Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  “I said it was a mere beginning,” Paul said at the same time.

  “Because you spent six weeks on a Hachscharah, I suppose you think it is unnecessary to avail yourself of our training program here. I spoke to Mr. Langley, and he says you have planted yams. You came in February. Now it is September, and you have planted yams. Go away, my friends, and train yourselves. Train, train, train! When you are ready, then come back and we will talk about a homestead.”

  It was November. The rainy season had set in. Ilse stayed in the “Badekabine,” “nesting,” as Paul said, while he put on his mackintosh and went to the settlers’ council. He had, after all, been chosen as one of three representatives to act as liaison between settlers and administration.

  The meeting was a plenary session, held in the mess hall of one of the kitchens, and the mood was one of general complaint. Halsmann had lost two cows from overgrazing his pasture in the drought that had preceded the rain. He complained that Mr. Langley had been riding around the country buying up cattle for the huge Swiss settlement, so that when the Laguna people came with their hard-earned pennies, the Schwarze were asking fancy prices. “They say, ‘That’s what the Americano is paying,’ but when we go to DORSA for three miserable cows, there are no more funds. Meanwhile, our respected representatives, whose job it is supposed to be to look out for our interests, are busy negotiating with Sommerfeld about chairs and tables for Bockmann, here, to open himself a little café in the Batey—”

  “Listen, Halsmann, you loudmouth,” said Bockmann, rising so that he appeared to be thrusting his large bland face into the other man’s red, irate face across the width of the room. “I owned the best café on the Prater Allee, and the Nazis confiscated it, sent me to Theresienstadt, and took my oldest son to Poland, and I’d like to know if I shouldn’t be entitled to five tables and twenty chairs to put up in the grass back of my house.”

  “They took away my slaughterhouse,” said Halsmann, “which supplied half of Frankfurt, and I’d like to know what it would hurt DORSA to give me three miserable cows.”

  “You’ve had three cows, Halsmann. You’ve had six cows. Nine cows,” said Otto Becker. “Listen, I worked in the office. I know exactly how many cows you have had.”

  “Let me tell you,” Bockmann said, “that when I get my tables and chairs I won’t keep coming back for handouts. I happen to know how to run a café.”

  “So that the people in the Batey can sit more comfortably on their fat behinds,” said Neumann, who had recently moved to the Bella Vista homestead and looked sick with worry and overwork.

  “And they, if you please, get their mothers and their brothers brought over here!” Halsmann shouted, looking at little Michel Brauner, who flushed scarlet. “While I, who have been working for thirty hours a day for two years, can’t get a visa for my wife’s parents!”

  Dr. Marchfeld spoke in a chilly, still voice, without rising from his chair. “And you would encourage Sommerfeld’s method for punishing those who are so unfortunate as not to have been settled yet by refusing them the salvation of their nearest relatives. I’d like to remind you, it’s a method that has driven Godlinger out of his mind.”

  Paul, who had been looking from one to the other, stood up. “Gentlemen, if I might have the floor,” he said.

  “Ja, ja, Steiner,” Halsmann said. “You are going to explain the whole thing to us.” Paul felt his mind deliciously clear and his words so easy that he laughed. “Halsmann,” he said, “rest awhile. Let me talk. If I’m not mistaken, we were considering whether DORSA, which has driven the price of cattle out of the range of Halsmann’s pocket (which may or may not be empty as a result of his own mismanagement), should or should not supply Halsmann with three more miserable cows. However, through inattention, I suppose, I lost the thread of the discussion. We seem now to be considering the question of Halsmann’s responsibility for the deportation of Max Godlinger’s wife.…” Looking around him, Paul saw that he had the attention of the assembly. Afterward, Otto Becker put his arm around Paul as they walked out together into the rain, which was still coming down with a steady intensity. “That was telling them, Professor.”

  “Old loudmouth Steiner, eh?” Paul said and laughed. He was looking forward to telling Ilse how he had taken over the meeting, for here at last he had found something he was good at.

  In the barracks, Ilse was lying on the bed.

