How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  By the time Roland and Sonya arrived at the Great Hall—a big room with a little stage—the thrown-together orchestra was playing: strings, one trumpet, woodwinds; an accordion, a balalaika; three guitars, one drum. Candles in tin cans were burning side by side on the rim of the stage, and on a ledge around the room, and at the windows. Each thick candle, Sonya noticed, was made up of a clutch of little, twisted candles, the Hanukah kind. There were also several Hanukiahs. A broad table held a mountain of hamantaschen. Another table sagged under bowls of liquid. “Let’s hope no one got hold of the methanol,” said Roland. At another Camp, mostly Polish Persons, two men had gone blind from drinking the stuff.

  Roland was dressed, he claimed, as Dionysius—that is, two sprigs of juniper were pinned to his scant hair, one falling onto his forehead, the other nestling within his humble nape.

  Most costumes were equally rudimentary. Where could Persons get fabric, jewels, gauzy shawls? Yet some had indeed procured such items. A wife had made a royal garment for her husband. It was a short black silk cape, formerly the lining of their only coat. They wouldn’t need a lined coat in Palestine, this loving spouse explained to Sonya. She had adorned the cape with little white fur tails which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins. Several young Mordecais wore, in front of their ears, scholarly coils: the strapping tape from Red Cross packages. One Esther had saved a beaded dress from her dead mother’s wardrobe. Another wore a dirndle skirt and a jersey shirt that said Englewood High School. A Catholic family slipped in shyly wearing Easter finery; after years in a cardboard valise the clothing too seemed to be cardboard. Ludwig and his Uncle Claud had encased their upper bodies in splintery barrels that had held potatoes. Their heads were crowned by circlets of dry leaves. Schwarz Konig was painted on Ludwig’s barrel. Uncle Claud was the White Queen.

  King, Queen, Wise Man, and the occasional hero: cigar stubs identified Churchill, a cigarette holder Roosevelt. No one came dressed as Haman. Haman adorned the yellow walls, though. He was painted in green, painted in black tar, drawn in pencil, cut from brown paper. There were several Hamans in relief, made from a sturdy papier-mâché. “What is this stuff?” Sonya asked the History teacher. “The Stars and Stripes, pulped,” he told her. Many Hamans were rendered feet up, head down. Every one wore a little black mustache.

  The orchestra fluted, blared, strummed. Persons danced, changed partners, danced again. The pile of hamantaschen diminished, was replenished. The two Hungarian sisters entered, hand in hand. A skit was performed in one corner. Ida entered, wearing a hat. A skit was performed on the stage. Someone sang, dreadfully. Three men dragged in the upright piano from the corridor, although the orchestra had specified that it did not require a piano, did not want a piano, certainly could not employ that piano, which was missing seventeen keys. The orchestra leader swiped at one of the three moving men with his baton, an umbrella spoke. Roland intervened. The piano, with bench but without pianist, remained, near the string section. The radiant young man from the South Building entered, wrapped in a blue-and-white tablecloth with permanent stains; Sonya guessed that it too came from Englewood, New Jersey. The philosophy teacher...

  Was that woman Ida? Sonya had never before seen her in lipstick; she must have been hoarding it forever; lucky it hadn’t pulverized. And that brilliant red silk blouse, how come it wasn’t dust . . . Ida blew a kiss to Sonya. Ida asked Mendel to dance. Mendel’s wife, vastly pregnant, smiled acquiescence. Mendel was dressed in a long black jacket whose wide belt bore a buckle covered in silver foil. Sonya guessed his Puritan garb was intended as Lutheran. Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another. It was a heavy cloche with a narrow brim, and it was covered with hundreds of shining bows, or perhaps butterflies, or perhaps ecstatic transparent birds. They caught the light of the candles, transforming that light into ruby twinkles, turqouise wings, flashes of green. Were they silk, those bows butterflies birds? Were they diamonds? Were they real winged creatures? Ida whirled by. Below the iridescent helmet her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck. “We have guests,” Roland said in Sonya’s ear.

  She had been ignoring the three American officers, though she had identified their rank, she had noticed their medals, she had recognized the famous grin. “Roland I am exhausted, my charm whatever there was of it is used up, would you take care of them for a while Roland? And tell them that your wife will be with them shortly.”

  “Wife?”

  “Everybody thinks we’re married, why upset that cart . . .”

  “I wish you were my wife. I would like you to be my wife.”

  “Yes,” she said, acknowledging his wish, maybe even acceding to it; and then she backed up, backed up, until she collided with the accordionist moving forward. The Persons’ orchestra was taking a break. Sonya sat down at the ruined piano.

  She played “You and the Night and the Music.” The missing keys were mostly at either end; the absence of middle A and the B-flat below middle C was a nuisance, but she fudged. She played a Strauss waltz and the waltz from Faust. The smoke thickened like roux. The air in the room was clouded and warm and vital; life itself might have originated in these emanations from burning tobacco. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She played “The Merry Widow.”

