Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  “I don’t know why I want to be in Poland with you,” Ruth had said to her father the last time she had talked about going to Poland.

  “I, for sure, don’t know why,” he had said.

  “I just want to,” Ruth said, “that’s all I know.”

  “You are supposed to be so clever,” Edek had said. “If you don’t know, who should know?” Ruth sensed a barrage of criticism coming her way.

  She began to say good-bye. Edek interrupted her. “It is not important for me to go to Poland,” he said. “For me, it is all finished there. But, if it is so important for you, I will go to Poland with you.”

  Ruth was stunned. “When do you want to go?” Edek said.

  “Next month,” she had said.

  “Okay,” said Edek. “You buy the tickets and pick me up on the way.”

  Ruth had been so taken by surprise, she hadn’t been able to answer him. “Thanks, Dad,” was all she had said. She had had to call him back and explain that Melbourne was not on the way from New York to Warsaw. She wouldn’t be able to pick him up. She would have to meet him there.

  Ruth felt a bit dizzy. She was used to running in larger spaces. She had been following the paths and promenades cutting across and around the Saxon Gardens. The park, off Pilsudskiego Place, a large square, was one of Warsaw’s most popular gardens. Two soldiers, with the freshly scrubbed faces of the young, guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at one end of the square. They marched in brisk unison around the memorial. Their black, highly polished metal-tipped boots clicked in a sharp synchronicity that echoed around the square.

  The gray, thin winter light gave the park a sparse, Spartan demeanor.

  The Baroque sculptures, the fountain, and the benches didn’t seem to add any warmth. There were over a hundred species of trees in the two-hundred-year-old gardens. They all looked the same to Ruth. They had T O O M A N Y M E N

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  trunks and they had branches. Maybe in summer, when they had leaves, it would be easier to differentiate between them.

  Ruth didn’t know a great deal about nature. Trees were green, to her.

  Grass was green. Nature was green. Too much green made her feel claus-trophobic. She was glad it was winter. Jews weren’t meant to know about trees. They weren’t meant to be able to distinguish between poplar trees and oak trees, or birch trees or maple or willow trees. In Yiddish, there was one word for tree. Tree. It covered all trees.

  There were quite a few people walking to work through the Saxon Gardens. On the whole, they didn’t look happy. They looked locked into some kind of misery. New Yorkers didn’t spend their days smiling, but there was a purposefulness and a vivacity to their snappiness and their lack of patience. Here in Poland, people looked oppressed. In 1983, on her first trip to Poland, Ruth had thought that they looked oppressed because of the terrible conditions that most Polish people were living under. There had been a dire shortage of food, then. Long lines of people queued for bread, for milk. There were queues for everything. Queues for soap, shampoo, toilet paper. Things were very grim for all Poles in 1983. The luxury goods stores in Warsaw displayed tubes of toothpaste and packets of laundry powder in the middle of otherwise empty shelves.

  Things had certainly changed since then. Now you could buy Chanel, Armani, Guerlain, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. And food stores were stocked with sausages and cheeses, and pickled and potted meats and herring, and smoked and roasted ducks and chicken. But everyone still looked miserable. In restaurants, shops, and offices, the notion of service hadn’t been wholly absorbed. Train conductors, shop assistants, clerks, and waiters seemed to slip from sycophantic to surly with unseemly speed. Most officials could lurch from obsequious to peremptory, in any exchange, with no evidence of what caused the switch. It was hard to like Poles, really, Ruth thought. A lot of Jews disliked Poles. “They’re a suspicious and sour people, and they seem to have a monopoly on stained, brown teeth,” her friend Aaron, a lawyer she had worked with, had said when she told him she was going to Poland.

  You rarely heard Jews voice similar sentiments about Germans. Jews might express anger or hostility or a fear of Germans, but they didn’t deride them in the same way that they slurred Poles. Ruth found this

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  strange. Yet she was the same. She hardly ever expressed any hostility to Germans. But given half a chance, a round of aggression would fly out of her if she spoke about the Polish. “They look harsh and crushed and wrinkled and old as soon as they hit forty, as though their souls have slipped out of them and turned into skin,” she had said to someone recently. What sort of a way was that to speak about any human being? She hated herself when she said things like that.

