“TATTEH,” SAID SIMA. I have to confess something.
They were at the table, after dinner. The baby was asleep in Sima and Chaim’s bedroom. Chaim began to peel a green apple with a short knife. Berel had won the last game of rummy, a game played with the slippery, laminated green-and-black cards Sima had bought discount at the museum store and kept in a cushioned brown box, in a drawer next to the dish towels.
Berel looked at her through his glasses. Her bottom lip shook. Perhaps he would not need to say anything. She would say she was sorry, she would say she wanted to do good, and he would say, Don’t worry, my lamb, my heart, don’t worry. I just wish you had told me directly. He would not admit the shame of taking money from them, from Pavel; for what? He would just remind her, please, not to go behind his back. He wasn’t stupid. She knew that.
I have to confess something. Her eyes, like her mother’s, were clear and green.
What is it?
Chaim kept peeling.
I feel so terrible.
What can it be? Berel stared at his daughter, trying to seem naive, watching her hands pull at a strand of her dark blond hair. What can it be?
It’s been bothering me since she died.
Oh, said Berel. And tilted his head to the side.
From years ago. From when we were in Russia. When you were taken away. She was going to the black market every day, for food for me. She was looking for milk; there was no milk.
I think I know this story, said Berel.
Chaim said: I haven’t heard it. He was smiling. He liked war stories, at least the pleasant ones, the ones without blood.
Sima said, I had the most brave mother in the world. The most brave.
Berel nodded.
Do you know how she got that milk? said Sima. I still don’t know.
Berel breathed out. Oh, she sold something she had stolen from her job. Something like that. The real adventure was getting it back to you, in an open clay cup she had, no lid, in the snow. And she had to hide it. You remember how she had that coat with the pockets sewn inside?
Yes, yes, I remember, said Sima. It was winter. She hid it in the coat pocket on the inside and walked with her hand behind the sleeve to hold it steady, like she had a broken arm. If she had been caught carrying milk! Because how could she get such a thing?
Berel leaned back in his chair. She was proud of the milk. She told me about it, I don’t know how many times, after I came back. I don’t know why she tried so hard—even as a baby, you didn’t love milk. But she didn’t think like that. Your mother, when she wanted something—
But Sima had tears in her eyes. She was so proud when she gave me the cup!
Chaim coughed softly on his apple.
It’s not funny! choked Sima. It’s terrible. Still, I couldn’t help it, to see that cup, with frozen pieces of curd floating on top, and the coating, broken, sticking to the sides—
Berel didn’t look at Chaim. He sat forward again, stared down at his winning game, the cards laid out in rows of three and four. What a little tragedy! His nose made a small noise.
You’re laughing too! Sima cried; tears were streaming down her cheeks. I took the cup to the back of the hut, where she couldn’t see, and I poured it out into the snow! All at once! Everything was white, so she couldn’t discover what I had done! I just poured it out!
Berel was laughing out loud now. Oh my god, my god, he snorted. Oh my god.
“Jesus Christ,” said Chaim, in an impressive American accent, and grinned. Sima smacked him on the hand, but lightly. She had begun to giggle herself.
Berel gasped. Inhaled, exhaled. He put his head on the table, his cheeks pressed to the open cards. What a little tragedy. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. He heard them quieting down.
Oh Sima, he breathed, mouth still at his elbow. I don’t know what to do.
She put her fingers on his wrist.
Chaim said: Didn’t you get the suit today? I thought you were going today.
Berel picked up his head and peered at Chaim. Chaim’s expression was plain, blank. He let nothing mix up the creamy calm of his face. So? It would drive Sima crazy soon enough.
Yes, Berel answered, I did. You did not tell me that the man—but yes, I got it.
Well, show it to us! Chaim strained his voice.
Not right now.
Please, said Sima. Her cheeks had swollen. Please. Just try it on. Or do they have to alter it?
They did it while I waited.
Please.