  “Are you ill?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, no, it’s just that when you’re not doing anything in particular in this ‘Badekabine’ the only thing to do is get into bed—especially when it’s raining outside. Renate was here all afternoon. She has left Michel.”

  “Poor old Michel,” Paul said. “He’s been getting it from all sides today. Halsmann gave him a hard time at the meeting. What excuses did Renate have?”

  “She says that in Berlin Michel was going to be a doctor, but now he’ll never do anything, and she can’t remember why she ever said she would marry him. She’s sorry for him. She cried.”

  “Well, when she dries her eyes,” Paul said, “she can marry Otto.”

  “She says Otto isn’t an intellectual.”

  “Poor Renate, she has swallowed culture and doesn’t know how to digest it.”

  “It’s you she likes, you know,” Ilse said.

  “Me!”

  “I was terrible to her,” Ilse said. “I used to just love to talk about quarrels and boy friends, but all afternoon while she sat here talking I kept wishing she would get off the bed, because I needed the space to put your shirts. Look, I put all the long sleeves together and all the short sleeves, and I rearranged the suitcase to make a space for the baby’s things. And don’t you notice anything? I’ve moved the furniture. The washstand is where the chair used to be and the chair is where the washstand used to be. Don’t you think it makes the room look bigger?”

  That year, the seasons behaved unnaturally. In December, the rain stopped and there was an intense wave of heat. Mr. Langley started a program of instruction in animal husbandry. Paul came back from the sun-struck fields and found Ilse lying on the bed, crying with fright. She said she had been bleeding. “Poor Pauli,” she said, “you look so exhausted, and now I’m worrying you.”

  “Ilselein, I’m just tired, and you’re not worrying me. Where’s the diagram I drew you? You remember what I told you about the baby descending?”

  Ilse said, “Tell me about the first time you saw a baby born.”

  “All right, you lie back.” He told her once again about the first delivery he had attended as a medical student. There had been the laboring woman, the doctor, the nurse, and Paul Steiner the student—four people in the room. And in an instant the baby had come out and there were five people.

  The next day Paul stopped off at the hospital. Dr. Marchfeld said, “Paul, you’re looking green.”

  “You, too! Ilse keeps feeling sorry for me. I’m just tired. Have you ever tried to corral six calves that would rather stay with their mothers? I thought I was going to get used to the heat, but I’m minding it even more this year. Also, we didn’t sleep last night. That’s what I’ve come to ask you about. Erich, why is Ilse bleeding?”

  “All right, old colleague. What does bleeding in the last month of pregnancy suggest to you?”

  “Placenta previa,” Paul said, with the tiny satisfaction of someone producing his credentials in good order; at the same time, a slow terror started hot between his shoulder blades. “Do you think it would be better to get her to the hospital in Puerto Plata?”

  “Certainly, it would be better, but under the circumstances I’m not going to risk her starting labor on that infernal road. We’ll keep our eye on her here.”

  In their room, Paul found Ilse whimpering in panic. He ran for the doctor, but by the time they arrived back at the barracks Ilse’s blood was gushing in fantastic quantities, and the baby, deprived of the oxygen that the ruptured placenta had carried away, had suffocated. “Poor Pauli,” Ilse said.


  “Poor nobody,” the doctor said. “Paul, sit on that chair, and Use, put your head down.” He spoke so briskly that Paul looked up with a wild leap of hope, but the doctor’s face was a dark red. Beads of sweat stood along his hairline.

  All night Paul sat by Ilse’s head. He massaged her hand. Her face was a blotchy dough color, with great bruised eyes. She said, “I wish, Pauli, you could lie down for a bit.”

  “I wish you would stop worrying about me, because that’s more tiring than anything!”

  She looked startled, but she was quiet after that, and he must have closed his eyes, because he awoke to see Dr. Marchfeld folding up a towel.

  The doctor said, “She is dead, Paul. You go and get cleaned up.”

  Paul said, “I shouted at her. I just wanted to speak with her once more.”

  The doctor said, “I’ll have her taken over to the hospital. Get yourself a clean shirt. Come.”

  “I just wanted to speak with her,” Paul said.

