A Sea Change by Michael Arditti

Author:Michael Arditti [Michael Arditti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129772
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

I shut myself in my cabin for three days. In answer to all inquiries, I said that I was sitting shivah, although I never uttered a single prayer. At a stroke the world had changed. In the past, it had been neatly circumscribed: at home; at school; in the streets. There was safety in boundaries, even when they were made up of Nazi do-nots. Now everything was as fluid as the view from my window. The only boundary left to me was my bed. I yearned to escape from the ship and pictured it striking a rock, with myself as the sole survivor, swept on a piece of driftwood to some deserted isle. Neither grief nor snakes nor an unbroken diet of pineapples could override the attractions of solitude. I yearned to withdraw and dreamt of a Jewish tradition of hermits who lived in caves or of rabbis who stood on pillars. In trying to free me from the weight of the past, my aunt had left me with a present as painful as a Gestapo torture. I was not naïve. I had known that grown-ups weren’t perfect long before I went to kindergarten, but I had presumed that their misjudgements were confined to children. I never realised that they could be as blind to one another as they were to me. The facts of the matter hadn’t changed. My father was still a brute who had hit my mother (my own fists clenched instinctively), yet his motives turned out to be as complex as those of any king I had studied at school. The revelation of his desire to write brought back memories of childhood nights, when my room had been transformed into an enchanted forest or a sultan’s palace or a great auk’s nest. Recalling the stories he had told me made me ponder the ones that he might have told himself, especially of the War. Uncle Karl had died but he had survived, to be measured forever against a memory. To my surprise, I felt a rush of filial sympathy, although the sensation brought no relief. Life might no longer be black and white, but mine was an all-pervasive grey.

Aunt Annette and Sophie made repeated attempts to rouse me, offering such inducements as swimming and sunbathing by day and films and concerts by night. Once Sophie brought in Luise, who padded over to the bed and, with a sad cry of ‘She sick!’, laid her face on mine and gave me a dachshund kiss. The Professor’s wife looked in briefly, although I suspected that her primary aim was to inspect the cabin. She brought me a life of Heinrich Heine, borrowed from the ship’s library, with print so small that it might have been designed to inflame my headache. My mother punished me with a visit from the Doctor and then lingered while he made his examination. After plying me with endless questions about my health – plus the occasional one about my mood to show that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.