Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  He listened to other kids brag about how tough they were, how many push-ups they could do, and listened to others complain about how boring gym was—and none of it reached him. Sometimes guys would congratulate him, or slap him five, but he hated to be cheered, hated guys calling out his name, urging him on. It was as bad as dreaming he had to be somewhere fancy, and didn’t have the right clothes, or any clothes. He wanted to be left alone. In some ways, it was as awkward as being made fun of, called a sissy. That could never happen to him, not just because he was good, but because he knew sports stats as well as anyone in class, could correct guys about batting averages—if he wanted to. He read it all in the newspapers, heard it on TV. He just didn’t care.

  Which was what his father had done, eventually. His father had tried taking him to ball games and movies every week during the separation and after the divorce, but it was terrible. First his father would pick him up, and Stefan would have to stand there awkward in their apartment foyer with its black and white linoleum squares, waiting for the typical stupid little conversations his mother and father had. Like they were supposedly friendly. He had always wanted to scream, or jump up and smash the carriage lamp on its twisted chain, but they talked—like people in his French class forced to make up a conversation out of brand new vocabulary words.

  “We’re civil,” his father said proudly, more than once.

  “That’s what they called a war,” Stefan blurted out, and his father almost smacked him.

  After the separation and then the divorce, knowing that both his parents were coming to a school play or holiday show he was in had made him so anxious he always expected to throw up. But he couldn’t say “Don’t come,” because he craved the appearance of a normal family, a normal life. Yet he didn’t know what to say afterwards, when they both congratulated him. Only Sasha seemed relaxed enough to smile naturally, and hug him as if he meant it.

  Until he moved in with Sasha, spending time with either one of his parents alone was terrible, whether it was shopping, or watching TV, or sitting in the park and watching the barges on the Hudson, waiting until dark for the lights of the George Washington Bridge to string along to the Palisades. Once he was with Sasha, he felt better, he had his own home, and both his mother and his father were the visitors, and they had to be nice to him. That didn’t just mean buying him presents, it meant not yelling or acting too weird.

  But then the whole divorce was weird, because no one could really explain it.

  His parents had not been clear. Yes, his mother had met another man, but he was just a friend, and that wasn’t really it, even his father said so. It was more like they finally gave up hope.

  “Everything was…so chaotic after the War,” his father said. “So much confusion, refugees, everywhere ruins, everyone dead—” But to Stefan it seemed that his father was talking to himself, answering his own questions and accusations. And Stefan imagined a time bomb that had taken years to explode. But it did explode. And nothing could change that, nothing could keep his parents together.

  “It’s the War,” Sasha kept repeating.

  “No it’s not,” Stefan said. “It’s them. It’s their fault.”

  Sasha stared at him.

  And Stefan felt full of power, full of himself, like he could say anything he wanted, like he was Godzilla crushing all of Japan with his enormous clawed feet.

  Some kids at PS 98 had felt sorry for him, Stefan knew. A couple mentioned it. He told them to shut up. Their parents must have found out. Why couldn’t his father or mother have died of a heart attack instead? That wouldn’t be so embarrassing.

  And when he entered junior high, it was briefly worse.

  Mrs. Schulberg, his English teacher, took him aside one day, her face unrevealing as a bird’s, to tell him he might want to write about the divorce, to explore his feelings.

  “Why?” he said.

  She squinted, looking very silly in her lace-collared blue dress. She was skinny, with short dark hair, and had an archipelago of moles down one side of her face.

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “Well, Stefan…writing can be, can be—”

  “Therapeutic?”

  She winced. She had already told him that even though his reading scores were so high, he used words in his compositions that were inappropriate for his age level—words like “phantasmagorical” and “supernumerary.”

  “I know what they mean,” Stefan had said, because he did, but that didn’t seem important to Mrs. Schulberg.

  “Writing can be good for you,” she said now. “Helpful.”

  Stefan said, “I think my parents need to write about it more than I do.”

