She had spread word that, while it rained in every other place all over town, their concession was miraculously dry. So, besides a headache that made his body throb in rhythm to its vast pulse, Greenberg had to work like six men satisfying the crowd who mobbed the place to see the miracle and enjoy the dry warmth.
How much they took in will never be known. Greenberg made it a practice not to discuss such personal matters. But it is quite definite that not even in 1929 had he done so well over a single week end.
Very early Monday morning he was dressing quietly, not to disturb his wife. Esther, however, raised herself on her elbow and looked at him doubtfully.
“Herman,” she called softly, “do you really have to go?”
He turned, puzzled. “What do you mean—do I have to go?”
“Well—” She hesitated. Then: “Couldn’t you wait until the end of the season, Herman, darling?”
He staggered back a step, his face working in horror. “What kind of an idea is that for my own wife to have?” he croaked. “Beer I have to drink instead of water. How can I stand it? Do you think I like beer? I can’t wash myself. Already people don’t like to stand near me; and how will they act at the end of the season? I go around looking like a bum because my beard is too tough for an electric razor, and I’m all the time drunk—the first Greenberg to be a drunkard. I want to be respected—”
“I know, Herman, darling,” she sighed. “But I thought for the sake of our Rosie—Such a business we’ve never done like we did this week end. If it rains every Saturday and Sunday, but not on our concession, we’ll make a fortune!”
“Esther!” Herman cried, shocked. “Doesn’t my health mean anything?”
“Of course, darling. Only I thought maybe you could stand it for—”
He snatched his hat, tie and jacket, and slammed the door. Outside, though, he stood indeterminedly. He could hear his wife crying, and he realized that, if he succeeded in getting the gnome to remove the curse, he would forfeit an opportunity to make a great deal of money.
He finished dressing more slowly. Esther was right, to a certain extent. If he could tolerate his waterless condition—
“No!” he gritted decisively. “Already my friends avoid me. It isn’t right that a respectable man like me should always be drunk and not take a bath. So we’ll make less money. Money isn’t everything—”
And with great determination, he went to the lake.
But that evening, before going home, Mike walked out of his way to stop in at the concession. He found Greenberg sitting on a chair, his head in his hands, and his body rocking slowly in anguish.
“What is it, Mr. Greenberg?” he asked gently.
Greenberg looked up. His eyes were dazed. “Oh, you, Mike,” he said blankly. Then his gaze cleared, grew more intelligent, and he stood up and led Mike to the bar. Silently, they drank beer. “I went to the lake today,” he said hollowly. “I walked all around it hollering like mad. The gnome didn’t stick his head out of the water once.”
“I know,” Mike nodded sadly. “They’re busy all the time.”
Greenberg spread his hands imploringly. “So what can I do? I can’t write him a letter or send him a telegram; he ain’t got a door to knock on or a bell for me to ring. How do I get him to come up and talk?”
His shoulders sagged. “Here, Mike. Have a cigar. You been a real good friend, but I guess we’re licked.”
They stood in an awkward silence. Finally Mike blurted: “Real hot, today. A regular scorcher.”
“Yeah. Esther says business was pretty good, if it keeps up.”
Mike fumbled at the cellophane wrapper. Greenberg said: “Anyhow, suppose I did talk to the gnome. What about the sugar?”
The silence dragged itself out, became tense and uncomfortable. Mike was distinctly embarrassed. His brusque nature was not adapted for comforting discouraged friends. With immense concentration he rolled the cigar between his fingers and listened for a rustle.
“Day like this’s hell on cigars,” he mumbled, for the sake of conversation. “Dries them like nobody’s business. This one ain’t, though.”
“Yeah,” Greenberg said abstractedly. “Cellophane keeps them—”
They looked suddenly at each other, their faces clean of expression.
“Holy smoke!” Mike yelled.
“Cellophane on sugar!” Greenberg choked out.
“Yeah,” Mike whispered in awe. “I’ll switch my day off with Joe, and I’ll go to the lake with you tomorrow. I’ll call for you early.”
Greenberg pressed his hand, too strangled by emotion for speech. When Esther came to relieve him, he left her at the concession with only the inexperienced griddle boy to assist her, while he searched the village for cubes of sugar wrapped in cellophane.
The sun had scarcely risen when Mike reached the hotel, but Greenberg had long been dressed and stood on the porch waiting impatiently. Mike was genuinely anxious for his friend. Greenberg staggered along toward the station, his eyes almost crossed with the pain of a terrific hang-over.
They stopped at a cafeteria for breakfast. Mike ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, and coffee half-and-half. When he heard the order, Greenberg had to gag down a lump in his throat.
“What’ll you have?” the counterman asked.
Greenberg flushed. “Beer,” he said hoarsely.
“You kidding me?” Greenberg shook his head, unable to speak. “Want anything with it? Cereal, pie, toast—”
“Just beer.” And he forced himself to swallow it. “So help me,” he hissed at Mike, “another beer for breakfast will kill me!”
