Ghita Schwarz

by Displaced Persons (v5)

  “You’ll make it,” Chaim said again as they reached the security gate. He might not go, she wanted to say. It’s pneumonia. Curable. But she remained quiet, embraced her husband, and continued alone to the waiting area.

  SHE HAD NEVER BEEN in this terminal by herself. She had gone with both Chaim and Lola for the Christmas school vacation, during her father’s second round of radiation treatments, and with Lola at the start of the summer, for the surgery to remove the cancerous section of his lung. Then she had felt hopeful. It had been a nighttime flight, and Lola had been excited to be awake so late, had talked and laughed about the book she was reading. Now Sima counted the passengers in the waiting area ahead of her, awaiting their individual luggage inspections. Eighteen. Now seventeen.

  It seemed impossible to her that she was here, that this had happened, that she should be pulled across the earth, one arm here, one arm thousands of miles away, like a doll made of rubber. She had begged her father to move to New York after he had retired. But he had told her not to consider it. What would he do there, without his sister and brother and cousins, alone among men his age, not knowing the language? To be alone was a terrible thing, he had said during one of their discussions, and she had grimaced in guilt.

  He had seen her face and taken advantage. You could move back here.

  Chaim’s work, she started, looking the other way.

  Ha! her father had answered.

  It had not come up again, not even three months before, when she had brought Lola. It had been an unusually warm December, and Berel had been happy to see his granddaughter, even if his own daughter displeased him with every move. On a day Lola was at the beach with some cousins, Sima took her father to a nursing home, a reputable one, with green lawns and air-conditioned rooms. Chaim’s raise would pay for what Israeli state insurance would not.

  Her father had said nothing through the tour until he stepped into the car, newly thin, jittery from not smoking.

  If you put me there, he said, we won’t have to wait for the doctors to kill me. I’ll do it myself.

  Sima felt ashamed. You won’t go there. It’s only if you wish.

  I don’t wish, he had said.

  He had become bitter and depressed, angry at his doctors, angry at her. The summer before, after his surgery, she had stayed with him for a month, making him food without salt. He paced around his tiny apartment in his dark robe, not getting dressed, complaining about her cooking. He wanted cholent. He wanted derma. Sima did not know how to make any of these things. They had rarely been able to afford more than the occasional chicken when Sima was growing up. What her mother had taught her to cook, she had mostly forgotten.

  Sima’s aunt cooked for him now. Zosia cooked with no salt for her own husband, who suffered from angina. While Zosia bustled around them, serving, clearing, rearranging, the two men would sit sullen at the table, shaking the pepper onto the food to make up for the lost flavor. After, they would play cards. Berel loved cards. When Sima was in the army he could disappear for two days at a time just to play, and when he returned, Sima’s mother would be waiting for him, furious, silent. Zosia was more tolerant. Berel would go over to her house to play with Zosia’s husband. The summer Lola was there, Berel took her with him. When her grandfather lost she would cry in loud, hopeless sobs.

  AT LAST SIMA WAS ushered into a private curtained area. No matter how often she had done it, each time Sima passed through the orange curtain, an El Al stewardess already unzipping her black valise, she felt a shudder of anxiety that they would find something dangerous, that someone had managed to slip something in while she wasn’t looking, and that she would be arrested and prevented from getting on the plane. Ridiculous, childish. She should worry more that the stewardess would judge her packing, but of course even in the rushed few hours after the call from her aunt and the purchase of her ticket, she had managed to arrange her clothes neatly.

  The white counter on which her suitcase lay open looked to Sima like an operating table. The stewardess wordlessly removed Sima’s bathrobe, blouses, slacks, brassieres, with fingers that were bare of polish but still neat and soft-looking. Sima’s own hands looked terrible, her knuckles chapped, a hangnail at her thumb. She should have gotten a manicure last week but had not had the time, and now this week—well. What a thing to think of. Still she put her hands behind her purse so that the stewardess, a pretty girl, thin as an actress, olive skinned, wouldn’t look at them in passing. She had once tried to be one of those perfect girls, had managed a pale version of that look while in the army, but she had never felt right. She felt more at home in New York than she ever had as a teenager in Israel, trying terribly to fit in.

