The Night of the Burning (14 page)

I felt my anger disappear. So she’d been waiting with eagerness to see me, too.

A maid in a starched uniform placed a large tureen of soup in front of Mrs. Stein and lifted off the lid. Fragrant steam filled my nose with the richness of a vivid memory. “Mama made soup with a whole chicken once,” I said aloud, without thinking.

I closed my eyes and inhaled the evocative scent. Yes, I remembered it clearly. Once, for a few days, we had owned a live chicken. It squawked around our little yard, snapping pieces of potato from my fingers. Nechama was just a toddler, and she watched fearfully as she huddled behind the door and refused to step outside. On the Friday after Papa brought the chicken home from his travels, he picked it up and took it to the shochet, the community’s slaughterer, to be killed. The chicken soup we had that night for Shabbes was a heavenly pool, glistening with golden suns.

“Oh, Mama,” I had said. “It’s so much nicer than your usual chicken-feet soup.”

Papa laughed. “As different as wine from grape juice,
Devorahleh.”

Mama beamed. “After the soup, we will eat the chicken meat itself. It is so tender that it fell right off the bones.” We ate the chicken meat with Mama’s smooth mashed potatoes, and Nechama and I argued happily over which was softer.

I opened my eyes, only to meet Naomi’s puzzled look. Mr. Stein was fiddling nervously with his napkin, and Mrs. Stein still had her soup ladle poised in the air.

“Um, would you like some of … Cook’s soup, Devorah? She makes it very well and Naomi loves it.”

“No,” I heard myself say. I did not say thank you and I squeezed the edge of the tablecloth until my fingers were sore, determined to stop myself from crying through the rest of the uncomfortable meal.

Mr. Stein drove me home quite soon after lunch, and that night I lay in bed sleepless. What now? I cried silently, the tears running down my face and pooling in my ears. What now?

Two more months passed, and I wilted in the glare of my first South African summer. Near the end of February, the crows cawed faintly in the heat. I was in English class, absorbed in memorizing a poem. I heard a tapping sound, and saw Daddy Ochberg knocking lightly at the little window set into the door of the classroom.

Miss MacKay hurried to the door to talk with him. I bent my head over my poem again, chewing on the tip of
my thick braid.

“Devorah!” Miss MacKay called. “Mr. Ochberg says he can take you home in his car, so you can leave a little early today. Pack your books, and remember your hat and blazer.”

I felt myself flush with surprise and pleasure as I hurried to get ready. It was a treat to be alone with Daddy Ochberg; usually children were fighting to skip next to him and hold his hand.

I chattered about school while we drove toward the orphanage. Daddy Ochberg smiled, but he didn’t say much and he seemed distracted, as if he wasn’t really listening. Gradually I began to feel uneasy. When we reached the building, Daddy Ochberg parked at the side rather than in front of the big doors.

“Let’s go into the garden, Devorah,” he said. “I have some news for you.”

He took my hand and led me onto the quiet lawn. We walked for a few moments in silence; my eyelid started to twitch. Daddy Ochberg coughed, started to say something, hesitated, then began determinedly. “Devorah, there is a couple who want to adopt you.”

I stopped still and stared at him.

“Their name is Kagan and they are nice people. Mr. Kagan is a photographer. He was very ill a few years ago; he had a disease called tuberculosis. But his doctor says he is better now and it is safe for you to be with him.”

Daddy Ochberg kept a firm hold on my hand and
continued his slow pacing up and down the lawn, leading me along. “I want to explain to you, Devorah. They are not rich people. You will always have enough to eat and you will have warm clothes. You will keep going to school, I’ll see to that, and you’ll go to synagogue with them. But there will not be money for luxuries; they are not rich people. Do you understand?”

My head was pulsing; so much information to sort out. A family wanted me; I would have a family again. Nice people. But Daddy Ochberg hadn’t sounded too certain. The man had a sickness with a complicated name, something you could catch, like the typhoid. What did it mean that they were not rich? It must be important. Daddy Ochberg had said it twice.

I heard myself blurt one silly question out of the jumble in my head: “Do they have a maid like the Steins have?”

Daddy Ochberg looked surprised. “Yes, I think they have a maid, Devorah Lehrman. Most white people in South Africa do have servants, you know. Is that what’s important to you, little one?”

My eyes filled with tears at the misunderstanding, and Daddy Ochberg let go of my hand and put his arms around me. He picked me up right off the ground and gave me a hug before putting me down.

