Two Rings

by Millie Werber

  Why was Brina so harsh? She didn’t know me; she didn’t know Jack. What could she possibly have had against us that she treated me with such contempt?

  Perhaps I was an embarrassment to her; perhaps she thought of me as the immigrant Polish servant girl. I was prost, common, like Chava, Chiel Friedman’s wife. Brina treated me as the ignorant laborer, alive only to do her bidding.

  Mannes suggested that Brina take me shopping. I had been wearing a suit I had made in Europe using material from a suit that belonged to a man. It had a loose-fitting jacket and a long, wide skirt. It wasn’t much, but I thought it was pretty enough. Apparently, though, it wasn’t the style in America. I came down one morning from the room Jack and I shared in the attic, and Brina looked at me and said, “Look what she is wearing!” As in “How pathetic! How scandalous that she should be dressed this way.” The current style, it turned out, was just the opposite of what I had on—pencil skirts, everything tight to the body and trim. I was out of fashion. This was apparently intolerable. Kindly Mannes suggested a correction.

  Brina and I set out for a day in town. I was nervous to go out with her; I didn’t know what to expect. I was thoroughly in her power; I didn’t know my way about the town, and I didn’t yet know any English. But, still, I was excited by the prospect—the idea of going into a store, with money to spend; the idea of looking around at the items for sale; to pick up, maybe, a hat, a pair of gloves; to try something on and look at myself in the mirror. These simple pleasures in life, these girlish delights—they had been lost to me for so long. I was happy at the idea of a little adventure.

  We went first to a shoe and hosiery shop. Brina was known there, as she was known throughout Beacon. The proprietor greeted her warmly, and Brina introduced me as if I were a charity case, a pathetic creature from another world: I was her “greener.” That became Brina’s standard descriptor of both me and Jack—her “greeners,” her greenhorns. The term had such condescension in it; it was so breezily dismissive, so cavalier: a greenhorn—someone ignorant, someone foreign, maybe not quite human. The word—it’s the same in Yiddish as in English—comes from the Middle Ages; it refers to a young cow whose undeveloped horns are still green.

  The store owner looked at me with a mixture of pity and dismay. I felt awkward and embarrassed, but I was angered, too, that Brina had presented me as if I were a pauper. The man must have understood Brina’s meaning, because he went to the back and got several pairs of stockings to give me—for free, as a form of charity. It was generous of him, to be sure; but I was mortified. I had no wish to be a charity case.

  He handed me the package, I nodded my thanks, and we left.

  Woolworth’s was next, the local five-and-dime. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they had for sale—aisle after aisle of household goods, stationery, toiletries—even an aisle for “Sundries,” for items that didn’t fit into any other category. Brina bought some things and handed me the bag to carry for her on our walk home.

  It’s not that I minded the carrying so much; I would have been happy to carry a package for her if she had asked. But she didn’t ask; she presumed—as if the whole reason for my being there, for being out with her shopping was so that I could carry the packages for her.

  When we got home, she took the bags from me—both the one from the hosiery shop and the one from Woolworth’s—and she kept the contents, stockings and all, for herself.

  I began to realize that I was her maid. I had come to America to be Brina’s maid.

  One afternoon, I sat outside to take a little rest in the sun. Brina called to me from the kitchen: “Malka, come here.” Dutifully, I came in and saw her sitting at the table grinding meat. She said, “Malka, here: grind this meat for me.” No need for pleasantries, no need for warmth, no need to ask, might I please. . . . I was her servant, not a guest, not a member of her family.

  I grew frightened of her.

  She served dinner every night in meager portions—maybe two or three ounces of meat, a half of a potato. It couldn’t have been the cost of the food that was dictating the size of her meals; she and Mannes had enough money to feed as many people as they chose. Maybe they were already involved in the American way of endless dieting—I don’t know. But even if the portions were enough for them, who for years had already had so much, they never seemed sufficient to us; they never were able to satisfy our constant hunger. I was pregnant, and Jack’s nephew, Sidney, was a young man of eighteen. Surrounded by abundance, we were always hungry.

