Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  Señor Rey led them toward a barracks mounted on a slab of cement: the infirmary she had come to inspect. The staff—a nurse-director and two assistants—stood stiffly outside as if awaiting arrest. It was probable that no member of any government had ever before visited—always excepting smugglers.

  The director, rouged like a temptress, took them around the scrubbed infirmary, talking nonstop. She knew every detail of every case history; she could relate every failure from under-medication, from wrong medication, from absence of medication. The Dutch girl seemed to understand the rapid-fire Spanish.

  Surgical gloves, recently washed, were drying on a line. The storeroom shelves held bottles of injectable ampicillin and jars of Valium—folk remedies now. A few people lay in the rehydration room. In a corner of the dispensary a dying old man curled upon himself. Behind a screen Señora Perera found a listless child with swollen glands and pale nail beds. She examined him. A year ago she would have asked the parents’ permission to send him to a hospital in the city for tests and treatment if necessary. Now the hospital in the city was dealing with wounds and emergencies, not diseases. The parents would have refused anyway. What was a cancer unit for but to disappear people? She stood for a moment with her head bowed, her thumb on the child’s groin. Then she told him to dress himself.

  As she came out from behind the screen she could see the two nurses through a window. They were walking toward the community kitchen to inspect the miracle of soya cakes. Luis lounged just outside the window.

  She leaned over the sill and addressed his waxy ear. “Escort those two, why don’t you? I want to see Señor Rey’s house alone.”

  Luis moved sullenly off. Señor Rey led her toward his dwelling in resentful silence. Did he think she really cared whether his cache was guns or cocaine? All she wanted was to ditch Luis for a while. But she would have to subject this village thug to a mild interrogation just to get an hour’s freedom.

  And then she saw a better ruse. She saw a motorbike, half concealed in Señor Rey’s shed.

  She had flown behind Federico on just such a bike, one summer by the sea. She remembered his thick torso within the circle of her arms. The next summer she had driven the thing herself, Olivia clasping her waist.

  “May I try that?”

  Señor Rey helplessly nodded. She handed him her kit bag. She hiked up her skirt and straddled the bike. The low heels of her shoes hooked over the foot pieces.

  But this was not flying. The machine strained uphill, held by one of the two ruts they called a road. On the hump between the ruts grass grew and even flowers—little red ones. She picked up speed slightly and left the village behind. She passed poor farms and thick growths of vegetation. The road rose and fell. From a rise she got a glimpse of a brown lake. Her buttocks smarted.

  When she stopped at last and got off the bike, her skirt ripped with a snort. She leaned the disappointing machine against a scrub pine and walked into the woods, headed toward the lake. Mist encircled some trees. Thick roots snagged her shoes. But ahead was a clearing, just past tendrils hanging from branches. A good place for a smoke. She parted the vines and entered, and saw a woman.

  A girl, really. She was eighteen at most. She was sitting on a carpet of needles and leaning against a harsh tree. But her lowered face was as untroubled as if she had been resting on a silken pouf. The nursing infant was wrapped in coarse striped cloth. Its little hand rested against her brown breast. Mother and child were outwardly motionless, yet Señora Perera felt a steady pulsing beneath her soles, as if the earth itself were a giant teat.

  She did not make much of a sound, only her old woman’s wheeze. But the girl looked up as if in answer, presenting a bony, pockmarked face. If the blood of the conquistadors had run in her ancestors’ veins, it had by now been conquered; she was utterly Indian. Her flat brown eyes were fearless.

  “Don’t get up, don’t trouble yourself …” But the girl bent her right leg and raised herself to a standing position without disturbing the child.

  She walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Señora Perera, her glance caught the diamonds. She looked at them with mild interest and returned her gaze to the stranger.

  They faced each other across a low dry bush. With a clinician’s calm Señora Perera saw herself through the Indian girl’s eyes. Not a grandmother, for grandmothers did not have red hair. Not a soldier, for soldiers did not wear skirts. Not a smuggler, for smugglers had ingratiating manners. Not a priest, for priests wore combat fatigues and gave out cigarettes; and not a journalist, for journalists piously nodded. She could not be a deity; deities radiated light. She must, then, be a witch.