  Dr. Marchfeld pointed him toward the washroom.

  In the shower, Paul came totally awake. His head was very clear. He even felt the pleasantness of the clean cotton shirt on his freshly dried skin, and already he saw how he would live in the future—perfectly normal in his actions and perceptions, and perfectly unfeeling within.

  Paul was putting things away in the suitcase when Otto came in. “That goddam quack doctor!” Otto said, and began to cry.

  Paul took a piece of paper and drew a line on an imaginary graph. “It’s more complicated than a wrong diagnosis, or wrong treatment,” Paul said. “I know. I was a medical student. I’ve heard doctors say, ‘If only this happens’” (Paul crossed his time line), “‘before this happens’” (he crossed it farther along), “‘in this five minutes I can save a life.’”

  “Don’t defend him!” Otto said. “I’ve brought you some coffee.”

  “No, thank you,” Paul said.

  “Just have a little coffee,” Otto said, and looked so desperate that Paul said, “We’ll both have some. There are two tooth glasses on the washstand.”

  Otto stayed with Paul for a week, going about his business by day and returning at night full of Sosua news. Frau Halsmann had left her husband and moved to the Batey. Among the new group from Luxembourg was a woman called Sarah Hankel, who had almost been left behind because where the emigration form said “Profession,” she had written “prostitute,” and the emigration officer had made her tear it up and start over. Two of the men were escapees from concentration camps, and Otto told Paul the stories they were telling, which were still new in those days. The next morning Paul went to see Sommerfeld about visas for his parents, not hesitating to use the blackmail of his recent tragedy.

  The news of the death of Paul’s young wife came to us in England. It struck home at my unsatisfied youth, my dream of love. I was in such awe of this Paul who had had love and lost it that it was years before I dared write to him.

  Paul answered with an extraordinary letter in which he wrote—still as if he were speaking of some third persons—about “two people spun in their cocoon of passion and pioneer dreams, in a world in explosion, too fantastic to be believed while it had lasted. When that chapter of tenderness was over, Paul was left numb and sober. He knew he must not die, because his parents were still in Vienna and would be lost if he did not help them, and that meant incessant begging and badgering at the DORSA office, perhaps for a long time. He knew this with a clear head and a dead heart.”

  My grandparents did not, in fact, get to Sosua until September of the following year. My grandmother, at the time a sick woman, was brought off the boat on a stretcher. Paul procured a three-cornered pillow from the DORSA office so my grandmother could sit upright through her sleepless nights. He massaged her feet and brought her three meals a day from the communal kitchen, which my grandmother, herself a beautiful and fastidious cook, was unable to eat. She was convinced that Paul’s recent stomach upsets had been caused by the oil used in the kitchen. Paul saw the necessity of getting a house of their own, and, rousing himself out of the lethargy in which he had lived the last year, reorganized the defunct Steiner Group. After the marriage of Renate and Otto, Michel had withdrawn, but Michel’s older brother, Robert, wanted to get out of the large “Swiss” group, and came in with them.

  My grandmother was dead against the idea. “What kind of a farmer is Paul going to be? He was never any good with his hands. Besides, look at him—he isn’t strong enough.”

  “It’s my nature to look starved, Muttilein. I’m feeling much better.”

  “We should move to town and open a little shop like our shop in Fischamend,” said my grandmother.

  “No,” said Paul. “No, no, no. No little shop.”

  The group returned hopelessly from their talk with Sommerfeld. Building in Sosua had virtually stopped since America’s entry into the war. There was a shortage of money and building materials of every kind. Paul and my grandfather went to work in the DORSA storeroom. My grandmother, who had recovered her health, quarreled with Renate and refused to speak with Frau Halsmann, who was having an affair with one of the boys from the bachelor barracks, eleven years her junior. It was not till the spring of 1944 that the homestead at Ferrocarril was completed and offered to the Steiner Group.