  One evening, after dinner was over and everyone had retired for the night, Jack and Sidney decided to go down to the kitchen and get some toast so the three of us could quietly take another few bites of food before we went to bed. I thought they’d bring back three slices, one for each of us. But when they returned, I saw they had with them seven or eight slices—maybe half a loaf of bread—and I got scared. We couldn’t possibly take all that bread for ourselves; Brina would notice that the bread was gone the next morning, and she would accuse us of stealing. I refused to eat anything until they agreed to bring back down to the kitchen half of what they had taken.

  Would she really have accused me of stealing? Was she really that coldhearted? Perhaps not, but all I got from her was icy disdain and the glance of someone who despised me.

  One day, Brina showed me a boxful of pictures. They were from her youth in Radom, and they showed groups of people, some young, standing arm in arm or sitting on benches outside buildings, some older, standing formally as if for a portrait. The photographs were black and white, grainy, as all pictures were in those days, and I didn’t recognize anyone in them. Brina was at least thirty years older than I; it would have been unlikely for me to know anyone she knew in Radom. But then, in one picture, I noticed a man I recognized—Ydel Weissman, who had been a friend of my brother’s.

  “Him,” I said, pointing to the picture, “I know him. That’s Ydel Weissman.”

  “That’s my sister’s husband,” she replied. “So tell me now why you survived and my sister didn’t.”

  It was an accusation, not a question.

  I couldn’t stay in Beacon; the place was intolerable to me. I told Jack we had to go. I would work, of course; I would be happy to clean houses, to scrub floors. This didn’t bother me; I wasn’t afraid to work. But not for her, not for Brina, not in Beacon.

  Jack agreed; he, too, felt uncomfortable there. So we told Mannes and Brina that we’d be going—“Yes,” Brina said, “yes, New York is a much better place for a young couple to be”—and we left. They didn’t ask where we were going; they didn’t offer to lend us any money. We were immigrants without any English; we had barely a small suitcase between us; we had no place to go and almost no cash. We had brought with us from Germany a cigarette case and a small gold ring, intending at first to give them to Mannes and Brina to thank them for their hospitality, but when Jack saw what the situation was, he suggested we keep them for ourselves instead; we also had a Leica camera. These were all our currency; this was all we had to build a life.

  We took the train to Manhattan.

  17

  MARTIN WAS BORN ON FEBRUARY 11, 1947. JACK AND I brought him back from the hospital ten days later. I had a difficult delivery, and after twenty-four hours of labor, Martin had to be delivered by forceps. But I was so happy to have given birth, and to a healthy child. I had been worried that the baby might come out looking a little like a monkey—I had been to the zoo at some point over the summer, and I had watched the monkeys playing in their dark cages. Received wisdom in those days (and how was I to know any different? Who did I have to tell me otherwise?) was that if a pregnant woman saw something out of the ordinary—and to me, of course, monkeys were surely out of the ordinary—then the image of whatever she saw would likely get imprinted on her baby. Babies born with what used to be called harelips were said to be born that way because their mothers, while pregnant, had probably looked at rabbits. I worried that my baby might not come out rig
ht, because of the monkeys. But Martin was perfect: ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, and an impossibly silken head and the softest blue eyes. We brought him back to our apartment and tucked him into the little bed we had made with a pillow and some towels inside a dresser drawer. I was a mother, young and terrified.

  Essentially, Jack and I were squatters in a mostly abandoned building down by the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side. We had moved there after spending several months renting a couple of rooms from Jack’s cousin Molly. We had sold the Leica camera we brought with us from Europe—we told the man in the camera shop to pay us whatever he thought the camera was worth, and he gave us seventy-five dollars, which, we later found out, was much less than it was worth, but to us at that time it was a real fortune—and we paid Molly seventeen dollars a month rent. But by early fall, we realized that we needed a place of our own and we had heard that on the Lower East Side, you could live pretty much anywhere you wanted.

