“Yes. Also my uncle keeps his corns in a box for just such purposes.”
Sonya dragged a rickety chair to the wall underneath a shelf, and climbed up on it, and retrieved the box of chessmen. She gave it to Ludwig.
He was scurrying off when Ida said, “Wait.” Ida was the secretary, a Person who had been a milliner Before. “I will tell about Purim, you should know, a Jewish boy like you.”
He paused midflight, back against the wall, eyes wide as if under a searchlight. “In Shushan, Shushan, Shushan long ago,” said Ida in English with a nod to Sonya; then continued in German, “there was a King, Ahasuerus; and a General, Haman; and Mordecai, a wise Jew who spent his time by the gates of the Palace. King Ahasuerus’s queen offended him so he called for a new Queen. Mordecai . . .” and she used an unfamiliar word.
Sonya ruffled through her German-English dictionary. “Procured? I’m not sure . . .”
“. . . procured his niece, Esther,” said Ida, her dark eyes insistent. “Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman arranged to murder the Jews. Esther, a Queen now, urged Ahasuerus to stop the murder. The Jews were saved.”
“Procured . . .” Sonya still objected; and Ludwig, still pinned to the wall, said, “It was a miracle, then.”
“A miracle,” nodded Ida.
“I do not believe in miracles, especially miracles accomplished by the fuck.” The word wedged its Anglo-Saxon bluntness into the German polysyllables. The vocabulary of children had been augmented by American servicemen. But the GIs were not responsible for the hasty and brutal lovemaking Ludwig had witnessed in forest huts, in barns by the side of the road, in damp Marseilles basements.
“A girl with good looks and a beautiful hat can work miracles,” Ida said. “Withholding the fuck. And that word, Ludwig, it is improper.” She returned to her typewriter. Ludwig ran away.
Sonya, who had more to do today than three people could accomplish in a week, strolled to the narrow window. It was midafternoon. Shadows were deepening in the courtyard formed by the long wooden barracks so hastily abandoned by the Wehrmacht that Persons continued to find gun parts, buttons, medals, and fragments of letters (“Heinz, leibling, der kinder. . . ”). There was still a triangle of sunlight in the courtyard, though, and ragged children were playing within it, and Ludwig should be among them, would have been among them if he weren’t a peculiar child who preferred the company of adults.
The year was 5707 by Biblical reckoning and 1947 by the Christian calendar. The Purim party would begin after dinner. There would be pastries—hamantaschen: Haman’s hats. Without those pastries the holiday might as well be ignored; without those pastries the Megillah—the Tale, written on a scroll—might as well be stuffed into a cistern. Tonight’s necessary hamantaschen—they would be a joke. Men who had been chefs Before knew how to bake sachartorte, linzertorte, all kinds of sweets; but where was the sugar, where the nuts? Today, using coarse flour and butter substitute and thin smears of blackberry preserves, they would bake ersatz hamantaschen, one or two per individual. Sonya did not know whether the practical bakers considered babies individuals, though babies certainly counted to the Red Cross and the American Command—each infant received its own vitamin-laced chocolate bars and its own Spam and its own cigarettes. Sonya could not procure sufficient tinned milk, however... As for the meal preceding the party; it would consist of the usual drek: watery spinach soup, potatoes, and black bread. Eisenhower had decreed that the Displaced Persons Camps be awarded 2000 calories per Person per day; decent of him; but the General couldn’t keep count of newcomers, they came in so fast.
“In my atelier I served the most distinguished and cosmopolitan women,” mused Ida, her hands at rest on the keyboard. “I fashioned turbans and cloches and toques.”
“Cartwheels and mantillas,” encouraged Sonya, who had heard this reminiscence before.
“I spoke five languages. I made . . .”
“Sonya!” came the voice of Roland, Roland Rosenberg, Sonya’s co-director. “Sonya?” and he followed his voice into the office, his eyes flickering over the beauteous Ida and coming to rest on Sonya’s narrow visage. He still had a fat man’s grace, even a fat man’s circumference, though he was losing weight like all the staff. “Sonya, the Chassids in the North Building refused to share their Megillah. They boycotted the general service.”
“The Enlightenment Society also boycotted,” Ida remarked. “They held a seminar on Spinoza.”
“The blackberry jam—there’s so little of it. Goddam!” said Sonya. She was subject to sudden ferocity these days. It was the Change, Ida told her knowingly, though Ida herself was only thirty-five.