Berel got up, pushed his chair to the table. He went into his room, where his suit, still in its garment bag, lay on the bed. He sat on the bed, next to the suit, and looked at the room. A drawing of a boy at a fruit stand hung in a green frame above the yellow dresser. Otherwise the walls were bare, light brown. The room would soon be his granddaughter’s. She could play with her own toys and wear new clothes until she outgrew them. Sima had worked from age fourteen until she left, but his granddaughter would go to high school, even university. She could attend class every day and study in her own room every night with the door closed, if she wished. The water from the sink, the toilet paper, the pale cotton sheets one could buy for a reasonable fee, everything here was soft and good. It really was. Already he was used to it. But he didn’t think he would miss it.
He fingered the garment bag. So, let them see him in it. He took off his shirt and wiped under his arms with a towel from the dresser. Then put on a white shirt—a gift that hadn’t fit, Chaim had said when giving it to him in a pile of items—and the gray suit over it. The hem grazed his heels. He did not have appropriate shoes. He put on his slippers. They would still see how it fell on his body. Should he check in the mirror that leaned in the closet? No. He knew how it looked.
He returned to the table.
Chaim grinned.
“Tatteh,” said Sima. And then in Hebrew: How beautiful.
Yes, it is a beautiful suit, he answered in Yiddish. He stood himself straight, turned around once, like a model, and then stopped to look at her, stretching his eyes as open as possible, lips pressed against his gums in a grimace she knew, a grimace he used, not always successfully, to keep himself from crying.
It is beautiful, Simale. And you know what? Berel lifted his eyebrows high, almost, it felt, to his hairline. He imagined the skin on his forehead folding and pulling. His lips and his gums were dry. You know what? Simale, you wouldn’t believe it, this place your husband sent me, but this beautiful suit, it was so cheap! So cheap.
Sima twisted her lips to the side of her mouth. Her fingers covered an eye: in shame?
He smoothed the lapel to his chest.
The Customer
April 1967
SLIVOVITZ. SLIVOVITZ. PAVEL HAD to say it twice, three times. He even wrote it out for the liquor store clerk, a young boy, not twenty-five, surely Jewish—how could he not know what Pavel was saying? At last the boy nodded, squinting showily at Pavel’s careful, fine capital letters.
“Oh, the clear stuff. Why do you say it with a ‘sshh’? There’s no h.”
Pavel maintained his dignity; he refused to answer. He stood at the counter and waited.
The boy pushed brown curls out of his eyes; they bounced back onto his cheeks. “In English the s means ‘ss,’ not ‘sshh.’” The words came out loud, slow but tinged with impatience, as if Pavel couldn’t possibly decipher them. The boy bent down for a key.
“Do you have it?” said Pavel, his voice smooth. “Or shall I take my business elsewhere?”
“I have it,” said the boy.
Pavel had to suppress a smile. I! Who was ‘I’? Only the owner was ‘I’! And if the owner, no doubt the boy’s father, knew how he was speaking! Pavel unbuttoned his raincoat, pushed his hand inside his jacket for the handkerchief, unfolded it, coughed gently, subtly. I!
The boy walked to the back of the store, toward a glass cabinet, and opened it. He took out a bottle and handed it to Pavel.
“What is this?” s
aid Pavel.
“Slivovitz,” said the boy, pronouncing it wrong. “What you asked for.”
“I did not ask for this.” Pavel pointed to the label: made in yugoslavia. “Don’t you have other kinds? A little higher, you know, quality?” He placed extra emphasis on the word quality. Let this child understand! He was a new customer but a real customer, one on whom the store would be able to depend. And, more than a dozen years in this country, not so much of a greenhorn, either.
“Well then, why don’t you take a look yourself?”
A note of challenge in the voice. So! In fact that was exactly what Pavel wanted, a look himself. He moved in front of the cabinet. Dust sparkled on the corners of the bottom two shelves, scattered with flasks. Ah—there was something. He pulled out a large bottle: made in czechoslovakia. “This,” said Pavel, victorious, tapping the picture of dark plums on the label, “this is slivovitz.”
“One hundred and eighty proof,” muttered the boy, ringing him up. “Jesus Christ.”
