by David Unger
“Yes, many years ago,” Samuel answered. And just then he saw Lena in his mind’s eye, putting on a chinchilla coat over her beaded dress with the low back. It was her favorite party dress.
“Didn’t last long, eh?”
“No,” Samuel confessed. The wound was still raw.
“Figured as much. I was also married,” he slurred.
“Were you?”
“Bet you don’t believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Yep. Lasted nearly ten years. No children, though we often talked about it, Esther and me. A train at a railroad crossing … hit her. Wham-o!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Samuel said with real feeling. “It must have been a terrible blow to you.”
Long seconds ticked by. Lewis had his eyes closed and nodded. Samuel’s nose itched, but he refused to scratch it. Dishes clattered in the kitchen. He wished he were anyplace but here.
When Lewis reopened his eyes, they swam in their sockets, without life preservers. “You believe everything I say, don’t you, Berkow?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You can’t believe everything you hear,” Lewis sang out, raising his glass to the air. “Well, it’s all a goddamn lie, this horseshit about the railroad crossing. I never get around to telling the truth. But you, Berkow, I feel I can trust.”
“Thank you.” Samuel sensed that Lewis was toying with him.
“Don’t thank me, Sammy. It’s just that now I know things about you—and this kind of has you in my pocket.”
Samuel didn’t know what to say. He wondered what Lewis meant. The part about being Jewish?
Lewis went on talking. “You see, buddy, back in Pittsburgh I worked in a foundry casting railroad ties. Hard and dangerous work, and hotter than hell, I can tell you that. Well, one of these chain slings was carrying a steel tie when all of a sudden the tie slipped and landed across my chest. I had a concussion, broke seven ribs and had second-degree burns across my titties. It’s a miracle I wasn’t crushed—six weeks in the hospital, but I survived. Esther and my best friend Red visited me most every night. I’d say that they brought me back to life. I was grateful to them. But by the end of my stay, I felt something strange was going on. There was too much staring between them, and then this knowing kind of look like they had just gotten discovered with their hands stuck in the cookie jar …”
“I don’t understand.”
“They had been screwing around behind my back!” Lewis roared, shaking his glass in Samuel’s face. “Do you understand that, my little Kraut?” Before Samuel could say a word, Lewis had resumed his account. “Well, the day I was to leave the hospital, they were supposed to pick me up together and drive me home. I still needed a wheelchair and Red offered to carry me to the car. I was waiting in my room, clean, dressed, and shaven, but the bastards never came.”
“They left you?”
“You can imagine how I felt. Sometimes a man’s got to forget certain things, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it. I keep hearing their voices bolstering me up, encouraging me to walk around with the crutches—it just gnaws on me. So the hospital drove me to my empty house, and I had to put up with all these smiling neighbors helping me—they all knew what had happened. They dressed my wounds, did the shopping, cooked for me as if they were the Lord’s apostles … Is this boring you, Berkow? If it is, I’ll just shut my trap!”
“No, please go on.” Perhaps a show of sympathy was all he wanted.
Lewis’s face was beet red. He grabbed the bourbon by the neck and stuck the bottle into his throat. “I swore if I ever saw hide or hair of either of them, I’d kill ’em. Pow, pow, pow, right between their fucking lying eyes …”
“A couple of years passed and I never saw them again.” Lewis raised his shoulders with a sign of indifference. “I heard nothing. Or rather I heard nothing that was louder than something … But then one day, they got cocky and sent a Christmas card to one of my neighbors. The postmark said they were living in Canton, Ohio, the stupid fucks. So I checked out the tax rolls and street directories and phone books, and I found the address of the place where they lived—with a baby girl. That January, I took a leisurely drive across state lines. I parked outside their perfect little home and waited. I waited a long time, till one morning when Red came out of the house, I just blew a ton of lead into him. Must’ve been three or four shots. Kapow, kapow, kapow, kapow!
