The Night of the Burning (12 page)

1921

“If you are going to succeed in your new country,” Daddy Ochberg told us seriously one night when he joined us for dinner, “you need to learn better English. You will be outsiders here until you laugh in English, play in English, dream in English.”

I agreed silently. English is the key. I have to learn perfect English so that I can take care of Nechama and myself in the future.

In the late afternoons, the busy principal of Cape Town Central School, Mark Cohen, would drive up to our orphanage in his sputtering old car, bringing several of his teachers with him, all of them volunteers. His method of teaching was simple.

“Let’s go,” he called, waving his arms. When he had all of us, big and small, crowded around him, he started walking. Inside, outside, he walked, pointing at things and describing them in English. “Bird!” he bellowed.

That one was easy. Mr. Bobrow had taught it to us already. But Mr. Cohen was just warming up.

“Greedy bird,” he went on.

We looked at one another blankly. Did “greedy” mean that the bird digging its beak repetitively into the soil was very hungry or very patient? Or perhaps “greedy” was the name of a type of bird?

“Greedy!” he enunciated, stuffing imaginary food into his mouth until his cheeks bulged, pretending to vomit, and then eating more.

I poked Nechama. “Greedy—like you at mealtimes.”

“Shiny bird,” he continued, pointing at the Cape dove’s magically glistening feathers, pulling out his gold fob watch and angling it to reflect the sun, then holding up his hand as if the sun were blinding him. Finally he pulled out a brand-new coin.

We stared at him for a moment and then burst into explanation among ourselves.

“Shiny, like your curls, Nechama,” was my peace offering.

Mr. Cohen beamed and pointed again at the gleaming bird, digging endlessly. “The bird is greedy. The bird is shiny.”

We repeated with concentration, slowly: “The bird is greedy. The bird is shiny.”

I felt panicky. So much to remember and already Mr. Cohen was walking on. Dragging Nechama, I ran after him. “You’re pulling me,” Nechama complained.

“Come on,” I urged. “It’s important.”

We needed more than Mr. Cohen’s afternoon lessons. Soon Nechama and I, along with the other children who were twelve and younger, were told we would be going to Miss Rosa’s school. Rosa van Gelderen, a Jewish woman from Holland, was the principal of an elementary school on De Villiers Street. It would be a long walk, but there was no choice. None of the other elementary schools would accept such a large group of immigrants who could not speak English.

On the first morning before school, my stomach kept heaving. “I have to be strong for Nechama,” I muttered to myself as I hovered in the bathroom. “She’ll be even more scared of school if she sees me like this.”

But when I came out, Nechama was chattering excitedly to Mr. Bobrow. “Let’s go, Devorah!” she shouted. “Mr. Bobrow is going to walk with us today to show us the way.”

I began to trail after them, but Mr. Bobrow called me to the front. “Devorah, I need you to take charge of the nine-year-old girls.”

Me?

“This way, Nechama, Faygele, Malke, Jente; this way, all of you,” I found myself saying authoritatively. “Stay together now.”

Miss Rosa had prepared her school well. “Welcome, Devorah. Welcome, Shlayma and Zeidel,” a teacher greeted us warmly. “I am Miss MacKay. Please follow me to your classroom. Our pupils are looking forward to meeting you.”

I checked for Nechama, only to see her following a pretty young teacher into a different room without a backward glance.

“Wel-come, Duh-vor-ah and Shhhlay-mah and Zay-dill,” Miss MacKay’s class chanted in singsong voices.

I lifted my eyes quickly to see if they were teasing. But most of the faces were smiling with kind curiosity.

“These are your desks right near me, and I’ve given you each an exercise book and pen,” Miss MacKay continued. “Please sit and we will begin our day.”

I was relieved to be able to scrunch down on a little bench attached to a heavy wooden desk. When I found the courage to peek around, the others were all busy with their lessons. No one was staring at me. As the minutes passed, I felt my neck and shoulders gradually relax.

Miss MacKay was generous and patient. I would have died rather than tell her that I didn’t understand even half of what she was saying that first day, but she had a way of repeating explanations for the three of us very simply, in a quiet aside. I concentrated so hard that my brain felt painfully swollen inside my skull.