“I know how it is,” Mike said around a mouthful of food.
On the train they attempted to make plans. But they were faced by a phenomenon that neither had encountered before, and so they got nowhere. They walked glumly to the lake, fully aware that they would have to employ the empirical method of discarding tactics that did not work.
“How about a boat?” Mike suggested.
“It won’t stay in the water with me in it. And you can’t row it.”
“Well, what’ll we do then?”
Greenberg bit his lip and stared at the beautiful blue lake. There the gnome lived, so near to them. “Go through the woods along the shore, and holler like hell. I’ll go the opposite way. We’ll pass each other and meet at the boathouse. If the gnome comes up, yell for me.”
“O.K.,” Mike said, not very confidently.
The lake was quite large and they walked slowly around it, pausing often to get the proper stance for particularly emphatic shouts. But two hours later, when they stood opposite each other with the full diameter of the lake between them, Greenberg heard Mike’s hoarse voice: “Hey, gnome!”
“Hey, gnome!” Greenberg yelled. “Come on up!”
An hour later they crossed paths. They were tired, discouraged, and their throats burned; and only fishermen disturbed the lake’s surface.
“The hell with this,” Mike said. “It ain’t doing any good. Let’s go back to the boathouse.”
“What’ll we do?” Greenberg rasped. “I can’t give up!”
They trudged back around the lake, shouting half-heartedly. At the boathouse, Greenberg had to admit that he was beaten. The boathouse owner marched threateningly toward him.
“Why don’t you maniacs get away from here?” he barked. “What’s the idea of hollering and scaring away the fish? The guys are sore—”
“We’re not going to holler any more,” Greenberg said. “It’s no use.”
When they bought beer and Mike, on an impulse, hired a boat, the owner cooled off with amazing rapidity, and went off to unpack bait.
“What did you get a boat for?” Greenberg asked. “I can’t ride in it.”
“You’re not going to. You’re gonna walk.”
“Around the lake again?” Greenberg cried.
“Nope. Look, Mr. Greenberg. Maybe the gnome can’t hear us through all that water. Gnomes ain’t hardhearted. If
he heard us and thought you were sorry, he’d take his curse off you in a jiffy.”
“Maybe.” Greenberg was not convinced. “So where do I come in?”
“The way I figure it, some way or other you push water away, but the water pushes you away just as hard. Anyhow, I hope so. If it does, you can walk on the lake.” As he spoke, Mike had been lifting large stones and dumping them on the bottom of the boat. “Give me a hand with these.”
Any activity, however useless, was better than none, Greenberg felt. He helped Mike fill the boat until just the gunwales were above water. Then Mike got in and shoved off.
“Come on,” Mike said. “Try to walk on the water.”
Greenberg hesitated. “Suppose I can’t?”
“Nothing’ll happen to you. You can’t get wet; so you won’t drown.”
The logic of Mike’s statement reassured Greenberg. He stepped out boldly. He experienced a peculiar sense of accomplishment when the water hastily retreated under his feet into pressure bowls, and an unseen, powerful force buoyed him upright across the lake’s surface. Though his footing was not too secure, with care he was able to walk quite swiftly.
“Now what?” he asked, almost happily.
Mike had kept pace with him in the boat. He shipped his oars and passed Greenberg a rock. “We’ll drop them all over the lake—make it damned noisy down there and upset the place. That’ll get him up.”
They were more hopeful now, and their comments, “Here’s one that’ll wake him,” and “I’ll hit him right on the noodle with this one,” served to cheer them still further. And less than half the rocks had been dropped when Greenberg halted, a boulder in his hands. Something inside him wrapped itself tightly around his heart and his jaw dropped.
Mike followed his awed, joyful gaze. To himself, Mike had to admit that the gnome, propelling himself through the water with his ears, arms folded in tremendous dignity, was a funny sight.
“Must you drop rocks and disturb us at our work?” the gnome asked.
Greenberg gulped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gnome,” he said nervously. “I couldn’t get you to come up by yelling.”
The gnome looked at him. “Oh. You are the mortal who was disciplined. Why did you return?”
“To tell you that I’m sorry, and I won’t insult you again.”
“Have you proof of your sincerity?” the gnome asked quietly.
Greenberg fished furiously in his pocket and brought out a handful of sugar wrapped in cellophane, which he tremblingly handed to the gnome.
“Ah, very clever, indeed,” the little man said, unwrapping a cube and popping it eagerly into his mouth. “Long time since I’ve had some.”
A moment later Greenberg spluttered and floundered under the surface. Even if Mike had not caught his jacket and helped him up, he could almost have enjoyed the sensation of being able to drown.
PAMELA SARGENT
Gather Blue Roses
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Chelmo—the deathfurnaces of the Holocaust, open wounds in the confused conscience of a civilized, modern world. Their fires, still stoked by kindlings of anti-Semitism, illuminate what lies below and beyond civilization’s fragile constructions.
