The Nazis were history. In Germany, Jews were safe. In Britain, Germans had long ceased to be ‘enemy aliens’. Yet, even before I was born, my parents were quarrelling over my identity.
The only thing they agreed on was that I was to be raised neither as a German nor as a Jew. Speaking German to me or giving me any form of Jewish education were therefore out of the question. It also went without saying, but was repeatedly said, that I was under no circumstances to think of myself as British. Though I would be born, raised, and educated in Britain and have English as my mother tongue, to regard myself as British would be a ‘betrayal’ of who I was – whoever that might be.
The big question was whether I should be raised a Catholic. My mother said yes. My father said no. Though he came from a line of devout Bible scholars, he had no detectable attachment to the Jewish faith and kept none of its festivals. But he had abysmal memories of Catholics in his native Rhineland, of being chased down alleyways by Jew-baiting classmates, and of the standard-issue taunting about his family’s sacrilegious thirst for the blood of Christian babies.
Besides, he thought he had made a big enough concession to Catholicism already: he had reluctantly agreed to my mother’s demand to marry in a Catholic church, and, to that end, had undergone investigations by clergy uneasy about marrying her to a divorced Jew.
It wasn’t the Jewish bit that concerned the Church; it was the divorce from his first wife, Hilde. My parents were astonished to learn that the Catholic Church regarded even the divorce of two non-Catholics, whom it didn’t marry, as illegitimate. Any marriage, they were told, is a binding decision in the eyes of God, whether or not the parties to it believe He exists; and so an atheist or a Jewish or a Buddhist marriage may no more be undone than a Catholic one.
It seemed like an impasse – until my father had an inspired idea. He was Hilde’s second husband; she had been briefly married to a German she had met while holidaying on the Spanish Riviera. The Church had to be consistent about its doctrine. If he had married a divorced woman, his marriage was surely illegitimate in its eyes. Which meant that he was still technically a bachelor!
He had barely seen Hilde in the years since she had abandoned him and their two sons and returned to her native Switzerland, but now it was time she did something for him. He needed her first marriage certificate. He would show that to the Church and it would realize that he was not, after all, a divorced man.
Hilde was delighted to help. If he married my mother he would no longer be the forlorn ex-husband, pestering her to return. Even better, their sons’ upbringing could be subcontracted to a stepmother. And the Church duly accepted him as an unmarried man who was taking a wife for the first time.
Oddly, my mother and father wanted to marry in Germany, though at that time they still professed to despise it. They settled on a church near Freiburg, recommended by Dr Gertrud Luckner, an old childhood friend of my father who had saved hundreds of Jews during the war, been captured on a train in 1943 as she tried to smuggle money to those left in Berlin, and survived incarceration in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Luckner was the one person who could persuade my father that there was another sort of Catholicism, one that turned its back on anti-Semitism not because the times now demanded it do so, but out of moral and theological conviction. She was the only witness at their marriage.
My parents’ quarrel over my religious identity was eventually resolved in a deal: I was to be raised without religion until the age of thirteen. Then I could choose what I wished to be.
The deal had one proviso. Both religions demanded a rite of initiation soon after birth. The Catholics had baptism, without which I would have no guarantee of salvation if I should die in infancy. And the Jews had circumcision, which got more painful the longer you waited. So I was both baptized and circumcised – in the same week. A priest officiated in the one case and a rabbi in the other.
Though I would occasionally be allowed to ‘keep Mummy company’ at Mass while my father prepared our Sunday lunch, the deal was essentially respected until his death – after which it was immediately abandoned.
I was then brought up a pious Catholic, going to Mass every Sunday, receiving weekly religious instruction, having my first Communion, and enjoying outings with the kindly friars at our local church-cum-priory.
At the age of eight or nine, I struck up a friendship with one of these friars, Brother Albert, who was invariably waiting for me after Mass with a bar of chocolate that he had secreted inside his robes. I would dash to the back of the church, where he was chatting to departing parishioners, and fish around for the piece of kindness that I knew he hadn’t forgotten.
I wondered what a friar’s body looked like beneath all that protection. It would surely be hairless and lacking a penis, with the smooth patina of ivory or marble that had somehow softened into flesh, like the statue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Venus transforms into a living woman. It would also be of mixed gender or none, as well as uniformly gentle in all its nooks, as if cruelty had departed him of its own accord, without having to be brought under control.
Sometimes, on a Saturday, Brother Albert took me to a nearby cafe, where he ordered a cup of tea and poured so much milk into it that it turned an iridescent shade of beige. How could he enjoy it? Was he so unspoiled by sensuality, or were his appetites so useless to him, that he could still taste the delicious tartness of tea leaves through all the beigeness? He would buy me a plain Danish and chuckled when I asked if I might indulge in a cream cake instead. My gastronomic venality seemed charming to him, though he seldom joined in. When he did, he remained impassive, and the mildness that usually leaves a face when it is in the throes of joy at a cream cake never left his.
It was bliss to be the focus of Brother Albert’s solicitude and to know that it could shine even outside his church. But these occasions were also awkward, as, alone with him, he and the mysterious piety of the priests, who were by turns severe and benign, would feel alien – a universe away from the microcosm of our German-Jewish home – and a frisson of fear would course through me.
One day Brother Albert suggested that I might like to become an altar server, a vote of confidence in my person that thrilled me.
‘Come and see me in the sacristy before Low Mass next Sunday,’ he told me.
Low Mass was a short affair, with little music, a bullet-point sermon, and a small attendance that seemed exclusive and intimate.
Father Paul was going to take it. He was businesslike, with the air of an accountant in holy vestments. I recognized him from the confessional, where, despite its darkness, I could identify the priest on the other side of the grille from his profile or his voice or both. And this unspoken intimacy we had on account of his knowing and forgiving my sins – those I had genuinely committed as well as those that I had invented – made my forthcoming debut as an altar server less intimidating.
Brother Albert kitted me out in a cassock of my own and told me what to do when. It was particularly important to remember to ring the bells before the priest consecrated the bread and the wine, and never to lose any crumbs from the plate bearing the Communion wafers, as, after their consecration, they were the body of Christ.
As I left the sacristy following my induction, I took a handful of unconsecrated wafers from a pile that I saw stacked on a golden plate, and stuffed them into my mouth.
Brother Albert erupted in anger.
I was mortified. Less at having eaten Christ’s potential body several times over than at being shouted at by a friar whose only weapon, I had imagined, was benevolence. But my attempt to apologize got stuck on a first grunted syllable: the wafers lost their crispness on contact with saliva, and their glutinous mass was sticking my tongue to my palate.
I never lost my fascination with those Communion wafers. How extraordinary that unlimited numbers of them could become Christ’s body in a trice; and that the miseries of the world might be redeemed merely by swallowing them with due piety. My favourite task as an altar server soon became to hold the golden plate under each congregant’s chin as they received Communion. Brother Albert had explained to me that it wasn’t easy: since I would stand to one side of the priest, I needed to take care neither to touch the worshipper’s chin with the plate, nor to hold it at an angle at which crumbs of Christ’s body could fall off.
But what came to intrigue me most were the congregants’ expressions. Each one was so different, and so was each tongue. Some tongues were grainy, others were smooth; some glistened, others were oddly matt; some had pointed ends and others were almost semi-circular. Most exciting of all was my mother’s. I hoped that, if I studied it in its sufferingly outstretched, receptive position, it would disclose the secret of who she was beneath her truculent, brilliant, coping self, vehemently dedicated to her twin religions of music and Catholicism. And so, perhaps, it would also disclose the secret of who I was – and might become.