That would be good for them. They shouldn’t learn to love so much her baking; it was bad for later. Larry was growing now, of course, and he could eat more steadily even than his father, but they taught him how to eat slow. It was a challenge, with a ten-year-old boy, to teach him to slow down! Fruit was good for eating slow. Pavel was careful about his eating, no matter how trim he was. And she too. They taught their children well. Finish what you eat, but eat slow. It was better for the digestion. Also one didn’t gain so much. Not that she prepared so many heavy foods. Cookies and cakes were the only exceptions.
Fela did not love to cook. She loved to bake. Pavel had a nostalgia for stuffed derma, but she could perform only a poor imitation of her mother’s recipes, and besides, too much meat limited her baking to cakes without dairy in order to keep the home kosher. She would bring the dairyless cookies with her for holiday dinners at the home of Pavel’s sister Hinda, and Hinda would scold her sons for eating too many. Fela and Hinda did not feel a warmth toward each other, even from the first, when Hinda was still a bitter girl without a mother or a sister or even a friend to guide her through womanhood and marriage. Hinda had married before Fela and Pavel, and no doubt Hinda had disapproved of the morals in the house near the DP camp, Fela and Pavel sharing a bed before signing a marriage contract. But that was not all of it. Hinda took herself away from everyone but her husband—to that neighborhood in Long Island, not a single acquaintance from Europe. Hinda did not like reminders, not even of the time in Germany after the war.
Fela was different. She had drawn an internal line and kept herself calmly on the side of the new life. Her mouth and face and hands no longer felt strange to her. For all Hinda’s clucking at the cakes, Fela still looked all right, although she felt she could lose two or three kilos. They had come upon her in the last year, without her noticing until summer, when she pulled the slim beige strap of her open-toed mules over her pedicured feet and felt herself teetering at the knees, the extra weight pushing down on her ankles.
As for Pavel, he noticed his own appearance more than hers. Every morning since they came to the United States she would watch him from their bed getting dressed. It fascinated her, the unwrapping of the phylacteries from his arms and forehead, his daily choice of shirt, his struggle to put on his specially made shoes, one stacked higher than the other to balance the limp. She would lie curled, breathing steadily, feigning sleep as he knotted his necktie in the mirror, pulled his jacket onto his narrow chest, and then stopped to stare at himself. Sometimes he would stare thirty seconds, sometimes almost five minutes. She knew what he saw. Scarred body, dented face, worn skin hanging below his thinning black hair. But his clothing was fresh, the shirt pressed but soft, the tie subtly patterned to complement the suit. He drove the children crazy on the way out the door, smacking their winter coats with a lint brush, refusing to acknowledge that once outside for five minutes they would accumulate far more debris than he could scrape off in the few moments before the rush out of the apartment to school.
THERE WAS A COMMOTION at the pool. Fela could see a small group of adults in a half-circle and two boys chasing each other, trying to steal a glimpse of the scandal within. She walked faster, her paper bag of oranges and apples tapping her thighs in an assuring rhythm. Nothing has happened, nothing has happened, she thought to herself, the words coming into her brain slowly, then accelerating. Nothing has happened, nothing has happened, God willing, nothing has happened.
“Mrs. Mandl! Here she is!”
The phrases in Fela’s head stopped even as her legs began to run, the inner soles of her mules slapping against the bottoms of her feet, the edges of her toes scraping against the gravel, then the concrete, then the tiles surrounding the pool. She pushed at the women in their half-circle, at the small damp girls crowded by the lounge chairs, she pushed, she didn’t know what or where she pushed, but she heard again, this time softer, the American woman’s voice that had called her name:
“Now don’t worry, Mrs. Mandl, really, don’t worry. She’s okay.”
Blood trailed down Helen’s temples.
“Oy, Gott!” Fela whispered, her breath cold against her teeth. “Oy, Gott!”
Her hair—her child’s hair! was dark and matted, thick with blood, more blood.