The Jew carries this burden of the past into a hostile present. Reluctantly, he passes it on to his children. Here is a story about those children, a melancholy prose-poem made up of fleeting after-images, a bad dream that finds its own reality. It is a slow descent into a cold future buried in the present, a present where only love and the strength of children can insure survival.
J. D.
*
I CANNOT REMEMBER EVER HAVING asked my mother outright about the tattooed numbers. We must have known very early that we should not ask; perhaps my brother Simon or I had said something inadvertently as very small children and had seen the look of sorrow on her face at the statement; perhaps my father had told us never to ask.
Of course, we were always aware of the numbers. There were those times when the weather was particularly warm, and my mother would not button her blouse at the top, and she would lean over us to hug us or pick us up, and we would see them written across her, an inch above her breasts.
(By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, “The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive.” And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)
By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college nearby, turning down his offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for mother. We had a lot of elms and oaks and a huge weeping willow that hovered sadly over the house. Our pond would be invaded in the early spring and late fall by a few geese, which would usually keep their distance before flying on. (“You can tell those birds are Jewish,” my father would say; “they go to Miami in the winter,” and Simon and I would imagine them lying on a beach, coating their feathers with Coppertone and ordering lemonades from the waitresses; we hadn’t heard of Collinses yet.)
Even out in the country, there were often those times when we would see my mother packing her clothes in a small suitcase, and she would tell us that she was going away for a while, just a week, just to get away, to find solitude. One time it was to an old camp in the Adirondacks that one of my aunts owned, another time to a cabin that a friend of my father’s loaned her, always alone, always to an isolated place. Father would say that it was “nerves,” although we wondered, since we were so isolated as it was. Simon and I thought she didn’t love us, that mother was somehow using this means to tell us that we were being rejected. I would try very hard to behave; when mother was resting, I would tiptoe and whisper. Simon reacted more violently. He could contain himself for a while; but then, in a desperate attempt at drawing attention to himself, would run through the house, screaming horribly, and hurl himself, headfirst, at one of the radiators. On one occasion, he threw himself through one of the large living room windows, smashing the glass. Fortunately, he was uninjured, except for cuts and bruises, but after that incident, my father put chicken wire over the windows on the inside of the house. Mother was very shaken by that incident, walking around for a couple of days, her body aching all over, then going away to my aunt’s place for three weeks this time. Simon’s head must have been strong; he never sustained any damage from the radiators worse than a few bumps and a headache, but the headaches would often keep mother in bed for days.
(I pick up my binoculars to check the forest again from my tower, seeing the small lakes like puddles below, using my glasses to focus on a couple in a small boat near one of the islands, and then turn away from them, not wanting to invade their privacy, envying the girl and boy who can so freely, without fear of consequences, exchange and share their feelings, and yet not share them, not at least in the way that would destroy a person such as myself. I do not think anyone will risk climbing my mountain today, as the sky is overcast, cirro-cumulus clouds slowly chasing each other, a large storm cloud in the west. I hope no one will come; the family who picnicked beneath my observation tower yesterday bothered me; one child had a headache and another indigestion, and I lay in my cabin taking aspirins all afternoon and nursing the heaviness in my stomach. I hope no one will come today.)
Mother and father did not send us to school until we were as old as the law would allow. We went to the small public school in town. An old yellow bus would pick us up in front of the house. I was scared the first day and was gl
ad Simon and I were twins so that we could go together. The town had built a new school; it was a small, square brick building, and there were fifteen of us in the first grade. The high school students went to classes in the same building. I was afraid of them and was glad to discover that their classes were all on the second floor; so we rarely saw them during the day, except when they had gym classes outside. Sitting at my desk inside, I would watch them, wincing every time someone got hit with a ball, or got bruised. (Only three months in school, thank God, before my father got permission to tutor me at home, three months was too much of the constant pains, the turmoil of emotions; I am sweating now and my hands shake, when I remember it all.)
The first day was boring to me for the most part; Simon and I had been reading and doing arithmetic at home for as long as I could remember. I played dumb and did as I was told; Simon was aggressive, showing off, knowing it all. The other kids giggled, pointing at me, pointing at Simon, whispering. I felt some of it, but not enough to bother me too much; I was not then as I am now, not that first day.
Recess: kids yelling, running, climbing the jungle gym, swinging and chinning themselves on bars, chasing a basketball. I was with two girls and a piece of chalk on the blacktop; they taught me hopscotch, and I did my best to ignore the bruises and bumps of the other students.
It was at the end of the second week that the incident occurred during recess.
(I need the peace, the retreat from easily communicated pain. How strange, I think objectively, that our lives are such that discomfort, pain, sadness and hatred are so easily conveyed and so frequently felt. Love and contentment are only soft veils which do not protect me from bludgeons; and with the strongest loves, one can still sense the more violent undercurrents of fear, hate and jealousy.)
It was at the end of the second week that the incident occurred during recess. I was, again, playing hopscotch, and Simon had come over to look at what we were doing before joining some other boys. Five older kids came over, I guess they were in third or fourth grade, and they began their taunts.
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