How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  “A couple of them actually work as plasterers.”

  “Well, we do need plasterers,” said Mrs. Levinger, deflected.

  “Rumor has it that they steal only from rich drunks.”

  “Rumor! Rumor has it that Winston is planning an invasion. I’ll believe that when it happens. We’re probably going to be invaded”; and Sonya imagined Mrs. Levinger picking up the fireplace shovel and banging the heads of Germans foolish enough to enter her office.

  Meanwhile the young Rumanians lifted wallets in Mayfair. And an unlicensed pair of Polish doctors kept an unlicensed clinic in Clapham Commons. Belgians who had arrived with diamonds in their hems sold those diamonds on the black market and decamped for South America, bestowing not one shilling to the Agency that had brought them to London, a different Agency, but still. “Not against the rules,” mentioned Mrs. Levinger. “Not comme il faut, however.” Sonya thought of Eugene’s mother’s little stone.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Lotte was saying. “I’ll get a job. I’ll pay my share. You’ll see.”

  “What’s this about a French girl,” said Mrs. Levinger a few days later. “I had a letter from a family . . .”

  “She’s with me.”

  They exchanged a steady look. “We can manage a small allowance,” said Mrs. Levinger.

  “If that becomes necessary,” said Sonya—in a rather cold voice, since she was almost in tears—“I will let you know.”

  It did not become necessary. On Saturday Lotte asked Sonya for a few shillings; also, could Sonya borrow a screwdriver from someone in the building? Well, she’d try. Mr. Smith was at his kiosk. The twittering old lady had gone to live with her daughter. The yellow-eyed man was out. Eugene was of course not in. Sonya finally knocked on the secretaries’ door, expecting no luck. But the secretaries owned an entire tool chest; they’d built a hutch for their window. They were raising generations of rabbits. “How . . . sweet,” said Sonya.

  “Cash,” explained one of the young women. “The nobs still love their lapin.”

  Sonya came downstairs with the screwdriver to find Lotte returning from the High Street with a brass lock and two keys. Within an hour she had affixed it to the door of the armoire. Then she stowed her violin next to the cognac. She locked the closet. For a moment she sank into the chair. “Safe,” she sighed. Sonya forebore to mention the bombings; perhaps they wouldn’t start again.

  Returning the screwdriver, Sonya ran into the landlady. “I have a . . . guest.”

  “I noticed, dearie. I’ll have to charge a bit more.”

  Every day Lotte went out looking for work. She came back disappointed. At night they went to concerts. It was like having Eugene back. “At Saint Aidan’s—there’s a choir singing tonight,” Lotte would say; or “A basso over at Marylebone—just got here from there.” Scattered musicians formed makeshift ensembles. “How did you hear about this?” asked Sonya as they drifted home from a trio.

  “I went to a music store looking for a job . . . met some other string players . . .”

  Lotte began to play on street corners. Sonya warned her to watch for policemen. At first she played in outer London. But though small bands of admirers collected (she reported matter-offactly to Sonya), too few coins fell into the open case at her feet. She moved toward the center of town. She played in Picadilly; in the Strand; near Whitehall. “I saw Churchill,” she exclaimed. Everyone knew that Churchill was directing the War from underground offices; but there were rumors of lookalike doubles, hundreds of them, deployed to fool the enemy and maybe the populace.

  In Lotte’s new sites she collected enough money to meet the landlady’s rise in rent, to buy cheese and smoked fish and peaches, to insist that Sonya always take the greater share. “You are my patron, my benefactor, my angel.”

  “I repudiate those roles. This peach is heavenly.”

  “My mother, then . . . no, no, you are too young.”

  “. . . hardly too young.”

  “Big sister!”

  Sonya was still on loan to Mrs. Levinger from the Joint; but Mrs. Levinger’s mandate had altered. Few refugees managed to get in now, but there was plenty to do for the ones already here. Families were starving. Sonya made rounds with ration books, with money, sometimes with piecework from factories—she might have been a foreman sweating workers. Lotte fiddled for coins.