“Who?” said Pavel.
“Forget it,” said the boy.
ORDINARILY, PAVEL WAS SURE, he would have turned and left, having given a bitter retort, at the first or second sign of the disrespectful behavior of the clerk. There was a phrase Pavel loved, one he learned even before coming to the United States, in English classes organized by the refugee committees in the displaced persons camp: the customer is always right. He had said this to himself often in the shop he owned with his brother-in-law, where he frequently dealt with men who liked their suits only one way and not the other, then changed their minds after a good deal of work had been done. The customer is always right. Even now, when the business was adjusting with the times to include more wholesale, textiles and fabrics to be sold to larger companies, he found the phrase useful. It wasn’t only the individual trying on for a special occasion who liked to be difficult. A buyer, a retailer, these people were controlled by their superiors; they haggled and bargained, but Pavel would be calm and flexible. One had to be cautious, of course, not too foolish, but even business-to-business, the sentence was a useful one to keep in mind. The customer is always right! It helped quiet the anger that sometimes pulsed up inside him when a man used a high tone, a loud voice, a harsh word.
Didn’t the boy know about the customer? And to correct Pavel’s language! Slivovitz was a word as familiar to Pavel as orange juice, or Coca-Cola, was to this boy. When Pavel was a child, his father would ferment the plum brandy at home, storing the bottles on the shelves of the kitchen. When it came time to open and taste, every year, without fail, Father would march around the house in fury. The slivovitz was terrible! It was true. His father really did not know how to make it. The cherry vishniac he made was good—sweet perhaps, a drink that women liked—but good. As for slivovitz, it was Pavel’s mother’s side that knew how to make it. Father couldn’t compete.
No, for certain, ordinarily Pavel would not have stood for the boy’s manner. At the least, he would have promised himself to speak to the owner. But this was a new neighborhood. The houses were each separated by wide lawns, the few apartment complexes, like the one he now lived in, were spread out, low to the ground, not cramped, with several stories piled one on top of the other. It was a good neighborhood, the kind where the liquor stores were not so close together. This one was near the new apartment; it didn’t pay to make enemies too quickly.
It was something else too. Lately, the sight of boys in their twenties, younger, made Pavel quiet. Silent. It had been worrisome at the time, but now Pavel thanked God every day and every night that Fela had had difficulty conceiving and carrying. If Larry had been born even two years earlier, he would be of draft age. It had happened to a friend of Pavel’s from camp, that his son had been sent to the war in Vietnam. So far, one month of unbearable anguish for the parents, and the boy was still in one piece—a miracle, but just that, a miracle. Pavel preferred not to count on miracles.
Better, he preferred not to deal with luck at all, good or bad. People out of danger did not deal with luck. They did not invite it into their lives, not even for a moment. To antagonize a boy in a liquor store over disrespect—this seemed like a way of asking an evil eye to come into the new apartment and gaze hard at Larry. The war would have to end, people said one year, at most two, but what if? The draft age was eighteen. One could avoid it even longer if one went to college, and Larry was smart, very smart, he would be in college and safe if the war did not end.
The rule was, the boys in college could stay in college. And if they changed the rule? But it was America. Laws were difficult to change, even with so much agitation. Pavel knew this with his head, with the mind that read the paper every day, but still he couldn’t get rid of his worry. Pavel’s father had served in the First World War, for the Austrian empire, no less. It was just before Pavel was born, and Father had never spoken about it. Never. No one had ever said so, but they all knew it was a forbidden subject. Father was the only one in the family to fight. The rest, on Pavel’s mother’s side and on his father’s, had managed to hide themselves in the small villages of Poland that thrived on the influx of young Jewish men evading the armies. What failure in the family had made his father a soldier? As far as Pavel had heard, in the emperor’s troops at that time, the Jews weren’t treated so differently from the rest. Officially, everyone’s blood was more or less the same. Still! A needless risk, unimaginable if Father’s family had moved east sooner. In Poland a good family did not let a child go to the military. No question. War or no war, for a Jew it was a death sentence. One saved for years for the bribes.