  A man’s voice startled her. “I think you can hear me,” he said. She looked around. There was no one there. She slowed down. Who could have said that? Where did the voice come from? There was definitely no one there. The nearest person was thirty or forty feet away, at the end of the path. She must have imagined it. Maybe she was missing New York. In New York there was always someone saying something to you, or to themselves. She slowed down to a walk. She was probably more tense and more jet-lagged than she realized. She decided to go back to the hotel.

  A couple walked past her. Ruth recognized fragments of their conversation. Fragments that were of no use. Ja nie moge. I can’t. Ja ci mówie. I am telling you. She’d heard Polish spoken by her parents all of her life, and she understood so little of it. A van with Hebrew lettering and OUR ROOTS, in uppercase print on its side, drove by. Ruth remembered the brochure she had found in her hotel room in Warsaw on her last trip. The brochure, Through Jewish Warsaw, was published by Our Roots, the “Jewish Information and Tourist Bureau.” The brochure detailed six tours, and the times you could be picked up for each tour from six different hotels. The price for all the tours was in U.S. dollars.

  Tour One covered the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Cemetery, the Nozyk Synagogue, the Jewish Historical Institute, and the ghetto wall. Tour Two was identical to Tour One except for the pickup times. Tour Three was stated, as Warsaw-Auschwitz/Birkenau-Warsaw. Tour Four offered Warsaw-Treblinka-Warsaw and Tours Five and Six had Majdanek as part of their package. Neither the guides nor the people in the Our Roots office seemed Jewish to Ruth.

  Ahead of Ruth, at the edge of the park, a young woman, about twenty, was squatting beside a tree. As Ruth got closer she realized that the young woman was having a shit. A thick roll of brown shit hung from the woman’s bum. Ruth felt nauseated. She wished she hadn’t seen the shit in such T O O M A N Y M E N

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  detail. How could a young woman do that? There were hotels with public toilets nearby. Ruth wondered why this relatively uncommon sight seemed so Polish to her. She had never seen anyone shitting in public in Poland before. Why did she see Poles as coarse and vulgar? It was very prejudiced of her. Two women walked by. They were probably her own age, Ruth thought, though they looked about sixty. They both scrutinized Ruth, then nudged each other and continued to stare at her. Ruth felt uncomfortable.

  Why were the women being so aggressive?

  Like many Polish women, they were over-lipsticked. Their bright red lipstick extended way above and beyond their mouths, and the black pen-ciled curves on their foreheads were not in the same place that the eyebrows they were mimicking could possibly have been. They looked harsh and judgmental. Photographs of two other Polish women had appeared in the New York Times, the morning that Ruth left for Poland. The article accompanying the photographs was about the prevalence of domestic violence in Poland. All that bowing and kissing of hands, which so many Polish men indulged in, may have masked more disturbing habits. The Times quoted a common Polish proverb: “If a man does not beat his wife, her liver rots.”

  The Polish government was now embarking on a billboard campaign to let people know that brutality could not be viewed as a family disagreement. A photograph from one of the billboards reproduced in
the New York Times showed a blond girl, her face swollen and bleeding. The caption read: Bo musial jako s odreagowa c. Because he had to let off steam. In another billboard, a battered and cut woman was photographed with her young son. Bo zupa byla za s l ona, the caption said. Because the soup was too salty. There was nowhere for battered Polish women to go. There were very few women’s shelters. Warsaw didn’t have a women’s shelter. There was no one for the women to turn to. The police, prosecutors, and the Polish public saw men as the kings of their own domain. Complaints about men were hard to get heard. It was also hard to get divorced, in this highly Catholic country. Poland had one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe.

  Ruth hurried past the two women in the park. She was five minutes away from the hotel. When she got there, she would write out the list of things to do that she had dictated on her run. The thought of putting things in order soothed her. She liked order. She liked things to go smoothly. Dis-

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  turbance unnerved her. Even a change in the weather disturbed her. She saw it as disorderly.

