The Gathering Storm (45 page)

come in that generation. And so the devil grows more fierce against the people of the Covenant." He kissed my brow again. "Until then we few remain strong and faithful until the King of heaven and earth returns."

The pastel sky ripened as we walked slowly home. I heard the church bells call the faithful to prayer. The ringing declared life must go on. One more day for those who had survived the night.

Eben opened the blackout curtains. Dawn flooded the room. We lay together on our bed and made love as though it were the last sweet morning of the world.

We had named the injured nightingale Rosalind. It was an elegant name I had always admired. Papa called me Rosalind in jest sometimes, in my more dramatic adolescent years. I fancied the name as a pseudonym if ever I went on stage as an actress.

When Eben sang to the nightingale, Rosalinds wings flicked with delight, and her golden eyes gleamed when she looked at him. She was indifferent to me. As she healed, I was of no more emotional significance in her little brain than the wind. I merely moved her cage from one patch of sunlight to the other. I was her source of bread crumbs and fresh water. But the sweet crooning of Eben Golah made her want to live.

"You are the Bing Crosby of the bird kingdom," I teased.

Eben sang a comic Bing reply: "You are Paradise...her eyes afire
with one desire..."

I laughed as our nightingale fluttered jealously in her cage.

"She's ready to go back to her one true love," I said.

"I know a little fella who's awaiting his gal on Primrose Hill."

"Let's hope he hasn't found a new love while she's been gone."

We covered the birdcage with a pillowcase lest Rosalind keel over from the shock of London traffic. Boarding the bus, we traveled to Primrose Village, returning to the place we had found her.

~ 357 ~

"Do you think he waited for her?" I scanned the trees.

Eben set the cage on the grass, unperturbed. "He's been waiting. You'll see. The path of true love and all that."

I opened the cage door and Eben offered his index finger as a perch. The bird stepped on his hand and remained in his palm for a long moment. With perfect mimicry, Eben whistled, summoning the lonely male from his perch. The leaves rustled nearby.

"Look! There he is, Lora!"

In an instant Rosalind spotted her beloved and flew to his side. The two groomed one another as if her time away had been nothing but a bad dream.

"I'll miss her," Eben said as we hurried back to the bus stop.

"Would you wait for me, Eben?" I asked.

"Forever." He clasped my hand and kissed my fingers. "My Rosalind."

"Tonight I expect you to sing to me too."

"Anything. As long as you promise never to fly away."

O

n the morning of December 22 I awakened to the tinkling of wind chimes outside our Hampstead window. During the worst of the bombing Eben had carefully picked through shards of stained glass from the shattered windows of a Christopher Wren church. For weeks he had laid the pieces out on our table. A nightingale. Roses: crimson and white. A flaming heart. An angel's fingers on a flute. Coral lips smiling. Patiently he drilled a hole in each fragment and strung them together into a wind chime and hung it outside the window. The sun shone through the glass, casting a bouquet of color on the floor.

That morning I opened my eyes and reached out for Eben. His side of the bed was empty. A fleeting instant of panic seized me, then I remembered his trip to Oxford. The last Jews in Berlin were deported to Polish ghettos. Nazi brutality against God's beloved people escalated beyond human imagination.

Eben was meeting with C. S. Lewis and a group who could rally
public support to lift the immigration ban on Jewish refugees fleeing to the British Mandate of Palestine.

He had planned a great Christmas surprise for me, he told me. I was to follow him on the afternoon train. My valise was packed in preparation for a long, passionate weekend at an old Elizabethan-era inn that he knew well.

On the pillow beside me was a folded parchment, inscribed in

Ebens elegant hand:
Happy Christmas, my dearest!
I opened the letter to find a poem.

Every word, every thought, of him was incendiary. Even after
four months of love, the embers were never fully quenched. Kindled

by the thought of him, I lay in bed and read his words again and again in different combinations:
"breathe my name again, please..."
and:
"please you..." and: "sing me awake beside you..."

There was magic in his poetry. I said his name, "Eben!" Throwing back the heavy curtains, I inhaled the winter morning and stood dripping in Eben's pool of color.

Though my train would not leave for hours, I hurried to bathe and wash my hair. I could not think of eating. I could only imagine him meeting me at the Oxford train station, sweeping me off my feet, and carrying me away to his secret hideaway.

The train to Oxford was slow, stopping at every village along the way. I brought a copy of
Sense and Sensibility
to read but never opened it. I gazed out the window at snow-covered pastures. Here and there was evidence of bombing. The rail lines and manufacturers had been a target of the Germans. Yet still my brave little adopted island homeland stood firm. I was in awe that England was still England after a year of brutal pummeling by the Nazis. Perhaps soon the Americans would come in as Churchill hoped and Eben predicted, and then we would win back the world. Eben and I would work together for a Jewish homeland in Israel.

The clatter of wheels on the tracks and the chatter of passengers did not penetrate my consciousness.

I prayed for Eben's success and for our future as the hours passed.

It was the golden hour when the spires of Oxford University appeared outside my window like a painting from a medieval fairytale. I strained to see Eben as the train finally reached the Oxford station.