  The stewardess was speaking. “What is the purpose of your trip?”

  Sima felt annoyed at the use of English. It was as if people thought she betrayed Jews everywhere by emigrating to the States. She replied in Hebrew: My father is very sick. She turned her wrist to look at her watch, a stupid gesture, automatic, as if a faster inspection would make her arrive in Tel Aviv sooner. The stewardess motioned to her to zip up her suitcase, her face blank.

  “Have a safe flight,” she said in English.

  “Thank you,” Sima answered, defeated.

  SIMA BIT DOWN ON her chewing gum as the plane rose into the night, clutched at the skin of her forearms, a nervous habit. She had a window seat, two rows behind the exits at the wing, close enough to escape quickly, but not so close that she would have to figure out how to open the emergency doors. The seat next to her was empty, and an older woman had the aisle.

  When Sima was a child her mother had a little folktale she repeated on the High Holidays—the sky opening, a chance to see the home of God and perhaps to make a wish. One was supposed to see three stars, and then the angels would write the stargazer into the book of life. Sima had thought of a big composition book, her own ugly handwriting, and the scratchy pencils provided by the refugee aid organizations, and could not understand her mother’s pleasure at the idea. Still, looking into God’s house sounded interesting: warm light, meat on the table, enough bread. In Palestine, her mother had said, the oranges are more plentiful than potatoes.

  When Lola was smaller Sima had tried to explain the story to her, but she had forgotten its details and had filled in her own. Stars like fruit trees, blazing chariots of angels, all the dead smiling down, covered in silver raiment. Lola thought planes were temporary stars, their green and red lights cutting across the cold night sky without the help of God or a holiday. No, no, Sima had said, but when she called her father to help her fill in the outline of the folktale, he said he did not know what she was talking about.

  He had gone along with her mother’s pretty stories for most of his life, but now that he was ill himself he had abandoned the practice. It was eight years since her mother’s death. She was sentimental, she knew, even a little superstitious, but she thought that her mother would watch over, guard her and her father, make sure she arrived in time. She looked at her watch again. 6:15 p.m., New York. She would not adjust her watch until the very last minute. In no time at all she would be there. She looked at the magazine lying unopen on her lap, thought about opening it, decided to wait. She would sleep for the second half of the flight and afterward find her luggage right away. She would go straight to the hospital from the airport, kiss him, comfort him, then take a quick taxi ride to his apartment to pick up fresh clothes for him. She imagined the apartment, his pajamas folded neatly under his pillow, the odor of his sheets and blankets. Her father would come home, and his bed would be undisturbed, just as he had left it. Or perhaps she would do a washing. He might expect her to. She thought of the wallpaper of her parents’ bedroom, the gold flowers skimming green stripes. Her mother had pasted the paper up herself, more than fifteen years ago. Her father kept it just as clean as her mother had. It still looked new.

  SHE EXAMINED HER TRAY of hot food. The smell of the meat nauseated her, but she could pick at the roll and the cold margarine th
at came with it. Chaim would take Lola out for pizza tonight, she thought, and would let her have a soda. Well, once in a while it was not so bad.

  I don’t think it will rain when we arrive, she heard. She turned—her neighbor on the aisle seat was speaking, her thin lips moving on a face spotted from the sun. They hoped so, of course—the woman added, nodding to Sima. It has been so long. But I don’t think it will.

  Sima smiled, nodded. The woman might be the age her mother would have been. I think you are right, Sima said. Not today.

  May I look at your magazine?

  Oh! Yes, of course. She handed it to her. I’m not paying attention to it. Keep it.

  No, no, I just want a look.