“Mein kind!” she cried. “Oy, Gott!”
“Mrs. Mandl!” Another voice, from the direction of Helen. Fela saw suddenly, even as she reached out to grab her daughter’s hand, to touch her daughter’s pink and swollen skin, that Helen sat in the lap of a large woman whose round face bubbled out from behind large brown sunglasses. Fela looked at the woman with confusion. A man stood over the two of them, wiping the back of Helen’s head with a bright white bandage quickly soaking with red, a wave of blood spreading as if through a snowdrift on a narrow cobbled street, but no, there was no snow, there was no snow, Fela turned her head to look past the plump legs of the women to the pool, it was summer, it was New York, there was no snow, but the pool was suddenly filled with dark red water, blood, no, it was blue, it was a pool, the municipal pool of Jackson Heights where she took her children each Saturday in summer, it was summer, and she was looking at the face of her five-year-old daughter, who had stopped her crying and was talking to her in English.
“Don’t worry, Ma, don’t worry.”
“Heads always bleed a lot! Nothing bleeds like a head!” It was the man speaking, his hand lifting and twisting Helen’s hair, rubbing his dark bandage on the child’s scalp. “She won’t even need stitches!”
“Stitches!” cried Fela.
“Mrs. Mandl!” repeated the woman, holding Helen by the waist. “Don’t get hysterical. It will only upset her.”
But what is it? What happened? My God, dear God, what happened?
The man smiled at her. “No speak English?” he asked. “Doctor.” He pointed to his bag, then clapped a hand to his chest. “Doctor.”
What has happened? What has happened?
“Does anyone around here speak Jewish?” called the large woman in the sunglasses. “Even a few words?”
“There’s no one here today,” said someone in the crowd. “It’s Saturday.”
She looked up for the body attached to the voice, then saw her son was before her, hair damp, shorts dripping, face wet with pool water and tears. She saw her son, and his father’s crumpled face in his, and her chest grew hot, her voice was wailing out, she could feel the wail coming out of her, though when it came out she heard it only in a whisper, What did you do? What did you do?
“She just wants to know what happened.” Larry’s thin voice. “She understands.”
A child started talking, a woman cut him off, then another woman interrupted. Diving, the children had been diving, running and diving, the somersaults the little ones liked to compete over, and Helen had made an acrobatic leap and knocked into the wall of the pool, emerging from the water with a line of blood streaming after her. Larry said not a word, and when Fela found it in herself to look at his face, to accuse him, he was looking down at his feet, at Helen’s feet, at the cement walk on which the crowd stood.
“Kids get hurt,” said the woman holding Helen. “It happens. Now, sit in that chair. Go, sit.”
The doctor nodded. “Let Dr. Velasco play hairdresser with your daughter another minute.”
Helen giggled.
Fela moved over to a lounge chair, Larry following. The women and children had dispersed, only one woman standing by, a soft smile on her face. Fela smiled back.
“It’s okay, everything okay,” Fela said. Perhaps the neighbor would turn away. But she stayed. Fela feigned a look of concentration as she watched the doctor’s hands, the slim bottle of ointment he twisted open and poured on yet another bandage, then moved her eyes down to his wide feet in brown sandals, to Helen’s own feet and legs, her little waist wrapped in damp nylon, the pink and yellow flowers of her bathing suit.
They had no idea, these children. No idea what it took to bring them into the wo
rld. If they knew, they could not risk everything in this way, diving against a mother’s wishes, running, screaming, hitting, scratching—almost, God forbid, choking each other!—they knew nothing of what it took. If they knew even a half, even a quarter, even a tenth, they would not dare.
No one knew but a mother.
And a mother had to keep quiet, had to stop herself from screaming in fear at every moment. This Fela was good at. When Larry was born in the DP camp hospital Fela herself had kept her words inside her, had kept her groans incomprehensible and controlled, for she had heard the stories, of other women in childbirth crying out, screaming, even three years after the liberation, even four, in the delirium of pain, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby.