He was there, waiting, his hat in his hands. His head was down. His usual smile was absent. I knew with a glance that something was terribly wrong. Had the meeting gone badly? Had his ideas been rejected?

I picked up my valise and was already standing when the locomotive lurched to a stop almost directly beside him.

~ 361 ~

I shouted his name, certain that no matter what was wrong, I could help him work through it.

He raised his gaze to me. Such sorrow. Such terrible grief.

I disembarked. He did not come toward me but only stood with his gaze riveted on me. My smile faded. I was filled with a sense of dread.

Kissing him lightly, I asked, "Eben? What is it?"

He took my bag, then linked his arm in mine. "Not here. We can't talk about it here."

On the walk from the train station Eben said nothing. I kept shooting glances at him, unsuccessfully trying to catch his eye. He stalked, wrapped in his overcoat, his head bowed almost to his chest, shoulders stiffly braced, striding into the icy breeze.

"Eben, what? Please tell me," I implored. The wintry air was nothing compared to the chill gripping my heart. "I can help, whatever it is."

He raised his gloved hand, palm outward, in a gesture of denial. It felt as if he were pushing me away. I felt something like a dagger pierce my innermost senses, especially when I saw his upraised fingers trembling violently.

His color was gray, ashen. His eyes, always so bright with life, darted everywhere, but focused on nothing. He walked ahead of me, almost lurching from step to step over the cobblestones.

What could it be? Some terrible news from abroad?

Since the fall of France precious few souls had escaped from Hitler s Fortress Europe; fewer still from the eastern reaches of the Nazi Empire. Still, some of those rare, brave individuals who managed to get free brought horror stories of what was happening in the camps for political prisoners. We had heard of slave laborers, living on meager rations and dying of pneumonia and typhus in unbelievably crowded conditions.

~ 362 ~

Could such news have reached Eben? Could bearing the burden of such tales be what was crushing him?

Or was it something to do with his work with the Jewish Agency? Some new tragedy unfolding in the British Mandate, dashing all our hopes for a Jewish homeland?

The station of the London and Northwestern Railway lay at the extreme west end of Oxford. After crossing the canal on Bridge Street we entered the university precincts. A clinging drizzle began to fall as we set our backs to the spires and quadrangles, passing Worcester College on our way up Walton.

And still Eben did not speak.

These past four months had been the happiest I had ever known. Nothing must be permitted to break that. Nothing would be permitted to!

As we turned onto Great Clarenden I recognized our destination from Eben's description. Tudor, from white-washed walls and exposed beams to sway-backed ridge line, the Burleigh Arms perched amid the bare trunks and naked thorns of last summer's roses.

Amid the skeletons a single white rose bush soldiered on, sheltered between a corner of the inn and a brick wall. Its few remaining leaves and fewer blooms sagged beneath the weight of rain dripping from the eaves.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, clasping Eben's arm. "The inn is beautiful. Wonderful!" I wanted desperately to sound cheerful; to rouse him from the depression that had claimed him.

Acting desperately cheerful does not help.

He did look at me then—a stare so bleak, so full of despair, that I shuddered.

Suddenly the inn was not pleasing, not remotely appealing. The winter-blasted garden seemed fraught with decay, like a neglected churchyard.

We did not stop to admire the gabled entry, or respond to the cheerful greeting of the bald-headed innkeeper, but went straight

~ 363 ~

up a crooked flight of steps. From a hallway just over the entrance we entered our room.

The chamber, with canopied bed and jutting bay window and cozy, flickering fire, was picture-perfect...it was the occupants who were dismal.

Flinging his overcoat onto the floor, Eben threw himself down in one of the chairs drawn up to a mother-of-pearl inlaid table. He pushed aside a bowl of freshly cut white roses. Somewhere, even in these near Christmas days, he had located and purchased flowers for me.

Then what was wrong? Why was my heart so apprehensive?

Eben removed the stopper from a crystal sherry decanter. Without offering me a glass he poured a goblet of pale amber fluid for himself, drank it off, and poured another. He looked grim, haggard, and something I had never observed in him before: he looked old.

"Eben, you must tell me! What is it? We're alone, now. Tell me."

Still without speaking he reached into the breast pocket of his suit coat.

Withdrawing a folded piece of light blue stationery, he tossed it onto the table where it fell across the blossoms. "Read it," he said.

Fearful beyond imagining, my nervous fingers plucked at the letter, tearing a bit off a corner as I opened it. I scanned it, terrified at what I would find written there.

In response to your inquiry,
it said,
here is what we have determined. The subject in question, Varrick Kepler, is confirmed to be alive and a Prisoner-of-War.

There was more, but my eyes no longer made sense of the words;
my fingers no longer retained enough strength to keep a grip on the message. It fluttered to the floor.

"Varrick," I said. "He's alive!" And then, "Varrick is...alive." My
heart racing, my head spinning, I felt joy, amazement, and horror-each succeeding the other, racing through my emotions. One hand groped for the arm of a chair as I felt myself sinking, sinking.