  Witches have authority. “Good that you nurse the child,” Señora Perera said.

  “Yes. Until his teeth come.”

  “After his teeth come, chica. He can learn not to bite.” She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and placed her forefinger on its tip. “See? Teach him to cover his teeth with his tongue.”

  The girl slowly nodded. Señora Perera mirrored her nod. Jew and Indian: Queen Isabella’s favorite victims. Five centuries later, Jews were a great nation, getting richer. Indians were multiplying, getting poorer. It would be a moment’s work to unfasten the pin and pass it across the bush. But how would the girl fence the diamonds? Señor Rey would insist on the lion’s share; and what would a peasant do with money, anyway—move to the raddled capital? Señora Perera extended an empty hand toward the infant and caressed its oblivious head. The mother revealed a white smile.

  “He will be a great man,” the señora promised.

  The girl’s sparse lashes lifted. Witch had become prophetess. The incident needed only a bit of holy nonsense for prophetess to become lady. “He will be a great man,” Señora Perera repeated, in Polish, stalling for time. And then, in Spanish again, with the hoarseness that inevitably accompanied her quotable pronouncements, “Suckle!” she commanded. She unhooked the pin. With a flourishing gesture right out of one of Olivia’s operettas, conveying tenderness and impetuousness and authority too, she pressed the diamonds into the girl’s free hand. “Keep them until he’s grown,” she hissed, and she turned on her heel and strode along the path, hoping to disappear abruptly into the floating mist as if she had been assumed. Penniless exile crawls into Jerusalem, she thought, furious with herself.

  When she reached the motorbike, she lit the postponed cigarette and grew calm again. After all, she could always give Spanish lessons.

  SEÑOR REY WAS WAITING in front of his shed. He clucked at her ripped skirt. And Luis was waiting near the helicopter, talking to the pilot. He gave the unadorned lapel a hard stare. The Dutch nurse would stay until next Saturday, when the mail Jeep would arrive. So it was just the three of them, Luis said. She wondered if he would arrest her in the chopper, or upon their arrival at the airstrip, or in the little plane, or when they landed at the capitol, or not until they got to her apartment. It didn’t matter; her busybody’s career had been honorably completed with the imperative uttered in the clearing. Suckle. Let that word get around—it would sour all the milk in the country, every damned little jar of it.

  And now—deportation? Call it retirement. She wondered if the goons had in mind some nastier punishment. That didn’t matter, either; she’d been living on God’s time since the cow.

  ALLOG

  THERE WERE FIVE APARTMENTS in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.

  Nobody liked to be seen there—not the middle-aged widower, not the Moroccan family, not the three old ladies.

  The widower got too few letters.

  The Moroccans got too many, all bills.

  The soprano got some, enough, too much, too little; what did quantity matter. Every concert series in Jerusalem had her name on its list. Do-good societies would not leave her in peace. But the one letter she craved rarely appeared, and when it did come it was only a thin blue square, as if it had been
first ironed and then frozen. She extended her palm, the missive floating on it. Decades ago she had indicated with the same gracious gesture, after sufficient applause, that her accompanist might now take a bow. The letter weighed less than a peseta; inside would be perhaps four uninformative sentences in a jumble of Polish and Spanish. She might as well burn it unopened. Chin high, eyes dry, she climbed the stairs.

  Tamar, who lived with her grandmother across the hall from the soprano, picked up their mail on her way home from school. Unlike the others, she didn’t care who saw her correspondence. She was seventeen. Her parents, in the United States on an extended sabbatical, wrote once a week. A great number of elderly Viennese who had fetched up on other shores wrote to her grandmother. But her grandmother didn’t like to go to the mailboxes, or anywhere else for that matter. When Tamar’s grandmother did go out—to exhibits, to lectures, to the market—she did so because as a woman of cultivation she was obliged to transcend her dislike of society, though not to conceal it.

