There Are No Doors

By Elizabeth Berns

There Are No Doors is about a family’s journey through life; the sacrifices, joys and dreams that carry them through several generations and four countries, and how they face each other and their challenges: with love, anger, humour, and empathy. There are no doors that are closed to the human spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398483569

Elizabeth Berns

Elizabeth Berns lives in New Zealand. She is a great grandmother. Her first book, Down but Not Out, was published in 2004.

Book preview

There Are No Doors

Elizabeth Berns

Austin Macauley Publishers

There Are No Doors

About the Author

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Elizabeth Berns lives in New Zealand. She is a great grandmother. Her first book, Down but Not Out, was published in 2004.

Copyright Information ©

Elizabeth Berns 2023

The right of Elizabeth Berns to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398483552 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398483569 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Caryn and Gabriel for their help, encouragement and computer skills.

If Fredrik had followed the advice of his peers and shot a single bullet into his foot as many of them had done, believing that being maimed was preferable to being conscripted, his son Henry, would not have travelled halfway around the world.

As it was, Fredrik had absolutely no idea what was waiting for him as he cowered under the seat in the old truck, hidden in the folds of rustling skirts belonging to the large woman seated above him. His one thought was to escape from Russia and the Russian army. His father had smuggled him onto the truck minutes before it had pulled away. They would never see each other again. They had understood the finality of this parting. In one timeless moment, the father and his son had each come face to face with their own terror, with letting go and finally going. Their eyes met in one last exchange of tenderness. The old man could not hide his anguish. The tears rolled slowly down his cheeks into his whitening beard. He was sure that they had made the right decision. Now, weeping with relief and the pain of losing his son, he turned abruptly away. He left the truckload of women, under whose protection he had placed his son before it was out of sight.

His son had escaped.

Fredrik lay hidden in the dark-skirted cavern under the wooden seat. He felt as if he were drowning in the swell of fear that engulfed him. He heard the women above him whispering in soft plaintive tones but he could not make out what they were saying. He shivered trying to hold on to the love and courage that had flowed so silently and with such strength from his father in the waning moments of their parting. That he would not see his father again, was the only certainty he had in his now uncertain future. The darkness that surrounded him comforted and frightened him. He was exhausted. The capsule of air in which he lay became stale and dank but the movement of the truck and the lack of oxygen eased him into a dream-choked sleep.

He dreamed that he was holding his father’s hand but could not feel his touch or the warmth and roughness of his skin. He saw small puffs of steam rise from his father’s mouth then expand into the sharp cold wind that snapped at them. He could not hear what he was saying but his familiar old lips were making words, perhaps wonderful words, Talmudic words. What was he telling him? He searched his father’s face trying desperately to understand him. Papa, help me he called to him soundlessly. A sudden jolt sent his father and his words floating away into an evaporating mist.

As the truck swayed and bumped its cargo of hope toward their new life, the boy grew cramped and restless. He cradled his small bag closer to his body drawing comfort from its familiar smell and he cried into its soft amorphous shape.

*******

Fredrik moved comfortably around the shop carefully picking up lenses and restoring them to one of the small white boxes on the crowded shelf. He was grateful to Josef for employing him as his optical assistant, although he never quite understood what his job entailed. He looked around the small shop and over at Josef who, hunched over his workshop table, was concentrating on a pair of spectacles he was repairing. His balding head, slightly creased at the base, looked like old polished oak as it caught the edge of the sharp light on his workshop table. I still can’t believe that I’m really here, Fredrick thought nodding to himself.

‘I must remember, he likes that I should call him Joe,’ he mumbled as he left the alcove that Joe called the galley.

‘Here is the tea, Joe,’ he said as he put the glass of steaming liquid on the wooden table, taking care not to let it spill over the two sugar lumps he had placed on the chipped white saucer.

‘Thank you, my boy, I’m coming now.’

‘Now’ in Joe’s vocabulary meant any time between immediately and forgetting completely.

Fred, as Joe renamed him, spent his days tidying the shelves, making tea and sweeping the floor. Joe had promised to teach him the business but there never seemed to be enough time. Joe liked to hear about Fred’s life in Russia, so the time that he could have spent showing Fred the ropes they spent more enjoyably getting to know each other. This meant that Fred remained, the optical assistant, a simple undemanding job but one that provided enough money for him to live in relative comfort in the small flat above the shop. Before Fred’s arrival, Joe had used the flat as a storeroom. It had been furnished with a jumble of empty and half-empty boxes that had been carelessly spread about the rooms with playful abandon, it was as if Joe had opened the door and aimed the box at the most enticingly vacant spot. However, all that changed for Joe when one wet wintry morning, a skinny shivering boy appeared at his door asking for work. Joe, surprised at the sudden arrival of the boy on his doorstep, responded like a mother finding an abandoned baby in a basket. Without considering what he was going to do with the boy he offered him a job. Together they had cleaned out the flat joking and laughing in Yiddish, their only means of communication. With one quick decision of the heart, Joe had given Fred a job, a home and a new life.

Before he had found Joe, Fred had passed through London’s, Poor Jews Temporary Shelter, where the ladies had taken him and where conditions were more primitive than any workhouse could have offered. A wooden floor, little food and overcrowding were all the comforts that had greeted them. In addition, the confusing mixture of hope and depression that hung in the limp cocoon of air that surrounded them began to unnerve Fred. He instinctively knew that he would not survive in this place and resolved to get away as soon as he could. Therefore, it was not long after their arrival in London that Fred said goodbye to his travelling guardians and began knocking on shop doors looking for work.