Fela closed her eyes.
When Pavel learned of this he would want them to go to synagogue for weeks. No. She would stand firm. It was too hot in the summer for prayer. Job’s wife had screamed at her husband, Curse your god and die! And the wife was right. What kind of husband accepted this pain, the damage coming and coming, until the end of the stupid tale when God presented the mourners with the false new family, the lie of peace after all the suffering, the lie that the new family itself would not suffer its own wounds? No one was exempt, no matter how much one had suffered before or how much one prayed now. It was the opposite, yes, the opposite.
Her son was speaking to her. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault.”
“Larry,” she answered.
“It’s my fault,” he repeated. Then he looked up at her. “I’m the worst person in the world.”
“Larry,” she said again, watched him put his face in his hands. She should touch him, comfort him, but he was using his own words for comfort. It’s my fault, I’m the worst person in the world. Did not this make one feel safer than the random truth, that a mother turning away caused blood to flow, that an inch more forward and Helen would have emerged from the pool laughing, blowing out air, spitting water at her brother?
She should touch his anguished face, but instead her voice was loud again, crying at him in Yiddish: Why? Why? Why did you not listen to me? Why did you disobey me? Do you think you are another mother, another father? You are a child, you obey!
“I’m sorry,” said Larry in English, crying. “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, choked on a word, then gurgled out: “I’m the worst person in the world.”
“Yes,” she answered him. “You are. The worst person in the world.” The words sounded good, hard, powerful, precise. She said it again, this time in Yiddish, with deliberation, the power of her voice startling her, relieving her.
He stopped crying and looked at her, his face wet and small, astonished. The worst in the world: her son. Fela’s brother, her youngest brother Lieb after whom her son was named, had been like Larry, so sensitive, so soft. There had been a time in her own youth when the children had run the lives of their parents, smuggling and trading, maneuvering for news and plans. But no more. Inside her swelled a sudden pity, pity for her son, her sweetheart, as they said in English, her little king. They thought they commanded everything. When she was a child she almost did not have permission to speak to an unaccompanied young man in her father’s store. But what had all the strictness accomplished? It had driven out her older sister to a kibbutz in Palestine, long before the war, and it had driven Fela herself out to the arms of a young man, her first love, when the Germans crossed into eastern Poland. But she had not done what she did to punish her father, or to make politics. She had left the home and fled to Russia for love. Her beloved had been arrested and disappeared, and their infant had died, but she had lived. Perhaps love had saved her life, as politics had saved her only surviving sister’s, taking them out of the town that was destroyed, every person, every baby.
And now, with her errands, with her impatience, with her need for silence and privacy, she had turned away from them and risked everything, stupid, stupid, as if she knew as little as her children about all the blood and torn flesh through which they had passed to enter this world. But she did know. Her son did not. Little man. Always trying to be good, and yet suffering the world’s punishments and random accidents, just like his parents.
Her pity made her speak again. She would cover over her cruelty, she would wash it away. Don’t worry, she said in Yiddish, don’t worry, my child. Helcha is all right.
She caressed her son’s head without looking.
Family Business
October 1961
ON THE TABLE BETWEEN them lay a bolt of silk the color of dark wheat. Pavel’s old friend Fishl Czarny had delivered the material straight to Pavel, a remnant from a manufacturer going out of business. For the first time in several weeks, perhaps longer, Pavel felt calm, his bad leg stretched out to the side, his hand caressing the cloth, taking in the fineness of the weave. The silk could make a lining for a dozen suit jackets, and with an important contract for a small retailer due in two weeks, the order would be completed with a touch of elegance.
His brother-in-law was speaking to him. “I go down to get a soup,” Kuba said. “Should I bring you a coffee?”
Why the pretense of English when they were alone? Pavel thought. It was a battle they fought silently every day, each trying to last as long as possible in the language of his choosing, as if Kuba were afraid of his mother tongue, as if Pavel would be able to teach him otherwise. But Pavel was in a good mood today, and his brother-in-law would not spoil it. He could be generous for a moment, he thought, and reply to Kuba in English. “Beautiful, no?”
