Meanwhile she typed applications for other Persons. Belgium had recently announced that it would take some. Australia also. Canada too. America was still dithering about its immigration laws, although the Lutheran Council of the American Midwest had volunteered to relocate fifty Persons, not specifying agricultural workers, not even specifying Lutherans. But how many tailors could this place Minnesota absorb?
She typed an application, translating from the Yiddish handwriting. Name: Morris Losowitz; yes, she knew him as Mendel but Morris was the proper Anglicization. Age: 35; yes that was true. Dependents: Wife and three Children; yes that was true, too, though it ignored the infant on the way. Occupation: Electrical Engineer. In Poland he had taught in a cheder. Perhaps he knew how to change a lightbulb. Languages Spoken in Order of Fluency: Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English. Strictly true. He could say “I want to go to America,” and maybe a dozen other words. His wife spoke better English, was more intelligent; but the application wasn’t curious about her.
Ida typed on and on. The afternoon darkened further. Her own overhead lightbulb shook on its noose. In the big hall above her ceiling raged a joyous battle: walls were being decorated, the camp’s orchestra was practicing, the Purim spielers were perfecting their skits.
She stopped, and covered her typewriter with the remnants of a tallith. She locked the office and went into the courtyard. Two members of the DP police stood there, self-important noodles. They grinned at her. She passed children still playing in the chill dark. She entered the east building. What a din: groups of men, endlessly arguing. And those two Hungarian sisters, always together, their hands clasped or at least their knuckles touching. She’d heard that they accompanied each other into the toilet. In the first room there was a vent to the outdoors and somebody had installed a stove, and always a cabbage stew boiled, or a pot of onions, and always washed diapers hung near the steam, never getting entirely dry. Hers was the next room, hers the first cubicle, where a nice old lady slept in the bed above, preferring elevation to the rats she believed infested the place, though there had been no rats since the visit of a sanitary squad from the British occupation zone. But the lady expected their return, and never left her straw mattress until mid-afternoon.
She was up and about now, gossiping somewhere. From beneath the bed Ida dragged a sack and dumped its contents onto her own mattress—a silk blouse, silk underwear, sewing utensils, glue, and a Wehrmacht helmet, battered and cracked. And cellophane; cellophane wrappers; dozens of cellophane wrappers, hundreds; some crushed, some merely torn, some intact, slipped whole from the Lucky Strikes and Camels that they had once protected … She began to work.
SONYA, EJECTED FROM HER OFFICE by the solicitous Ida, had only pretended to be taking a walk. When out of range of the office window she doubled back to the south building. Two women there were near their time, though neither was ready to be transported to the lying-in bungalow. In their room they were being entertained by three men rehearsing a Purim spiel: a Mordecai with a fat book, an Ahasuerus in a cloak, and a fool in a cap with a single bell. A fool? The Purim spiel had a long connection to the commedia dell’arte, Roland had mentioned. This fool played a harmonica, the king sang Yedeh hartz hot soides—Every heart has secrets—and Mordecai, his book open, rocked from side to side and uttered wise sayings.
Sonya next went to the storehouse. Someone had stolen a carton of leftover Chanukah supplies donated by a congregation in New Jersey. Not a useful donation—the camp would be disbanded by next December, every resident knew that for a fact, all of them would be housed comfortably in Sydney, Toronto, New York, Tel Aviv … Still, shouted the Person in charge, this is a crazy insult, stealing from ourselves; why don’t we rob the swine in the village?
The TB hospital next, formerly the Wehrmacht’s stable. The military nurse who ran the place snapped that all was as usual, two admissions yesterday, no discharges, X-ray machine on its last legs, what else was new. Her assistants, female Persons who had been doctors Before, were more informative. “Ach, the people here now will sooner or later get better probably,” one said. “They’ll recover, nu, if God is willing, maybe if he isn’t, if he just looks the other way. Choose life. Isn’t it written?”
