Mayer said, That’s it. That’s better.
Pavel stared at his cousin. Mayer raised his eyebrows toward him. This was all that Mayer had expected. A statement of love. No apology, no admission.
Mayer went again to English. “I heard Sally Klein had a baby. At her age! And it was healthy.”
“Yes,” said Hinda. “She did. She was in bed rest, but it was fine. I went to the party.”
Mayer chattered on. Pavel sat back in his chair. His belly seemed to him to be growing toward the table, swelling like a starving person’s. It was clear, wasn’t it, that nothing more would be said. He wished suddenly that he had something to tear, that he had torn something that month seven years ago, when he had come back from repairing his mother’s grave and suddenly realized what was happening, realized but did nothing to stop it, sure that it wasn’t, sure that she would speak for him, order her husband to negotiate a deal that would keep Pavel in the business they had built together, keep the family intact. He knew that she knew. He had smashed eggs in the sink out of rage. He should have torn something then, a piece of good clothing, a new scarf, a favorite shirt, and worn the scrap pinned to his jacket like in the week of mourning after a loved one’s death. He should have, but he didn’t. He looked at her napkin, white cotton stained with pink lipstick. What if he grabbed it and ripped it to shreds right this second?
He made an involuntary noise with his lips. His mouth was dry, but he did not want to take in a drop of water. He was full. Anything else would spill out of him.
The waiter came over with the bill. Pavel signed without checking to see if it was right, and took out ten dollars as a tip. Mayer looked at the cash but said only, Are you ready?
“Yes,” said Pavel. “I have something to do.”
They stood up. Pavel twisted into his coat while Mayer brought over Hinda’s. Mayer had no hat. Pavel looked over at the center of the room. No one he knew. Hersh was gone. Pavel pushed his legs forward, letting Hinda go in front of him, not for politeness, but so she wouldn’t see if he had to stop and rest.
Outside, Mayer told Pavel to wait while he got the car from the corner.
“No,” said Pavel. “I’ll go.”
Hinda turned to walk in the opposite direction. My best, she said in Yiddish.
But Pavel’s face was already sideways, his hands in his pockets. He followed Mayer, who rushed to the meter. Who cared if Hinda saw him so slow? He doubted she even was watching.
FELA WAS NOT HOME; he could tell as he turned the key that it was locked from the outside. His magazine lay on the hallway table, with unopened bills from the hospital. The insurance was not paying the doctors on time; day after day Fela complained on the phone; he did not have the patience.
When she came home after five, carrying two bags from the grocery, Fela found him sitting in the kitchen, light not yet turned on, watching the news. She had bought potatoes and would warm up her good barley soup. A piece of chicken if he felt like it.
That was good, Pavel said. Everything she made was good.
So? she said.
So, he answered, so nothing.
How can it be nothing? said Fela. She poked around: Hinda’s clothes, her face, her sliver-thin lips. She must have said terrible things about someone, no? Pavel tried to comply with her questions, but there was nothing to say. Empty. He fished around the soup bowl, waiting for words to come out.
Fela moved the bowl away, angry. You still won’t eat anything. Maybe Helen will have something. I don’t know why I make so much food.
His daughter was visiting after their dinner, on her way home from work. They saw her quite often now, every two or three days. Not a big talker, Helen, not a shouter and laugher like her brother, but a good girl. A good girl, a professional, a public-health worker, doing what, exactly, he had difficulty remembering, but with a satisfactory husband, if only one child. Well, maybe more children would still come. He was not supposed to say anything about it to her, Fela said. It just got her upset.
But Helen did not appear to be in a sensitive mood as she tripped into the kitchen, dropping her satchel in the hallway as Fela cleared off the table and brought out the tea. She took off her jacket and pulled out the white chair between him and Fela. A kiss on his forehead. All right.
“You must want something to eat,” said Fela. “I have extra soup. He didn’t finish anything.”
“No, no, no. We’re going somewhere for dinner. Jonathan is meeting the sitter. I’m going straight from here.”
“Did you change your hair? It looks a little red.” Fela stretched her hand to touch her daughter’s head.
