Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  “I always don’t see him all day. During the week. From early in the morning. And then at night, when I have to go to the hospital, again I don’t see him…Come here, Matthew, angel,” Maria said gently in a winy voice, and she tapped the place next to hers. “If you don’t eat now, you’ll then later be hungry. It’s true. I have, if you want, apple juice.”

  Arthur said, “Go ahead, Matthew. Make your mother happy.”

  Rubbing his eyes again, Matthew squeezed past the sink and leaned against his mother, who said in the same surprising voice, “See how wet you are still, baby, angel. Your clothes…” She nuzzled her head against his, and in a whisper, almost as if she were crooning to a baby, said, “I tell you what, Matthew. Here—eat now, just a little, whatever you want and then quickly, right away, change into dry pajamas. And then you can watch TV—a long time. OK? Yes? It’s a deal?”

  Matthew did not answer; he seemed content to stand there, leaning against his mother, his body pressed against hers, removed from its own responsibility. Of course he was only a child.

  In the terrible clear, cold light of her studio in Stockholm—a light like ice—Elisabeth did not sit perfectly still at her desk, did not intend to. She turned in her high swivel chair, designed expressly for this purpose. Though perfectly dressed, she turned not once, but again and again, rising higher and higher till she was thrown from her chair. Directly across from her, her husband showed no surprise; he was known everywhere for the impassivity of his expression, which matched so perfectly the starkness of his designs. He began to turn on his chair also—these chairs that he had designed—and, thrown from it similarly, made the downstairs neighbor remark to a guest: “Don’t be frightened, it’s only foreplay.” They rose and turned together on the floor just as they had done separately on the chairs. In front of them the enormous window was uncurtained, but, removed from the responsibility of her body, Elisabeth did not care.

  “That’s probably what my kids are doing now,” Reba said, yawning. “Watching TV. That’s all they ever do now since they found out we might be going to South America. Someone told them there’s no TV there.”

  In a green, sunny clearing in Central America, just outside their own house, Sr. Weil’s four young daughters lay swinging together in a hammock. The hammock swung very slowly, sometimes barely moving at all; it was the time of highest afternoon heat and there was nothing to do. Birds called but did not fly off. Inside the house a servant ran water, or singing to herself, clattered a dish. None of these sounds ran out to their natural ends, but hung on in the air where they’d fallen, suspended by the heat. The four little girls, so similar in appearance, swung on in the hammock; they rocked and rested. By turns, they braided and un-braided each other’s long black hair, and holding up small brown arms against the light, they traded bracelets. Smiling and whispering, they fell asleep, curled up limb against limb, lying together like kittens in the sun. How freed they were from the responsibility of their own bodies was something they did not yet know. It was possible they would never need to.

  Matthew said, “I’m finished, Mommy.”

  “OK, baby,” Maria said slowly, and with her whole body gone slack, she leaned forward to let him through. “Pajamas, Matthew,” she called back. “Remember!…Who wants dessert? Coffee? Cheese—that cheese, naturally, I almost forgot. And probably fruit somewhere.”

  “There’s some fruit left over from the Block Party,” Joan said. “Apples and oranges. The bananas got squashed.”

  Agreeably, Maria said, “We are all, I think, squashed. Shloshed? Tomorrow, probably, I’ll be squeazy.” Smiling, she brought over the cheese and a bowl of fruit, and did not bother to clear off the table. “Look!” she cried out suddenly, pointing to an oval ceramic bowl on top of the refrigerator. “That crook? That crock? It’s what I used always to marinate sauerbraten in! I don’t know now where it came from.”

  “I borrowed it, I forgot to tell you,” Joan said. “And there’s something else I almost forgot.” From the pocket of her dungarees she pulled out a large black wool sock, saying, “This sock. Someone lost it in the laundry room. I better hang it up in the elevator.”

  Louise watched Maria pick up the sock and carefully straighten it out on the table; slowly, dreamily, she ran her fingers up and down each line of ribbing. “It’s not mine,” she said.

  Joan cut off a piece of very runny Brie and, partly missing her plate, said, “I think it’s a man’s sock. It’s enormous.”