Sonya went to her own bedroom. As camp directors she and Roland occupied private quarters—a single narrow room with a triple-decker bed. Roland slept on the bottom, Sonya in the middle, once in a while an inspector from headquarters occupied the top, where else to put him? There was a sink and a two-drawer dresser. Sonya opened the lower drawer and reached into the back. Why should she too not dress up for the Purim party? Choose life, choose beauty, choose what all American women long for, a little black dress. She grabbed the rolled-up garment she had stashed there two years ago and brought it into the weak light and raised it and shook it. It unfurled reluctantly. She took off her shirt, slipped the dress over her head, stepped out of her ski pants. The dress felt too large. There was a piece of mirror resting slantwise on the sink—Roland used it for shaving. She straightened it. Then she backed away.
A witch peered at her from the jagged looking glass. A skinny powerless witch with untamed gray hair wearing the costume of a bigger witch.
She had been a free spirit once, she thought she recalled. At the young age of fifty she had dwelled on a Rhode Island beach; she had danced under the moon. She had known the Hurricane. She had lived in a bed-sitter in London and had worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. She had saved some children. She had known the doodlebugs. In a damp pub in 1945 she had accepted Roland Rosenberg’s invitation to run Camp Gruenwasser with him. She had allowed his fat, freckled hand to rest on hers.
She peered closer at the tiny witch in the glass. And then some disturbance in the currents of the air caused the mirror to hurl itself onto the wooden floor. There it splintered.
Roland would have to shave without a mirror. Maybe he’d grow a beard. She was attempting to pick up the shards when he came in.
“Sonya, stop.” He walked down the hall and fetched the communal broom and dustpan—a large thistle on a stick, a piece of tin. She was sucking her finger when he returned. He looked at the cut. “Run it under water for a long time.” She ran it under water for a long time. When she turned around the damage was swept up, the implements had been returned, and he was lying on the lowest bed, eyes closed, as if it was this recent effort that had exhausted him, not two years of constant toil.
She closed their door. She unbuckled his worn belt. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt. What color had it been originally? It had long ago faded to the yellowish green of his eyes. She unbuttoned the cuffs, too, but did not attempt to remove the shirt—it was up to him whether or not to take it off; he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? Was he? He had all the vitality of a corpse. But when she roughly rolled down his trousers and pulled them off and rolled down his undershorts and pulled them off, she saw that he was ready for her. When had they done this last—three months ago? Six? For them, as for the Persons, one gray day got sucked into the next. Yet there were joys: letters from relatives thought dead, meat sometimes in the soup, and tonight a party … She stood and lifted her little black dress over her witch’s body. It ruffled her witch’s coiffure. She left the dress lying on the floor. She straddled Roland’s erection, brushing him back and forth, side to side, until she felt a spurt of her own moisture, and he must have felt it, too, for, alert, he gripped her upper arms and turned them both over at once as if they were a single animal, a whale in green flannel maybe. She looked up at him. “Roland, I love you,” she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders, the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. Were these not things to love? Oh, and the kindness. He thrust, thrust … “Ah,” she said. And even in her pleasure, her witch’s pleasure, she heard the stealthy opening of the door. She turned her head and met Ludwig’s
rodent gaze.
BY THE TIME ROLAND AND SONYA ARRIVED at the great hall—a big room with a little stage—the thrown-together orchestra was playing: strings, one trumpet, woodwinds, an accordion, a balalaika, three guitars, one drum. Candles in tin cans were burning side by side on the rim of the stage and on a ledge around the room and at the windows. Each thick candle, Sonya noticed, was made up of a clutch of little, twisted candles, the Chanukah kind. There were also several chanukkiyahs. A broad table held a mountain of hamantaschen. Another table sagged under bowls of liquid. “Let’s hope no one got hold of the methanol,” Roland said. At another camp, mostly Polish Persons, two men had gone blind from drinking the stuff.
Roland was dressed, he claimed, as Dionysius—that is, two sprigs of juniper were pinned to his scant hair, one falling onto his forehead, the other nestling within his humble nape.