  The noise increased. There was some yelling: another skit. She saw Ida waltzing with the General. Ida looked up at him from under her hat. As they turned Sonya saw an inquiring look on her lovely face. As they turned again she saw the look turn into one of admiration. As they turned again she saw the look become one of pleasure.

  “She’s fucking him,” said Ludwig, in English. He had taken off his Black King’s barrel; he was seated on the bench beside her; he smelled of brandy. “I am employing a metaphor,” he explained.

  The General danced a two-step with Ida’s cubicle-mate, the little old lady who came alive at dusk. He danced the Kazachok with a group of Ukrainians. He danced another waltz with Ida. And then, twenty minutes later, Sonya and Roland and Ludwig and Ida and a dozen others stood at the gates to wave good-bye to the jeep carrying the three officers. The General touched his cap—handsome headgear, really, with all that gold insignia, but no match for Ida’s.

  Sonya predicted that the Camp’s rations would soon increase, but they did not. She hoped that Ida might get a private gift—silk stockings, maybe—but nothing appeared. She even thought that the new immigration act would be rushed through the United States Congress.

  “It was only a dance,” shrugged Ida.

  “Two dances. And you were ravishing.”

  “He’s a soldier,” Ida sighed. “Not a king.”

  But then something did happen. The allotment of cigarettes per Person was officially increased, but the augmented allotment was not to be distributed (a formal letter ordered) but to remain in the disposition of the Directors. And that, Sonya and the newly bearded Roland discovered, was enough to change things significantly—to get butter, milk, greens, sanitary napkins; to buy a sow, which enraged some but fed others; to pay a glazier from the village to fix broken windows; to procure gas for mendicant trips to Frankfurt which resulted in more butter, milk, greens, and sanitary napkins; and finally, with the aid of a bundle of additional dollars contributed by Americans, to enable a sizeable group of Persons to bribe its way overland to Brindisi where waited a boat bound for Haifa.

  One day Mendel’s wife, who had replaced Ida as the Directors’ secretary, handed Sonya a letter.

  “We have reached Palestine,” wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. “We have been saved, again.”

  The Coat

  “Other capitals,” began Roland, and paused for breath as he sometimes did. Sonya waited with apparent serenity. “. . . are in worse shape,” he concluded.

  They were standing on the Pont Neuf, holding hands. All at once they embraced, as if ravaged Paris demanded it.

  Roland Rosenberg was sixty and Sonya Rosenberg was fifty-eight. T
hey had directed Camp Gruenwasser since 1945; but finally the place had been able to close, its last Displaced Persons repatriated to Romania. So the Rosenbergs too had left, traveling westwards on first one train and then another. Each was dressed in prewar clothing, each lugged a single misshapen suitcase. They looked like Displaced Persons themselves; but their American passports gave them freedom, and their employment by the Joint Distribution Committee gave them cash.

  Paris was giving them dusty cafés, a few concerts with second-rate performers, black bread, and this old bridge called New. Recovering from their embrace, they turned again toward the river. “The Old World,” said Roland, “is a corpse.”

  Sonya—who had spent the war years in blistered London and the five decades previous in Rhode Island—knew The Old World only by reputation. Cafés, galleries, libraries, chamber recitals; salons de thé; polyglots in elegant clothing conducting afternoon dalliances before returning to one of the great banking houses . . . A derelict barge sailed toward them, sailed under them: thin children without shoes played on its deck.

  On their third day, coming out of a brasserie near the Bastille, Roland suffered a heart attack. He spent a week in the hospital. Sonya sat by his side in a long room with metal cots and wooden floors that, like Camp Gruenwasser’s infirmary, stank of carbolic acid. She displayed an outward calm, she even felt calm—he would survive this attack, the French doctors told her, with emphasis on the this—but she could not prevent her long fingers from raking her long hair, hair that had turned from gray to white during the War and its aftermath.

  When Roland was released they traveled by train to Le Havre and by ship to New York. The Joint got them a place on Lower Fifth.

  It was a meandering apartment with mahogany furniture and gilded mirrors and draperies in a deep red. Circus wagon, Sonya might have called that shade, but she knew that colors had acquired new names since her departure in 1940, almost a decade ago—names borrowed from wines and liqueurs: cassis, port, champagne, chartreuse. The apartment was rent-free—that is, the Joint paid its rent to the regular tenant, who was away in California for a year. At the end of the year Roland and Sonya would find something more to their mutual taste, whatever that turned out to be. At Camp Gruenwasser they had shared an office and then a bedroom; they had married six months ago; but they had not yet together made a home.

  Right away Sonya got her hair cut. The actress Mary Martin was playing a Navy nurse in a Broadway show. Mary Martin’s hair was clipped close to the scalp, like a boy’s. All over Manhattan women were trying that coiffure, most of them just once—even the prettiest face looked plain without surrounding fluff. But the cropped style suited Sonya’s long head and steady eyes. “You’re always beautiful to me,” said Roland when she came nervously home from the beauty shop. The effect of his declaration was stronger because of the flatness of its tone. “I’ll love you until the day I die,” he added, again without emotion; and she knew that to be true too. Let the day be slow in coming, she thought, again smelling the carbolic of the hospital.

