by Jenna Blum
“We have to get you into a cab,” he said. “You’re going to miss your plane.”
“All right,” June agreed, but she didn’t move, and Peter didn’t know why until she asked, “Can you really not feel that?” and he realized she was running her hands over his back.
“No,” he said, “I have no sensation there.” That was true, and it was the blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn’t feel anything in them at all.
* * *
After Peter put June in a cab, he decided to walk to Masha’s. It was only a few blocks, and it was still early; the sun had risen into milky clouds, but the temperature was fairly mild. After the previous evening’s holiday throngs, Peter relished the empty sidewalks. The only people out at this hour were returning from a night of revelry or walking dogs; in neither case did they want to make conversation, which suited Peter fine. He bought a cup of coffee from a corner grocery on Ninety-Second and First, again wrapped in a queer feeling of well-being. How could this be, when June was gone, soaring somewhere in the sky above? But Peter was heartened by that morning’s conversation; he had never disclosed so much to any woman, and she had handled it well. He glanced at the ladies’ wear boutiques he passed and smiled when he realized he was looking for the mannequins with June’s face.
He stopped to admire a mechanical Christmas tableau, a family, mother, and father and two children opening presents with painted-on smiles and jerky movements—and suddenly found himself thinking of the last time he had observed the holiday. Peter’s last Christmas had been in 1942, when Vivi and Gigi were toddlers; they were growing quickly then, out of their baby round-belliedness into long-legged little girls, and it seemed they could never get enough to eat, particularly Vivi, who loved anything Peter set in front of her. Their ration cards were a joke; if not for the scraps Masha brought home from the Adlon, the girls would have starved. Their growth would have been stunted; Peter was home with them full time by then, his work permit having been revoked, and he deliberately kept from Masha the tales he had heard from mothers in the building’s stairwells, about children grown slow and fretful, about their developing sores or their adult teeth not coming in for lack of milk.
That Christmas there were no presents, although they did manage to have a tree, a pathetic little foundling Peter had salvaged from a scrap heap. Their specimen was barely two meters, and it listed to the side on which it also had no needles. But Peter had propped it on their kitchen table and wrapped its trunk in a tea towel, and he had spent several nights while the girls were asleep punching holes in tin cans with a screwdriver; when he inserted candle stubs in them and put them on the tree, he thought, it would look quite festive. Not quite the magnificent firs of his childhood, ablaze with tapers—Peter’s family, quite assimilated, celebrated Christmas just as Masha’s had. But it would do for a surprise.
Masha came home from the Adlon long after midnight, having had to close out the hotel’s Christmas Eve buffet. Peter had been watching for her through the window and saw her bundled figure drop off the tram as it rattled past the flat, clattering the plates on the shelves. The girls slept on; city children, they woke only when it was too quiet.
By the time Masha had climbed the six flights of stairs, Peter had the candles lit in the tin cans, which he had inserted among the few branches that would hold them. “Happy Christmas, Mashi,” he whispered.
“Happy Christmas, Petel,” said Masha. They kissed. Masha’s pale face was nearly translucent with exhaustion but for the very red tip of her nose. She unwrapped her scarf and took off her coat; Peter smelled roast bird wafting from her whites, and his stomach growled.
“Goose?” he whispered.
Masha nodded. “And duck,” she whispered back; “I had the carving station,” and she held up her lunch pail.
Peter didn’t bother with utensils; he sat at the table and shredded meat with his fingers, careful to set aside the bulk of it for the twins. Vivi twitched at the odor of food but didn’t wake, merely put her hand on her sister’s cheek in the room’s double bed.
“This is delicious,” said Peter, “thank you.”