  And maybe they did. His mother was furious that he decided to live with Sasha.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have had a child! I didn’t want to! Not after everything—” On the brink of revealing something, on the brink of filling in miserable gaps in what he understood of the past, his mother stopped, blushing, head down, ashamed of herself.

  “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head back and forth. “I’m so sorry.” And she tried to hug Stefan. He fled for the bathroom and locked himself in. They were at home, but the white tiled bathroom felt cold, like a prison.

  “Your mother’s sorry,” Sasha called from the other side of the door after a while. Stefan was sitting on the floor, a towel crushed to his wet face. He had screamed into it at first, and then cried. But nothing helped.

  “No she’s not,” Stefan growled. “She’s just embarrassed.”

  Both his parents were embarrassed, he was sure of that. It was like a Perry Mason show—he had seen the crime, he knew, and he was going to jump up in court with the truth. They were afraid of him. He could explode too.

  By the time the divorce was finalized, his father had admitted he was looking for jobs outside of New York, because staying wasn’t “comfortable.”

  Go to hell, Stefan thought. I hate you.

  He hated his mother too, maybe a little more, because she tried to pretend that nothing had changed, that she hadn’t left him, that she loved him just as much as ever. Even though there was this Leo guy Stefan supposed she was “dating.” Just the idea of it made him sick, and he refused to meet Leo.

  Sasha was knocking on his bedroom door now.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to bed,” Sasha called. “Did you set your alarm?”

  “Yes!” It was always set, he had never missed getting to school on time, but still Sasha asked, as if we were acting out his idea of what living with a teenager was supposed to be like. It was annoying, but it was also kind of funny.

  “Good night,” he said, and heard Sasha’s echoing good night followed by the bathroom door closing.

  Right now, being in his room made him feel kind of lonely. He got up to turn on the desk lamp. He pulled down the window shade with no regret, because all you could see was another wall of the building, pierced by windows, a grimy closed courtyard if you looked down, and boring stone decorations along the roof if you looked up: dumb flowers and designs. From his old bedroom window he had seen Manhattan stretch out towards the Bronx. The view had been full of red, gold, and brown apartment buildings rising and falling over hills that he knew from his school teachers had been claimed by Indians and then Dutch farmers long before the English, and then all the European immigrants who came much later, immigrants like his parents and Sasha.

  His old building had filled half a city block. It had massive cornices and leering griffins, but it wasn’t the highest spot in the city. Teachers had told him that the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, a few miles north, stole that honor. And he loved the Cloisters, the battlements that made you feel you were really in the past because all you could see at most spots was trees, the enormous cold hallways and wide worn stairs, the big rooms filled with armor, chests, and tapestries whose colors were so bright they looked fake. This was his past, he felt, something beyond his parents’ lives in America, something more powerful. Whene
ver he took a school trip to the Cloisters, he came away wishing he could be one of those beautiful serious-looking angels in fancy robes. But despite all that, on his old hill he used to imagine it was the highest place in the city. He could then feel sorry for anybody who wanted to live downtown or off in flat and dreary Queens which his mother had once told him was built on garbage.

  Their old building had been built on history, not far from the crowded and very old cemetery used by Trinity Church, a high mysterious walled space full of big dark trees, tumbled gravestones, and ghosts, he used to think. On the thick stone wall at one corner was a plaque commemorating a battle of George Washington—a shiny plaque, like it had just happened.

  The dark lobby of the building he’d grown up in, three steps up from the outer hall, three again from the street, was walled and floored like a castle. Its mirrors reflected a heavy peeling table where people rested their packages while they waited for the scarred paneled elevator. He loved listening to it sink and sigh like it was alive and seventy years old. At night, because his parents’ apartment was right next to the elevator shaft, the heavy murmur came to Stefan distantly through the thick walls. It was comforting, like somebody in a rocking chair.