At last it was time to go home, and the Ochberg children gathered at the school gate to walk together. Looking at the group, I suddenly realized that in our school uniforms we could not easily be distinguished from the South African children around us. “We all look the same,” I said, smiling at Nechama. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Nechama frowned doubtfully at her dull yellow
button-up dress. “Why can’t we wear pretty clothes to school?” she asked. “The ones in the last donation box were beautiful. I could wear a pinafore over the blue velvet so it wouldn’t get chalk or ink on it, and you would look better in red or pink than in that yellow.”

“It’s safe,” I explained impatiently. “Don’t you see how much safer it is for us to look like everyone else?”

Nechama glanced away. She never wanted to hear my warnings about danger; she didn’t even seem interested in talking about the good times back home.

I straightened the flat cotton belt on my simple dress and thought about all the things I had liked at the school: the solid wooden desks with neat holes for the inkpots and long, thin “moats” for pens and pencils; the water fountain, which shot water into my mouth at the push of a pedal. Of course, I loved the books most of all. I had received eight of them to take home, eight books I did not have to share with anyone. A reader, a heavy red history book, a worn old geography atlas, a book of science experiments and another of biology, a mathematics text, a folio of music and songs, and a dictionary of Afrikaans, the other official language in South Africa. My favorite was the English reader, with little pictures at the beginning of each chapter.

The books. A new worry suddenly made me clutch them more closely. “How will we pay for all of these?” I whispered anxiously to Shlayma. But he was more interested in kicking an empty milk carton along the path.

My question was answered after lunch. Mr. Bobrow
and Matron led everyone in the job of scrubbing the dining tables and drying them with extra care. Then the adults laid out huge rolls of new brown paper, stacks of shiny white labels, and many pairs of scissors. “Your schoolbooks do not belong to you; they belong to your school and have to be returned in good condition at the end of the year,” Mr. Bobrow announced. “In order to keep them clean and to strengthen the covers, each book has to be covered in brown paper, and your name must be neatly written on a white label glued to the front.”

“Each book!” Faygele protested. “I have so many.”

“Each book,” repeated Mr. Bobrow sternly. “Now gather around while I demonstrate the correct way to turn over the corners.”

We spent hours folding and wrapping brown paper carefully around our books; it was hard to cut the paper so that it fit well. And then there were the labels to be written. I loved the precision of the job and the appearance of my books covered in fresh, smooth-brushed brown paper. I even enjoyed being among all the other children doing the same task.

Every afternoon we walked home from Miss Rosa’s school together, talking and teasing. The heat was blinding. I was in charge of shepherding a group of younger children and stopping the stragglers from hanging back to look longingly into the cool darkness of the little corner shops. Inside, the Indian owners sold a bewildering selection of
chocolate bars and bottles of flavored milk in bright colors and packets of potatoes sliced thinly and fried to a crisp. The shops had names such as Formosa Café or Manny’s Café, but the word “café” was pronounced as if it were spelled “caffy,” and the shops were nothing like the one or two elegant cafés we had seen in Warsaw.

I didn’t think of Warsaw often and I hardly ever thought about That Night. When I did, I changed the direction of my thoughts quickly. I had become quite good at that—since London, maybe. Yes, it was as our boat chugged into London that I had first felt open to hope. By now a couple of months in South Africa had flown by, and trouble seemed far behind. Of course I still kept a very close eye on Nechama, and of course I remembered everthing about Poland—who else was there to remember everything? (My fingers checked my pockets automatically, but I had begun keeping my photograph in my private drawer at the orphanage.)

The orphanage felt big and beautiful and warm to me. Among its generous offerings was a real library. Once a week, it was opened by blue-eyed Miss Stella, the volunteer librarian, who loved books as intensely as I did. As she walked down the orphanage corridor with her keys, calling to us like the Pied Piper, children rushed to choose the books they would borrow but especially to hear the stories she read aloud. Miss Stella knew the exact stories from the Bible that Papa had told us, and she showed me books
where those stories were written. But she also read us stories about South African children having adventures in the wild bush and about lonely princesses of France and England and about pets that saved their owners’ lives.