“It will be good for you to have parents again, Devorah. You’ve had to look after yourself for too long, as well as
take care of your sister. She now has a family, and we think you need one, too.”

I clenched my fists. He spoke as if Naomi and I were separate now, as if Naomi didn’t need me anymore.

Daddy Ochberg was talking again, briskly. “I have to hurry off now. Matron knows that I’ve explained things to you. Next month I’ll come and visit you at the Kagans’ house.” We were back at the big front door, and he deposited my schoolbag next to me. “I’m glad for you, Devorah. And I think you’ll be glad for yourself one day.” Then he was walking back to his car, turning with a smile and a wave before he closed the car door.

I took a step after him. My eyelid was flickering. Questions tangled in my head. But Daddy Ochberg started the car and drove away, down the driveway and out of the orphanage.

I sat on my bed until supper, staring at the floor without seeing anything. When the bell rang for the evening meal, I went downstairs slowly. All around me, the others ate and talked happily, but the food wouldn’t go down my throat.

“Devorah.” Matron called me aside after supper. “Too excited to eat, dear? Now, I want you to pack your clothes and books in the morning. You won’t go to school tomorrow because your new parents will be here at noon.”

I flinched. New parents! What did that make my “old” parents? And what about my sister? Was she going to give
me a new sister, too?

Suddenly I had an idea. “Matron, will you speak to the Steins?” I blurted. “Will you speak to the Steins and tell them I’m going to a family now, so Naomi must come and be with me because she’s my sister. I’m sure the Kagans will take Naomi; she’s so sweet and pretty. I’ll beg until they agree. Put us together again, please, Matron.”

Matron sighed and put her arm around me. “You know the Steins would never give Naomi up, dear. They love her. She’s their daughter now.”

I wanted to kick and scream as I’d urged Naomi to do. I wanted to run out the door, walk all the way to Naomi’s house, grab her by the arm, and run away with her. But I just looked down while Matron gave me advice about manners and appreciation and keeping neat and tidy.

Finally I was released. “Why don’t you go to sleep now, Devorah,” Matron said with another hug. “You’ll be up early in the morning, I’m sure. Have a good night, dear.”

But the night wasn’t good; it was long and black and full of nightmares about Mama and Papa. Mama and Papa kept asking me where my sister was, and I didn’t know the answer. They kept asking me not to forget them, and they didn’t seem to hear my replies. I called and called to them, but their dim figures turned away from me and were swallowed by the darkness.

1922

On the morning of February 28, 1922, I gathered together my belongings, my hands moving like those of a mechanical puppet I’d seen in London. I pulled back my dark hair and tied it so severely that my forehead felt stretched. I didn’t know what to wear, so I put on my school uniform. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my face was tired and peaked, with two bright spots flushing my cheekbones.

I was ready long before noon, sitting straight up on the neat bed, my battered English suitcase on the ground. More than ever before, my bed, the dormitory room with its row of identical beds, and the windows looking out onto the garden felt secure and familiar.

“I’m afraid,” I whispered into the silence. My stomach was tight as a drum as I waited to be summoned, but by ten past twelve no one had come to the door or called my name. Eventually I stood up and peered down the hallway. One of the older girls, Chava, was hurrying from the direction of Matron’s office.

When she saw me she scowled and called out irritably, “Hurry, Devorah, Matron’s waiting for you and she’s cross.”

“I’ve been ready,” I squeaked. “I thought I was supposed to—”

But there wasn’t time to explain. Chava snatched up my suitcase and hurried back down the hallway. I followed, my eyes prickling at the unfairness.

At Matron’s office, Chava opened the door and gave me a little push inside. I stumbled awkwardly into the room and opened my mouth. I wanted to say that I had been ready, that I had been waiting in the dormitory. But Matron was tapping her pencil on the desk and she didn’t give me a chance.

“Finally, there you are. Devorah, meet Mr. and Mrs. Kagan, who have very kindly adopted you. This is Devorah Lehrman.”

A tall man got up from the edge of the chair where he was perched and came toward me with his hand outstretched. His long, thin arms and legs made him look like a huge gangling spider, and I shrank back. But his voice was gentle as he took my hand. “Hello, my dear. We’re very
glad to meet you.”

Then I felt myself being pulled against a corseted, substantial bosom and kissed firmly on the top of my head. A large woman with a florid face and beads of sweat on her upper lip beamed at me.