*******

During the years that followed, Joe gradually became guardian, father, teacher and friend to the eager young Fred who grew to love and respect him.

Then one day, a miracle happened to Fred. He met Sophie, a young girl in whose dark brown eyes lay the deep shadows of distant pine forests, and he fell in love. Although Sophie’s family had left Russia, the same year as he had, they had not left under the same circumstance. Their shared history, language and need became the rich soil in which their mutual love and friendship took seed. It was a match not made in heaven but in a small London tea shop.

Fred’s marriage to Sophie quickly changed the little household above the shop. Apart from cushions and other knick-knacks that kept on appearing much to Fred’s amusement, the three of them regularly sat down to properly cooked meals for which Joe always rewarded Sophie with a big noisy kiss on the forehead.

‘You’re a fine young woman and an even finer cook.’

Sophie laughed at the ambiguity of his compliment. She grew to love this funny, shuffling old man, whose laughing eyes and warm generosity she felt sure would be much appreciated by a loving wife of his own.

‘Surely you know someone for him?’ she asked Fred one evening after Joe had left.

‘Well, I don’t think you should say anything to him,’ Fred mused, ‘I believe he was married a long time ago,’ he concluded, not wanting to discuss Joe’s marriage options with her.

‘Oh, I wasn’t going to, but it does seem such a waste.’

When Henry and Hilda were born, Joe slipped into the role of grandfather as if he had been waiting for the opportunity all his life. In the late afternoon, he would leave Fred to mind the shop while he went upstairs to ‘play with the children’. He had a constant supply of chocolate in his pocket, which he pretended came from his shop-coat sleeve, but before giving it to them he gave them each a big wink as he handed it over to Sophie.

‘Only if they have been good today,’ he counselled.

The cold winter days, shortened by the early flight of daylight, ushered the nights in long before the clocks were ready for them. Therefore, it was already quite dark one afternoon when, after work, Fred came upstairs with news that would once again set their lives on a track of future uncertainty. He had heard from a customer that ships were departing regularly for South Africa and the reported warmth of that sunny distant land set fire to Fred’s dreams.

Sophie was worried about leaving her family but at the same time she hated the damp and the early darkness that forced her to keep the children indoors for more hours than she thought was good for them. However, Fred’s announcement had come so suddenly that she had not had time enough to assemble a solid argument against it.

‘It sounds like it could be a good idea, Fred, but I’m not sure that this would be the right time to move them, they’re too small to go on such a long journey.’

‘I understand that it may be a bit difficult, Sophie, but we have both come this far, so a little further could take us to where we are destined to be.’

‘Fred, please don’t talk like that, none of us knows where we are destined to be and anyway I don’t believe in that sort of thinking.’

Realising he had made a tactical error, Fred took Sophie’s hand and regrouped his argument.

‘Sophie, the children will benefit from living in a better climate.’

‘Yes, Fred, I know you’re right about that, especially for Hilda, she’s always so tired and so pale, more sunshine will definitely do her good.’

Sophie loved the little flat. It was their first home together and she knew that it would be difficult to leave it. She tried one last objection.

‘We don’t know anything about Africa and it’s a long way to go to find that we have made a mistake when we get there.’

Although Fred had not complained, Sophie knew that he wanted more than the life he shared with Joe in the shop; he needed to do something for himself, to try the wings that had been so prematurely clipped in his youth. And so it was decided. Fred and Sophie were to become immigrants once again.

Stoically, Joe accepted their decision. He had always feared, yet known, that Sophie and Fred would not be with him forever but he was grateful for the time that they had enjoyed together. As part of their little family, he had filled a need that he had not realised he had. He loved them dearly but knew it was time to let go.

‘Letting go,’ he told Fred, trying to comfort them both, ‘is sometimes more important than holding on.’

The feeling of emptiness and loss that seeps into family partings re-entered Fred’s life once again. Joe had become a second father to him and the pain of their parting caused a backwash of memories of his father, of Russia, of his mother packing his new shoes, memories that he had been careful to lock away.

As their ship cut through the icy water towards their new country, Fred sat silently struggling with the recurring images of his life with Joe. He could still smell the musty odour of Joe’s shop coat that had made his nose itch when Joe had sat beside him on the old couch teaching him to speak English, making exaggerated gestures as he articulated and repeated what he regarded as a few simple words. Fred had enjoyed the comfort of Joe’s fatherly arms as he ended these sessions with a rough hug and a concealed dollop of affection in the form of constructive criticism. Before Fred was married, they would stay up late, sitting close to the old stove drinking tea and discussing Joe’s philosophy of life, which mainly took the form of Joe advising him on the pitfalls and joys of marriage, based on his own unsuccessful attempts.

Fred had grown to love Joe, the father and the grandfather that he had become and would miss him dearly.

The boat was crowded and noisy. The pungent smell of sweat refused to dissipate into the sea air. Sophie tried to keep the children close to her; she was terrified of losing them in the maze of corridors and passages that encircled them. This constant vigil left her with hardly any time for herself and, consequently, she had not given the ramifications of their new life in Africa a thought since they had embarked. Now, as she rummaged through the soft leather bag for a clean pair of trousers for Henry, a flood of panic swept through her. The new land, strange people, even black people, a fleeting moment of fear made her soap-reddened hands shake. She dug deeper into the bag. Her hand touched the brass candlesticks. Although the metal felt cold through the clothes, a rush of warmth gushed from their contact. They had travelled hidden under the truck seat in this same old leather bag; they had been blessed on her table