The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

by Polly Horvath

  “Loz mich tzu ru. Go away, I’m busy being sick,” said Mrs. Mendelbaum.

  “What in the world is that?” It looked as if she was happily drinking a bottle of shoe polish.

  “My friend Sophie sends me six bottles of her cough medicine when she sends my things. A secret recipe from the shtetl. So, does she think I am going to spend my days coughing? But she says all the women in the shtetl keep it so on their shelves. For emergencies. For their nerves. For childbirth. Who should have such nerves?”

  “Really, I wouldn’t if I were you, Mrs. Mendelbaum. You never know what’s in these herbal doodads. Not regulated.”

  “I should cough myself into a coma? Go away, I am sick.”

  “Yes, I know you’re sick now, Mrs. Mendelbaum, but you don’t plan to be sick the week before Christmas, do you? When you should be cooking.”

  “How should I know?” asked Mrs. Mendelbaum. “Now I am sick. Later, who can say? Do you think this is sickness that I want? Who would want such a thing?”

  “Oh dear,” I said. You just never knew what was going to set her off. “I don’t mean to inconvenience you, but you don’t really mind cooking when you’re sick, do you? I’ve bought a goose.”

  “A goose. You want me to cook a goose?”

  “Well, it isn’t very good raw, I would imagine.”

  “How do I know now whether or not I will be too sick to cook a goose when the time comes?”

  “Well, you can’t be sick forever, I mean, can you?”

  “Az a yor ahf mir, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

  I really hated it when she called me Mr. Smarty Pants. It seemed to me that if someone was paying you for doing nothing but lying around being sick, the least you could do was not call him names.

  “Well, you could, um, you could RALLY! That’s what you could do, Mrs. Mendelbaum. People do rally. They rally all the time. They rally do. Hahaha. Or you could cook while sick. I suppose people must do that, too. Especially people who live alone. Otherwise they would all die, wouldn’t they?”

  “What? Cook when I’m sick? You should eat food cooked by a sick person? And for Christmas? Who knows from cooking geese? A nice chicken maybe and a few latkes.”

  “I don’t even know what those are,” I said briskly. “Anyhow, I’ve made a very careful list of just the right kind of Christmas foods. The goose, of course, we’ve already discussed that.” Discussing the menu made me feel like the lord of the manor. Usually these days I felt completely out of control in my own house. It irked me. “Chestnut stuffing, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts amandine, a plum pudding, a trifle, and a bûche de noël. I’m not married to the Brussels sprouts amandine. You could do them up any way you like. With mint, for instance. There’s someplace I’ve left you scope for imagination, Mrs. Mendelbaum, if that gives you any pleasure.”

  “Why should Brussels sprouts give me pleasure? Lying on a desert island having my toes sucked, that should give me pleasure, too, I suppose.”

  “Please, Mrs. Mendelbaum, let’s try to focus on the menu,” I said.

  “These starlets, with their fancy-shmancy pedicures, so they should lie in the sand having their toes sucked. This is a life?”

  “Please,” I repeated. It seemed that not only would Mrs. Mendelbaum not cook, she wouldn’t even talk about it.

  “My friend Sophie sends me movie magazines. Such things to amuse me when I’m ill. Humdinger brings them to me. Go to a hospital, Zisel, she begs me.”

  “You’re not thinking of leaving us, are you, Mrs. Mendelbaum?” I asked worriedly. “Before cooking Christmas dinner?”

  “And what’s all this about bushes? Making a bush? You want me to cook a bush? What kind of strange goyishe rite is this?” croaked Mrs. Mendelbaum, putting her hands to her ears, but appearing to talk more to herself than to me. “The waltzes have begun again in my ears. Oh, please go away. I hear Viennese waltzes again. Ach, go, go. A kabaret forshtelung in my head. Go.”

  “Poor woman is delirious,” I said to myself, going out and closing the door and then, on second thought, sliding my menu under it. She could study it in her own time.