  “Mm.” Maria nodded. With her fingers still tracing over it up and down, ridge to ridge, she was picking out small pieces of lint. “Not mine.”

  Awkwardly, Joan said, “Well, I thought—I mean, it could be Dennis’.”

  “Could have been.” Maria shrugged. “But he didn’t have ever such big feet.”

  Reba scraped her chair back, rubbed her eyes, and said, “God, it’s so late, I should really go…But I can’t move. And besides, as soon as tax season starts, Bert becomes a total maniac.”

  Maria folded the sock very carefully, returned it to Joan, and picking up an orange, stared at it and said, “April twentieth.”

  “It’s April fifteenth, Maria,” Reba said.

  “No, no. April twentieth, it’s what I had always to say in school every day.” And smiling distantly at the orange, Maria recited rapidly under her breath in German, saying finally, “For Hitler’s birthday. They gave us every year on April twentieth an orange.”

  “Ah hah! The Führer’s birthday!” Arthur said. “Was he a Libra? Or a Pisces?”

  “I don’t know,” Maria said, and peeling the orange with a knife, making spiraling circles of the rind, she had begun to smile the way she always did when Arthur teased her.

  He put his arm around her now and said, “Come on, Maria. Tell the truth. Those were your happiest days, weren’t they? Eating oranges for the Führer, picking mushrooms with Heinrich and Ludwig, strolling up around the mountainside to visit Frankenstein, just you and Cousin Klaus…Those were your best days. And you had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”

  “I didn’t ever know, Arthur. Not then, not now.” Maria had spat out an orange pit and with her raised face very pale, Louise saw that she was speaking with odd, sudden urgency. “How can you know? Did I think ever when I was a little girl living in that stupid, ugly little town—city—that I would soon, one day, never be there again? To live in the country, a farm girl, with everything different? And then, in the farm with my cousin, to one day be working in a factory? And after to be in a dancing club? And still after, to be in America with Dennis? You think every time: This is my life. But it’s not. You don’t know. You know only always that it can change, be different.”

  Dennis would die. Maria was a very simple-minded woman; she had only simple-minded thoughts, and took comfort from the commonplace. Louise could not control her own dizziness; she felt the lights change and the table tipping, dipping. The idea of a table tipping is not an idea, but an example of concrete thinking—a serious symptom. You think every time: This is my life. But it’s not. In her dizziness, Louise got up to go to the bathroom. You know only that it can change, be different. The sock was not Maria’s: it belonged to a man. Dr. Vinograd, for instance, had gone from one life to another, not necessarily all on skis. Maria was crude in her perceptions of life; she understood one thing only—survival. As a young bride during the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, Rebecca had given numberless wonderful parties, had loved being a hostess. She had thought: This is my life. But it wasn’t. Once, many years before, Pablo Casals, on a mountain-climbing expedition, had injured his hand. He had thought then with half-deceiving relief: I will never play the cello again. But he did. It was possible that such beliefs had left Maria without a conscience, like Frankenstein. Like Elisabeth, whose life had so changed that it was frozen now in chilly perfection. Just as facing backward on a moving bus, everything slipped away in frozen, exaggerated stillness: a world where no one moved and nothing was translatable. Dizziness
was in itself a translation—and a very ordinary one: the table tipped. The woman on the bus with the two sweet-faced, dark-haired little girls had not known: it was why she looked at her lively, chattering daughters with such wonder. Once she had spoken a different language, had learned English with a British accent, never guessing then that the past and this particular present which she knew could not tell her future. You know only that it can change, be different. The sock, which was not Maria’s, could have been once.

  Dennis would die. Passing through the foyer, Louise looked up at the photographs and saw that these positions and stances of agony which he had worked to refine as an expression of his art were now an exact reflection of the agonized condition of his body. Which could no longer change, be different. You won’t leave me yet, Matthew, will you, baby, angel? Maria, peeling an orange, knew perfectly well what had happened to her, but had an odd way of looking at history: she did not think it determined the future, sealing it up. The table tipped. It was a view that was not necessarily true, but simply just as possible.