  One spring evening Sonya decided to cross the river before going home. No raids for a long time now, just a few planes every so often, scared off by the ack-ack guns. On the embankment she saw a clown . . . no, it wasn’t a clown, it was a girl. Yes, it was a clown: Lotte.

  She was near a bombed-out site beginning to be rebuilt. Those plasterers—were the Rumanian boys among them? Lotte wore wide plaid trousers underneath her usual skimpy jacket. She had found a diplomat’s homburg—snatched it, maybe—and she had blacked the space between her upper teeth and darkened some of her freckles. Her pale hair foamed beneath the hat. She played the street repertoire that she practiced at home—Kreisler, Smetana, Dvorak—with exaggerated melancholy and exaggerated vivacity. “To make their eyes water,” she’d explained. “To give them a swooping finale.”

  After the swooping finale she walked among the loiterers, her hat upside down in her hand. When she came to Sonya she bowed. Teasingly she shook the hat. Sonya reached into the pocket of her raincoat but Lotte moved on.

  The listeners drifted away. A smiling Lotte returned to Sonya. “Let’s feast!”

  “Those clothes!” Sonya smiled back.

  The homburg turned out to be a trick hat, collapsible. Lotte shed the wide trousers with one twist of her nimble hips, revealing a pleated skirt, one of the two she owned. With trousers and hat in one hand and the violin in the other she led the way to a pub.

  They sat in a corner booth, the two of them—three, counting the instrument. Lamplight streamed through stained-glass windows into the noisy place.

  “I did well today,” said Lotte handing the money to Sonya, who knew better than to refuse. “But I would prefer a steadier income.”

  “You should be at school,” Sonya moaned.

  “Soon I will find a place in an orchestra. Or a nightclub.”

  Sonya ordered a second whisky.

  Roland Rosenberg appeared the next week and stayed for forty-eight hours. Though still fat he was thinner and worn. But: “You are losing weight, Sonya Sofrankovitch,” he had the nerve to say. “Take care of yourself.”

  And then—Lotte’s mad dreams came true. A restaurant keeper heard her, hired her, provided crepe trousers and a sequinned jacket. Café Bohemia was a hodgepodge of banquettes, murals, gilt, and salvage. Sonya dropped in one or two nights a week.

  There were no more eye-watering swoops, no more glittering glissandos. She played Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn. She looked twice her age, Sonya thought. But then Sonya herself probably looked twice hers.

  And Lotte found a trio—two old men and one old woman—who wanted a second violinist. “They play very well,” Lotte commended,

  “though none of them is Jewish.” The recitals were free; but the performers were paid, sometimes, by a Foundation in Canada. Lotte had to rifle the account she shared with Sonya to buy a blue dress with a collar—the sequinned outfit was not considered appropriate.

  She had every right to rifle the account. She was contributing more than Sonya. She bought a fold-up cot and no longer had to sleep on the floor. She bought a second geranium. She bought whisky, though she herself drank only an occasional glass of wine. And when Sonya turned fifty-three, Lotte bought a pair of train tickets; and they journeyed to Penzance for a weekend, and stayed in a hotel, and walked on the beach, holding hands like sisters.

  ONE and Two. ONE and Two.

  A Sunday afternoon. Lotte was out playing with the quartet.

  ONE Two ONE Two.

  Sonya opened her door. This time it was he.

  “The war has gone on so long it seems like peace,” Sonya wrote to her aunt. “One day is like ano
ther. No new horrors, just old ones.” She wondered if the letter would get by the censors.

  Eugene was busy. Perhaps, to compensate for his unfair internment, someone was pulling strings. So many people were making so many unseen efforts. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger continued the quiet tasks of their Agency, more and more of them against the rules. The yellow-eyed man upstairs spent weeks at Bletchley Park. Lotte fiddled on corners when she had a free afternoon. Mr. Smith, so adept at inviting confidential disclosures, was discovered to be a spy, and was arrested.

  Eugene wrote reviews for newspapers. Sonya helped occasionally with sentence structure. New families wanted him to teach their children, practicing Czerny in formerly grand neighborhoods now sparkling with shards. He gave performances, too. He joined Lotte’s quartet from time to time; and he played trios with Lotte and the cellist; and he played duets with Lotte. When the two could, they practiced in the church where Eugene and Sonya had listened to the Czech brother and sister. “Such a good piano,” Eugene said.