“Poppy seeds—why couldn’t they send poppy seeds, I requested poppy seeds,” said Roland. Consulting a list, he left as unceremoniously as he had entered.
“Roland, it’s all right,” Sonya called after him. “The kindly German farmers—they will certainly butcher some calves for our party.” She was in the doorway now, but he had rounded the corner. “Whipped cream will roll in like surf.” She raised her voice, though he was surely out of earshot. “General Eisenhower—he will personally attend.”
“Sonya,” said Ida in a severe tone. “It is time for your walk.”
About Purim Ludwig had dissembled. Feigning ignorance was always a good idea; know-it-alls, he’d observed, tended to get beaten up or otherwise punished. In fact, he’d already heard the Story of Esther, several times. First from the young man in the Room next door, the one with the radiant face. Ludwig, recognizing the radiance, predicted that the young man would get caught in the next X-ray round-up. Meanwhile the feverish fellow did a lot of impromptu lecturing, even haranguing. Did he think he was the Messiah? grumbled Uncle Claud. One day last week he’d gathered a bunch of children around him and recited the Purim Tale. He made a good thing of it, Ludwig thought from the periphery of the circle; he almost foamed at the mouth when reciting the finale, the hanging of Haman and his ten sons, the slaughter of the three hundred conspirators. Then the Story had been taken up in the Schoolroom on the second floor of North Building, where grimy windows overlooked in succession the one-story kitchen; then the grubby garden, all root vegetables, well this was a stony patch, said Uncle Claud, his voice rumbling like a Baron’s; we cannot expect the chanterelles we scraped from the rich soil in the South of France. Past the garden a road led between farms to the village of tiled roofs. Beyond the village green hills gently folded. The Judaica teacher, not looking through the window at this familiar view, had begun the Purim story by reading it in Hebrew, maybe half a dozen kids could understand. He translated into Yiddish and also Russian. His version, a droning bore in all three languages, insisted that the Lord, not Esther, had intervened to save the Jews. The History teacher said that night that there was no justification for this interpretation in Scripture. A day later the Philosophy Professor referred to the story as a metaphor.
“Metaphor?” inquired Ludwig; and presently learned the meaning of the term. He loved learning. He liked to hang around the office because Roland without making a big thing of it let fall so many bits of knowledge, farted them out like a horse. Sonya too was interesting to observe, hating to argue but having to argue, hating to persuade but having to persuade. She’d rather be by herself, reading or dreaming; Ludwig could tell; she reminded him of his mother... And Ida with her deep beautiful eyes and her passionate determination to go to Palestine; if only Uncle Claud would fuck her, maybe all three would end up in the Holy Land, well, not so Holy, but not a barracks either. He’d heard that people there lived in tents with camels dozing outside. But Uncle Claud preferred men.
Even without the Story Ludwig would have noticed Purim. The Persons in the Camp—those who were not disabled, paralyzed with despair, stuck in the TB hospital, too old, too young, or (by some mistake in assignment) Christian—the Persons were loudly occupied with the holiday. In the barrack Rooms, behind the tarps and curtain strips that separated cubicle from cubicle, costume makers rustled sa
lvaged fabrics; in stairwells, humorists practiced skits; in the West Building raisins fermented and a still bubbled. In the village Persons were exchanging cigarettes and candy bars for the local wine. “Sour and thin,” sneered Uncle Claud, who hid among his belongings a bottle of cognac procured God knew how. Uncle Claud smoked most of his cigarette allotment and also Ludwig’s, and so he rarely had anything to barter. The cognac—Ludwig thought of it as a foretaste of the waters of Zion. “Zion has no waters,” Uncle Claud insisted. Every night he gave Ludwig a fiery thimbleful, after their last game.
They owned a board. Sometimes they were able to borrow chessmen; but usually they used those of a Lithuanian in the next Room, the fervent Messiah’s Room. The Lithuanian didn’t care for chess but happened to own the set of his brother, now ashes. He wouldn’t lend, wouldn’t sell, would only lease. Claud had to relinquish a cigarette for the nightly pleasure. But now... Ludwig parted the shredded canvas that was their door, sat down on the lower bunk beside his uncle. “Look!” he said, and shook the box like a noisemaker.
Claud smiled and coughed. “The Litvak—he can kiss my backside.”
When Sonya left the office, Ida resumed typing. She was doing requisitions: for sulpha drugs; for books; for thread; for food, food, food.
