A night out in summer, a warm night. Pavel was excited; they had eaten a full meal. And he was among friends, an old friend, a boy he loved. Chaim, used to the casual dress of Tel Aviv, was already in shirtsleeves. Pavel decided to take off his jacket. They were on the beach, after all; where else could one wear short sleeves without feeling too self-conscious? A light summer cap protected his sparsely covered head.
A man had walked slowly toward the four of them, passed by the ladies and nodded. Pavel had smiled at the stranger: a Jewish face, sandy haired, not too handsome. But the man did not smile back. He was close to Pavel, nearing him, and peering at something strange on Pavel, below Pavel’s eyes. Pavel looked down. Did he have a stain somewhere? Then the man stopped.
“Listen,” he said, looking at Pavel, then at Chaim, then at Pavel again. “Why the hell don’t you have that removed?” The man’s accent was American.
Pavel stared. The man gestured at Pavel’s tattoo. “There’s surgery that can do it, without too much pain.”
Pavel’s jaw jutted forward. “What?” he said, very quietly. Then louder, “What?”
The man stepped back. “Listen, I didn’t—”
Pavel’s rage threw itself out of his mouth. “Should I be ashamed? Should I be ashamed?”
The man’s lips were parted. No response.
“Tell me, sir, you who know so much, should I be ashamed?”
The man was several paces away. “Listen, no hard feelings, okay? Just forget it.”
“Forget it,” Pavel called after him. “Yes, just forget it.” He was frozen, his feet unable to lift themselves from the wooden planks of the boardwalk.
Chaim tapped him on the shoulder. Pavel turned toward Chaim’s calm, frowning face, then toward the women. Fela’s hands shook; the lines in her forehead looked deeper, more numerous. Sima, with no English, stood still, uncomprehending.
But Chaim understood. He’s forgotten it, Chaim said in Yiddish, he’s forgotten it. The rest of us should be so lucky.
Pavel had breathed out. Relief. His wife had tears in her eyes, and her tears made him suddenly protective. Oy, Fela, he had said. Don’t be upset. I told him, didn’t I?
But after that night on the boardwalk, Pavel tried to keep to long sleeves. He rolled them up in the workshop, where the cutters and pressers were used to men and women with numbers, or at home, where his children did not seem to notice. Outside his arms were covered. Inside, in his office, in the kitchen, in bed, he wore whatever he pleased.
It was wrong to judge everyone from this one stupid man, but Pavel knew others who had had similar encounters: a word here, a peculiar glance there. Mina Elbaum, a woman Pavel had known and liked for years, actually had had hers removed in the 1980s, when the procedure was no longer experimental. For some people, even looking at it themselves made them upset.
No one would dare criticize Pavel for his tattoo, or his accent, or almost anything now. People today thought more highly of a person who had been through the war. But Pavel kept on his long sleeves. It was an improvement, he supposed, to receive the opposite reaction, something that came like a compliment, it was better than a criticism, but still it was no good. A number made no one a hero. Plenty who suffered worse were not numbered. The dead were not numbered. His children’s friends, adults, when they happened to meet him, bore an expression of awe. Sometimes that awe made Pavel feel worse.
What made him feel better was stones. Not just stones, but stones in their rightful place. It was not a hobby of his, the stones. It was the contribution Pavel made. He had friends who made speeches and friends who wrote books, friends who organized the remnants of their town to make a memorial book. He had friends who had made quite a bit of money and gave it to good causes, causes everyone believed in, monuments, museums. What Pavel did was smaller. But just as important. It was said that he who saves one life saves the whole world. Everyone who was alive was alive in part because someone had helped him to be saved. But what about the dead? Their place in heaven could not be stolen. But their place on earth—that was always in doubt. Pavel helped to mark their place.
Early on, some years after the liberation, the French had come to the site of the former concentration camp with an ugly project. They wanted to exhume the mass graves and extricate the Frenchmen, bring them back to France for a real burial. Pavel had been on the Jewish Committee of the displaced persons camp just after the war, and the ones left in New York had called an emergency meeting. It was one of the proudest things he had done, speak out, halting, angry but sincere, that the dead could not be exhumed. It was Jewish law, and Jewish law superseded French desires to have their soldiers and resistance fighters and even their children returned to them. Each mass grave was long sealed, closed with a large stone, inscribed with the approximate number of buried bodies. The committee agreed with Pavel, brought their resolution to the international administration of the camp. The bodies stayed put.
He who saves one life saves the whole world. And he who saves one marker for the dead? It couldn’t be the same. But people trusted Pavel to do his one task, his one project. That was why Henry Budnik insisted on Pavel’s oversight of his own stone. That was why it was important for things to be in their rightful place. If Pavel made a mistake, who would correct it? If Pavel were not there, who would watch over it?
The one thing he had wanted to do before he died, more than to make an oral history of himself, more than to organize the photo album of his relatives, even more than to see Larry remarry and give him a new grandchild, was to fix the stone of his mother. He had done this almost a decade ago, but now again he was unsure. Was there never to be peace?
And what of his own—but he could not think of that. He could not. If he did, he would not sleep. Fela had suggested he should think instead of the living.
Pavel dreaded sleep, and he dreaded sleeping alone. He liked to have Fela in the house in case something happened, in case he stopped breathing. He liked to have someone there, even in the next room. In the early years of their marriage she would talk to him when he woke up from his violent dreams, comforting him, holding him. Now she did the work of a nurse, giving him a pill in an emergency, judging whether to call 911. He liked to have her in the house when he rested.
Fela would be pleasantly surprised, relieved, to find him asleep in his bed, not waiting for her, letting her relax and have a good time. Pavel raised his legs with his right hand, pushed aside the bedsheets with the left. The remote control was by his bedside. He would watch the news, think of something alive and bright.
But it was a murder they were reporting, a murder and a fire, and Pavel worried that with the noise of the television he would not be aware of Larry dropping Fela off, Larry chatting with his mother before letting her go inside. Pavel put the television on mute. If something important came on he would increase the volume. But nothing important seemed to be happening.
Pavel closed his eyes to help himself hear. Think of the living. He tried to concentrate. He almost heard the door clicking open, the lock turning shut. He almost saw Fela placing her purse on the table by the coat closet. He almost dreamed Fela’s body gliding through the hallway, moving toward the bedroom to wish him good night.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, and my editor, Jennifer Brehl, for their advocacy and insight; to Molly Magid Hoagland, Cathy Park Hong, Emily Krump, Aaron Kuhn, Elizabeth Perrella, Tirzah Schwarz, Kevin Young, and the MacDowell Colony for their crucial support; and to Maurie Samuels and Malena Watrous for their perceptive advice, encouragement, and generosity.
a cognizant original v5 release october 26 2010
About the Author
GHITA SCHWARZ is a civil rights litigator specializing in immigrants’ rights. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, The Believer, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
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Credits
Jacket design by Mary Schuck
Jacket photograph © by Steven Randazzo/Superstock
Copyright
“I Hear That the Axe Has Flowered” from Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger. Translation copyright © 1972, 1980, 1988, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc., New York.
“Cheek to Cheek” by Irving Berlin © copyright 1935 by Irving Berlin; © renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
A portion of this novel, “Oral Histories,” appeared in a slightly different form in the Spring 2006 issue of Ploughshares.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DISPLACED PERSONS. Copyright © 2010 by Ghita Schwarz. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schwarz, Ghita.
Displaced persons: a novel / Ghita Schwarz.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-188190-9
1. Holocaust survivors—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.C4879D57 2010
813'.6—dc22
2010020365
EPub Edition © July 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-200681-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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