  Sonya brought her families to the concerts—the couple and their retarded daughter, once; the half-crazy mother and her little boys several times; the young waitresses; the pickpocket plasterers.

  Of course—she told herself—all couples who played together developed affinities. Some had affinities from birth—consider those Czech twins, consider the Menuhins. Eugene and Lotte were not brother and sister, though they could be father and daughter. Twenty years lay between them. She calculated again. Twenty-four! She thought of the tenor... Eugene’s brown profile bent over the keys. His mouth grimaced, sucked. Lotte nestled her chin onto her handkerchief. The fingers of her left hand danced. There were dark patches under the arms of the blue dress. At night, on her cot, she sometimes cried out, in French.

  One evening Sonya came home to an empty room smelling of cigarettes. She put the milk she carried on the sill next to the geraniums. There was a chapel a block away—an ugly little dissenters’ place. She sat in a back pew and rested her brow on the back of the pew in front of her, and lifted her head, and brought it down again on the wood, and lifted it, and brought it down.

  III.

  The first of the doodlebugs struck a week after the D-Day landings. They struck again and again. They were not like the bombs of the earlier Blitz. There was no time to get to a safe place; there was no safe place. People simply flattened themselves, waiting to be hurled, impaled, shattered, blown to bits, buried alive. If they were far enough away from the site they might be spared.

  “The end is near, the end is near,” the landlady told Sonya. “The end is near,” sighed the parents of the damaged daughter. “Hitler’s last gasp,” declared Mrs. Levinger. Sonya thought that the Fuhrer seemed to have a lot of wind left in his lungs, but all she said was that the demented mother and her boys must be gotten out of London. “Maybe that house in Hull”; and for half an hour they discussed the pros and cons of the children being incarcerated in a virtual bedlam, each woman supplying the other’s arguments like the friends they had become. They resolved on a more farmlike retreat, and Sonya made the arrangements.

  Work continued, rebuilding continued; even concerts.

  One day at half past noon Sonya was eating an apple on a bench in Hyde Park when she heard the familiar hum. She continued to chew. She saw the flying bomb, there was just one, it was only a bomb, they were all only bombs. Some, she’d been told, failed to explode. This one exploded, south of the Park. She was still chewing. Smoke rose, dark gray and thick, and the sounds she heard now were sirens, and further explosions and buildings crashing, and shrieks, and footsteps, her own among them, for she was running across the park, her apple still in her hand, toward the bomb, because the place of the bomb was the place of that church, wasn’t it? And they were rehearsing this noontime, weren’t they? She ran across the King’s Road; and now she was part of a mob, some rushing along with her, some against her. Sides of houses had vanished. Faces were black. She stumbled over a woman, stopped; but the woman was dead. She ran on. An arm poked out of a heap of stones. She stopped again, and this time helped a fireman dig at the stones and extricate a woman, still alive thank God, and a baby protected by the woman’s other arm, the baby too was alive thank God thank God. The smoke made it hard to breathe. Buildings kept falling. There was the smell of scorched flesh. Sonya reached the street of the church. The church was blasted. There was already a cordon; how fast the municipality had worked; no more than ten minutes had passed; these brave people; but she would simply have to get under the rope. Her apple was gone. She stooped. “Miss!” Somebody strong yanked her by her hips. She whirled into the arms of a red-faced man in a helmet; and saw, over his shoulder, Eugene, his brow dark, bruised in fact, and Lotte, filthy. They were holding hands. In her free hand Lotte held the instrument case. They had not been in the church, they explained when she reached them. They had lingered at home.

  The barrage continued for months. Only storms kept the planes away. Sonya prayed for a hurricane. Churchill conceded that London was under attack. The flying bombs did not cease until three weeks before Victory.

  But earlier still—five weeks before Victory—Lotte and Eugene left for Manchester. The director of the new civic orchestra there had heard Lotte playing with the quartet, had offered her a job. There would be pupils for Eugene.