  The building on Lewis Street where we set up house had been abandoned by its landlord after it was condemned by the Board of Health. The place had electricity and cold running water, but no heat or hot water. Garbage piled up on the street outside the building, and the smell of rotting waste rose up and into the apartments. I chose an apartment on the third floor of the walk-up to try to get away from the stench.

  In the winter, when we brought Martin home, we could never get warm enough. With no heat, we slept in as many layers of clothes as we could put on—three pair of socks, shirts and sweaters, scarves and hats. We bundled up like hobos.

  There was a bathtub in the center of the kitchen, and during the summer, I would fill it with cold water so I could take a soak to try to cool off. One night, I tried sleeping on the fire escape to get a little air, but I was scared of the animals that might come in the night so I came back inside.

  The place was primitive, and I cried to think that this, too, was America—this filth, this poverty, the garbage and the stink and the wind thrashing at the windows—but the place was ours. It was my first home, my first real home, since I had to move with my family to the ghetto six years before. I was determined to make it as lovely as I possibly could. I scrubbed the floors with vinegar and salt; I scoured the sink and lined the cupboard shelves with paper. I bought fabric on Orchard Street and made little curtains for the windows. It was a squatter’s apartment, truly, but it felt almost like a little household. Jack found work in the garment district; my father and Sidney eventually moved into another apartment on the same floor. I kept the place clean and I made dinner every night, and when we brought Martin home from the hospital and tucked him into the little bed inside a drawer, it really did feel as if we had made a family. Our very own home, our very own son.

  I was scared all the time.

  I had no idea how to care for a child. An old woman lived down the hall—a stooped and sorry creature she was, but she became my guide because I had no one else to guide me. Martin scratched himself just slightly on his face, and this woman told me I had to cut his nails. But how could I take a pair of scissors to fingers so impossibly small? How would I hold him still? She told me I had to be very careful about germs, that germs were all about and that germs could make Martin sick. So everything Martin wore—his little shirts, his pants, his socks, his diapers—I washed in boiling water, dried them, and ironed them. I ironed every one of Martin’s clean diapers to kill the germs that may have lurked there.

  Me with Martin

  I was worried he wouldn’t talk. He was a very good baby, undemanding and easily settled. He didn’t cry much, but it never occurred to me that his soft gurglings could be a sign of contentment. Instead, I fretted. “How will he talk if he doesn’t cry?” Knowing nothing about these things, I brought him to a clinic and told the doctor what was worrying me. The doctor snatched the bottle from Martin’s mouth and started to tease him, bringing the bottle back close to his lips and then pulling it away before Martin could latch on. The poor child started to wail within seconds. “See?” the doctor said, “the child can cry just fine.”

  But I didn’t know. I was not yet twenty years old, and I had no one to teach me, no one to encourage me and tell me not to be anxious. No one to tell me I was doing a good job. Jack tried to be supportive, of course, but he knew even less than I. He was fearful, too—he wouldn’t even hold Martin for fear of dropping him. I loved being a mother; it satisfied something deep inside me, some longing to be infinitely attached to another living being. But I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I was busy all the time with the diapers and the cleaning, and more than that, I was afraid, daunted by the worry that I wouldn’t do things right. It wasn’t just the practicalities, making sure Martin was safe and clean and healthy, making sure he ate enough, hoping he was growing enough, and watching that he wouldn’t stumble on the stairs as he started to walk. It was the dream. That dreadful dream.

  Even after my daytime fears began to fade, after I began to learn to trust my own sense of how to be a mother, of how to raise a child, even after our second son, David, was born three years later, and I wasn’t any longer so worried about how to bathe a child or how to hold him when his nails needed to be clipped, after I even stopped ironing clean diapers, still the dream came. For years and years, long after we moved from Lewis Street and settled into a series of ever-nicer apartments, the dream followed me like a demon. My children grew into adolescence and then into adulthood, and still the dream would wake me in the night, and I would find myself cold and clammy at once, my heart racing.

