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The Bahraini Pearls Book Two A Strand Of Hope

By Denise Griffon

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PROLOGUE
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls, must dive below.
~ John Dryden ~ (1631 – 1700)



Berlin: January 1, 1939

Now his heart was more anxious than ever. He desperately needed to see Elise.
He picked up his pace as much as he could without attracting attention.
When he was able, he detoured around city buildings, using back alleys, delaying his arrival even further. But was it necessary? The streets no longer seemed alive. People kept their covered heads down. No one greeted others with animated salutations. It was as if a mantle of sadness had blanketed his city.
He was almost there.
He cut through his neighbor’s garden and raced the last meters to his boyhood home. After checking first for spies, glancing one way then the next, he banged the back door with his fist. No one answered. He progressed to the nearest window, the window to Aaron’s makeshift bedroom. The glass here had been shattered, leaving open access to the inside of the house. Michel removed the remaining shards of glass and climbed into the room, pushing aside the tattered remains of his mother’s chintz curtains.
Once inside, his mouth gaped at the chaos.
Aaron’s easy chair had been overturned, the wooden legs sheared off at strange, uneven angles. Aaron’s dresser drawers had been emptied and the contents strewn about. The drawers themselves lay in random, fragmented piles of planks, desolate now of his grandfather’s possessions. Water had seeped in through the open panes and the wooden floor had warped and rippled with moisture.
Dried blood was everywhere.
Blood had spattered in a frenetic pattern on the bedclothes. On the floor it had pooled into thick crusty masses of dark red stain.
And bullet holes. Bullet holes in the walls and in the floor. Michel felt faint.
He staggered to Aaron’s bed and sat down on the cold, stiff bedspread, trying his best to avoid the stains of blood. Oh, my God! What happened here? Dear God, help me, help me.
Gathering his courage as best he could, he stood and inspected the room for clues.
Aaron’s gold wire-rimmed glasses sat on the bedside table next to the wall, while his robe lay untouched on the far side of the bed, where it normally resided when not in use.
Michel hunted for his grandfather’s Torah, which he usually kept on the bedside table next to his spectacles—it wasn’t there. In slow motion, Michel pulled back the covers and there it was, tucked underneath the quilted bedspread. In shock, he picked it up and reverently tucked the small book into his coat pocket.
He entered the kitchen. The bloodstains were even more numerous here.
His mother’s oak table had been overturned. Every cupboard was open—some of the doors hung haphazardly off their hinges. Michel gasped at the sight of his mother’s apron, soaked with blood, lying hapless on the floor. Then he noticed the dishes, carefully washed and dried by the sink, as if Elise had just finished with them.
He opened the refrigerator and was repelled by the odor. He imagined the electricity had been out for some time, since the night of Kristallnacht. The food inside was moldy and green.
Closing the refrigerator door, Michel turned toward the opposite counter of the kitchen. He paused at the sight of baby clothes, freshly laundered and carefully folded in a laundry basket by the sink.
With hesitant fingers he picked up the tiny, white crocheted sweater his mother had made for little Kurt and unfolded it over his arm. Gently he pressed it against his cheek, remembering how much Elise had loved the garment and how handsome they’d thought Kurt in it. He hugged the soft sweater to his chest.
Next to the laundry basket, he saw a pair of tiny baby shoes. He gently picked them up and marveled again at their size, as he had when Kat and Fritz had gifted them to the baby at the time of his birth. Michel wept, remembering his newborn son dressed in the soft cotton garments and wearing the tiny shoes.
But he didn’t weep for his son’s death, no, not yet—perhaps his family was still alive. He was still hoping against all hope. But he wept that his cherished ones had had to undergo whatever horrific scene they’d seen played out here.
I can’t waste valuable times on tears, he admonished himself.
Almost reverently, he placed the minuscule infant items back into the laundry basket and took a step back, attempting to gather his wits.
After a few moments, he mustered his courage and gently reached back into the basket and removed the tiny sweater, as well as its matching infant hat and the little white shoes. He placed them in his coat pocket with Aaron’s Torah, and moved on toward the front room, dreading what he might find there.
He closed his eyes when he saw the trail of blood meandering into the parlor and on toward the splintered front door. His mother’s framed pictures still hung on the walls, but now grotesquely so, nodding at odd angles. And there on the plaster wall adjacent to the front entrance were two trailing handprints, silently commemorating the terror of what had happened here in bloody etchings.
The furniture was askew and shredded, as if slashed with a sharp knife. The windows were all fragmented into razor-edged shards. Michel struggled to hold back his tears. He collapsed to his knees.
God, why? Why did this have to happen?
The answer seemed to come immediately: Gather yourself together. Observe the home. Then leave as soon as possible. I will be with you. Always.
Michel obeyed.
He had no other choice. He would find a time for mourning later. He knew he needed to leave lest someone call and report his presence in the home.