  Roland’s skin was still pasty but he was less often short of breath—a new medicine was helping. The Joint kept asking him to make speeches; well, of course, who knew more about the plight of European Jews during the previous two decades; who could judge better the situation of those who were left on the continent; who could better suppose the future. He came home from speechgiving with his shirt moist. Thank God the apartment building had an elevator.

  The apartment’s permanent tenant was a woman, they thought—they judged partly from the four-poster’s silk spread, creamy yellow. Eggnog? There was a crumpled lace-trimmed handkerchief in the back of one of the dresser drawers; it smelled of perfume. The tenant read German; German books were everywhere. “She is German,” concluded Sonya.

  “Or Austrian or Swiss,” said Roland. “Or Lithuanian.”

  “She’s no Litvak,” Sonya insisted, helplessly remembering Baltic Persons shivering in Gruenwasser’s underheated barracks. “She’s an aristocrat.”

  “There are Lithuanian aristocrats,” began the reasonable man; but Sonya was already enumerating the signs of hoch culture: millefleur paperweights; framed eighteenth-century drawings; volumes of Rilke and Novalis; a shelf of novels in French. And the family photographs on the desk: a bespectacled father, a finefeatured mother—how would she fare with a Mary Martin chop?—five blonde daughters in the loose children’s dresses of the twenties. The photographs seemed unposed—perhaps a favorite uncle had taken them, Roland suggested. The girls, very young, played in a garden; mountains rose in the distance. Slightly older, they occupied a living room—three lolled on a couch, another sat at a piano, the littlest looked out the window. At the foot of a gangplank the entire family stood close together, as if bundled. They were all in coats except for the father, who carried his over his arm. Mama wore an asymmetrical hat. The girls—teenagers now—wore cloches.

  “They got out in time,” said Roland.

  “They’re not Jewish. Intellectuals, though, liberals . . .”

  “National Socialism had no use for them. Which one is our landlady, do you think?”

  Sonya peered at the faces, alike but different—one wore glasses, one had very full lips . . . Roland coughed, touched his chest. “The curly one,” Sonya decided.

  And so, the identity of their more-or-less landlady more-or-less established, they turned to other things. Roland’s job at the Joint kept him busy, and Sonya was playing hausfrau and taking long walks. She got to know the butcher, the grocer, the fishmonger. She was a steady customer at the hardware shop and the lending library and the dry cleaning establishment. She patronized a coffee shop on Fourth Avenue, and established an ersatz friendship with its proprietress. Through the Joint she and Roland met apprehensive immigrants and were kind to them. And Sonya made two real friends: women who’d known one of her cousins—a jewelry designer on the East Side, a social worker on the West. Sometimes, on weekends, Sonya and Roland went to the movies with these women and their husbands, or out to a restaurant. Normal life, she exulted. She thought of Ida, the Camp secretary, maybe safe in Israel née Palestine, maybe killed by mortar fire.

  There was an armoire in the room they called the study. Sonya had stored her few summer dresses in the right side of it, and Roland’s one summer suit. He had a winter suit, too. Insufficient; the Joint asked him to provide himself with a tuxedo at its expense. He was more and more in demand as a speaker, requested now by organizations of wealthy philanthropists, not just Zionists and Socialists. Roland reluctantly bought a tuxedo at Macy’s and Macy’s altered it to fit. It was delivered on a Saturday.

  “I’ll hide it in that armoire,” he said. “And I’ll hope that I don’t ever have to pull it out, that those fellows find somebody else to harangue them. Just thinking of their dinners I get heartburn,” and he groaned in his easy chair.

  “Don’t get up; I’ll put it away,” said Sonya quickly.

  She opened the left door of the armoire; and held the tuxedo high, like a lamp. It was shrouded in the new element plastic. She attempted to hang it, and encountered resistance. Something was already hanging there. She opened the right door and thrust the tuxedo among the summer clothes. Then she took down the something.

  It was a long black narrow coat of soft wool. It was doublebreasted: buttons on its right side, buttonholes on its left, and so—she had to look down at her own striped cotton blouse to be sure—it was a coat designed for a man. It had a shawl collar of fur—brown fur, mink probably. Her friend the jewelry designer had a mink jacket, its glossy hairs similar to this. There was a producer who lived on West End Avenue; Sonya had seen him in his famous mink greatcoat.

  She peeked into the living room. Roland was dozing now, the newspaper in disarray across his lap. She took the coat from the wooden hanger and, carrying it across her two extended arms, brought it into the bedroom.

  There she put it on. The stripes of her blouse peeped between the crescents of fur like some oth
er species. This coat needed a brandy-colored silk scarf costing perhaps one month of Roland’s salary, perhaps two. A bit of black would suffice. She reached into her middle drawer, pulled out a black slip, draped it within the collar. There.

  Women’s slacks were just catching on. They were not generally for street wear, unless the streets were in the Village. Sonya had adopted them enthusiastically. They suited her long stride. She could buy men’s pants off the rack. She was wearing black trousers today, and oxfords.