  In the dream, I am in Auschwitz.

  At some point, fairly early on in my time in Auschwitz, before Mima stole the pair of children’s shoes for me—this part is true, this part isn’t dream—all the women in our group, the ammunition workers from Radom, were moved from one part of the camp to another, as I have said. I was still wearing those murderous wooden clogs. The ground around the new barracks was covered with jagged stones. Not packed dirt, not gravel, but large stones covered the ground, stones with sharp edges, as if new and roughly hewn from a quarry. It was hard to walk over these stones; there was no place to get a secure footing among all the uneven edges. The wooden clogs—with no give to them, with no way to accommodate the ups and downs of the irregular shapes—made it harder still. Sometimes I fell—a few times I fell just trying to walk across the yard—and falling was dangerous: If you fell at the wrong time, if the wrong person saw you fall, you could get beaten, or killed.

  It is this scene that comes to me in the dream. I am back there, in that yard in Auschwitz, wearing those wicked wooden clogs, standing precariously on those jagged stones. In the dream, it’s just like it was then, only now it’s worse—because now I’m holding Martin. He’s a small child—maybe just a year old—and he doesn’t yet know how to walk. He’s not wearing any shoes, so he couldn’t walk, anyway, if I put him down. But I can’t put him down, because he’ll try to crawl if I do, and if he crawls in this place, if he lays those lovely knees, those dimpled hands, down on those stones, then his supple skin, his skin softer than the softest eiderdown, will get cut. Those rocky points, those jagged edges, will dig into Martin’s skin and make him bleed. In the dream, I hold him; I cannot put him down. The sun is baking the stones, and the heat rises thick and heavy in front of me. My arms are straining under the weight of my poor boy, caught with me in this camp, with nowhere to go. I am holding him—my God! I am holding him—as I must. Yet my arms are on fire with his huge heaviness, with the load of my lovely and beloved boy. I must hold my son, I must keep him clasped to me, but I feel my grip failing. I feel my son starting to fall.

  This is the dream. I told it once to a German psychiatrist—back in the 1950s, the German government sent me to doctors and to a psychiatrist in New York when it was working out its reparations to survivors—and the psychiatrist who heard my dream told me he thought it was “fascinating.” Then he advised me to put the past behind me and get on with my life.

  Jack would t
ry to comfort me when I awoke from the dream. He would hold me, and I would cry in his arms, and he would make a little joke about something as he always did, and I would eventually find my way back to sleep.

  I don’t dream the dream so much anymore. But sometimes I do. Sometimes it returns, vivid and visceral as ever. And then I am again in Auschwitz, fearful of taking even a single step.

  Epilogue

  I AM OLD NOW; THERE’S NO DENYING THAT. MY SKIN IS translucent, like tissue paper; I can see my veins down the underside of my arms. My hair, baby fine to begin with, thinned out nearly to nothingness decades ago. I had a small stroke a few years back, and sometimes now I’m unsteady on my feet, but I am determined to walk without a cane.

  It’s hard to be alone. I have friends who are on their own now, widows after decades of marriage. Somehow they seem to manage, though truly I can’t say what they feel deep down, in the quiet of their nights. I know for me, it is hard—really, I think, unbearably hard. I don’t understand why life is set up this way, why one partner should die and leave the other all alone. True partners should die together, at one and the same time.

  I loved Jack, and I loved the life we worked so hard to create. We built a business over decades: Jack and I made all the financial decisions together; I did a lot of the labor on my own. In the early years, even with two small children to care for, I cleaned apartments and saw to their furnishing, and I would travel often by subway and almost always at night to collect rent payments from our tenants. I wasn’t afraid; I had been through worse. Jack and I were trying to make something of ourselves, for ourselves and for our family, and we were doing it together, as partners.