He reared back and rested on his heels in an effort to compose himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a brown purse against the wall, almost concealed behind the shadows of the sofa.
Elise’s purse. He reached for it as if it were a buoy or lifeboat cast to him in a sea of fear—the last remnant of his beautiful Elise.
He hugged it to his chest and allowed himself to weep, not as a grown man, but as the boy he once was.
He wept as the young boy who once sobbed in this same room of this very house.
He wept like the small boy who’d received the unbearable news of his father Saul’s death at the end of the Great War—the father he’d considered his best friend.
The tears came hard and fast now, released with all the anxiety and worry he’d suppressed and contained all these months while out of the country.
Sobbing, he berated himself. He never should have taken his mother out of the country leaving his wife and child behind. How he hated himself now for that lapse in judgment. Why hadn’t he ignored the advice of his brothers and risked taking Elise and the baby with him? True, it would have been harder to engineer their escape while traveling with a nursing, newborn baby, but he should have tried. He should have tried.
If only he could go back in time. If only he could take back that decision he’d made months before. Michel cried until the tears came no more.
As his sobs receded, it dawned on him then that some of the vast amounts of dried blood had to have been spilled from his beautiful wife’s body, and that fact lessened the chances that Elise was alive. And had she been arrested, she would have carried her purse with her.
Taking deep breaths, Michel prayed to God for strength to complete the search, to give him some hope if any were to be found.
Gathering up the leather handbag, he assembled his stiff legs underneath him, and in dread, continued his inspection of the home. He took the stairs slowly, ascending to the second floor, foreboding increasing with his every step. Ignoring his mother’s room, he made a beeline for his childhood room at the back of the house, the room Elise had occupied with the baby during his absence. He grasped the glass doorknob and waited several seconds for his lightheadedness to disappear.
Entering the room, he smelled the fragrance of his wife’s perfume, and he breathed in deeply, the scent conjuring up the individual dearest in the entire world to him, with just one inhalation.
He stumbled to his old childhood desk, which Elise had used as a vanity, picking up her old hand mirror with its embroidered needlepoint underside. He knew Elise treasured it as one of the few tangible items she possessed of her late mother. It occurred to him that Elise would never have left without her mother’s mirror as well as her purse if she had left the house of her own accord.
Michel reached for her perfume bottle, fresh tears streaming down his cheeks. The bottle was a beautiful porcelain green lady Elise had received as a wedding gift from the women at the synagogue. He remembered the delight on Elise’s face when she’d first displayed the bottle to him. She’d been entranced with the charming damsel’s pose. The ceramic lady was fluffing her ribbon-tied hair while gazing in a handheld mirror, not unlike the one he’d just held that once belonged to Elise’s mother. He knew the gift had been chosen for Elise because the lady had so closely resembled Elise herself.
Michel ran his index finger over the mint-green skirt before he carefully separated the porcelain lady at her waist. He withdrew the upper portion of her body from the skirt, revealing the long glass dauber with which one would dab the perfume
He inhaled deeply of Chanel No. 5, the only fragrance Elise had ever worn.
Using the baby’s sweater as a protective wrap around the porcelain lady, he carefully pocketed the bottle of perfume, so reminiscent of his beautiful wife.
Downstairs, a door slammed.
Michel swiftly crossed the room to the closet and entered it, his ears focused, his heart pounding. A woman’s voice. For a brief moment, Michel fantasized the woman might be Elise.
But as the owner of the voice climbed the stairs, he recognized her as their close neighbor, Frau Ema Hahn. When she entered the bedroom, he came out of the closet, giving her a scare before she recognized him.
“Michel, you came back. Oh Michel, you’re safe.” She hugged him tightly, before taking him in with sad eyes. “We were so worried about you.”
Before he could ask his burning questions, a rock was thrown through the broken window from the backyard down below.
“Ema, come here.”
Together they peeked out the window to where Ema’s husband was frantically bellowing to get their attention. He waved a quick greeting to Michel, his relief visible when he recognized the young man, but then his relief quickly faded to panic.
“The SS, they’re here. In the front street. We must get Michel out. Climb out, Michel. I’ll help break your fall.”
Michel had enough experience eluding the SS to not think twice. Without hesitation, he handed Elise’s purse to Frau Hahn and climbed out the window, ignoring the shards of glass in the frame. When he’d lowered himself to the lowest position possible while still suspended from the sill, he dropped, Ema’s husband helping to break his fall.
“Run, Michel, run. Run now.”
But Michel hesitated. “My family?”
The old man sadly shook his head. “They’re gone, Michel. Gone. Now run. Run and hide. Godspeed.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Frau Hahn called as she tossed the purse down to him.
And Michel ran for his life, clutching the brown purse to his heart.

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