THE FEELING OF TRIUMPH over his purchase had returned by the time Pavel arrived home. Fela had finished cleaning up from dinner, and his walk had reinvigorated him, as it did every night.
Fela saw the paper bag in Pavel’s hand as he walked into the kitchen, where she sat at the white table, drinking tea.
“Hello,” she said in English. A bad sign. But then changed to Yiddish. Did you get what you went for? she asked him, still unsmiling.
I found slivovitz! said Pavel, pressing his lips down so as not to smile too much. I didn’t think there would be a store in the neighborhood that sold it! But you see, if you try, you can get everything. And a good quality!
“Mazel tov,” said Fela. What about the milk?
She was angry. Pavel slapped his hand to his forehead. Oh. I forgot. Completely forgot.
Fela kept sipping. Why do you ask me what I need if you can’t remember it?
I know, I know.
Nine-thirty. It is too late to get some now. There’s enough for their breakfast, but you won’t have it for your coffee.
Pavel stood at the head of the kitchen table. He had no response.
All right, Pavel. Could you go in to Helen? She won’t sleep. She won’t listen to me. She wants to read. A book you bought her. She should sleep!
It was true, Pavel thought, Helen did not like to sleep. She asked for permission to finish her chapter before shutting out the lights, then cheated and slipped in another one. Fela claimed it was a function of what the child was reading, suspense novels. Crime novels. If Helen read something else, Fela insisted, she would get tired more easily. Of course she couldn’t sleep! Couldn’t Pavel buy her something more appropriate for a young girl? A girl did not have to choose everything on her own.
Pavel loved to buy books for his daughter. But he let her pick. How should he decide what she should read? She was eleven, “going on twelve,” as she liked to say, a phrase Pavel found very funny. There was a paperback exchange in Jackson Heights that she adored, although Pavel felt some embarrassment walking in there and breathing the odor of old paper, smudged ink. He could afford new books for his children! And if they weren’t new, they should be in the library, where it was natural for people to share. Still, the used bookstore had a pleasant atmosphere, with a little couch and pillows in the corners between the bookcases. Pavel and even Fela would sometimes leave Helen there under the supervisio
n of the shopkeeper while they ran a few doors down to the pharmacy or butcher shop. But mostly Pavel would sit on the couch, stretching his leg toward the corner, reading his paper while Helen cocked her head and imitated the adults browsing. Occasionally he would give a little smile to the manager, a lanky man in his thirties, who smiled back without saying anything. He had a certain look in his eyes, something like friendliness, Pavel thought, but not exactly friendliness. He watched Pavel too closely, too—Pavel did not know what it was. It made Pavel uncomfortable. Perhaps the owner was a little strange, he had customers who were not so clean-looking, who got into discussions about politics and stayed late into the evenings, after other stores on the block had closed. Fela had learned the owner’s name, but Pavel had forgotten it, and he felt, after a few visits, that it would be impolite to ask him in person. Each time Pavel left the store with his daughter he promised himself to ask Fela the name—it would make it easier, less awkward, Pavel thought, if he could greet the owner by name, as an equal, when he walked in—but each time he returned home his head was full of other thoughts.
Helen had cried on the day of the move from Jackson Heights to Rego Park. It was terrible. For Larry, five years older, a little change was not a problem. He was looking forward to the move, even, and he knew some of the children in the neighborhood from Hebrew school already. That was Larry, always independent. Helen grew attached to things. She loved the small playground she no longer played in, the fraying, unbalanced swings that made Pavel’s stomach twist in fear when he watched other children; even as he lectured to Fela that she protected too much, he had never allowed Helen to go on them. She loved the bakery that made a special chocolate cake and, when she was smaller, had handed her a sandwich cookie, dyed green, in the shape of a leaf, every time her mother made a holiday purchase. She loved the bookstore owner. A week or so before the final move, when most of the clothes and things in the apartment were already in boxes, she had peeked into the store—its door was open despite the April rain—and shouted something toward the cash register.
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