Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  My parents stayed on the roof when Mr. Aryeh led Sammy and me back down to his street-level studio where the film holders could be safely unloaded in the darkroom. The room had no windows. Heavy black fabric, similar to the camera hood, hung over the door, preventing light from leaking in. Sammy moaned in the absolute darkness, so I took his soft hand while Mr. Aryeh talked us through the process of pulling each sheet of film from the holder and passing them through the trays of different solutions.

  “Developer,” he said. “Eight minutes. Stop bath, just a quick wash through. Fixer, takes off the excess silver, makes the image permanent. Then you rinse in cold running water to wash off the chemicals. Ten minutes. Twenty is better. That way the film lasts. And your image lasts on the film.”

  “Lasts how long?” By now, despite the darkness, I could see him performing each step.

  “Forever, maybe. At least that’s what they say. Forever if it doesn’t get damp and you keep it stored in a cool, dark place, and you don’t handle it much and get it dirty. Otherwise the image goes and the film crumbles.”

  “Goes where?” asked Flat Sammy.

  “Aha!” cried Mr. Aryeh. “The family savant!”

  “What’s that?” asked Sammy.

  “A genius.”

  “No,” said Sammy, giggling. “I’m slow.”

  “Okay, then,” Mr. Aryeh agreed. “A slow savant.”

  When enough time had passed, he switched on the lamp. Both sheets of film were hanging from a line of string over the sink. Wooden laundry clips held them in place while they dripped, dripped, dripped. Shadow was light and light was shadow, just like everything ends up eventually.

  “Magic,” Sammy whispered.

  “Alchemy,” said Mr. Aryeh, “except better than gold. What’s gold got to do with being a human? A picture, though, a picture is something. A big something. So now you kids go eat lunch. Come back in an hour. It’s so hot in here that the film should be baked by then. I can’t teach you everything, but today is a start, yes?”

  I tugged Flat Sammy upstairs to the apartment. My aunt, who was putting the finishing touches on a bowl of chicken salad, motioned to a loaf of bread. “Cut sandwiches for the two of you, please, and for your uncle.”

  Uncle David was sitting in the living room, his feet resting on an ottoman, his eyes half closed.

  “Aunt Sara said bring this for you,” I said.

  He cocked his head. “Is that Marta?”

  I never saw a man eat a sandwich so slowly, as if eating was a chore. He would take a bite, put the sandwich back on his plate, then start to chew. As if the sandwich weighed more than he could hold. Flat Sammy plowed through his sandwich and I ate quickly as well, wanting that awkward meal to be over.

  “Go on, you two,” said my uncle. “I’ll finish later.” He set his plate on the little table beside him and closed his eyes.

  “Come on, Sammy,” I said after we returned our plates to the kitchen. Only thirty minutes had passed since we had left Mr. Aryeh but I knocked on his door anyway. He answered, a napkin tucked into the collar of his shirt.

  “You kids again? So soon?” He checked his watch. “Look through these while I finish eating,” he said. He handed a box of photos to each of us. “You have your scissors, Sammy?”

  Of course he did, attached by a string to the waistband of his pants like a pocket watch.

  Sammy rifled through a box of extras, outtakes and rejects, some of people who came every year for a new portrait for their parlor, or the bedroom, or to be mailed back to Europe with a couple of American dollars.

  Sammy went to work with his scissors, as focused in his attention as a diamond cutter working a stone. I sifted through my box photo by photo, though who knows what I was looking for. I must have looked at a hundred in the time that Mr. Aryeh ate his big plate of sour cream and boiled potatoes and drank his cup of hot tea.

  “It will take years to become a photographer,” he said, “but you can learn. You got years?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Dinner was an abbreviated affair, what with my father and mother sequestered on the roof next to Mr. Aryeh’s pigeon coop, the flock locked in and muttering like tipsy men at Mr. DeWitt’s poker games, Flat Sammy in the living room with my uncle, a folding table between them, and my aunt with me in the kitchen. Mr. Aryeh had slipped away to his own dinner and heaven knows what conversation with his wife about my mother.

  Mr. Aryeh had not asked after Noah and the boys, nor did he mention the hijacked barge. In addition to working for the newspapers, he was now working weekends for the police department taking mug shots. His portrait work was falling off as local families lost touch with loved ones in Europe. What kind of lost touch? Thousands of people had already disappeared, shoved to the east by the Germans and to the west by the Russians, and shoved around in every way by the Poles. German and Austrian Jews with money were boarding the Tran-Siberian Train to Japan and passenger ships for Shanghai; others were walking to Marseille and to Thessaloniki—where Sofia’s mother was born—to hire boatmen who would smuggle them to Palestine. The relatives in Zyrmuny, who had barely a cent to their names, could not know how fast my hoard of $20 bills was growing. They could not know—nor could I tell anyone—that help was coming.

  “What do you hear from Noah?” my aunt asked when she got me alone in the kitchen. She set down a plate with a chicken leg and boiled potatoes for me, and a plate with the chicken neck, the back, and the liver for herself.

  “That he’s not coming home from California,” I said.

  “Is that so?” she asked, startled.