  Sasha’s building didn’t have the same romance for him—it was newer, much smaller, and even the mailboxes weren’t heavy and brass, but skinny aluminum-looking things. He didn’t talk about this with Sasha, didn’t even think about it much, except at night.

  He missed the archways of his parents’ apartment, the parquet floors with the design along the edge that Sasha explained was a “Greek key.” He missed the high ceilings, and the moldings where the walls met the ceilings, and the ones that made rectangles and squares on each wall. They were a reminder of palaces where he knew the frames would be filled by paintings, but empty and painted the same color as the rest of the wall, they seemed like sad and quiet ghosts. He missed the glass-paneled double doors between the living room and dining room, the cupboard that filled one corner of the large square foyer. It had always seemed a little mysterious, because its doors were glass, but little thick curtains hung inside—which seemed strange and inviting. It was basically for junk, but Stefan had always loved rooting around in there, and when he was little, had even tried crawling into it.

  He curled up now, imagining what it would be like to do that, to crawl in, close the doors, to have light penetrate the curtains, but nothing else except the sound of the elevator, filling the shaft, rising slowly, pushing air up to the top. He would have all his favorite toys and books, and his dog Scotty, and he would sleep without dreaming anything that made him wake up.

  The radio was playing the Goldberg Variations, which always made him fall asleep, so he got up to go wash his face and brush his teeth. Sasha had left the light on in the bathroom, like Stefan was a little boy, but Stefan had stopped complaining about it. It wasn’t so bad, really, that Sasha was taking care of him even when asleep.

  Looking into the mirror, Stefan wondered if he was more like his mother or his father. He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to ask any of them. He wet a comb and tried parting his hair on the right, then the left, then the back. Then he just stuck it in and made faces at himself for a while before he yawned and decided he was probably tired.

  He headed for bed, glad that Sasha did not nag him about staying up late, or reading, didn’t announce lights had to be out at a certain time, or that he had to be in his room. At school, kids were always complaining about things like that. These were conversations he didn’t join, because he didn’t want anyone to think he was bragging about Sasha.

  He liked being up when everything was quiet in the apartment, and he could admire the paperbacks he had begun buying with his allowance: the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books, books by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. This was really a new thrill for him, made even better after Sasha had said, “You’re building quite a library.”

  Their public library a few blocks away was his favorite place in the world. He loved the big fat globe lamps that hung down from the ceiling but were so large they seemed to hold it up. And he loved the dark old shelves filling every possible space—high shelves, low shelves, big, small, along walls, in the middle of rooms, almost like a forest of books—and everywhere colored book spines or book jackets shouting at him for attention.

  He wanted his room to feel like that, walled with books, a castle of books.

  And he would be its knight, with the Polish eagle on his breastplate, fierce and triumphant.

  Stefan liked reading about Poland, even though its history was mostly very sad. Especially it being “The Christ of all Nations.” That was a picture which made him feel like he did when he was about to throw up—sweaty, heavy, cold. He did not want to think about anybody, anything nailed to a cross, tortured and bleeding. His parents and Sasha felt the same, he had figured out. And besides, they didn’t believe in any religion, which sometimes made him feel weird. Like singing Christmas songs in school, and wanting to see the store windows, especially at Macy’s. He understood that Christmas, and everything connected to it, was “vulgar”—maybe the most vulgar thing about America. But that made him feel a little guilty when he got Christmas presents, and when he figured out what to get for all of them.

  “It’s just lies,” his father had told him many times.

  Stefan never shared this with kids at school; besides, most of them were Jewish in the special track at JHS 152 and they talked about their Hanukkah. He knew that his parents and their parents had something in common. Because the Jews had also suffered in the War, just like the Poles. And the Jews were brave, also like the Poles. Only Poland still wasn’t free, because of Russia, but the Jews had their own country which nobody had taken over, not yet.

  He fell asleep thinking about Israel, and the United Nations, and the Straits of Tiran, all of which had been in the news lately.

  “I betcha the Jews get their asses kicked, I betcha they get fried.”

