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Authors: Daniel Torday
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the visa my father had arranged. With U-boat attacks on ships in the Atlantic and the North Sea all winter long, travel was dangerous, but my body was determined to reach London. In a room at the back of the consulate I was provided a secondhand longshoremanâs sweater and a ticket for passage to Britain. I would enter the country at the port of Grimsby, from which I could travel by land to London.
On my way to the harbor I stopped to see if Françoise was at her position at the café. I was about to risk death to put the North Sea between us, but my mind was like melody and harmony in counterpointâthere was a second kind of memory in my muscles and it longed to see Françoise once more.
But she was not there.
When I think of it now, do I recognize what I was doing, the mistake I was making by leaving Françoise without saying good-bye? If you have had such wisdom in the moments when you were driven by emotion, by jealousy and confusionâwell, nostrovia, as the Russians say. Had I taken a day more to think about it, had I taken Françoise back on a bicycle to the tulip fields, where we could have talked about it, could she have alleviated the anger I was feeling? Would it have changed what I was feeling? Iâll never know. Whatâs done canât be undone.
My decision was made. My body was in motion. I would not vacillate further. So I traveled along the same path as during the previous dayâs trek, and only an hour later a large ship run by William Muller and Company had a space for me, and I boarded.
We embarked.
10.
The open sea was cold. I spent the long passage out the Nieuwe Maas up on deck, looking north and gazing at the waters trying to imagine I could see the U-boats circling us, seeking our demise. While up there I experienced a feeling of the loss of love Iâd only experienced something close to one time before. When I was twelve, most of my summer was spent by the oxbow in the river below my fatherâs factory. Evening would arrive as we relaxed upstream from those waters, which served as the waste bin for whatever refuse was sloughed off by the workmen at Brüder Weisberg. Each afternoon before dark the children of Leitmeritz would walk down to the Elbe to the same bend in the river where my cousins and I had spied my mother and father in their broken flirtation when we were too young to know what weâd seen. There we swam. Fifty feet out into the middle of this stretch of water our fatherâs fathers had built a birch-wood dock. Across from this dock dangled a rickety ladder.
One day I walked amid the din of afternoon cicadas crying in treetops. We children of the little city of Leitmeritz worshiped at the brown riverâs ankles. My cousins lived between my familyâs house and the river, and I picked them up for the walk. I could think that day only of a little girl named Suse. My pursuit of her had become an idée fixe. She was in Ninyâs class at the gymnasium, the daughter of one of my fatherâs workmen. Iâd known her father, Vladek, since I was a child. He was a dedicated worker who did not speak much. His disdain for his station and for my father was never obvious, but Iâd always surmised it must be present.
Suse was a mediocre student. She wasnât dim, but she never seemed to hold an opinion of her own. Even at that young age she was a person who is not living her own life, but waiting for someone to live it for her. There was something not wholly unpleasant in this mannerâa certainty to her acceptance of life and its hardships that smacked of a kind of counterintuitive confidenceâand it was, for a boy coming from a home like mine, immediately attractive. I told Niny, my sole conspirator, about my design.
âYouâll help me speak to Suse today,â I said.
âDo what you will,â Niny said. âI wonât help, but I wonât get in your way.â Even then Niny knew how to handle
On my way to the harbor I stopped to see if Françoise was at her position at the café. I was about to risk death to put the North Sea between us, but my mind was like melody and harmony in counterpointâthere was a second kind of memory in my muscles and it longed to see Françoise once more.
But she was not there.
When I think of it now, do I recognize what I was doing, the mistake I was making by leaving Françoise without saying good-bye? If you have had such wisdom in the moments when you were driven by emotion, by jealousy and confusionâwell, nostrovia, as the Russians say. Had I taken a day more to think about it, had I taken Françoise back on a bicycle to the tulip fields, where we could have talked about it, could she have alleviated the anger I was feeling? Would it have changed what I was feeling? Iâll never know. Whatâs done canât be undone.
My decision was made. My body was in motion. I would not vacillate further. So I traveled along the same path as during the previous dayâs trek, and only an hour later a large ship run by William Muller and Company had a space for me, and I boarded.
We embarked.
10.
The open sea was cold. I spent the long passage out the Nieuwe Maas up on deck, looking north and gazing at the waters trying to imagine I could see the U-boats circling us, seeking our demise. While up there I experienced a feeling of the loss of love Iâd only experienced something close to one time before. When I was twelve, most of my summer was spent by the oxbow in the river below my fatherâs factory. Evening would arrive as we relaxed upstream from those waters, which served as the waste bin for whatever refuse was sloughed off by the workmen at Brüder Weisberg. Each afternoon before dark the children of Leitmeritz would walk down to the Elbe to the same bend in the river where my cousins and I had spied my mother and father in their broken flirtation when we were too young to know what weâd seen. There we swam. Fifty feet out into the middle of this stretch of water our fatherâs fathers had built a birch-wood dock. Across from this dock dangled a rickety ladder.
One day I walked amid the din of afternoon cicadas crying in treetops. We children of the little city of Leitmeritz worshiped at the brown riverâs ankles. My cousins lived between my familyâs house and the river, and I picked them up for the walk. I could think that day only of a little girl named Suse. My pursuit of her had become an idée fixe. She was in Ninyâs class at the gymnasium, the daughter of one of my fatherâs workmen. Iâd known her father, Vladek, since I was a child. He was a dedicated worker who did not speak much. His disdain for his station and for my father was never obvious, but Iâd always surmised it must be present.
Suse was a mediocre student. She wasnât dim, but she never seemed to hold an opinion of her own. Even at that young age she was a person who is not living her own life, but waiting for someone to live it for her. There was something not wholly unpleasant in this mannerâa certainty to her acceptance of life and its hardships that smacked of a kind of counterintuitive confidenceâand it was, for a boy coming from a home like mine, immediately attractive. I told Niny, my sole conspirator, about my design.
âYouâll help me speak to Suse today,â I said.
âDo what you will,â Niny said. âI wonât help, but I wonât get in your way.â Even then Niny knew how to handle