  Lotte had been sharing Eugene’s bed since the day the doodlebug struck the church. But the night before leaving she scratched on Sonya’s door. She put on the old clothes—the hat, the plaid trousers. She played “Some Day I’ll Find You” and “I’ll See You Again.”

  In the morning all three walked to the Tube and rode to the station. Even next to Eugene and Lotte, Sonya saw them as if from a distance—two gifted émigrés, ragged, paired. Father and daughter? Step-siblings? Nobody’s business. As soon as they boarded the train they found a window and stared through it, their loved faces stony with love of her. She wondered how long Lotte would flourish under Eugene’s brooding protection, how soon she would turn elsewhere. She was French, wasn’t she, and Frenchwomen were faithless . . . His mother’s diamond! She lifted her left hand in its disreputable glove and pointed toward the place of a ring with her right index finger.

  On the other side of the window Eugene shook his head. Yours, he mouthed.

  So Sonya sold the ring. It fetched less than she’d hoped—the stone was flawed. She bought a voluminous raincoat made out of parachute material. She bought new gloves and some dramatic trousers. She stashed the rest of the money.

  IV.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Sonya, when Mrs. Levinger had left them alone.

  “Oh, I wanted to visit. When I was in Lisbon, in Amsterdam . . . But each time, something sent me elsewhere.” He shifted in his illfitting jacket. He had lost more weight. Mrs. Levinger had hinted that he was some kind of hero.

  They left the office and walked into wind and rain. Sonya’s new coat swirled this way and that; it got drenched though it was supposed to be water repellent; it dragged her backwards. Finally she lifted its skirts, so as to be more easily blown to wherever he was taking her.

  A pub. They sat down. Sonya knew he would not mention the nature of the work he had done; and he didn’t—not during the first beer, not during the second. So: “Where now?” she asked, resting her worn-out hands on the worn-out table.

  He told her about the Displaced Persons camps. He was going to the one at Oberammergau. “I hope you will join us. Your persistence, your intelligence, your accommodating nature . . .” She waved away his words with her right hand and he caught it midair. “I will stop this talk, though it is not flattery. I invite you to Oberammergau.”

  “I speak no German.”

  “But you are musical,” he reminded her. He caught her other hand, though it couldn’t be said to be in flight, was just lying there on the table. “Sonya Sofrankovitch. Will you come?”

  She was silent for several minutes. His odd smile—would she ever get used to it, to him?—told her how much
he wanted to hear Yes.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Purim Night

  Camp Gruenwasser was preparing for Purim, that merry celebration when you must drink until you cannot distinguish the king from the villain, the queen from the village tart.

  “Purim?” Ludwig inquired.

  He was twelve; pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin Before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat.

  “Purim is a holiday,” Sonya said. She was fifty-six, also pale and thin by nature. She had spent the War in London; now she was co-director of this Camp for Displaced Persons, what a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty, they were; homeless, they were; despised. “Purim celebrates the release of the Jewish people. From a wicked man.”

  “Release. Released by the Allied Forces?”

  “No, no. This was in Shushan, Shushan, Shushan, long ago . . .” She said ‘long ago’ in English. The rest of the conversation—all their conversations in the makeshift, crowded office where Ludwig often spent the afternoon—was conducted in German. Ludwig’s was the pedantic German of a precocious child, Sonya’s the execrable German of an American with no talent for languages. Her Yiddish was improving at Camp Gruenwasser, though. Yiddish was the Camp’s lingua franca, cigarettes its stable currency.

  “Shushan, Shushan, Shushan,” Ludwig repeated. “A place of three names?”

  Sonya briefly closed her eyes. “I was repeating an old song, a line from an old song.” She opened them again and met his reddish-brown gaze. “Haman was the name of the wicked man. The heroine was a queen, Esther. Speaking of queens . . .”

  “We were not.”

  “We were not what?”

  “We were not speaking of queens.”

  “Even so,” said Sonya. “A set of chessmen came in with the allotments yesterday. It is lacking only a pawn. A stone—can you employ a stone?”