Most costumes were equally rudimentary. Where could Persons get fabric, jewels, gauzy shawls? Yet some had indeed procured such items. A wife had made a royal garment for her husband. It was a short black silk cape, formerly the lining of their only coat. They wouldn’t need a lined coat in Palestine, this loving spouse explained to Sonya. She had adorned the cape with little white fur tails which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins. Several young Mordecais wore, in front of their ears, scholarly coils: the strapping tape from Red Cross packages. One Esther had saved a beaded dress from her dead mother’s wardrobe. Another wore a dirndl skirt and a jersey shirt that said ENGLEWOOD HIGH SCHOOL. A Catholic family slipped in shyly wearing Easter finery; after years in a cardboard valise the clothing too seemed to be cardboard. Ludwig and his uncle Claud had encased their upper bodies in splintery barrels that had held potatoes. Their heads were crowned by circlets of dry leaves. SCHWARZ KÖNIG was painted on Ludwig’s barrel. Uncle Claud was the white queen.
King, queen, wise man, and the occasional hero: cigar stubs identified Churchill, a cigarette holder Roosevelt. No one came dressed as Haman. Haman adorned the yellow walls, though. He was painted in green, painted in black tar, drawn in pencil, cut from brown paper. There were several Hamans in relief, made from a sturdy papier-mâché. “What is this stuff?” Sonya asked the history teacher. “The Stars and Stripes, pulped,” he told her. Many Hamans were rendered feet up, head down. Each wore a little black mustache.
The orchestra fluted, blared, strummed. Persons danced, changed partners, danced again. The pile of hamantaschen diminished, was replenished. The two Hungarian sisters entered, hand in hand. A skit was performed in one corner. Ida entered, wearing a hat. A skit was performed on the stage. Someone sang, dreadfully. Three men dragged in the upright piano from the corridor, although the orchestra had specified that it did not require a piano, did not want a piano, certainly could not employ that piano, which was missing seventeen keys. The orchestra leader swiped at one of the three moving men with his baton, an umbrella spoke. Roland intervened. The piano, with bench but without pianist, remained, near the string section. The radiant young man from the south building entered, wrapped in a blue and white tablecloth with permanent stains; Sonya guessed that it, too, came from Englewood, New Jersey. The philosophy teacher …
Was that woman Ida? Sonya had never before seen her in lipstick. She must have been hoarding it forever; lucky it hadn’t pulverized. And that brilliant red silk blouse, how come it wasn’t dust … Ida blew a kiss to Sonya and asked Mendel to dance. Mendel’s wife, vastly pregnant, smiled acquiescence. Mendel was dressed in a long black jacket whose wide belt bore a buckle covered in silver foil. Sonya guessed his puritan garb was intended as Lutheran. Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another. It was a heavy cloche with a narrow brim, and it was covered with hundreds of shining bows, or perhaps butterflies, or perhaps ecstatic transparent birds. They caught the light of the candles, transforming that light into ruby twinkles, turquoise wings, flashes of green. Were they silk, those bows butterflies birds? Were they diamonds? Were they real winged creatures? Ida whirled by. Below the iridescent helmet her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck. “We have guests,” Roland said in Sonya’s ear.
She had been ignoring the three American officers, though she had identified their rank, she had noticed their medals, she had recognized the famous grin. “Roland, I am exhausted, my charm whatever there was of it is used up, would you take care of them for a while, Roland? And tell them that your wife will be with them shortly.”
“Wife?”
“Everybody thinks we’re married, why upset that cart …”
“I wish you were my wife. I would like you to be my wife.”
“Yes,” she said, acknowledging his wish, maybe even acceding to it; and then she backed up, backed up, until she collided with the accordionist moving forward. The Persons’ orchestra was taking a break. Sonya sat down at the ruined piano.
She played “You and the Night and the Music.” The missing keys were mostly at either end; the absence of middle A and the B-flat below middle C was a nuisance, but she fudged. She played a Strauss waltz and the waltz from Faust. The smoke thickened like roux. The air in the room was clouded and warm and vital; life itself might have originated in these emanations from burning tobacco. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She played “The Merry Widow.”