“I got highlights. And, you know, a trim.”
“Guess who he saw today.”
“Who?”
Helen looked at Pavel. There had been a big discussion, not four weeks ago, when he lay prone in the bed, barely able to make it to the window seat to eat the egg and toast Fela brought him. Mayer, the big peacemaker, had wanted to bring Hinda to the house. Hinda wanted to see Pavel, claimed Mayer, it was Hinda’s idea, he insisted, she asked about him all the time, desperate. Fela had refused to be home for it; she had seen enough of Hinda to last several lifetimes, thank you very much. If Pavel wanted to see her, she was his sister, and who was Fela to stop him? Fela did not have a sister living, and so she could not judge. She could not judge, but she did not have to be in the apartment to officiate, to give the idea that this person called a sister was being invited like a piece of royalty into her home. Larry had called from a conference in Chicago, furious. She just wants to see you lying down, that’s all! She wants to feel good about herself before someone dies! This had shaken Pavel. The words were harsh. But perhaps Larry was right.
Fela had left to talk to Larry from the kitchen. Helen had stayed. She had sat on the bed and asked what he wanted. I don’t know, he had said. I don’t know what I want. I can’t make a decision. Helen thought he might be too tired to make a decision; why didn’t he decide when he felt a little better? It wouldn’t be long. He had whispered, Everyone wants for me to decide. And Helen had answered, hands folded in her lap, There’s plenty of time to decide. Plenty of time. No need to rush.
“He saw Hinda. With Mayer.”
“That’s news.”
“Nothing new,” said Pavel. “All the same.”
“What happened?” Helen was looking at Fela, but Fela said nothing. She almost was smiling, making fun, perhaps, but trying to hide it.
Pavel tapped his mug with his fingers. “I took them to the club.”
A pause. “Did you wear that shirt? It looks very good on you.” It was cornflower blue, casual, and he had worn a dark gray tie.
“I told you, Pavel! It’s beautiful!” said Fela. “I bought it for him, Helen. It’s maybe five years old.”
“How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“I mean, how do you feel about it?”
“Okay.” He turned his eyebrows up, lifted his hand to the side.
“Okay?”
“Okay, like nothing.” Pavel smiled. His throat was beginning to hurt again, even after the soup. But what could he do? It was worth it to give some little conversation when his daughter was here.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
Fela interjected. “That’s just what I said. I came home from the store and he was sitting, just in his chair. Nothing, nothing. Like now.” She went on. “‘So how did she look?’ I said. And he said, ‘Like a shriveled-up old woman.’”
“She did,” rasped Pavel. “Like a shriveled-up old woman.”
Helen turned from one to the other. “I guess it’s been a while.”
Fela slanted her eyes. “He saw her on the street once, in Midtown, not so long ago. But from a distance.” Then said, almost sharply, “Do you want some fruit? I have grapes.”
She got up from the table. Pavel watched her back, wide and regal, swathed in a violet cardigan. She banged around the kitchen counter, clapping the plates and bowls together. But n
othing would break. She took care with dishes. He sniffed his light tea. He knew he was better, that when they went for his checkups the doctor now told him the same things he told her, that there were no terrible whispers about his health, the way there had been before the surgery, when his lungs would fill up with water in the middle of the night and Fela would hear him gulping and expelling air like a locomotive. He wasn’t eggshells anymore. She snapped at him and he snapped back. He wasn’t glass.
He was a tough strip of twill. More, he was human, he was Joseph, the slave and prisoner pricked with bad luck and good, and smart enough to keep quiet, at least after he had learned a few lessons. The brother sold down the river, robbed of his beautiful coat. Everyone wanted Joseph dead and Joseph had held out. But Joseph died in the end, as Pavel supposed he himself might too. But not yet. He had something in him still, he was sure. Something in him still.
“I have a big box of letters she sent me when I was in Germany after the war, waiting for the visa. What she said in those letters! I was to her like a king, a prince!” He stopped, his throat aching, and took a sip of tea.