  During the middle years of the war, Sosua’s economy became integrated into that of the rest of the country. Its harvests were considerable, and Sosua cattle—the offspring of Mr. Langley’s prize bull—brought good prices in a market already driven high by the wartime shortage. There was a boom in tortoise-shell Mogen Davids after Farber had stocked the general store (of which he was now the manager) and given his new Dominican wife one to wear around her neck when she visited home. His onetime partner in the tortoise-shell business was left with an oversupply of crosses, which he had intended for the native market; for a while, the two men did not speak to one another. The experimental dairy co-operative was showing profits for everyone except my grandmother, who had been forbidden to sell the butter and cottage cheese she made in her own kitchen, and when she went to Bockmann’s café—which now served hot Viennese dinners and had a one-lane bowling alley—she sat at a corner table and would not speak to anyone.

  In the midst of the general prosperity, the new Steiner homestead was having its first hard years. Paul’s eggplant harvest had failed, each fruit rotting at the point of contact with the earth. “It may be just my two left hands,” Paul said, “but next time I’m going to try planting a month earlier and harvesting before the rain sets in—with one corner planted the same as this year, for a control. That should eliminate the wet-ground factor, unless the rains start a month early or half a dozen unknown factors get in the way. Oi! I’ll do it on my own time.”

  “On your own time, you should sit a little,” my grandmother said.

  “I’m afraid to sit. I may not want to get up again,” Paul joked.

  But his strength was seeping out of him. He felt the heat as a persecution that never let up. Every job he did seemed to him inadequately done and needing to be done over more carefully, and he forced himself to do it again.

  The second harvest was not as bad a failure as the first, but the homestead needed a substantial additional loan from DORSA, and Paul’s health had broken. My grandmother nursed him and cooked for him and talked to him about starting a shop in town.

  The war was over. Hitler was dead. Renate persuaded Otto to move back to the Batey and take over the Sosua trucking concession to carry the produce of the dairy co-operative and the new privately owned sausage factory to the town markets. Robert Brauner, wanting to have the entire homestead under his control, bought out Paul’s share, and Paul opened the little shop in Santiago.

  I remember once, when Paul and I were walking in Santiago together, we talked about Ilse. Neither of us mentioned her name. I had asked Paul if a person in the first throes of loss wants to be left alone or to be nursed along, and Paul said the person wants to be left alone but that he
had been helped by Otto’s presence. “The very irritation of having him there acted as a distraction. In the moments I had to be talking to him, I could not concentrate on the pain.” Paul said that he had recently found three lines of a poem in his head. “And I know they are about my poor wife:

  “You are like the moonlight in the day,

  Invisible—yet perceived

  By the heedless heart no longer grieved.

  It’s just like me to have the first three lines of a poem that I don’t know what to do with,” he said.

  “Pauli,” I said, “what are you going to do with yourself?”

  “Try and make a go of the shop until our quotas come. In America, I’ll try and get a job—perhaps in a laboratory, where my medical training might be useful.”

  “I don’t mean just that,” I said. “You never go anywhere.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Lorle.”

  “But I do,” I said, and I felt like crying. “Omama didn’t even want you to go for a walk this evening, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I’m afraid your Omama cares more for my being home than I care for going out.”

  “But you have to make a stand, Pauli.”

  “No, I don’t,” Paul said. “I’m too old to make a stand on principle. If I should ever find anything I want to do enough to make a stand, I will, I promise you. But there’s nothing, Lorle, that I want.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Santiago de los Caballeros: Omama and Opapa

  It was in hot, late summer that I arrived in Ciudad Trujillo. My mother met me at the pier, and we took a chartered taxi, which, in the absence of a railroad, carried the better class of passengers across country.

  My mother, who had not seen me in two years, sat looking at me while I looked out of the window not liking this new country where I was going to live. The mountainous areas seemed brash and new, lacking in composition; the plains were sunburned and monotonous except for the miserable palm-leaf shacks and occasional bursts of gross, oversized vegetation. Over all stood the unrelieved, unlovely white heat of the sky. At every crossroads, we stopped at the little inspection posts. The soldiers joked with the driver and the three chatty Dominicans in the back seat, who were putting up good-naturedly with the heat, the noisy merengue on the car radio, and the road rattling beneath us.