucasian. There is near-universal scientific
consensus on the point, and those who disagree are considered lunatics by researchers of actual experience. It is their subhuman, animal-like nature that allows them to excel in purely physical endeavors, yes, even above the Aryan. But their brains are no bigger than a dog's, and their incapacity for higher thought is scientifically verified. So, while the Negro maybe able to run faster or jump higher, who here would ever trade your place as an Aryan for that of a Negro?"