Kuba’s round face was a mask. He said, “What have we given away for it?”
Pavel sighed. He was not angry, but he might become angry, and it was stupid to enter an argument without full command of one’s words. He answered in Yiddish. I don’t give away. I make business. Shouldn’t he have a suit from us, for all he does?
So he deals in fabric now? Kuba relented halfway, spoke in Polish.
He has a friend, yes, who has occasion to supply—take a look! What it will add to the Steiner order! Pavel spread the silk across his palm and wrist, stretched out his arm toward Kuba.
It’s the bartering that I don’t like. Like peddlers in a village. We can’t account well for it.
What is to account? There is no man I trust more.
Ah. Kuba looked at him, half-cold, half-hurt. Of course.
But Pavel didn’t regret his words. Of course! Of course! He was with me in—
Yes, yes, I know, Kuba interrupted.
He’s a religious man! More, he is a loyal—he and I—
“I have not yet eaten,” Kuba said. “Do you want I should bring you a coffee?”
No, said Pavel. No—I—He was standing, he suddenly realized. “No, thank you,” he said, slowly, to make himself calm. “No.”
He stood another moment after Kuba had left. Another argument was coming, this time about the space for the shop. Pavel wanted to lease from the landlord the space next door when they expanded. Kuba hated their location, a few blocks north of the garment district, on crowded Forty-sixth Street near the electronic shops and jewelry dealers. But Pavel loved it. He liked being outside the center, apart and distinctive. And in the seven years he had been in New York, seven lean years after the hell of waiting four years after his accident for new visas, he had made for himself a skill not just in cutting but in handling cloth, and had built for the family a network of connections with his friends in the nearby businesses. So what if they were outside the main pole? They made for themselves another small pole, catering to people who made their money on other things, who introduced Pavel to luxuries at a discount, a slim chain for his wife, a good wallet for himself, and the watch for his nephew, his sister’s firstborn. Could Kuba have forgotten the watch? Even if Pavel had to push himself up the narrow staircase to his shop and office, grasping the railing with one hand and his cane with the other, even if on occasion the accountant next door complained of the noise made by the steamer and sewing machine
s, the location was ideal.
But nothing was too good for Kuba. Even if here they were more secure, with cheaper rent and plenty of customers who found them convenient, Kuba wanted something in the center. On occasion they went together to the wholesale dealers and damp workrooms on Seventh Avenue to look at the shops of some of their suppliers, and Pavel could sense Kuba looking at the jobbers’ shop floors with a bit of envy. He knew what Kuba longed for, a view every day of workers bent over long rows of wood and metal, a factory setting, where every item that changed hands was exchanged for money, American dollars, not favors or promises of future assistance from a button dealer or a ribbon salesman fallen on hard times.
Kuba made good accounts of the ledger books, and he oversaw Enzo’s tailoring with as much authority as was credible for someone with not too much expertise. He claimed to know textiles from his childhood, but the story seemed always to change, always to put Kuba, with each revision of the tale, in a wealthier, happier position before the war. The history was part of Kuba’s argument, that it was natural for him to oversee a group of workers. But Pavel did not like that image, everyone in a row at a long table, sweating and squinting, the buzz of machines like a broken orchestra. He did not like it. He preferred the family business small and customized, selling to his friends and his friends’ friends, people who knew they would be purchasing an expert suit often altered from someone else’s manufacture, once in a while stitched on their own as contract for another company. That was why he managed the relationships with suppliers and redrew the designs from their oral specifications, because they trusted him. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone. Sometimes people brought in suits purchased elsewhere, because Freddy in the shop knew how to fix it just so, not just with the machine, but by hand. Was there something better? How would their little shop stand out among the bigs on Seventh Avenue?
If we moved there, Kuba would argue, we could be big.
Displaced Persons Page 14