Masha sat across from him and started removing her hairpins with such emphatic movements, some of them flew into the corners. “Why that girl,” his mother had asked, “out of all the eligible young ladies we’ve introduced you to? She’s not only common, she’s homely.” It was true; Masha’s face was long and bony, her coloring too anemic for beauty. She barely had any eyelashes. But Peter had been in awe of Masha since the first moment he became aware of her: in the Adlon kitchen, Peter’s second day as a commis. Chef had stopped the entire staff to watch Peter dice an onion, making an example of Peter’s clumsiness, his utter incompetence. “Look at this,” he had screamed in Peter’s ear, seizing a handful of ragged slices and flinging them into Peter’s face, “my grandmother could chop onions better using her dentures! You will not stop, nobody will cook, until you do it right,” and he had dumped a basket of yellow onions onto Peter’s chopping block, some of the orbs bouncing off to the floor and rolling away. There was no sound but for the sizzling and bubbling of ignored food on various burners, Chef’s enraged huffing, and Peter’s snuffling as he chopped and chopped, blindly, eyes burning with tears, lacking even the burned match one usually held between one’s teeth to prevent weeping during this task. Until finally he felt his knife taken from him. “Watch,” said a soft voice near his shoulder, and when Peter’s stinging tears had subsided, he saw an even younger and smaller apprentice making quick work of his latest onion, Peter’s knife moving so fast he couldn’t see it, like a hummingbird’s wings. “Like this,” said the small commis, “put your finger on top of the blade to guide it, you see?” and Peter nodded. Chef, who had been hulking behind them both, flicked at the pile of tiny dense cubes on Peter’s cutting board and said, “Ach . . . Back to work!” and as if the Adlon kitchen staff had been frozen by enchantment and were now released by his bawl, they sprang back to life. All except the little commis, who patted Peter’s shoulder, retreated to the sink near the walk-in, and took off her white cap to dash water on her forehead—for it was a woman, Peter saw, with amazement, a tiny one with white-blond braids, which she tucked back up into her cap before she resumed work at her own station, stretching strudel dough as though nothing had happened. And that was Masha.
Now she started to giggle. “That tree is . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand to block the sound but laughed all the harder; soon she was quaking with it.
“The tree is what?” said Peter, feigning indignation. “Magnificent? A masterpiece? Worthy of The Nutcracker?”
“Yes,” said Masha, “exactly, that’s what I was trying to say.”
She wiped her wet eyes and nose and put her face in her hands.
“I’m so tired,” she said, “and I’m sorry, Petel, but I couldn’t get any chocolate for the girls. Chef had it practically under lock and key.”
“That’s all right,” said Peter. “The tree is the present—don’t you dare,” he warned her as she snickered again. “The girls will think it’s a marvel, you wait and see.”
“I’m sure they will,” said Masha. Peter patted his lap, and Masha came to sit there. Peter could smell the grease in her hair, cooking lard and oil.
“Our being together is the gift,” he said.
“Petel,” she said, picking up his hand and playing with his fingers. “About that . . .”
“Not this again,” said Peter.
“Dieter says he can get three ID cards,” said Masha. “It’ll cost us, but isn’t that why we saved your mother’s earrings?”
Peter looked down at her small hand with the scars and burns earned by any chef. Her whole left palm was a shiny lineless pink from when she’d grabbed a saucepan without a rag. She was toying with his wedding ring, spinning it around and around.
“I want to save the earrings,” said Peter. “For an emergency.”
“Petel, this is an emergency.”
Peter scoffed. He gestured toward the window, where the snow fell silently on the streetcar tracks, covering the sidewalk. “Does that look like an emergency to you?”
“I’ve started to hear things. About how there will be a roundup—”
“Horseshit,” said Peter, “propaganda.”
Masha sat up on his lap, eyes blazing. “That doesn’t even make sense. Why would the Nazis spread rumors about a roundup? That’d give people time to leave!”
“Scare tactics,” said Peter. “That’s been their game all along. To cow people into doing what they want.”
“Well, it’s working, isn’t it?” said Masha.
She got up and went to the window, where she stood gripping her elbows and shivering—the pane was cracked, and the room was cold.
“Come away from there,” Peter said, “you’ll catch your death of pneumonia.”
“And what will your death be? Theirs?”
Masha nodded to the twins, asleep like a heap of rags in the bed.