  A native Israeli, Sima thought. Not from Europe. Not just the accent but the boldness. Her mother never would have asked a stranger for a magazine. How her mother had sheltered her, protected her. Not that those acts were enough to eliminate the constant fear and hunger, of course—but the stories she told her—lies, even—had kept Sima calm, at least in the moments of the telling. In Russia, when Berel had disappeared, sent away to hard labor, and she and her mother had been alone, her mother had spent night after night quieting her with stories, folktales, small events from her hometown before her marriage, the lives of her sisters, her brothers, the dry goods store the family had owned, the small cousins who tore down a shelf of dishes one awful day. Her mother had a superstition for every event, a little tale for every night. Why couldn’t Sima remember them? That one about stars and the wish bothered her in particular. She could remember conversing about it, her mother’s small round face, but not the tale itself.

  If we had a calendar it would be easier, Dvora had said one night. But it is around that time. We can approximate. So get ready for your wish.

  What should I wish for?

  It’s your wish. Only don’t wish for something foolish, like bread or meat. That’s the kind of thing God doesn’t have any control over.

  Sima had looked at her mother’s face, serious and focused.

  And you don’t have to wish for your father to come home either, because I’ve already taken care of that with my wish.

  You wish for him to come back?

  I wish for all of us to get out of here alive, so your father coming back is included. It’s wasteful to have two of the same.

  Maybe it’s better if two people do it.

  Believe me, think of something else, something bigger.

  I can’t think of anything bigger.

  Yes you can, said her mother. Think of something very big, something that takes a long time to come true. You have to give these things time. And you can keep it a secret.

  What had Sima wished for? She could not have been more than five, and thirty years had passed. Of course she did not remember. But in the end her father had returned, and they had lived, and they had come to Palestine. Was that what she had wished for? It would have been like her, taking her mother’s cue. A country, a real home, no need to run from anywhere. Absolutely, that would have been just like her as a small child, wishing her mother’s wish without even knowing it.

  And then, of course, it would have been like her to move away anyway, to leave her mother and father, just for the love of a man.

  For a time, Chaim could leave her parents’ apartment flushed with an enthusiasm for living in the heat, working with his hands even as he studied, safe, almost safe, in control, as Berel would remind him, of his own destiny. But the optimism would leave him. He did not feel in control of his destiny. He had no parents to cling to, and he felt a constant numbing fear. And Sima felt the fear too, of the monthly calls into the reserves, of their Arab neighbors whose poverty and resentment seemed to accuse them of some ongoing crime. Chaim felt it more, he felt it even of his own people in uniform—it scratched at him from inside, so much that he confessed it to her once in a while. He wanted to go.

  And at that time she had not felt Israel to be her home. Her father’s attachment to a country, her mother’s too—perhaps this was what they had in common, this was a dream they had shared, for all their differences in temperament—they had been devoted, accepting, even eager for this new life, where her mother cleaned houses and her father cleaned milk vats and Sima—younger, stronger—cleaned offices. Really, what did it matter to them? Her mother still had vanity of course—she bought a pair of gloves that she used for the sole purpose of putting on her nylon stockings without tearing them, stockings she wore twice a year on the High Holidays—but for Sima, the pain of her job and her ugly hands and her two worn dresses was overwhelming. She had worked hard to look cheerful and pleased for her parents, and to push down the darkness inside her in front of her new friends, and even in front of her oldest friend, a hard girl she had met somewhere in Russia, then found again in Rehovot in the first years. Sima had worked hard to ignore the darkness, to make her outside light.

  Her mother had had difficulty with Hebrew—at least her father had his boyhood schooling—but to Sima it was just another job, learning the new language, the experiments with her teeth and tongue to imitate well, to laugh properly, to slide in like a native. A false native. She always felt some anxiety in Hebrew, as if about to be caught, recognized, accused: Sheep! Soap! It had happened to her maybe once or twice when she had arrived, the mockery of schoolmates for being among the weak of the diaspora, the old Jews, the ones who let themselves be slaughtered for fear of fighting. The name-calling had happened only once or twice, maybe three times at most, but it was enough.