  Stefan was in homeroom, and Eddie Morrice, the class clown, had been blabbing about Israel and the Arabs. He was always making noise or calling attention to himself, and was frequently sent to the principal’s office. He was a math and science whiz, and loudly bored in those classes. He mimicked teachers behind their backs, made jungle noises like elephants and wild birds. All the guys knew from the showers that his was as long as a toothpaste tube. And Eddie had once, on a dare, taken it out in homeroom, in the back row, and put the end of it on his desk top for a second or two. Stefan was a row over, and had felt disgusted, excited and alarmed, remembering bathing with his father as a little boy, and wondering what it would be like to stuff so much into his briefs every morning. In the john, Eddie loved to flick his penis around after taking a leak, splashing anyone he could.

  “No they won’t! Bullshit! You’re crazy!” Guys were yelling at Eddie, Jewish guys, mostly—like little Ronnie Stern and red-faced Michael Gross. And even some of the girls were shaking their heads and muttering.

  From the newspaper that morning, Stefan had gathered that a war was imminent, and it made the June day seem hotter and heavier. Sasha was asleep when Stefan got up, so they didn’t talk about the news, but Stefan thought about it on the bus all the way up through Washington Heights to 152 in Inwood. He tried to remember something he read once about Winston Churchill and World War II—didn’t he say “Brave little Belgium” when it was attacked? Stefan thought of Belgium, and poor Poland, betrayed by the Russians and wiped from the map in 1939 one more time, Germany crushing it in only three weeks. Three weeks!

  How could a little country like Israel stand up to all those Arab armies?

  “I’ll bet a dollar,” Eddie was saying. “I’ll bet two dollars,” and soon he and other guys were snaking their pinky fingers to clinch the bets. The bell rang and they headed for their seats.

  “Can Israel win a war?” he asked Sasha at dinner, which they had gotten to late, because of the scary news from the Middle East.
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br />   Sasha looked pale, hadn’t eaten much of his lamb chop or mashed potatoes, and had just picked at his salad. He shrugged. “They have to. They have no choice. It’s win or—”

  “Will we ever go to Poland?”

  Sasha set down his fork, pulled at his shirt collar. “What?”

  “Poland. Will you take me there someday?”

  Sasha shook his head. “There’s nothing left of where we lived—it was all bombed, destroyed, stolen. It’s a graveyard, not a country. And the war hasn’t made them better people.”

  Sasha had always been negative about Poland—like he was ashamed of it—but never sounded this depressed and discouraged. Was it connected to the Middle East somehow?

  Stefan drank some more iced tea, and thought about what to ask next. He occasionally imagined himself and Sasha—and sometimes his parents, though usually not—being welcomed in Poland, welcomed home, dancing with folk dancers, eating sausage, and talking that language so very full of shushing sounds.

  “My French teacher said a third language is always easier to learn than a second is. Since I’m doing so well in French class, why don’t you teach me Polish?” It bothered Stefan that all he really knew how to say was Do widzenia, “Good-bye,” nie and tak, “no” and “yes,” and things like Dzien dobry, “good morning” and Prosze, “please.”

  Sasha sat back in his chair, frowning. “Polish, it’s a useless language.”

  “Not if I want to go there.”

  “Why would you?”

  “To see things, to be there.”

  “Poland is ugly. Go to France—your French is so good already. Go to France, live in France.”

  “Is it because of the Russians? Because of the Communists?”

  Sasha nodded quickly. “Of course. Now, why don’t we have some Jell-O—that should taste good today.”

  And Stefan brought out the cool green dessert dishes from the refrigerator.

  When he was washing up, the downstairs bell rang, and Stefan knew that it was his mother—she always rang twice, and then twice again. Like it was a secret signal. Usually, he headed for his room if he didn’t know in advance she was coming over, but tonight for some reason, he stayed in the kitchen at the sink, and didn’t stiffen when she came in to kiss him hello a minute later.