Dear Colonel Spaulding,
You are correct that the 2000 calories Per Person Per Day are Supplemented by Red Cross packages and purchases from the village. But the Red Cross packages come unpredictably. Some of our Persons will not eat Spam. And though we must turn a blind eye to the Black Market, it seems unwise to encourage its use. Our severest need now is dried fruit—our store of raisins is completely wiped out—and sanitary napkins.
Yours Very Truly,
Sonya Sofrankovich
Ida ran a hand through her hair. Her hair was as dense and dark as it had been ten years earlier, when she had been captured, separated from the husband now known to be dead, oh Shmuel, and forced to work in a Munitions Factory. Not labor camp, not escape from labor camp, not the death in her arms of her best friend, oh Luba, not recapture, not liberation; not going unwashed for weeks, not living on berries in the woods, not the disappearance of her menses for almost a year and their violent return; not influenza lice odors suppurations; not the discovery in the forest of an infant’s remains, a baby buried shallowly, dug up by animals; not the one rape and the many beatings—nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair. Her hair betrayed her expectance of happiness. And where would she find this happiness? Ah, b’eretz: in the Land. Milliners, she had been informed by the Emissary from the Underground, barely concealing his disgust . . . Milliners were not precisely what the Land required. Do you think we wear chapeaux while feeding our chickens, Giverit? Perhaps you intend to drape our cows with silken garlands. Sitting on a wooden chair, hands folded in her lap, she told him that she would change careers with readiness, transform herself into a milkmaid, till the fields, draw water, shoot Arabs, blow up Englishmen. Then she leaned toward this lout of a pioneer. “But if cities arise b’eretz, and commerce, and romance—I’ll make hats again.” He looked at her for a long time. Then he wrote her name on his list. Now she was waiting for the summons.
Meanwhile she typed applications for other Persons. Belgium had recently announced that it would take some. Australia also. Canada too. America was still dithering about its immigration laws, although the Lutheran Council of the American Midwest had volunteered to relocate fifty Persons, not specifying agricultural workers, not even specifying Lutherans. But how many tailors could this place Minnesota absorb?
She typed an application, translating from the Yiddish handwriting. Name: Morris Losowitz; yes, she knew him as Mendel but Morris was the proper Anglicization. Age: 35; yes that was true. Dependents: Wife and three Children; yes that was true too, though it ignored the infant on the way. Occupation: Electrical Engineer. In Poland he had taught in a Cheder. Perhaps he knew how to change a light bulb. Languages Spoken in order of Fluency: Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English. Strictly true. He could say I Want To Go To America, and maybe a dozen other words. His wife spoke better English, was more intelligent; but the Application wasn’t curious about her.
Ida typed on and on. The afternoon darkened further. Her own overhead light bulb shook on its noose. In the Big Hall above her ceiling raged a joyous battle: walls were being decorated, the camp’s orchestra was practicing, the Purimspielers were perfecting their skits.
She stopped, and covered her typewriter with the remnants of a tallis. She locked the office and went into the courtyard. Two members of the DP police stood there, self-important noodles. They grinned at her. She passed children still playing in the chill dark. She entered the East Building. What a din: groups of men, endlessly arguing. And those two Hungarian sisters, always together, their hands clasped or at least their knuckles touching. She’d heard that they accompanied each other into the toilet. In the first Room there was a vent to the outdoors and somebody had installed a stove, and always a cabbage stew boiled, or a pot of onions, and always washed diapers hung near the steam, never getting entirely dry. Hers was the next Room, hers the first cubicle, a nice old lady slept in the bed above, preferring elevation to the rats she believed infested the place, though there had been no rats since the visit of a Sanitary Squad from the British Zone. But the lady expected their return, and never left her straw mattress until midafternoon.
She was up and about now, gossiping somewhere. From beneath the bed Ida dragged a sack and dumped its contents onto her own mattress—a silk blouse, silk underwear, sewing utensils, glue, and a Wehrmacht helmet, battered and cracked. And Cellophane; Cellophane wrappers; dozens of Cellophane wrappers, hundreds of Cellophane wrappers; some crushed, some merely torn, some intact, slipped whole from the Lucky Strikes and Camels that they had once protected . . . She began to work.