  “He writes about all these big plans for when he gets back, but that’s just him dreaming.”

  “More potatoes?” she asked. My aunt had careful eyes. “So he doesn’t say that he’s not coming. You say it.”

  “Sofia and I invented this Odyssey Project when we were little, scrapbooks of all the places in the world we would visit. We went on making them even when we were old enough to know it was make-believe. It’s like that with Noah. Cutting down trees, being gone from the police. As if that makes everything okay. It’s just more make-believe, what he’s doing out west.” We had abandoned the Odyssey Project years ago without even discussing it. It was not something we decided. It just happened. Then it came to life again, the perfect safe place for cash instead of girlish dreams.

  “But look at him, all the way in California,” she said. She chewed on the backbones, making a sucking sound that sounded good. “Maybe it’s make-believe, but it’s also a fact.”

  My aunt apologized again and again for sending us off with a bag of apples instead of the usual overload of leftover roast and puddings and what-have-you. “Had I only known you were coming,” she complained. She looked at my father. Then she looked at my mother. Then she looked at me. What on earth was she searching for? What kind of clue or sign was she looking for after all these years when there were fewer answers instead of more?

  I was relieved to get away from that sullen apartment and from my mother’s perfunctory good-bye. A quick peck on the forehead, an invisible smudge wiped from my face. My father tucked the bag of apples under his arm and held my hand for the quiet walk to the streetcar. Gaslights were being lit for the evening and the sky changed from pink to blue to black. A few minutes later, through the streetcar window, I saw a family huddled beneath a burning street lamp. The woman’s eyes were little explosions of panic that she was stoking by slapping her palms against her hips. Surrounding her were dilapidated wood crates overloaded with blankets and pillows. Her husband was sitting on an equally ramshackle chair; his face was buried into the back of a small boy who was staring at nothing. My father was looking out the window too. He pulled me closer.

  At the pier he arranged for us to ride an evening barge to Barren Shoal. At the head of the dock was a vendor selling beef hotdogs from a steam cart. My father gave him the once-over and me one of those Why not? looks, though we had already eaten dinner and had the bag of apples to t
ide us over. The hotdog man split open two rolls and stabbed the dark pink franks from the steam cabinet with his knife. We each ate one loaded with sauerkraut, then shared one with onions in greasy red sauce, a spot of which got on my shirt even though I bent at the waist to eat the way my father did. And like the man I had seen on the subway. I had not eaten on the street since that pretzel at the opera years before. My mother, of course, would have been revolted by the whole enterprise. It is hard to imagine that she ever ate on the street. Never mind hard: how about impossible.

  “Good?” asked the man.

  “Good,” replied my father.

  “Good?” asked my father.

  “Good,” I answered.

  “Good,” said the man, as if for that moment the only thing in the world that mattered was a hotdog. He folded down his umbrella, rinsed the top of the cart with water from a jar, and rolled off to the stable where street carts also parked.

  The usual crew of pickers was on the barge that would carry us back to Barren Shoal. The fat corpses of horses not fully picked over looked lavish. I wondered about Katrine, the girl in the brown dress who I had not seen for a long time. Thinking about her had something to do with the family I had seen from the streetcar. I looked for her among the pickers working in the dark. After that, with everything happening so quickly, I did not think of her again.

  My mother really did come home a few days later. I did not know she would be arriving when she did, or if my father knew and withheld the information, or if, in fact, he did not know either. I cannot say what difference knowing would have made. After all, it was not until she was gone that I saw how comforting her absence could be. The house was emptier for sure, but easier without all those daily reminders of what she was not. Not that this delighted me: we were supposed to have a mother who we could leave, not a mother who could not stop herself from leaving us.

  I arrived home from school and there she was, working at the kitchen table, the thin curtains pulled back to let in more daylight.

  “It’s been a while since we had brisket for dinner,” she announced into the dead air, never taking her eyes off her knife.

  I did not tell her I had made a brisket the Sunday before any more than I would have said I was stealing money. Or that I touched and had been touched by a boy named Ray. The bowl beside her was filling with chopped onions, an amount which had taken me three times longer to chop just days ago. There was always the risk that anything could set her off.

  “I stopped on the way back,” she said, meaning she shopped at the same good butcher in Brooklyn where my father had stopped a week earlier. It was her only acknowledgement about being away. “Keep chopping while I brown this meat,” she said, the familiar tone of instruction now returning to her voice. “Wash your hands good first.”

  She spooned some rendered chicken fat into a roasting pan, struck a match beneath the pot, and the fat began to sizzle. Then came the searing sound of the meat on the hot pan, so hot it browned the down side almost instantly. She hovered over it, long fork in hand ready to turn it. Then the searing sound flashed again when she browned the other side, the house filling with the sweet aroma of onions and meat, as if her cooking could drive away the odor of rotting flesh, the mystery of her absence, and everything else that was morose, or confusing, or mournful. I craved it, this food that overpowered the smell of the factory. I wanted everything that was corrupt and putrefied replaced by the sweet. Better to be guilty of romanticizing than to never imagine things better than they might ever be. How else would we know what to hope for?