The orphanage hosted formal debates on the first Saturday night of every month, moderated by the august Judge Joseph Herbstein. All the dining tables were cleared away, and rows of temporary seats created an auditorium. A raised platform was placed at the front for the adult participants, who were usually distinguished visitors from Cape Town society. I always made sure to arrive early so that I could find a seat near this low stage.

“We know that many of you grew up in countries where it was not safe to speak your minds, where you could not vote for the best leaders,” Judge Herbstein boomed one evening. “When you learn how to debate, you learn how to think and to argue. We want you to forget your fear in this wonderful country where everyone can talk and vote freely.”

There was a protesting burst of loud, forced coughing from one of the distinguished visitors seated near Judge Herbstein. Startled, everyone turned to look at the man.

Judge Herbstein seemed to falter. “Where Jewish people can talk and vote freely,” he said.

I understood what the interruption meant. One of the girls at school had an uncle who had been put in jail for protesting that most brown-skinned people weren’t allowed to vote in South Africa. She had explained to me that only
people who had been labeled white could vote, even though their ancestors had come mainly from Holland or England. Most of the people who were called black had descended from the original inhabitants of Africa and they outnumbered whites by far. But still they could not vote.

The police were very rough with people who spoke up against the unfairness, she added. In my heart I also thought it was unfair, but I was afraid to say anything.

Judge Herbstein regained his composure, and I settled back to listen. I would never be bold enough to debate whether capital punishment was moral, or whether the arts or the sciences were more important to human life, or whether women or men were more intelligent, but I could at least vote for the best speakers.

One Saturday night, three ballet dancers performed for us. Nechama loved everything about them: their grace, their elegance, their costumes. She clapped wildly, her pretty face aglow under her mop of curls. For days afterward, she stood in front of the long mirror in the entrance hall, stretching her arms above her head while trying to spin around gracefully. As I watched, I suddenly noticed how much taller my sister had become. She looked like a young girl, not a plump child any longer. I reached out and tried to give her a hug, but Nechama pushed me away. “Stop that,” she said. “I’m just getting this ballet step right.”

Sundays were free days, and the tennis courts and soccer and cricket fields were full, as people in South Africa seemed to be very enthusiastic about sports. Here
Ne-chama and I were in agreement. Neither of us could understand why anyone would want to chase after a ball and hit it with something. Nechama would rather spend hours with her girlfriends trying on the torn bridal gown and high heels they had found in the dress-up box in the playroom. I lay and read books outside in the shade of the eucalyptus trees, grass blades tickling my skin and the heavy scents of oleander and hibiscus filling my nose. Often I looked up to watch the sun striking a flint on Table Bay, light shooting from the blue ocean.

The golden moments were Daddy Ochberg’s visits every Friday afternoon before Shabbes dinner at the orphanage. As his big car turned into the driveway, children gathered like magnets, flying to meet him. We clung to his fingers or pinched the cloth of his jacket until he was weighed down with us and had to slop along heavily, taking ages to progress up the stairs to the front door. Nechama hung on with the rest, shrieking with laughter. And I held on to her, and the children holding on to me were also holding on to Daddy Ochberg, so that we were linked in a circle. I was happy. I had no idea that the circle was about to break.

1921

The day that my happiness stopped growing was a Monday. It was early December, two and a half months after we had arrived in Cape Town. The summer heat was reaching its peak, and it took us longer and longer to drag ourselves home from school.

“I’m going to put my head under the garden tap at the bottom of the driveway,” Nechama declared, wiping away the sweat that collected beneath her straw hat.

“You’ll get your school uniform wet and Matron will be cross. Do what I’m doing: blow upward with your lips to fan your face,” I advised her.

Nechama giggled at the wisps of hair drifting up and down above my eyes, but she copied me. She still had that habit.

We reached the orphanage at last, crossing the royal purple carpet of fallen jacaranda flowers just within the gates and hurrying toward our lunch in the dark cool
dining room.