The noise increased. There was some yelling: another skit. She saw Ida waltzing with the general. Ida looked up at him from under her hat. As they turned, Sonya saw an inquiring look on her lovely face. As they turned again she saw the look change into one of admiration. As they turned again she saw the look become one of pleasure.
“She’s fucking him,” Ludwig said, in English. He had taken off his black king’s barrel. He was seated on the bench beside her. He smelled of brandy. “I am employing a metaphor,” he explained.
The general danced a two-step with Ida’s cubicle mate, the little old lady who came alive at dusk. He danced the Kozachok with a group of Ukrainians. He danced another waltz with Ida. And then, twenty minutes later, Sonya and Roland and Ludwig and Ida and a dozen others stood at the gates to wave good-bye to the jeep carrying the three officers. The general touched his cap—handsome headgear, really, with all that gold insignia, but no match for Ida’s.
SONYA PREDICTED that the camp’s rations would soon increase, but they did not. She hoped that Ida might get a private gift—silk stockings, maybe—but nothing appeared. She even thought that the new immigration act would be rushed through the United States Congress.
“It was only a dance,” Ida said.
“Two dances. And you were ravishing.”
“He’s a soldier,” Ida said, sighing. “Not a king.”
But then something did happen. The allotment of cigarettes per Person was officially increased. The augmented allotment, however, was not to be distributed (a formal letter ordered) but to remain in the disposition of the directors. And that, Sonya and the newly bearded Roland discovered, was enough to change things significantly—to get butter, milk, greens, sanitary napkins; to buy a sow, which enraged some but fed others; to pay a glazier from the village to fix broken windows; to procure gas for mendicant trips to Frankfurt, which resulted in more butter, milk, greens, and sanitary napkins; and finally, with the aid of a bundle of additional dollars contributed by Americans, to enable a sizable group of Displaced Persons, including Ida, to bribe its way overland to Brindisi, where waited a boat bound for Haifa.
One day Mendel’s wife, who had replaced Ida as the directors’ secretary, handed Sonya a letter.
We have reached Palestine, wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. We have been saved, again.
THE COAT
“OTHER CAPITALS,” BEGAN ROLAND, and paused for breath as he sometimes did. Sonya waited with apparent serenity. “… are in worse shape,” he concluded.
They were standing on the Pont Neuf, holding hands. All at once they embraced, as if ravaged Paris demanded it.
Roland Rosenberg was sixty and
Sonya Rosenberg was fifty-eight. They had directed Camp Gruenwasser since 1945, but finally the place had been able to close, its last Displaced Persons repatriated to Romania. So the Rosenbergs, too, had left, traveling westward on first one train and then another. Each was dressed in prewar clothing, each lugged a single misshapen suitcase. They looked like Displaced Persons themselves; but their American passports gave them freedom, and their employment by the Joint Distribution Committee gave them cash.
Paris was giving them dusty cafés, a few concerts with second-rate performers, black bread, and this old bridge called New. Recovering from their embrace, they turned again toward the river. “The Old World,” Roland said, “is a corpse.”
Sonya—who had spent the war years in blistered London and the five decades previous in Rhode Island—knew the Old World only by reputation. Cafés, galleries, libraries, chamber recitals; salons de thé; polyglots in elegant clothing conducting afternoon dalliances before returning to one of the great banking houses … A derelict barge sailed toward them, sailed under them; thin children without shoes played on its deck.
ON THEIR THIRD DAY, coming out of a brasserie near the Bastille, Roland suffered a heart attack. He spent a week in the hospital. Sonya sat by his side in a long room with metal cots and wooden floors that, like Camp Gruenwasser’s infirmary, stank of carbolic acid. She displayed an outward calm, she even felt calm—he would survive this attack, the French doctors told her, with emphasis on the this—but she could not prevent her long fingers from raking her long hair, hair that had turned from gray to white during the war and its aftermath.
When Roland was released they traveled by train to Le Havre and by ship to New York. The Joint got them a place on lower Fifth.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 17