  Mrs. Goldfanger, on the ground floor, loved society. But she crept from her apartment to the mailboxes like a thief. She wanted to be alone when puzzling out the Hebrew on the envelopes, making sure that everything in her box was truly addressed to Mr. Goldfanger or Mrs. Goldfanger or Mr. and Mrs. Goldfanger or the Goldfanger family; and not to the Gilboas, who ten years ago had sold their apartment to the Goldfangers, newly arrived from Cape Town. The Gilboas still received advertisements from tanning salons, which Mrs. Goldfanger felt justified in throwing away. But some morning a legacy might await them in the Goldfanger box. Such things had been known to happen. And then what? She would have to run after the mailman, hoping that he was still crisscrossing Deronda Street like the laces on a corset. If he had completed his route she would have to go to the post office with the misdirected letter, and join the line that backed all the way to the delicatessen; and she would have to explain in her untrustworthy Hebrew that Gilboa, who had just received this letter from a bank in Paris, was away, gone, exiled, and had left no forwarding address.

  So Mrs. Goldfanger’s relationship with her mailbox, as with many things, was an anxious one. How strange it was, then, that one August morning, having deciphered the first envelope and also its return address, she gathered up all the others without looking at them—let the Gilboas wait another day for their emeralds. She flew up the stairs, a smile on her pretty face.

  Mrs. Goldfanger was eighty-five. Her doctor said she had the heart of a woman of thirty, and though she did not believe this outrageous compliment, it strengthened her physical courage, already considerable. She was not afraid of the labor of tending her husband—she could lift him from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to bed; she could help him walk when he wanted to. But her sadness was deepening. To diaper him seemed the height of impropriety, and listening to his unintelligible gabble was someday going to break her thirty-year-old heart. The assistants she hired were often indifferent; if they were kindly they soon got better jobs.

  But now … she knocked at the door above her own. Tamar’ grandmother opened it, dressed as usual in slacks and a blouse. No one had ever seen her in a bathrobe.

  Mrs. Goldfanger leaped into the apartment like an antelope. “It’s come!”

  Tamar’s grandmother examined the official envelope and then handed it to Tamar, who had wandered in from the balcony, where she was breakfasting in her skimpy nightgown.

  Tamar, too, examined the envelope. “The hepatoscopist has landed,” she said.

  A YEAR EARLIER the state of Israel had entered into a treaty with an impoverished Southeast Asian nation. Under the treaty Israeli citizens could purchase the assistance of Southeast Asians for the at-home management of the elderly. The foreigners were not to be hired as nannies, house cleaners, or day care workers—able-bodied Israeli citizens were available for that work, not that they relished it. The Asians’ task was to care for sages who had outlived their sagacity.

  The employers undertook the expense of airfare—round-trip airfare: workers were not supposed to hang about when their charges died. Citizenship was no part of the deal. Weren’t these people already citizens someplace else? The Law of Return did not apply to Catholics, which most of them nominally were, nor to hepatoscopists, which some of them were said to be.

  As soon as a bureau had been established, Mrs. Goldfanger had applied for an Asian.

  “What’s a hepatoscopist?” she asked Tamar’s grandmother now.

  Tamar’s grandmother said: “Hepatoscopy is the prediction of the future by an examination of the entrails, specifically the liver, of a mammal. Properly a sheep, more practically a rodent.”

  “Oh.”

  “All those stray cats,” Tamar murmured. “Useful at last.”

  In the weeks following Mrs. Goldfanger’s application, Tamar’s grandmother had accompanied Mrs. Goldfanger to a series of office visits. The younger old woman had helped the older old woman fill out the required forms. Every time a packet of papers arrived in the mail, Mrs. Goldfanger brought them up to Tamar’s grandmother. She settled herself at the table in the dining room. Sunlight slanting through the blind made her rusty hair rustier—more unnatural, Tamar mentioned later. “Henna is a natural substance,” her grandmother reminded her.

  And now the Asian was here. Or would be here in three weeks’ time. Mrs. Goldfanger was to go to the bureau at ten o’clock on a morning in September to be introduced to the newcomer and to sign the necessary final papers.

  “Shall I come with you?” Tamar’s grandmother said, sighing.

  “Oh, not this time.” Mrs. Goldfanger paused. “That there should be no confusion,” she confusedly explained. “But thank you very much, for everything. I just wanted you to know.”