“Esther knew who had done it, but she wasn’t about to say anything to the cops. Red was a bootlegger and a numbers man on the side, and that’s where the coppers’ investigation stopped. I’m not ashamed of what I did, Berkow, I would do it again. No shame what-so-ever!”
“So they never suspected you?”
Lewis chuckled. “Did you think I’d just stay there and wait for them to come looking for me? Hell no, I got the hell out of there, made it all the way down to Honduras before I stopped for breath … I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Berkow. Maybe because you’re a Jewish Kraut and you don’t know who the fuck you are and you’re scared as all get out to be here. You wouldn’t breathe a fucking word of this to anyone, would you?”
Samuel shook his head.
“There you go,” Lewis said, folding his arms on the table and squeezing his eyes. “Sometimes I think of their little girl who had nothing to do with this betrayal, but then I see Esther. I can’t say I still loved her back then, but the bitch really deserved it. Do you still love your wife, Berkow?”
Samuel grew rigid. “I often think of her—if that’s what you mean.”
“But do you still love her? I mean after all these years?”
“Maybe I do.” There was so much he still couldn’t admit to himself about Lena.
“Yep,” Lewis nodded, “that’s what makes it worse.”
CHAPTER TWO
The sleeping quarters were two cubicles next to the dining room. Lewis’s room was on one side and across the hall was the guest room—a small cabin with a table, two bunks, and an open porthole. Samuel’s suitcase was wedged against one wall, and the bottom berth had been prepared for him. A stumpy candle burned away on the table.
Samuel took off his suit and laid it across the upper bunk, putting his long-sleeve shirt on top. Normally he would’ve slipped into his pajamas, but the torrid night made it impossible, even with the window open. After weeks at sea and the stifling heat he’d had to endure since reaching the Caribbean, he longed for the cold of a Hamburg winter, the icy breath, the down comforter, the thick feather pillows.
He went to the bathroom at the end of the hall and heard Lewis, through his closed door, snoring like a clanging furnace.
Back in his room, Samuel blew out the candle and settled into bed. He bore his head into the pillow, pounded it with his fist to make a cavity for his head. He felt exhausted, but somehow he could not sleep. Was the bed too narrow and lumpy? Was he just too tired? He should’ve accepted Lewis’s offer of bourbon to relax him.
After twenty minutes of tossing, Samuel got up. He put on his shirt, slipped into his Ballys, and shuffled out of the room. He crossed the dining area and climbed the stairs back to the deck.
He was half naked, but who would care?
The tightness in Samuel’s chest eased and he could finally breathe. He made his way to the rail of the steamer, which was anchored some four hundred yards from the coast. The stars were spilling out of the darkened sky. Had there been a moon, Samuel would’ve been able to see something more than the occasional flash of light from the shacks on the shore and what seemed to be the dancing of shadows against a streetlight.
Feeling slightly chilled, Samuel pulled his shirt tighter around him.
Lewis’s confession and all the talk of marriage had addled him. When he closed his eyes, Lena suddenly appeared, coltish, as she had been when he first met her at the Alster Pavilion that January evening. Lena was quite thin, and her trademark was the coral cigarette holder, which almost always seemed to be dangling from her lips o
r her hand, with or without a cigarette. Samuel himself didn’t smoke, but anyone would’ve tolerated this vice, just to be beside Lena and smell her perfume.
Samuel gripped the railing tighter. A dozen years had gone by—twentyfour times the length of their marriage—and still his heart was raw, a violin string aching to be plucked. He saw her in a series of flashes: dining with her and her brother in Hamburg; flirting in a Viennese parlor on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. Samuel opened his eyes—puffy clouds sat on the horizon and water quietly splashed the sides of the freighter.
They had met at a masquerade party. Samuel was living in Berlin at the time, but had gone to this Hamburg party—a request of his father’s—to see if he could come up with fashion ideas for the new spring season at their stores. There were all sorts of women dressed in feathers and sequins, gaudily so. He had bumped into Lena at the towel table by the bathrooms downstairs—she was radiantly tanned.
“Oh, so sorry,” she had said.