  A terrible lack of order had disrupted her mother’s life, when her mother was fifteen. Ruth’s mother was still in high school when the Germans took over Lódz. The Germans took over Lódz on the fifth of September, 1939. The fifth of September, almost seventeen years to the day before Ruth Rothwax would come into the world, already quiet. Already understanding that things had been thrown out of kilter in her world, and would remain tilted and off-balance for years. Photographs of Ruth show a wide-eyed, somber baby girl in the arms of a mother whose small smile masked none of her torment.

  In Lódz, on that day in September 1939, people could hear cannon fire and shelling and the low rumble of artillery heading toward them. “It was so quiet in the streets,” her mother had told her. “It was like even the birds and the flies had stopped breathing,” Rooshka Rothwax had said to Ruth.

  “Even children were quiet.” When Ruth listened to Rooshka talk like this, she could feel the silence herself. A silence that had enveloped the Jews of Lódz. All everyday noise seemed to have stopped. As though everyone had caught a hint of what lay ahead.

  Hundreds of German troops had arrived a few days later. The soldiers sang, with gusto, songs about Jewish blood flowing from their knives. “You could smell the evil,” Rooshka had said. New edicts from the Germans appeared daily in Lódz. Jews were allowed to be on the streets between 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. Any Jew seen on a street at any other time would be shot.

  The Germans began to round up Jewish men. They made them hop and jump in the street. They cut men’s side-locks off and set fire to their beards.

  Rooshka’s mother sent Rooshka out to buy bread. It was safer for Rooshka to go. She was in less danger than her father or any of her four brothers.

  The Poles were eager to prove their loyalty to the Germans. Heil Hitler, they said. Heil Hitler. They pointed out Jews to the Germans. Poles who went to school with Jews pointed their former friends out. Poles who had done business with Jews, for years, turned them in to the Germans for any infraction of the new rules. “You’ll be sorry you didn’t fuck with me,” a boy Rooshka went to school with said to her. “No one will want to touch you now, you piece of shit,” he said. “You missed out on a good fuck.” Rooshka said nothing. She walked away from him. “You thought you were better T O O M A N Y M E N

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  than me,” he shouted. “Well, you’re not. The Germans know who is shit and who isn’t.”

  Rooshka Rothwax, Rooshka Spindler, then, had been a shy girl. Book-ish, despite her quite startling beauty. She wasn’t really interested in boys.

  She wanted to be a doctor. A pediatrician. She knew that for a Jewish girl from a poor family to stay in school it was necessary to have no distractions.

  “I want you to marry Edek Rothwax,” Rooshka’s mother had said to her, the day they had to move into the ghetto. “They are rich. You will be safer with them, and you will be able to help us, too. He has been chasing you for years. I think he will be a good husband.” Edek and Rooshka were married, in the ghetto, on December 7, 1940. She was sixteen.

  Ruth wiped the sweat from her face. She was surprised at how sweaty she was. She’d thought that she probably wouldn’t sweat much in this cold weather. She had been deep in thought. She often thought about things when she was running. Thoughts that she managed to avoid at other times often arrived in the middle of a run.

  Ruth thought about her mother. Order appeared to have returned to Rooshka Rothwax’s universe, in Melbourne, Australia. The bunks, the barracks, the lice, the mud, seemed to have receded. But the recession was only on the surface. The silk blouse and the suntan couldn’t erase the dead, their arms and legs sometimes still twitching. It couldn’t erase the pus, the vomit, the shit, the piss. It couldn’t eradicate the stench of all that flesh burning. Rooshka’s mother and father and three sisters and four brothers’

  bodies had been part of that terrible smell.

  In Australia, Rooshka Rothwax’s house smelled of Chanel No. 5 perfume and Christian Dior creams and lotions. Everything was in its place.

