The age difference between the two of them was barely noticeable, because Alma had developed early, and her tendency toward solitude had made her very mature for her age. Whereas Nathaniel swam in what seemed like an insurmountable adolescence, the seriousness and strength that her father had instilled in Alma and that she saw as essential virtues only became more pronounced. She felt abandoned by her cousin and by life. She could imagine the intense self-loathing Nathaniel had experienced when he entered high school, because she felt something similar, if less acutely, but she did not allow herself the luxury of studying herself in the mirror to spot her defects, or of complaining about her fate. She had other worries.
With apocalyptic hurricane force, war had descended on Europe. Alma only caught blurred black-and-white images of it in cinema newsreels: jumbled battle scenes, faces of soldiers covered with the stubborn soot of gunpowder and death, planes dropping bombs that fell through the sky with absurd elegance, explosions of fire and smoke, crowds baying their devotion to Hitler in Germany. She no longer had a clear memory of her country, the house she grew up in, or the language she spoke as a child, but her family was constantly present in her yearnings. On her bedside table she kept photographs of her brother and the last one of her parents on the quayside at Danzig, and kissed them every night before going to sleep. The war images pursued her by day, popped up in her dreams, and never allowed her to behave truly like the girl she was. When Nathaniel gave in to the illusion that he was a misunderstood genius, Ichimei was left as her only confidant. He had not grown much, so that she was now a half a head taller than him, but he was intelligent, and always found a way to distract her when she was overcome by ghastly visions of war. Ichimei would make arrangements to reach the Belascos’ mansion by trolley bus, by bicycle, or in the gardening van, if he could persuade his father or a brother to give him a lift; Lillian would send him home later with her driver. If two or three days went by without their meeting, he and Alma would find some time at night to whisper to each other on the phone. Even the most trivial comments took on transcendental importance during these furtive calls. It never occurred to either of them to ask permission, since they thought telephones eventually could be used up, and thus would never be at their disposal.
The Belasco family followed the alarming news from Europe with increasing dread. The Germans had occupied Warsaw, and four hundred thousand Jews were crammed into a ghetto of 1.3 square miles. They had learned from Samuel Mendel in London, where he was an RAF pilot, that their relatives were among them. The Mendels’ wealth could not save them; early on in the occupation they lost all their possessions in Poland, as well as access to their Swiss bank accounts. They had to quit the family mansion, requisitioned and turned into offices by the Nazis and their collaborators, and found themselves reduced to the same level of unimaginable misery as the other inhabitants of the ghetto. It was then that they discovered they did not have a single friend among their own people. That was all that Isaac managed to establish. It was impossible to get in touch with them, and none of his attempts to rescue them was successful. He used his connections with influential politicians, including a couple of senators in Washington and the secretary of war, who had been a fellow law student at Harvard, but they all replied with vague promises that they never kept, because they had to deal with far more urgent matters than a rescue mission in the hell of Warsaw. The Americans were watching and waiting, still believing that the war on the far side of the Atlantic had nothing to do with them, despite the Roosevelt government’s subtle propaganda to turn the public against the Germans. Behind the high wall marking the boundary of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews survived in extremes of hunger and terror. There was talk of large-scale deportations; of men, women, and children being dragged off to cargo trains that vanished into the night; of the Nazis’ determination to wipe out not only the entire Jewish race but other undesirables as well; of gas chambers, cremation ovens, and other atrocities that were impossible to confirm and therefore hard for the Americans to give credence to.
IRINA BAZILI