  MRS. MENDELBAUM

  AM I GOING CRAZY? I think I am better becoming, my fever, it has gone, and just a bit of the cough left, and I begin to see him, my Ansel, my gelibteh, and the café in Vienna where we met. I do not mean I imagine such things, that I see them in my mind’s eye and my memory. No, to me they become real. My bedroom becomes the café and there I sit, young, stylish, in my new black skirt and the black stockings with the clocks on them. Oh such stockings, I have not had a pair like them since. Vienna then was what, so full of intrigue. Such a place. Like overripe fruit, it smells of things that are too much, too easily gotten by some, the table full of fruit that rots because the ones who are allowed it have more than even their appetites will allow for. It frightens my mother, I see, this Vienna, but I am young, I am aware, but it does not seem that anything could happen to the young like me.

  And as I see the café again, so clearly, I begin to think as I have not for so many years, in German again. It was skating on thin ice to go to the café alone like this with my cigarettes and coffee. There was talk that I would not be allowed to do so much longer. That even if such a thing were not declared, I might disappear and no one in the police would bother to find out how. Like playing in traffic, was what it was. After your mother had told you not to. That’s why it was so exciting, of course. But it wasn’t really as exciting as it could have been because I wasn’t pretty enough to be taken much notice of and I didn’t dare wear the kind of makeup that would have made me more noticeable and my hair was all wrong. It still hung all the way down my back, and even if I put it up it didn’t have the look of the sophisticated new perms. All it said about me was newly out of mama’s house but not really a woman yet, not interesting, not even really that pretty. Just young and innocent, which attracted certain types, but I could always tell the types, they always approached as if their own black clouds of intentions pulsed like heartbeats beneath the surface, they were rotting in their own ways, and when I saw them coming, I quickly sent them on their way.

  I should have stayed out of the cafés probably, but it was the only place where I could go to be alone. Our house was full of my sisters and brothers and family members who had escaped other places where Jews were being treated even worse. So much worse sometimes, according to the newly arrived, that we didn’t know whether to believe their stories. There was a haze everywhere, elusive like smoke, of bad things that might happen to us. I was young and full of hope and didn’t want to hear about these bad things, so when I had had enough I would put on all my finest things and come and sit in the café as if I could find the truth of a happier future for myself. I knew unsavory things were happening everywhere, not just to the Jews, even here in the back room of the café. No one made any attempt to hide them from a young innocent girl like me, no, I knew that they thought if I didn’t want to see such things I should stay out of Viennese cafés. It was as if suddenly there was a license for those who did not have to worry about their futures to let loose their beasts, you could see them almost, their snarly bestial heads poking out of their chests, the other that they could be. Are we all like that, I wondered. If Father did not have to worry, would there be a beast in him, too? In me? If we knew we could have control of other people, would we use it? Why not? What, after all, would make us different?

  I began to see that everywhere there was either the doomed surrender of the preyed upon or the strange ecstasy of those dark figures coming into power and the kind of madness that ensued as people tried forbidden fruits and more and more strangers knocked on my mother’s door with stories of atrocities elsewhere. Everyone could feel tensions building. Bad things coming. “All we have left is sitzfleish,” said my mother worriedly. Patience that can endure sitting. But I was very young and I preferred the ugliness of the predators to the kind of pessimism I was seeing at home with my own people. I was tired of it, everyone talking
of escape but no one leaving. Why not then go out and have a good time? And more and more men were looking at me as standards loosened, slipped, as I came into the café time and again. What was I offering them, they wondered. I could see I excited just enough curiosity by coming again and again, by sitting alone. Anything that elicited curiosity, that titillated in any way, hooked these men, for a small time at least. They won’t look when, if my uncle is right, we are all treated differently as Jews. If, as he predicts, bad things are to happen. Then they will not see me at all. Then I will go from being unseen to not being at all and I am young, I have not yet been, and if I am not to be in the future, I will be now. I will not sit quietly afraid in the house when I have not yet had a life.

  One dark November before the Christmas lights would brighten the gloomy streets again, just as I finished the dregs in my tiny china cup and stubbed out my cigarette, a man came in. He was small and neat and beautiful with bright eyes, and he was stopping for directions, but then he saw me, so he ordered coffee and sat at the bar drinking it and looking shyly at me—I have never seen eyes like that—until I signaled the waiter and ordered another cup, too, although it was time for me to go. And then I did something no lady should, I went boldly to the bar and invited this man to come sit at my table.