Sonya, ejected from her office by the solicitous Ida, had only pretended to be taking a walk. When out of the range of the office window she doubled back to the South Building. Two women in South were near their time, though neither was ready to be transported to the Lying-In Bungalow. In their Room they were being entertained by three men rehearsing a Purimspiel: a Mordecai with a fat book, an Ahasuerus in a cloak, and a Fool, in a cap with a single bell. A Fool? The Purimspiel had a long connection to the commedia dell’arte, Roland had mentioned. This Fool played a harmonica, the King sang Yedeh hartz hot soides—Every heart has secrets—and Mordecai, his book open, rocked from side to side and uttered wise sayings.
Sonya next went to the storehouse. Someone had stolen a carton of leftover Hanukah supplies donated by a congregation in New Jersey. Not a useful donation—the Camp would be disbanded by next December, every resident knew that for a fact, all of them would be housed comfortably in Sydney, Toronto, New York, Tel Aviv... Still, shouted the Person in charge, this is a crazy insult, stealing from ourselves; why don’t we rob the swine in the village?
The TB hospital next, formerly the Wehrmacht’s stable. The Military Nurse who ran the place snapped that all was as usual, two admissions yesterday, no discharges, X-ray machine on its last legs, what else was new. Her assistants, female Persons who had been doctors Before, were more informative. “Ach, the people here now will sooner or later get better probably,” one said. “They’ll recover, nu, if God is willing, maybe if He isn’t, if He just looks the other way. Choose Life. Isn’t it written?”
Sonya went to her own bedroom. As Camp Directors she and Roland occupied private quarters—a single narrow room with a triple-decker bed. Roland slept on the bottom, Sonya in the middle, once in a while an inspector from Headquarters occupied the top, where else to put him? There was a sink and a two-drawer dresser. Sonya opened the lower drawer and reached into the back. Why should she too not dress up for the Purim Party? Choose Life, Choose Beauty, Choose what all American women long for, a little black dress. She grabbed the rolled-up garment she had stashed there two years ago and brought it into the weak light and raised it and shook it.
It unfurled reluctantly. She took off her shirt, slipped the dress over her head, stepped out of her ski pants. The dress felt too large. There was a piece of mirror resting slantwise on the sink—Roland used it for shaving. She straightened it. Then she backed away.
A witch peered at her from the jagged looking glass. A skinny powerless witch with untamed gray hair wearing the costume of a bigger witch.
She had been a free spirit once, she thought she recalled. At the young age of fifty she had dwelled on a Rhode Island beach; she had danced under the moon. She had known the Hurricane. She had lived in a bed-sitter in London and had worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. She had saved some children. She had known the doodlebugs. In a damp pub in 1945 she had accepted Roland Rosenberg’s invitation to run Camp Gruenwasser with him. She had allowed his fat, freckled hand to rest on hers.
She peered closer at the tiny witch in the glass. And then some disturbance in the currents of the air caused the mirror to hurl itself onto the wooden floor. There it splintered.
Roland would have to shave without a mirror. Maybe he’d grow a beard.
She was attempting to pick up the shards when he came in.
“Sonya, stop.” He walked down the hall and fetched the communal broom and dustpan—a large thistle on a stick, a piece of tin. She was sucking her finger when he returned. He looked at the cut. “Run it under water for a long time.” She ran it under water for a long time. When she turned around the damage was swept up, the implements had been returned, and he was lying on the lowest bed, eyes closed, as if it was this recent effort that had exhausted him, not two years of constant toil.
She closed their door. She unbuckled his worn belt. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt. What color had it been originally? It had long ago faded to the yellowish gruenwasser of his eyes. She unbuttoned the cuffs too, but did not attempt to remove the shirt—it was up to him whether or not to take it off; he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? Was he? He had all the vitality of a corpse. But when she roughly rolled down his trousers and pulled them off and rolled down his undershorts and pulled them off, she saw that he was ready for her. When had they done this last—three months ago? Six? For them, as for the Persons, one gray day got sucked into the next. Yet there were joys: letters from relatives thought dead; meat sometimes in the soup; and tonight, a party... She stood and lifted her little black dress over her witch’s body. It ruffled her witch’s coiffure. She left the dress lying on the floor. She straddled Roland’s erection, brushing him back and forth, side to side, until she felt a spurt of her own moisture, and he must have felt it too, for, alert, he gripped her upper arms and turned them both over at once as if they were a single animal, a whale in green flannel maybe. She looked up at him. “Roland, I love you,” she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders, the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. Were these not things to love? Oh, and the kindness. He thrust, thrust, Ah, she said; and even in her pleasure, her witch’s pleasure, she heard the stealthy opening of the door. She turned her head and met Ludwig’s rodent gaze.
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