  In the bathroom, the sounds of other people’s plumbing rumbled and clanged through the pipes. Soon Matthew, on his way in to brush his teeth, would stop off to stand near his mother. In his pajamas and without his glasses, he would look almost like a baby, his vulnerability extreme, his tentativeness exaggerated and poignant: set, like a photograph, for nostalgia. Chairs would scrape; Arthur, Joan, and Reba would get up slowly and, gathering their things together, begin to move toward the door—as always, reluctant to leave. A bulb in the hallway would be burnt out, Maria would leave her door open for them till she ran off to answer the phone, which might or might not be the hospital.

  Louise looked in the mirror and considered the familiar evidence of her own face, which had said always: This is my life. And it was, but just like a photograph, set and bounded in one time, it could not tell her anything more than what had already happened.

  Sickness

  IN BOOKS, RADIATORS HUM and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running. Not that she isn’t longing to. But there is an older neighbor around or an aunt maybe, and her philosophy is: He’s crying? So he’ll cry! And the baby in the radiator—how can he know all this? So he sends up a last, raging yowl and I am woken up.

  Here, in the brief, early whitish light, the march of neighbors has already begun. For even though it is barely morning of my first day home from school, the news of a sick child has shuttled through the building like steam through the pipes, and my mother’s voice rises from the kitchen in bitterness.

  “What’s a doctor? He sits and sits studying long enough so that finally in one place his bathrobe wears out.”

  It is not a question now of tissues and aspirins, of swollen glands or a throat that won’t swallow. This time it is serious: Lichtblau, the limping Golem with MD on his license plate, has made a housecall. Dragging one heavy foot behind the other, he has announced measles and a high fever, and in a stingy mumble as dull as the one that sends black years to the Irish kids on his new Buick in the street, he has even mentioned the possibility of hospital. But this doesn’t worry me because what’s a hospital? One, nurses: quick-stepping, white-clad girls whose heads are all blond and faces shiksa-silly. And two, doctors: bald, heavy men, sad-eyed and Jewish, who walk slowly on dragging legs, their bodies wrapped up in old maroon bathrobes, shamefully all worn away in one spot.

  What would I do in a place like that? Where would I keep my glass of sweet, lukewarm tea that sits, whenever I am sick, like lightened liquid honey on a folding chair by my bed? Where would I put all my books? Where would I get my neighbor stories? As I lie back against the pillow, my room flies up before me like an airy, pastel balloon. From the window, slats of sunlight sift in, off-spinning ballerina twins to the clumsy elephant slats of the fire escape: the sun is playing a game of potsy on the linoleum. Hopping each time to a different cone of color, the sun has zoned my floor so that it’s a country counter of homemade, fruit-flavored ice creams, or else great clean pails of paint from which I can choose new, sweet, custardy colors and order the painter to paint my room.

  Outside, other children’s feet thump off to school. Some are shouting: they just got to the corner, shoelaces dragging, and now, for spite, the light is changing. And some are crying: people with bad work habits, maybe they forgot their consent slips or their gym suits, and because it’s too late now to go back, the crying buttons them into their stormcoats even tighter and their whole bodies knead with what’s coming. But I am inside, I am home, and sickness is all pleasure.

  “Some tremendous achievement,” my mother says, and from the kitchen her voice in anger and sourness closes in on itself till it’s black, black as the telephone, a mother jungle—steamy from her tears and sour from her breath. If she listened to me, she’d be completely different, even wear nail polish, but if that’s what I’m looking for, she says, what I better do is go out and get myself another mother. As it is, though, the one I have plucks pinfeathers out of a chicken, and because her fingers get clumsy and impatient instead of elegant and neat, the knife point nips them so they bleed a thin, crooked trail that maps out spongy yellow Chicken-land: a bridge across the legs, a mountain pass to the wings, and all the way back through to the interior where the tiny stomach and liver lie hiding together, breathing like brothers.

  “Some tremendous achievement,” she tells Birdie. “To sit and sit and study and study and nowhere in the whole process is there a head that comes into it or a brain that’s involved. In medical school the big expense is in bathrobes.”