“So what, Pavel?” called Fela, from the counter. “You think she remembers?”
“One day,” he croaked, “one day I’ll take out that box and send her those letters. In one package. Just to remind her.”
“Ha,” said Fela. “And what will she do with them?” She came back to the table and moved into her chair.
“Why would you do that, Dad?”
“I don’t know,” said Pavel, looking at Helen’s lowered chin, at Fela’s tight mouth. “Just to see. Just to see.”
“I think you should keep them.” Helen pulled at a grape.
“You think?”
So maybe he would keep them. Maybe Hinda felt no guilt. Maybe he felt nothing either, no grief, no sorrow, not even, after seven years, humiliation. Maybe no one felt anything. It was all just people, the members of a family, streams of wool thread, separate, hooked into the same loom by coincidence, touching and twisting only when the design required. Maybe no one felt anything for anyone but the missing. Wouldn’t that be a joke! Surviving in order to argue and hate.
His daughter was staring. “You’re laughing,” she said. “Why are you laughing?”
Was he laughing? He supposed that he was. Pavel looked straight at Helen, trying to stop.
“I’m laughing,” he rasped, beginning to grin, his gums dry and exposed. “Why am I laughing? I don’t really know.”
But really he did. He patted her hand. He laughed, he thought, because it was funny.
Eulogies
September 1999
THE FUNERAL OF TSIPORA Sheinbaum, once married to the leader of the Belsen refugees, was to begin at nine o’clock in the morning, promptly. Rush hour. But Fela was not nervous. Now that Pavel had been forbidden by the doctors to drive, they would get a ride from Rego Park to the memorial chapel in Manhattan. They would arrive on time, relaxed, their stomachs calm. Pavel would sit in the front to stretch out his bad leg, and she would sit in the back, staring out the window, her lower back resting against a cushion, with time for herself, not worrying. No responsibilities except to sit. Serene.
Pavel’s oldest friend, Fishl, picked them up in front of the house. He was three years older than Pavel, but he drove more stably, and without the twenty-mile-an-hour caution, not to mention the bravery against motorcycles and sports cars, that had made Pavel’s driving notorious among his friends. Fishl drove an Oldsmobile, the kind with the long fronts that protected people in case of accident. With such a big vehicle, parking would be a problem in Manhattan, but it was worth it. Fela liked Fishl’s car, its unused lighters in the backseat, the windows that came down at the push of a button. The front had room for Pavel to stretch out his bad leg. She knew he was relieved not to drive, despite his protests to the contrary.
They would see everyone; with Dincja so sick, Fishl was excited to be out. These were not his close friends, although he knew one or two of them as long as Pavel had, and he wondered aloud, all across the Triborough Bridge and through Central Park, who would be there, who would be missing. There had been a feud between Tsipora and Gershom, now a prominent donor to charity, a feud that had started five years ago, about this project or that museum, some board that one or another was on, a big to-do. Pavel had trouble keeping up with this kind of detail—he never liked the politics, and they didn’t have the money to participate anyway—but he knew, from his head to his feet, that Tsipora was in the right. And even if she wasn’t, Gershom was in the wrong. They had been somewhere recently, Pavel and Fela, and Gershom had come up to them and greeted them warmly, all the while ignoring Tsipora, who stood next to Fela. It was a terrible humiliation for Tsipora, one that implicated Fela and that made her feel ashamed to this day. So what if he was prominent! Did that mean they all had to bow down to him? To the point of abandoning a friend?
Tsipora was the last link that bound them all together. No nickname, although there must have been something as a girl. Fela could not imagine it. She was a very grand lady. To Fela and to everyone else living she was always Tsipora, and the name, three syllables, biblical yet modern, elegant and large, evoked exactly the story it came from: Tsipora, wife of Moses, traveling with him, a partner. Yet the Moses of Tsipora’s life, her husband Yehuda, Yidl, was long dead. Twenty-five years now. And what had happened to the first Tsipora, the one from the Torah? No one knew. Not worth mentioning, the life of the wife. Ha. So, times had not changed too much.