“You need some fattening up, poor child. Nearly starved in that terrible country. Going to see to it, get some good food in you now. All you have, that one little suitcase? That’s all, Matron? All the papers signed at last? So many papers. And in this heat. Affects me worse every year. All right, come along now, Mr. Kagan. Get this little one home, shall we?”

In a burst of half sentences, and trailing Mr. Kagan and me behind her, Mrs. Kagan bustled to the door, thanked Matron, and set off down the long driveway. I looked back helplessly. Goodbye, Cape Jewish Orphanage, goodbye. Another goodbye.

The next few hours spun by dizzily, propelled by Mrs. Kagan’s brisk bossiness and energy. It wasn’t until the end of the day, when I was finally alone in the room I was to call my own, that I had time to sort through the startling changes in my life.

The Kagans lived in a flat in a three-story building about twenty minutes’ walk from the orphanage. There wasn’t much space and my room wasn’t really a room, more like a large walk-in cupboard under the stairs to the upstairs neighbor. But it had been vigorously cleaned until
the floorboards shone and the little window gleamed. There was a pretty yellowwood washstand backed with six green tiles, and a woven rug next to the bed. I was glad to sit down on the white knobby bedspread, rest my elbows on my knees and my head on my hands, and think for a while.

My thoughts went first to Mr. Kagan. I liked him, but of course not in the way I had liked my own father. Mr. Kagan wasn’t strong and fun, he wasn’t someone who could toss you up to his shoulders or silence you with a single look when you had been too noisy. He was very quiet, timid maybe; his voice was gentle and his light blue eyes were soft and droopy, like a puppy’s eyes. Mrs. Kagan must have thought so, too, because she treated him just like a favorite dog. She told him where to go and what to do, and once I saw her stroke the fine hair on his head indulgently.

Her own dark blond hair was carefully arranged in waves and sprayed so that the waves never shifted. A thick layer of powder sat on the reddish skin of her cheeks, and when she perspired, the powder gathered in moist wrinkles. And yet her face was kind.

I couldn’t decide about Mrs. Kagan yet. She was big and solid, and she moved like the three girls at my school who sometimes linked arms and plowed through the crowds on the playground chanting: “We. Walk. Straight. So. You’d-Better-Get-Out-of-the-Way.” She seemed to me like a strong wind, almost a storm. She made you want to
brace yourself and stand firm, so you wouldn’t blow over. I had to smile a little: it seemed clear that Mr. Kagan had lain right down when that wind first hit him.

“Cleaned this room out for you myself on the weekend, so no need to worry about spiders,” she had said as her busy hands shoved the little bed close up against the wall and straightened the towel hanging on the washstand. Then she had insisted on helping me unpack my small suitcase. When the few clothes were lifted out and she saw my old photograph packed carefully at the bottom, Mrs. Kagan suffocated me for a moment in a massive hug.

“We’ll take care of you now, dearie. Climb in bed and get a good night’s sleep.” With a kiss on the top of my head and a bang of the door, she was gone, leaving quiet in her wake.

I guessed that the Kagans were sitting together on the hard, overstuffed couch in the living room, a room heavy with framed photographs taken by Mr. Kagan. There were photographs of white brides, stiff Bar Mitzvah boys, plump babies, and unsmiling grandparents.

“Will I be related to all these people now—now that you’ve adopted me?” I had asked.

Mrs. Kagan, straightening an ornate frame, had laughed. “Oh, none of these people are Kagans, my dear. I don’t know any of them at all.”

I gazed around the living room, surrounded by strangers. But Mrs. Kagan bustled on. She was very proud of her husband’s photography and showed me his tiny
darkroom at the back of the flat as if it were a stateroom for a king. It was a scary place, I thought, very dark and smelling of chemicals. There were buckets of shiny liquid and clothespins on long cords that brushed my hair like cobwebs.

“Does Mr. Kagan work in here every day?” I asked.

Mrs. Kagan’s cheeks grew pinker and she said a little too loudly, “Mr. Kagan used to have a large photographic studio in Stellenbosch …” She looked closely at me and gave the specific address as if I was daring to disbelieve her. “Muller’s Buildings on Plein Street in Stellenbosch. But his talent was not appreciated. Not fully appreciated by those … farmers. Anyway, Mr. Kagan’s health was not good at the time. Quite well now, thank God. So we decided it’d be best for him not to bother with the public but to do photo developing right here. Yes, at home on Caledon Street.”