  Birdie is puffy-brown and stuffed, the awful splendor of a Florida suntan. Her voice too is bleached—thin and hard from the sun and sandy from cigarettes. With aqua earrings, an orange dress and two orange-painted big toes that pop out from aqua open-toe shoes, Birdie is herself a sunstroke.

  “Let’s face it, Manya,” she tells my mother. “You’ll never get satisfaction. A Jewish doctor is a Jewish prince.”

  A Jewish prince! Joseph Nasi, Joseph the prince…

  The chamber was thick with incense and plush with silken pillows. In the distance a droning voice was chanting the name of Allah, summoning the faithful to prayer. But within the richly adorned room not even a palm frond dared stir, for in the center, seated upon the largest and most sumptuous silken pillow of them all, was the Sultan himself, brocade pantaloons loose about his legs and a gleaming scimitar at his waist. Behind him stood his fierce, mustachioed guards, before him veiled and scented dancing girls. All awaited his pleasure and command. Beneath the imperial turban, however, the Sultan’s heavy brow was clouded and his darkened visage bespoke distress. Besides all this, he was very ugly, had a fat, puffy face as if mosquitoes couldn’t keep away from him. With a soft rustle of silks, a graceful, veiled maiden appeared before him, bearing a silver tray of sweetmeats. But barely raising one languid hand, the Sultan sent her away. On hot days, sweetmeats probably made him a little nauseous. A richly garbed courtier bowed low before him.

  “Sire,” he said, “an emissary just arrived from the mighty King of Spain urgently begs that Your Majesty receive him.” But bidding him rise, the Sultan merely looked away, saying, “I shall receive no one.” A thin, hurrying Vizier flung himself at the Sultan’s feet crying, “If it please Your Majesty, a messenger stands at the palace gates with a plea of grave import from Your Majesty’s heroic general now engaged with the Infidel in battle far afield.” The beetle-browed Sultan sighed.

  Suddenly a great clatter was heard from without and finally even the fat, sitting Sultan started getting a little curious.

  “What occasions this disturbance?” he demanded of his court.

  “It is nothing, Your Majesty,” replied a saber-bristling guardsman. “Nothing His Highness need concern himself over. It is merely a Jew.”

  “A Jew?” cried the Sultan, hastily rising from his cushions as color
flooded his features. His eyes were popping, too, and probably by this time there was even a vein twitching somewhere. “A Jew? What Jew?”

  “Merely a Jewish doctor who calls himself Joseph.”

  “Joseph!” the Sultan cried out with great emotion. “All praises to Allah Who has sent him to me this day. Bring Joseph to my presence immediately.”

  Hustled in between two armor-laden guardsmen was a slight, bearded man of modest dress and bearing and proud, intelligent eyes.

  “Sire,” he said, stepping forward, carefully lowering his eyes, but not bowing his head or bending his knee, for there was only One to Whom Joseph bowed. And not every other minute either because he certainly wasn’t Catholic.

  “O Joseph,” the Sultan called out in great agitation. “What news do you bring me? What of my son, what of my ships, and what of the terrible apparition of my nightly slumbers?”

  “For your son, O great Sire, I have prepared a special salve and now the lad’s eye is as bright as ever it was.”

  “Selim,” the Sultan breathed. That was his son’s name in Turkish.

  “Of your ships, Your Majesty. Though one was lost in a storm at sea, the cargo of all the fleet has been rescued in a foreign port by a friend and member of my faith, one Mannaseh ben Levi. Further, he has sent a message to me with the news of a worm, Your Majesty, who through his own cunning can spin silk. He offers to send to your court as many of such creatures as Your Majesty desires in the shipment with the lost cargo.”

  “Allah be praised!”

  “Of the apparition. It was a warning to Your Majesty of the storm at sea which distressed your ships. Now that the cargo is safe, the dreaded apparition will trouble you no longer.”

  “O Joseph, physician to my body, my soul, and my coffers. How shall I reward you? What is it that you wish?”

  “For myself, Sire, there is nothing I desire. But for my people, I ask that they may always live in peace within your walls, free to pursue their daily lives and to worship, harming no one, according to our age-old laws and beliefs.”