Tsipora had deteriorated. Yidl had passed away when his natural force was still unabated. But Tsipora, a strong woman for at least two decades after his sudden departure, had not made it whole to her death. It had been a relief for her friends, it tempered the sadness, that the suffering of her last days was over. Even at the last she had struggled to attend the card game, sitting in the backseat of the car of the Budniks or the Krakowskis, traveling through Queens and inner Long Island and even, twice, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Chaim and Sima had unfolded their pretty mahogany card tables and fed them all with smoked fish from the local shops. The women played separately from the men, and Sima, toward the end, was the only one who would take Tsipora as a partner. Much younger than the rest, Sima, and so less angry about the money. When Vladka Budnik lost! It was a scandal, the way Vladka screamed. Her husband was afraid of her, afraid of losing among the men, which he did often. But Tsipora, that was the tragic thing. Couldn’t remember what happened from one hand to the next, and started in on a terrible speech in the middle of everything. This was one of Fela’s oldest friends in all the world, a friend to whom she and the others owed plenty. But in the last few years, women moved to the side of the room, bent toward the dried fruit when they weren’t hungry, began talking loudly of something important, anything, to avoid being Tsipora’s partner. And really, did Fela have the right to judge? She herself liked to win.
Fishl let Fela and Pavel off in front of the memorial chapel and went to park the car in the garage himself, waving Pavel off. They would save Fishl a place. A crowd was gathering outside already, though they were maybe twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Sima and Chaim stood on the line to sign the book of the mourners. Pavel became nervous when he saw a line, but someone would let him cut in front. Fela watched him pull himself over to Sima and Chaim, eager to chat.
Pavele, Pavele. Fela! Where are you? Come here. Sima gave Pavel a hug and a kiss, then rubbed Fela’s shoulder. Mazel tov, mazel tov. Fela told us last week! When is Helen due?
Fela blocked the sound out. She turned this way and that, looking for the family. There was a separate room the funeral home had, a room where one spoke to the family in private. A guard watched the room, so mere acquaintances, strangers, couldn’t push their way through. Should she try to go in? She decided against it. From behind the guard she thought she could see Tsipora’s son and daughter, even the grandchildren, tall and grim, the girls in short black suits.
The people on the line
to sign the book filed into the chapel. Someone had told them to. Fela and Pavel took seats in the third row. The first row, of course they couldn’t; but any farther back, it almost would have disrespected the friendship. Sima and Chaim sat just behind them. Very appropriate. Fela looked around. She didn’t see Gershom. She shouldn’t be surprised, but still. A young woman, perhaps forty, in a bright yellow dress—like a traffic light!—trotted past. Fela squinted. Her glasses were not for public use, even at a funeral, where one needed to look only dignified, not beautiful. Yes, the Kalmans’ daughter. A professor of some kind, still unmarried. Even she was here. Fela nudged at her husband with an elbow, then shook her head in the direction of the yellow dress. Pavel nodded. Fela faced toward the front again. Tsipora had a big following. It was nice that people’s children came. Still, to dress so flashy. Little kings and little queens, they had all raised their children to be. To do what they wanted. Little kings and little queens. The Kalmans were not the worst in spoiling, either. Even her own children, and no doubt their children after them, if Larry ever remarried—but Fela stopped the thought in its tracks. Wasn’t this what everyone wanted, children so carefree?
It was one of Tsipora’s qualities, a quality that Fela envied, that she truly did not begrudge anyone a bit of cheer and joy. They had been wealthy, splashy, for some years after the war. An enormous apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with artworks and sculpture, expensive furniture. Parties not to be believed. The food enough for a banquet, and two dozen or more people, some refugees, some Americans, everyone mixed together, important and not important, rich people and people with nothing. Beautiful, and very giving, both Tsipora and Yidl had been. Against everything, they believed in their own happiness. That was what made the parties strange, the terrible effort they and everyone, all the guests, even the ones who knew better, exerted to make it joyful. It was strange, two people, each of whom had lost a child during the war, before they knew each other, making a new world, a golden calf, even, out of money made—well, who knew where.
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