  By now she spoke English very well. She spoke English to her daughter. She had lived in New York twelve years, longer than in any other place in her life. And soon, she felt, it was inevitable, she would speak it better than the languages she had been born into but did not speak outside her home. It was something to be proud of, her English, and it made her excited, the ability to move things in and out in a new language, the language the world thought of as powerful and important. In her head sometimes she would search for a Hebrew or Yiddish word, once in a while even something in Polish or Russian. Occasionally something indeterminate and jumbled, a private language whose sound she could not name but which was the language inside her, the language of a lost place, would bubble up. But her mouth spoke a careful and lilting English. And even this was something to be proud of, the accent people took to be European, of uncertain origin but sophisticated. Even at the beginning, sleeping on the sofa bed at the Queens home of Fela and Pavel, she had felt herself an object of admiring curiosity. It was more than her youth, she thought, but she had responded by acting young and cheerful, flirting with Larry and painting rouge on Helen’s cheeks, Pavel standing at the threshold of the living room, watching in silence, happy.

  Chaim had felt it too, she thought. Not just in the Mandls’ house, with Fela touching his arm constantly as he washed dishes with her, but everywhere. When they had come to America it had been a pride to be from Israel. All the things she had not felt when she lived in Rehovot, she felt in New York, people impressed with her service in the army, with what they presumed to be her knowledge of the land. Not like now, all the criticism, all the judgment. That’s right, feel sorry for the Arabs! Well, she had been poor too, poorer yet, without a home either, without anything! And who had spoken out for her?

  SHE GOT UP TO stretch her legs, use the bathroom. Seven hours left. When she came back to her seat she had to tap awake the woman on the aisle. She looked at her watch again. Six hours and fifty minutes left. She had had no communication with anyone in her family for the last six and a half hours.

  She sat down, rustled under her blanket. To be alone was a terrible thing. In Russia the people who had their families with them lived; those who came there alone starved, fell ill, took risks that led to arrest again and again. It amazed Sima that her husband could have emerged alive out of Poland alone as he was, without a friend or a brother to accompany him.

  It amazed her, and yet she forgot it all the time. Chaim’s face had a smooth
health, his blue eyes had a flatness that made him seem untouched. Like the sea, her mother had said all those years ago, and Sima had felt a thrill that her boyfriend had looks worthy of comparison to something so grand and enveloping. But in time Sima thought: Not the sea, but the sky. Not something she could dive into, searching and breathing, not something she could cross. Unreachable.

  Chaim had opened up to Sima’s father. Berel had remembered him from the DP camp in Belsen. When Chaim walked through the door the first time, on one of Sima’s weekends home from the army, Berel had given him a sharp look that Sima took to be suspicion. But it was recognition: two questions later, Berel knew for sure that Chaim was the young man who had worked as an aide in Sima’s camp classroom. Sima had been surprised—it had changed her view of him. Chaim had taught her when she was a child, he had stopped her from crying, he had held her hand on outings. The excitement she felt when she saw his slim frame now seemed to be part of something deeper, fate or destiny.

  In those days Sima had known nothing about him. He was her boyfriend, a swaggerer like all of them, but also kind, quiet in private, gentle. The cocky walk seemed to her an imitation of his fellow soldiers, a public gesture to show he had adapted to the desert. He was from Europe, of course—their shared accent in Hebrew had made them exchange a smile when they first met, at a café one night, among a large group of young people. So few in her group were from Europe—so few of his friends, too. No one talked about such things then; they tried to blend in. But their little cadences, softer than native Hebrew, slower, less confident, made them feel they already knew each other without saying so much; and alone, outside the hearing of native Israelis, they could speak in Yiddish.