  “Cousin! To find you here!” I said to the man because the waiter was eyeing us curiously. I had never been so bold.

  “Ah, you remember me, your cousin Ansel, I thought you might not,” he said, taking his coffee carefully to my table and pulling out my chair.

  “Yes, but do you remember your cousin Zisel?” I asked.

  “Of course, and I remember how you love cake,” said Ansel and ordered pieces for both of us, sending the curious waiter away.

  And as it was getting on into evening the small band came in and began, as they always did at this hour, before being replaced by raunchier acts, the waltzes, and the sound of waltzes tinkled out into the lights of the street, drawing in more and more people until the café filled but we didn’t notice, my Ansel and I. Not that night or ever again so long as we were together. And the world slipped away bit by bit. Ansel took me from Vienna to Canada because he knew, too, that bad things would begin happening and it would soon be harder if not impossible to go. And he was not like my family. He would not just wait it out. My mother begged me to wait with the rest of them until they were sure, perhaps things would not be so bad, perhaps stories were exaggerated, this was their home, but Ansel was sure and I was sure of Ansel. And because my family would not go with us, Ansel and I left without them, and I thought over and over how I was the one who did not want to listen to the warnings but I was the one to go, and the rest of them, who talked of nothing else, stayed. But I must admit I thought little of them after I left. For me, the whole world had become Ansel.

  When last I heard of my family, years after coming to Canada—because at the time there was never any word, too many had been displaced, lost, died, no one really knew, it was better to wait until news came to you, it was better not to spend too much time thinking: the possibilities were too many and too horrible—it was a friend of a distant cousin who would tell me definitely that they were all gone, all those in my household who had waited too long, put in camps, not even in the same camps mostly but spread out, far apart, to die. Some of the family members, this friend thought, had ended up together, but she couldn’t tell me which ones. She had only heard rumors that some had been together. She had been at a camp herself but not with any family. Better that way, this woman thought. She longed for familiar faces but soon she saw it was better not to see those faces dying before you. It was lonely, yes, but better to imagine them with hope, she thought. Maybe not. Maybe to be together would be comfort to all. Maybe there was no better any which way. Oh well, for sure, Zisel, though, all gone. That she knew for sure. There were networks. People worked hard to pass on news. It was all they could do now. Did it do any good or just spread misery? Perhaps they were beyond all misery. Was there a point you got to beyond misery? She didn’t know. But I could not speculate with her. I had left my family many years ago in more than one way and made my life with Ansel. And the family friend was only envious when she saw how little it affected me. It would be heaven to be so unaffected, she said. Ich zol azoy vissen fun tzores, she said, and moved on.

  Even after I got this news I was too busy to think of them, my dead parents, my dead brothers and sisters. I had babies one after the other, such blessings, and we lived in a bubble together for many years, safe, it seemed, in Canada. Safe forever. This would be my life forever. It did not occur to me that this, too, would pass. There were no Nazis but there was still death. It was not only Nazis who separated families. One by one, they died. Ansel first, then my four boys, one by one, cancer, a car accident took two, and finally my Menachem, my kaddishel. As if everything that had happened to me from the café until his death had been a long and happy dream. The dream world had been the good one. What had I done with my time in those dream days? I had fed them all. It didn’t seem much, but I knew now it was everything. It was everything my life. Soups and kreplach and matzo balls. All the things I had learned from my mother. The way to add the ingredients to make the dense honey cake substantial yet light. All the formulas for being the way I had learned to be. And yet, I knew who I became did not come from such recipes, it came from Ansel and our boys. But now there was no one to say, ah, only Zisel can make such a light honey cake, the way Ansel had always said it. His way of saying there was only me in the world for him just as for me there had only been him. No one anymore knew what I was making, let alone that only I could make it so. I had been who I was for so many years because I had been so in Ansel’s eyes. It was not that I was wonderful and so he found me so. It was that because he found me wonderful, I was.