“It’s quite all right,” Samuel had answered, accidentally touching her arm.
“You aren’t Charles Laughton, are you?”
He had laughed.
“But you look so much like him—you only need a cigarette!”
“That and much more. Unfortunately, I don’t smoke.”
She wore a velvet hat cropping her black hair and a thin lace veil over her face—she was pretty and fresh and all of nineteen. He had been through the Great War, was a veteran with oodles of experience: handsome and fit, to be sure, but at least ten years older than her.
“No, you do look like him—have you seen him in Piccadilly? Only British films make it to Capetown,” she said tipsily, raising her veil. She had blue eyes.
“So you’re from South Africa.”
“Yes, touring the continent with my older brother,” she said wistfully. “Max is my protector. We’ve had so much fun. So many parties, but I must confess I don’t know how you stand this miserable cold and snow. Our next stop is Berlin—which everyone tells me is magical, but even colder still.”
And so it had begun. If he had only controlled himself at the Alster Pavilion, they would have met, exchanged a few words, and gone off, each on their own. He should have just accepted her compliment—he resembled George Raft more than Charles Laughton, but never mind, he had been taught to accept a compliment—but he had stupidly countered by saying she looked like Marlene Dietrich, all but the color of her hair. Somehow his wayward arrow had hit the bull’s eye—Lena squealed with joy, jumped up and down, squeezed his hand, hugged him tight, and gave him a kiss on the lips.
Beyond the gusts jangling the ships rigging, he could still smell her perfume: lilac. That fragrance had bewitched him. On her neck, behind the ears, on her wrists. That night he had offered to guide her and her brother through their remaining days in Hamburg and then off to Berlin, where he happened to live.
Their romance had been a kind of whirlwind, the one time in his life when Samuel had surrendered to the moment and acted impulsively. That evening at the Alster was followed by two weeks of wild merriment—fancy dinners, visits to jazz clubs, nights of singing and dancing, finished out with nightcaps of Courvoisier and Grand Marnier, a debauchery of sorts. Lena loved being with an older man, one who knew how to dance, who treated women with respect, a man who had fought in a war, had four bullet wounds, who knew how to make love deliberately to her body.
And the day before Lena and her brother were set to sail back to South Africa, she insisted that they get married at once. So they did. Max, entranced by the homosexual clubs in Berlin, had abandoned his chaperoning once Samuel appeared. He was off on his own escapades, thinking that at least Lena—crazy, impulsive Lena—had found a Jew to marry, a rarity in Capetown and maybe this, only this, would keep his parents from killing him when he returned to South Africa alone.
On the day her brother Max set sail, Samuel and Lena went off by train on their honeymoon to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest.
Still to this day, trains, gutters, castles, expensive hotel rooms, all smelled like lilac to Samuel. It was love, not infatuation, he had believed.
But two weeks later, they were back in Berlin. It was February—the sky was constantly gray and low and the days began and ended in a moderate drizzle. Samuel had to go back to work. The wind blew in icy licks, and Lena had no interest in visiting the Brandenburg Gate or going to museums, especially not alone.
The criticism of him had begun quite innocently: You look silly selling ties across some dirty counter, she would say when she visited him at the store. Then it became more personal: I don’t mind your father visiting, but must your friend Klingman stay with us every time he comes to Berlin? I hate his beady eyes, the fact that all he does is criticize and complain. Lena never listened to Mozart or Brahms, she never picked up a book to read. Samuel, couldn’t we move into a larger flat near the Kurfürstendamm? I am frozen by the time I make it down to the shops there. Lena had no girlfriends and made no new friends in Germany after her brother left, yet she would say: And, well, I feel humiliated inviting my girlfriends to such a dark and dank apartment. Couldn’t we find a larger one with more light?