  A few days later she went next door to thank Mrs. Paradissis for the bread and other things she had sent over during her own absence. This was not such a big deal but for the fact that my mother had not set foot in anyone else’s house on Barren Shoal since Helen died.

  She was gone for the better part of a late afternoon.

  “Here,” she said when she returned, a plate of Mrs. Paradissis’ melomakarona cookies in hand.

  “Honey cookies,” I said.

  “Melomakarona,” she corrected, as if she knew about them all along. “Just baked.”

  “Mrs. Paradissis doesn’t bake cookies on Wednesdays,” I said, guarding my turf with a degree of authority that far outweighed the importance of the thing I was protecting. “She bakes bread on Wednesdays.”

  “Well, today we baked these,” she assured me. “I told her how much I’d enjoyed these in the past—I can’t remember when I last ate one, can you? Next thing I knew, she had the sack of flour on the table and I was draining a honeycomb and chopping nuts.”

  She again offered me the plate. The honey not absorbed by the cookies pooled around them.

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” I said.

  “So what, go on.” Her voice was still flat, but she was there.

  It only takes a shift of a few degrees to make a world feel the new tilt of its axis. I was still shy around my mother after that, not certain what to make of her having changed overnight. Or having changed in the month that she stayed in Brooklyn. The fact is that whatever made this possible must have been stirring about inside her; she had probably been changing for months, maybe even years. Now she wanted catching up about everything. She wanted a full report about things that happened in the weeks she was over in Brooklyn, but she also wanted to know about things that went back years.

  “Tell me about the union, Marta. Your father doesn’t talk about it anymore, at least not to me,” she said. We were in the yard taking down laundry. That clothesline was a pretty silly place to hang clean clothing, now that I think about it. Not that we had a choice, but no sooner was it washed then it was flaked with soot. “Your father’s still convinced that he could have stopped Noah from leaving.”

  I did not have a whole lot to report. With Noah in California and Yorgos now living in Astoria and going to school, the subject of the union rarely came up.

  “Last thing I heard is that two groups came over to talk to the men. Everyone made a big deal and Joey served homemade wine. Then a fight broke out.”

  “Help me with these sheets,” she said, handing me two corners.

  “A man from one group called someone from the other group a fascist. Then everybody got into it. ‘You’re a fascist. You’re a Trotskyite. You’re a wise guy. You’re a commie.’ They’re supposed to be getting a union, but instead they were beating each other up. Mr. Dowd got his nose broke!”

  “It makes no difference,” said my mother. She walked towards me and joined her two corners with mine.

  “Both eyes got black and blue.”

  “None of this matters. Who wins. Which union. Everyone wants to be the boss.”

  I reached down for the two corners created by folding the sheet in half.

  “And what about this boy?”

  I said nothing.

  “Ray,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “I saw you writing those letters. I heard your teacher say he was going away.”

  Dolores never spoke of Ray at the warehouse and I saw no point in drawing attention to myself by asking. I had no idea what he was doing or where.

  “You’d have to ask Miss Finn,” I said.

  Not that I imagined she would. But hearing Dolores or Miss Finn say that Ray was in Spain would be dreadful; it would be just the thing to make me care more instead of less. What is crummier than still caring after being rejected?

  “You miss your brother?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, raising the new corners to again meet hers.

  “And Sofia: does she miss Yorgos?”

  “We don’t talk about it.”

  “You girls talk about everything.”

  “He used to smack her around. Why should she miss him?”

  “What should she do? Not be his sister?”

  “Be happy he’s gone.”

  “Don’t say such a thing. Not ever.”

  “It doesn’t matter that he was bad to her?”

 
“That’s family,” she said.

  “I’d rather be beaten by a stranger.”

  With Noah and Yorgos gone and Joey slowed down by the beating he took from his own brothers, our lives settled into a different rhythm. Sofia studied the movie magazines that Miss Finn now mixed in with the newspapers. Perhaps she had always brought them over for the older girls; we were the older girls now. As for me, all those weeks of stealing made me jumpy, even if stealing was easy. The longer it went on, the likelier I would get caught. The greater the likelihood of getting caught, the jumpier I got. Instead of $20 a week I now took $40. Why not? I was trying to save lives.

  Noah wrote letters every month, sending them under the pseudonym James Peck so neither the police nor anyone else could track him down. How he came up with that name he would never say, not even later when we were both grown and he would swear he honestly could not remember and I would swear back that I did not believe him and he would say believe what you want. To this day I cannot say why it mattered to me, but it did. Maybe it had something to do with all the mysteries that Noah and so many others meant to hide.

  He wrote mostly about the site where he was working: about the beauty of the Pacific West; about how boring is to eat rice and beans, beans and rice, and fish, fish, fish—even more than we ate on Barren Shoal; how his buddy Tyson had convinced one of the camp guards to go deer hunting in the hills and they shot a buck; about how Tyson dressed the deer with a bowie knife and they grilled the meat, liver and kidney and all, over a wood fire. Anything they did not eat—mostly innards, but also the hooves, and the snout, and the kinds of things the scavengers would have gladly hauled away from the garbage barge—they hurled into the brush for the buzzards.