“Keep your voice down,” said Peter. “Stop being so dramatic, Lana Turner.”
He’d hoped the reference to one of Masha’s idols would cheer her, but she just stared at him.
“Hasn’t everything I’ve said come true so far? Haven’t things gotten worse and worse? Look what happened to your father, your mother. You can’t even work!”
“But you can, your work pass is still good,” said Peter. “My father was a troublemaker, and my mother— Lots of people caught that flu. You act as though the Nazis gave it to her! Look, we’re fine here, we’re safe and warm and fed. As long as you can work, we’ll be fine.”
“For how long?” said Masha. “People know. They know you and the girls are here. How long before some Jew-catching Greifer gives us up? For money, or a travel permit, or to save their own skins?”
“I think you underestimate our friends, Mashi.”
“I think you overestimate how many friends we have, Petel.” Masha shook her head, her long hair falling like a curtain around her face. Impatiently she pushed it back.
“You’re here all day,” she said, “with the girls. You don’t know what’s going on out there. You don’t see.”
“Yes,” said Peter with a bitterness that surprised him, “you’re right, I’m like a recluse, or a man in a cell.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, for Masha was then in front of him, crouching on her clogs, seizing his hands in her cold ones.
“That’s just it. You are. You’re a prisoner here in our flat. And it’s only going to get worse. The roundup—”
“Just rumors.”
“—I heard it’ll be in spring, as early as February. We don’t have much time—”
“No,” Peter said.
His voice was loud enough that it woke Gigi, who started to cry. He went to her and lifted her from the bed, her body warm and heavy with sleep.
“Shhh, you’ll wake your sister. Everything is all right; Mama’s here, see?”
Masha waggled her fingers. “Hi, sweet love,” she said.
Gigi buried her face sleepily in Peter’s shoulder.
“How,” Peter whispered, “do you expect me to take them God-knows-where—to America or England or whatever outlandish destination you have in mind? They’re so little. They tire so easily. They’ll talk.”
“There are ways,” Masha said. “Sleeping syrups—”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m Aryan.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“After the war—”
“I’m not breaking up our family,” he hissed. “I will not.”
Gigi lifted her head from his shoulder and put her hand on his cheek.
“Papa angry?” she asked.
Peter kissed her palm.
“No, sugarplum,” he said and turned her toward the tree. “Do you like the lights? See how they glow?”
Gigi stared at the candle stubs in their perforated tin cans.
“Vivi sleeping,” she said with satisfaction and corked her mouth with her thumb. She put her head back on Peter’s shoulder, and he inhaled the unwashed scent of her hair—white like her mother’s, stringy without a bath since the previous week.
Masha was breathing hard—furious or on the verge of tears or both.
“Petel, I’m begging you to be reasonable. These people will stop at nothing. You must see—”
“Reasonably,” said Peter, “things are bound to get better. It’s always darkest just before dawn—right, Gigi?” She nodded. “We’re almost to a new year. How about this: by spring, when it’s warmer and easier to travel—I’ll consider it. Consider it,” he repeated.
Masha looked at her daughter, stroking the child’s hair over and over.
“They are half Jewish,” she said. “Have you considered what will happen to them if—”
“But you are their mother, and you are Aryan.”
She chewed her lip. “By spring I might be able to get a fourth Ausweis as well.”
“You see?” Peter said. “It will all work out.” He put out his free arm and drew his wife to his side.
“By next Christmas, we will probably all be in London,” he added.
* * *
“Hey, buddy, would you mind stepping aside?”
Peter looked over; the man who owned the shop he was standing in front of waved for Peter to move so the man could unlock the grate.
“Apologies,” said Peter.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s Christmas. Or almost.” The man was gnomic and bald except for tufts of black hair sticking out of his ears. “You window-shopping, handsome?” he said, unlocking the grate. “You wanna come in, pick up something for your wife or sweetheart? I got some great haberdashery.”
“Thank you, no,” said Peter.