By March the complaints began piling one on top of the other: I hate this Arctic climate. All the people here are stiff and cold. All you do is work and at night you’re too tired to go out. I can’t stay here all day. I miss my parents. I miss the beach. I was thinking of taking a cruise home … I’ll be back by May, in six weeks …
Samuel slammed his palm on the ship’s railing. He should have put his foot down and said: No! You must stay with me, Lena, you cannot go alone. You’re my wife. If you need something to do, why don’t you get a job or go to school?
But he was too hurt to say any of that. He had fallen in love with a face, a perfume, stupid conversations, and a pair of blue eyes. The fact of the matter was that he, a man who had been alone all his life, suddenly felt afraid to be alone.
“Please, Lena, please don’t leave me,” he begged her as she brushed her dark hair on the stool by her powder table. She then took a cotton ball and began removing the makeup from her cheeks with an astringent.
“It’s only for six weeks,” she replied, not looking at him through the mirror.
“I don’t want you to go.”
She glanced up at him and saw that his eyes were watery. Rather than soften her, it made her angry, terribly angry. Without knowing where it came from, she blurted out: “Samuel, you’re a good-looking man, but frankly, you’re also such a bore.”
Samuel was stunned. Instead of answering her, touching her, he simply turned around and went to look out of the grated window on the other side of the bedroom. He tightened his fist, as if he were squeezing his heart into a ball.
The next day Lena left.
When Klingman came to visit a few weeks later, it was clear that Lena had taken everything of measure in her two trunks and had no plans to return to Berlin. Klingman asked his friend why Lena had left, and Samuel had merely shrugged, mumbling that sometimes a healthy plant, when transplanted, comes down with an unsuspecting disease. “Better to have it back in its native soil than have it die.”
Samuel felt the warm breeze blowing and looked up. There was a seagull sitting on the rim of the smokestack and though it was huddled in its wings, he felt the bird eyeing him, perhaps smiling. He was such a sight, in a longsleeve shirt, underwear, and Bally shoes. Even a strange bird could see it.
He was tired of thinking of Lena, tired of Lewis, a man he had just met several hours ago. All the talk about what Samuel should and shouldn’t do, what he should and shouldn’t know. The crowning blow had been Lewis’s sordid confession of how he had killed his wife’s lover.
The sea stank of rot, not lilac, a kind of stagnant soup of oil, dead fish, and putrid dreams. Still, Samuel knew that he was living through dangerous times—this was not the moment to simply sniffle and weep. He had left Hamburg just in the nick of time—Kristallnacht had happened just nine months earlier�
��the “party” in Europe, as Lewis referred to it, had already begun.
The last few weeks in Hamburg had convinced him that only war would stop Hitler. Samuel really had seen too much bloodshed. But it was Uncle Jacob who had forced his hand, gotten him to leave Germany, not the gunning down of those two Hasidic Jews.
So he was on a tramp steamer headed for Puerto Barrios. From there, he would take the train to Guatemala City, where his cousin Heinrich would help him get an apartment and a job. He would honor the moment: once and for all he would plant his feet firmly on the ground—no more excuses for leaving, for abandonment, for shifting about.
Samuel went back down to his room. The moment he crawled into bed, he dropped to sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
What’s taking you so long in the shit room?” Lewis asked. “Got the runs?” Samuel was leaning over the sink, his elbows deep in soapy water. “I’m rinsing out a dirty shirt,” he said, opening the door. He was surprised: No good morning. No how did you sleep?
“Why are you doing your own washing?”
“I always wash my own things—ever since I was in the army.”
“Not on my ship, you don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I say so. It’s not right for a white man to be washing his clothes. Don’t you have any idea how it looks to others for you to be doing your own laundry?” Lewis spat out of the porthole above the sink. “I’m surprised at you, Berkow. I thought you were smarter than that.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with intelligence.” He could feel his blood beginning to boil.
Lewis grabbed a dirty rag from a nail. “Okay, not intelligence, but what’s right and wrong. Now, dry your hands, Berkow. My boy will finish up here.”
Samuel took the towel, scratching his head. Lewis turned around, whistled a song out of tune, stuck his head in the kitchen, and shouted angrily in Spanish.