  Rooshka ironed and folded towels and tea towels, napkins and sheets. She ironed handkerchiefs. She stored things in neat, carefully organized shelves. You could see at a glance where everything was kept. Everything was in its place. And Rooshka needed it that way. Now and then Edek accidentally put something where it didn’t belong. A pillowcase on top of the towels, or a couple of bowls where the saucers should have been. It always left Rooshka distraught. Order was everything.

  Ruth Rothwax tried hard to be disorderly. She didn’t want to be like her

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  mother. At work, she practiced messing up her desk. Moving pieces of paper so that they weren’t perfectly aligned. It wasn’t easy, and Ruth felt proud when she could tolerate some chaos. She felt overjoyed the day she managed to leave her apartment without making her bed. She was also in the process of trying to create a degree of disarray among the coat hangers in her closet. For most of her life, she had needed her hangers all to face the same direction. Now, if she accidentally put one back the wrong way, she tried to leave it there. At least for a day. Ruth could see the absurdity of some of the issues she was trying to come to grips with. How many sane people wrestled with their coat hangers? She started to laugh and almost tripped over. It was impossible to laugh and run. She straightened herself up.

  She imposed order on herself in other ways. She allowed herself a maximum of twelve minutes to read People magazine. She knew that People magazine was rubbish, and that it often gave her a headache to read about this starlet’s battle with bulimia, or that actress’s long road to recovery from alcoholism. Even the divorces and marriages were hard to digest. She had barely caught up with a celebrity’s second marriage when the magazine was reporting his third. A twelve-minute limit to this information seemed to settle Ruth’s conflict about the place People magazine should occupy in her life.

  The place that New York City occupied in her life had crept up on her. For her first five years in the city, she had claimed she was in transit. On the verge of returning to Australia. Now, after twelve years, she had to acknowledge that she loved New York. She loved it most when things worked. When a taxi arrived as soon as you raised your arm. When the train to Greenport, Long Island, left at 7:04 P.M., on Friday, and the ferry that took her to Shelter Island was waiting in Greenport for that train.

  She liked Shelter Island because it was quiet, but also because everyone obeyed the rules. If you drove through a stop sign, it would appear in the

  “Police Blotter,” in the Shelter Island Reporter, the following week. Ruth knew that being on Shelter Island relaxed her, and she tried to spend at least six weekends a year there. She needed the peace of mind and the freedom that the island gave her.

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  Order helped Ruth to experience f
reedom. Children of Holocaust survivors found it hard to feel freedom. Ruth had read that many times. They found it difficult to separate from their parents. Difficult to have a life of their own. Difficult to have a life. They had to create obstacles and burdens for themselves. To align themselves with their parents. To experience at least some of the horror. Weighted down with fear, apprehension, and depression, they felt free enough to go on. Children of survivors had to fill up their parents’ emptiness. They had to make up for lost objects and people and ideals. No wonder freedom seemed far-fetched for so many of them.

  The warnings of impending danger that children of survivors received from their parents were not overt or intentional. Parents didn’t shout out their knowledge of the hostility of the world. They didn’t have to. The children had received that message of omnipresent threat a long time ago. The children understood, too, that they had to keep their anger to themselves.

  How could you be angry with parents who had suffered so much? The children became adept at turning their anger on themselves. And dealing with parents who were too preoccupied to notice the angers and upsets of ordinary, everyday life. Parents who were always preoccupied. Always somewhere else, somewhere out of reach. In a past that was untouchable.

  There were also strange envies and resentments to grapple with. Ruth knew that her mother envied her for having a mother. And she knew, when she was a teenager, that her mother resented the fact that Ruth had a youth.

  Ruth tried to dispense with her youth. She cultivated a serious weariness.

  At twelve, when she began to attract looks, she tried to get rid of them, too.

  She covered her new breasts with bulky dresses that covered most of the rest of her.

  Her mother’s looks were one of the few things about Rooshka Rothwax that had survived intact. Rooshka was exceptionally beautiful. And Ruth didn’t want anything to diminish the importance of that. So, Ruth put on pounds and pounds of fat, and soon no one looked at her, except in pity. By the time Ruth felt safe enough to emerge, Rooshka Rothwax was dead and buried.