He touched the brim of his hat and started walking, then realized he was heading north and needed to go south. He corrected his course. He removed his overcoat despite the chilly air and slung it over one arm—he had perspired through his shirt. His coffee had gone cold; God knew how long he had been standing there. Peter would have been embarrassed if it hadn’t been New York, where people were accustomed to much stranger sights. He took one deep breath, then another. The air smelled of the hot sooty wind from the subway grates, hot dogs from a nearby cart. Peter pitched his coffee into a garbage can. He was in New York and it was 1965 and there wasn’t a bit of snow on the ground. The sun was shining fully now. Peter glanced at his watch; it was almost nine. He would need to truss partridges, make sure the chestnuts were roasted for stuffing and hard sauce had been made for the plum pudding.
He quickened his step down the glittering, gum-spattered sidewalk, then changed his mind at the last minute and hailed a cab. He gave the driver, a turbaned Oriental fellow, an address and sat back. The sitar music spiraling out of the radio reminded Peter of his days as a younger man wandering the city: ashamed of having lost the job at the Oyster Bar but using the freedom, and the wages he had saved, to sample every food he had never had before. Potstickers. Saag paneer and gulab jamun. Chicken in mole sauce. Roti. Shawarma. His favorite had been dim sum in Chinatown, where he could sit at a counter and point at whatever rolled past him on a cart. He remembered his astonishment at being served, in this manner, a broiled, breaded chicken foot.
The cab stopped at the southeast corner of Fifth and Fifty-Seventh, and Peter hopped out. He did have to fight crowds again now—tourists and last-minute shoppers, men who had forgotten to have their secretaries buy gifts for their wives. Peter went through the famous brass doors. Enough was enough. He had to put a stop to this . . . invasion of the past. It was June, he felt quite sure, June was the ticket, with her optimist’s innocence, her lack of appreciation of how bad things could get, her charm and youthful vigor—she was the quintessence of Peter’s adopted country, his fresh American start. Peter had waited long enough; it was time to take a confident step toward the future. Maybe this would do it. H
e stood looking around Tiffany’s until he identified where the rings were, and then he walked to the glass counter. An associate in a Savile Row suit stepped over.
“May I help you, sir?” he said.
Masha’s Spring 1966
Masha’s Spring 1966
Appetizers
Nova-Wrapped Hearts of Palm Salad on a Bed of Spring Lettuces, with Truffle Vinaigrette Dressing
Spring Pea Soup with House-Made Croutons, Crème Fraîche, & Fresh Mint
Chicken in a Spring Blanket: Chicken Liver Pâté–Filled Blintzes with Mustard & Horseradish Dipping Sauces
Waldorf Salad: Bibb Lettuce, Grapes, Green Apple, Radishes, Bleu Cheese, Roasted Walnuts, Hand-Creamed Mayo, & Pickled Beets
Baby Asparagus en Croute with Mini-Fondue Dipping Sauce
Entrees
Lamb Wellington Accompanied by Mashed Potatoes & Baby Asparagus
Poached Bluefish with Dill Sauce, Roast Fingerling Potatoes, & Green Beans Amandine
Rabbit Stew on a Bed of Garlic Mashed Potatoes & Sautéed Spring Peas
Chicken Kiev with Herbed Rice & Vegetable du Jour
Hamburger Walter: Ground Chuck au Poivre & Flambéed in Brandy, Accompanied by Pommes Frites & No Vegetables At All
Sides
Spring Peas with Fresh Mint
Creamed Spinach with a Garlic Parmesan Crust
Roast Fingerling Potatoes
Mashed Garlic or Horseradish Potatoes
Pommes Frites (French Fried Potatoes)
Latkes (Potato Pancakes with Applesauce)
Tzimmes (Casserole of Sweet Potato, Citrus Zests, & Currants)
Pickled Beets with Horseradish Crème Fraîche
Dish of House-Made Pickles
Spätzle
Just Desserts
Rhubarb Pudding with Brown Sugar–Vanilla Ice Cream & Candied Rosemary
Rum-Soaked Apple Cake Masha with Crème Anglaise