Free A View From a Broad by Bette Midler Page B

’An angel with black wings!’
    “Oh,” Josef said, “if only we could dream up such fanciful interpretations for our visions in the night! I’ve always loved that little mouse for seeing an ordinary bat as something so-mystically beautiful. That’s why I named the boat after his story.”
    “You named the boat?” I asked, surprised.
    “Well, I did. Yes. The boat is part mine, you see. Originally it was my father’s. Now it belongs to the whole family. Would you like to see it?”
    Of course I wanted to see it and from its gleaning wood hull to its polished mahogany interiors, Englen med Sorte Vinger was quite the loveliest vessel I had ever been on. Sensing my enthusiasm, Josef asked me if I would like to see a part of the boat he didn’t usually show to anyone. When I said yes, he opened a small hatch in the middle of the cabin floor that I hadn’t noticed before and climbed down a rickety ladder, motioning for me to follow.
    I descended into a small space so dark I could barely see and for one fleeting instant wondered if it was only his boat Josef wanted to show me. But as my eyes became accustomed to the half-light, I saw that the walls of this lower cabin were covered with yellow cloth Stars of David. Suddenly the whole day changed.
    “During the War,” Josef said, “we ferried Jews to Sweden. Every star is a Jew we saved. Or tried to save. There are maybe forty or fifty stars there, and we never got caught. My father was the town’s greatest fisherman and a master at masquerade. He would give the German guards his freshest eels, sometimes even a lobster if we had been lucky enough to haul one in. He gave the Germans the best of his catch, and they never caught on to what he was doing. Well, towards the end of the War they did, but by then they didn’t care. They just wanted to go home, like everybody else.”
    I was flabbergasted. And moved. Then upset to think how little of what we Americans hear or are taught we really absorb, how little of it really penetrates the heart. For of course I had heardabout the Danish underground and the escape route across water to Sweden, but until the moment I stood in that dark, cramped cabin with Josef it was never real to me, more like a movie I had seen once long ago, then promptly forgot.
    I tried to remember where I had first heard about Denmark and the Yellow Stars. Probably in school. Then I remembered I had learned almost nothing in school. In world history I had only gotten as far as Ponce de Leon. (Oh, Ponce! Ponce! The most sensitive and sensible of all the explorers.) Suddenly I wanted to make up for that lack; I wanted to know all I could about World War II, World War I—everything. I brooded. Finally, in utter humiliation and under cover of darkness, I forced myself to buy and read a twelve-pound volume titled Wars.
    I realize twelve pounds is not quite enough weight to constitute truly far-reaching research, but I found out what I needed to know: that what we live through every day is a continuation of the Battle of Jericho, and that there is a kind of Sleazy Nationalism which breeds within the breast of the citizen confusion, dissatisfaction and a burning desire to get what his neighbor’s got or what he thinks he’s got or has been told he’s got. In other words, paranoia, avarice, acquisitiveness, glory seeking (which is really only vanity, after all) and, yes, folks, let us be brave, BOREDOM on a scale so vast as to be incomprehensible are the causes of war and always have been.
    It was a heavy book, in every way. However, it wasn’t the reading I minded, it was the carrying that wore me out. I stuffed Wars into the satchel I always carry in my right hand. After two weeks of lugging it from country to country, my right arm and breast swelled to such gigantic proportions that I was forced to cut off my sleeves and go without a bra. Not a good idea for a hefty young woman even in her own homeland, (not to mention on foreign soil, where