I was truly under Hitler’s spell, that cannot be denied. I was impressed with him from the moment I first met him, in 1932. He had terrific power, especially in his eyes.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, 15 July, 1946, Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany, testifying at the Nuremberg Trials
Once, after reading Romeo and Juliet in Sister Bernadette’s class, I met up with Hava at a small café. We drank our coffee, and as we walked to my house, she suggested that we act out the death scene. ‘I can be Juliet,’ she said as she closed her eyes, swaying back and forth on the pavement, and stabbing herself with an imaginary knife. ‘O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.’
Hava began to stagger on the pavement. She didn’t look anything like Juliet of Shakespeare, but like Crazy Hava of Brussels.
‘Hava,’ I muttered, embarrassed, ‘people are looking at you.’
Hava opened one eye and giggled. A man in a bowler hat with a newspaper under his arm stopped and said to her, ‘Shakespeare is for serious-minded people.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘And you, miss . . . I’m sure your parents did not raise you to hang out with lunatics.’
The man with the bowler hat waved his newspaper in the air. ‘Shameful!’ he said.
‘Let’s do the death scene in your cellar,’ Hava suggested. ‘There are too many theatre critics around here.’
‘There are too many army spies,’ was my reply.
I remember that particular walk home, but not just because of the angry man. It was spring; the markets were full of tulips and early asparagus, plump mushrooms, tall rhubarb, spinach, and watercress. Trees expanded with green leaves. The trams seemed to clack against the road with a softer pitch. The sun made the buildings blush. Children leaned out of their prams as mothers gossiped. Old men with open collars sat on the avenue benches, probably thinking about other spring afternoons.
‘I don’t think my father would be happy about us playing in the cellar,’ I said to Hava as she stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement.
‘Your father will never know we’re down there, Simone. We both know the lines; we can just go there, set up the scenery quickly, and play out our dying scene.’
It was dark in the lowest level of my house. When Hava and I opened the cellar door, she suggested we take candles.
She went down first, her long hair touching the back of her neck. The candlelight wavered. Hava’s shadow on the wall was wide and fat. I heard her hard shoes hitting each step. She turned, looked up at me and said, ‘Maybe there are bodies buried down here.’
The cellar was dry and filled with empty boxes, a tool rack, a shelf of empty jam jars, and a long, flat work table.
‘We can use the table as a bier,’ Hava suggested.
‘Or we could go back upstairs and have some tea instead,’ I suggested.
‘Tea?’ Hava said as she began to form her long hair into a bun. ‘We don’t drink tea when we’re dying, Simone.’ She took a small piece of string from her pocket and tied her hair back. ‘You can’t be too pretty for death,’ Hava said as she slipped off her shoes, and then stretched out on the low table. Her body fitted perfectly: her arms at her sides; her legs straight and parallel. She closed her eyes. ‘Do I look dead?’
‘You look like a Belgian girl stretched out on a dirty work bench.’
‘I need a pillow,’ Hava said as she lifted her head and looked around in the dim light. ‘There, what’s that in the corner?’
I walked to the corner and found several small, bulging burlap bags with the words ‘coffee beans’ stencilled on each. ‘They’re bags of coffee beans, Hava.’
‘Well, I don’t think Juliet used coffee beans as a pillow, but I don’t think Shakespeare would mind.’
‘How come you are playing Juliet? I don’t want to be Romeo.’
Hava raised her hands and made a magician’s gesture above her chest: ‘Simone, in Shakespeare’s day men played the role of Juliet. You can play the role of Romeo. Your voice is deeper than mine so it will be much easier for the audience to think of you as a boy.’
I laughed. ‘I don’t think spiders and dust make up a legitimate audience.’
‘Just say your lines, Simone,’ Hava said as she adjusted her coffee-bean pillow and closed her eyes. She looked like a sculpture in the candlelight: her body all curves and soft lines. I was all straight lines and flat. Perhaps I did make a better boy than a girl after all.
Hava and I knew the entire play by heart; it had been her idea to learn it. ‘I want to die a thousand times in the arms of Romeo before I actually die,’ Hava said as she handed me a copy of the play one afternoon. ‘Let’s memorize the entire play together.’
We never finished the dying scene in the cellar because, just as we began, the angry voice of my father echoed from the top of the stairs.
‘What is going on down there? Simone? Is that you?’
Standing in the candlelight with Hava, I felt like we were two martyrs about to be engulfed in the flame of my father’s torch; two city girls caught in a foolish escape into our imaginations. Hava and I in the shadows, surrounded by the protective black space as if prepared for a shower of anger – a shower that would not cleanse, but would separate her from me, and from my conservative father, who understood order and respect, uniforms and tradition.
Hava jumped off the table with such speed that she knocked over the candle and everything went dark, except for the light at the top of the staircase.
‘Simone?’
‘Yes?’
My father started to stomp down the wooden stairs. When he reached the bottom step there was a small click and the torch that he held firmly in his hand illuminated the cellar with a beam of yellow light. I turned, and there was Hava untying her hair and giggling.
‘Hello, Miss Hava,’ my father said as he aimed his light into my face. ‘Simone, what are you doing down here in the dark?’
‘We weren’t in the dark, Papa. We had a candle.’
‘Simone, you know what I am asking.’
‘General Lyon,’ Hava said as she stepped into the bright beam of the torch, ‘Simone is doing a report for her science class about mould. We were looking for bits of mould on the cellar walls so she can look at it under the microscope at school.’
Hava stood in that light as if she were on stage. I was afraid she was going to bow, or that I was going to applaud her clever lie.
‘The cellar is no place for young women. Come up, both of you. We’ll have some tea and biscuits,’ my father said.
As Hava and I walked up the stairs, and my father stepped into the kitchen, Hava whispered to me, ‘I will never be afraid of the dark for as long as you are my friend.’