  So it was alone, three weeks later, that Mrs. Goldfanger journeyed to the dingy office that she now knew so well. Her hand alone shook the hand of the serious man. Her voice alone welcomed him, in English. His English had a lilt, like the waves that lapped his island country. Mrs. Goldfanger, unassisted, told the bureau official that she understood the necessity for employer and employee to visit the office once every four months (later she wondered briefly whether the visits were to occur four times every one month). Her smile beckoned the man to follow.

  His satchel was so small. He wore tan pants and a woven shirt and another shirt, plaid, as a jacket. She hoped that cabs would be numerous at the nearby taxi stand; she wanted him to see immediately that the country was bountiful. Providence smiled on the wish: three cabbies were waiting, and the first promptly started his engine. But before the pair could get into the vehicle a schnorrer approached. Mrs. Goldfanger gave him a coin. Joe felt in his own pocket. Oh dear. “I’ve paid for us both,” she explained.

  DURING JOE’S FIRST AFTERNOON at the Goldfangers’, he spent several hours on the balcony fixing the wheelchair. Because he was on hands and knees he could not be seen above the iron railing, wound about with ivy; but on the glass table, in plain view, lay an open toolbox and an amputated wheel. Coming home from school, Tamar paused under the eucalyptus, squinted through the ivy with a practiced eye, and saw the wheelchair lying on its side, the kneeling figure operating on it. Whatever he was doing was precise, or at least small; it required no noticeable movement on his part. He maintained his respectful position for many minutes. Tamar, under the tree, maintained her erect one. Finally his bare arm reached upward—blindly it seemed, but in fact purposefully—and the hand, without wandering, grasped a screwdriver. The girl went into the building.

  In the succeeding days there were signs of further industry at the Goldfangers’ apartment. The rap of hammering mixed with the mortar fire of drilling. The soprano noticed the new servant standing in front of the Goldfangers’ fuse box in the shared hall, his fingers curling around his chin. Soon the stereo equipment rose from its grave; remastered swing orchestras that Mrs. Goldfanger had not been able to listen to for months issued from the open doors of the balcony into the autumn warmth.

  “Joe is
a wonder,” Mrs. Goldfanger said to Tamar and her grandmother. “He’s descended from the angels.”

  Tamar’s grandmother narrowed her eyes. The indentured were often industrious. A good disposition was natural to people born in the temperate zone. Sympathy flourished in mild climates; it withered in torrid ones; and in this country, amid five million wound-up souls, it was as rare as a lotus. People here had mislaid civility a century ago.

  Mrs. Goldfanger gushed on about Joe; Tamar’s grandmother kept her knowledge of human nature to herself. “My husband is lucky,” Mrs. Goldfanger said.

  Mr. Goldfanger’s decline had been gradual, though Tamar and her grandmother remembered that he had moved in already trembling. The children in the ground-floor apartment opposite the Goldfangers’ had never known him as other than a speechless gremlin. Those funny pointed ears, hair sprouted right out of them, and he always looked as if he were going to speak, but he never did, not one word. They had been warned not to mock him.

  This family, referred to as Moroccan by everybody in the building, had all been born in Israel—father, mother, three children. The epithet derived from the previous generation and would no doubt abide for several hundred years. The Moroccan mother got vigorously tarted up for the holidays and for nights out, but at other times she hung around in an unclean satin robe. She had apricot hair and freckles and a mischievous smile. Her children were always underfoot—under her feet, under everybody else’s. Her husband ran a successful tile business; some of the most praised kitchens in Rehavia owed their gloss to him.

  He was artistic—or at least he had an artistic eye—but he was not handy. The entire family, in fact, was all thumbs. All ears and all eyes, too; they couldn’t help but be aware of the cleverness of the Goldfangers’ new aide. Such fingers! And so, every ten days or so, when one of their appliances would break down: “Joe! Joe!” they’d call. “That damned toaster!” And Joe, leaving the Goldfangers’ door open in case his patient needed him, would walk across the hall and diagnose and maybe repair the thing, and softly return.