  MARTEN KNOCKERS

  “WHAT IS THIS, some kind of rat?” I asked Humdinger because the island was full of rats and now it appeared one was dripping on the carpet.

  “No, that is a dog,” said Humdinger in patient tones.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked in astonishment. A dog, of all things. Were we starting a petting zoo?

  “You told Jocelyn she could have a dog.”

  “I did? I did? Fancy that. But it isn’t even Christmas.”

  “I don’t believe it was a present exactly.”

  “Presents! You know, Humdinger, I’ve been so focused on Christmas accessories and paraphernalia that I completely forgot that people get presents for Christmas. This opens up a whole other catalog-ordering opportunity, now, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve never had anyone to buy presents for. Goodness, what do you want, for instance?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “But you must. You must say. I have no idea what a tall, middle-aged man might desire in the way of Christmas bounty. Do you like neckties? No, you wear that odd kind of collar thing, don’t you? A butler collar, I guess it is. Never knew there was such a thing. So I guess butlers don’t need neckties.”

  “Indeed, neckties are very nicely thought of as Christmas gifts.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I suppose they are. Don’t want any myself. Take that off my list immediately, if you please, Humdinger. Yes, well, how about chocolates? Women love the stuff. I hear butlers like to eat. Most of them are on the portly side, which is to say, fat. And it’s been my observation that fat people love chocolate.”

  “Many people love chocolate, true.”

  “You know this is kind of like being in a musical duet with you, Humdinger, where you repeat or paraphrase the tag line of every stanza. I feel we should put this whole conversation to music. Do you sing, Humdinger?”

  “Regrettably, no.”

  “Pity. Well, I suppose you don’t have a sweet tooth either, eh, Humdinger? The old sweet tooth. The foil of many a butler.”

  “I wouldn’t say sweets were my foil, no.”

  “Well, then perhaps some macadamia nuts. People tend to be either sweet or salty in their snacking
preferences. The old chocolate or nuts choice, I call it. You know, I’ve been reading these Christmas gift catalogs and they do seem to sell an awful lot of macadamia nuts. Expensive. Unusual. Exotic. Hawaiian. But now me, Humdinger, I don’t associate Hawaii with Christmas. Leis, luaus, hula girls doesn’t spell Christmas to me. What you want is snow and reindeer and mistletoe and a lot, really a lot of plum accessories. That’s what you want. That and a Jesus or two in a stable.”

  “One is usually considered sufficient.”

  “Yes, but we’ve got money. Gobs. No use being sufficient when you can be excessive. We’ll have two. That way no one will have to fight over them. Have you ever seen people fighting over a baby Jesus?”

  “I can’t say that I have.” Humdinger started to roll his eyes but stopped. I must say I was surprised. I had never seen him roll his eyes before. It was most unlike him.

  “Oh yes, bloodshed, I assure you. I’m looking back now down that long tunnel to my childhood.”

  “A lot of baby Jesus fights in your youth, were there?” asked Humdinger politely.

  “Well, yes, as in the best of families, of course,” I said. “Bloody things, as I say. My brothers and I would take turns stealing it and hiding it in soap dishes and such. Drove my mother crazy. This way, you see, if anyone feels like stealing it we have a spare for the crèche. Anyhow, one Jesus was clearly not enough. They dispensed with him quickly enough, now didn’t they? Of course, you’ve got to be crazy to volunteer for that job anyway, don’t you? I mean really. Lamb of God, ha. Lamb chops. That’s what they do with lamb. Ever been around during lambing season, Humdinger? All those wonderful lambs running in the field, spring’s miracle, life renewed. Well, they don’t just send them all to Club Med, now do they? So sad and yet so tasty, that should be mankind’s motto. Ha! I don’t consider myself a religious man, Humdinger, but everyone knows the story whether you believe it or not. That whole mess at the end with nailing people up on crosses. Of course, Romans were doing that all the time. Regular weekend entertainment, like going to the movies. You know, I think it would make a good paper that, things people do to entertain themselves on the weekend. I mean that in the larger sense, of course. Weekend metaphorically, yes…”