by Rebekah Pace
She pulled at my sleeve. “Let’s go.”
We retrieved our bicycles, shivering in our wet clothes as we pedaled home through the puddles. We were both spattered with mud from head to toe when we arrived at her house.
Straightaway, Mira went upstairs to take a hot bath. While I waited my turn, I shed my wet shirt and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Outside, where storm clouds still threatened, one house on the next street was ablaze with light.
“Peter? I’m finished with my bath. I’m drawing water for you.”
I shivered as I turned away from the window and made sure to lock the door before I started upstairs. When I headed to the bathroom, I heard her humming in her room as though nothing was wrong.
***
The sky lost its grayish-yellow tinge, but the rain continued into the late afternoon. Mira stood with me at the window. “We’ll just get wet all over again if we go out for dinner. We missed lunch and I’m hungry. I’m going to cook dinner now.”
“Sounds great. Can I help?”
“You can set the table.” She opened the cupboard and handed me plates, then busied herself in a way that indicated she had the situation under control, and I need not linger to keep her company. After I’d done my part, I got out the world atlas that had belonged to Mira’s father. The boundaries and the countries on the maps dated from before the Great War, before our parents were born. As I flipped through the pages, I thought about the trip Mira and I had planned when we were children and traced my fingers over different ways to get from Leipzig to Paris.
I turned more pages and found the route I’d traveled from Hamburg, through the North Sea, the English Channel, and across the Atlantic to New York. When I turned the page to New Jersey, my vision grew blurry. The floor tilted, and I slammed the book shut. Was just thinking about my home in that other plane—or wherever it was—enough to send me back there?
Again, I entertained the possibility that this was more than a lucid dream. I existed both here and there simultaneously. My geriatric alter ego was here somewhere, too. Mira had proved herself capable of independent thought, and she didn’t always agree with me. What if Mira was also alive somewhere in what I, for lack of a better term, thought of as the real world?
“Peter? Come taste this and tell me what you think.”
Shaking my head to clear the cobwebs, I went into the kitchen. She held a wooden spoon to my lips.
“You made Eintopf.” I savored the rich broth. “It’s perfect. Just like my mother used to make.” I took the spoon from her hand and wrapped my arms around her. “Thank you.”
“It sounded good for a rainy night.” She smiled up at me. “Everything will be ready in a few minutes.”
“Then I’ll be right back.”
When I returned the atlas to the shelf, I thought of our time in the Judenhaus and wondered if there was a way to get around the rules of the dream and communicate with Mira.
If she was real, she would remember our secret code. On a sheet of paper, I printed, sihtsiomerhtnadaerma? rayeuoerla? Is this more than a dream? Are you real?
The wind swirled in the open window, lifted the note from the table, and blew it across the room. I grabbed it just before it disappeared out the opposite window, but the wind blew harder, tearing at the paper in my hand as if someone was trying to take it away from me.
In the kitchen, Mira was facing the stove. If she saw me leave the note on the counter and weight it down with the sugar cannister, she gave no sign.
***
After dinner, when I cleared the table, the note was gone. I tried to catch Mira’s eye, hoping she would give me a signal if she’d found the note, but just like when her mother had tried to keep us from communicating with each other, her face revealed nothing.
As soon as I heard her run water to do the dishes, I slipped out the front door and headed back to my parents’ house. Upstairs in my old room, I found the physics textbook.
I was coming up the walk to her front door when I hear her cry out. I dashed inside and met her coming out of the kitchen, a dish towel wrapped around her hand. Blood soaked through and spread like an opening blossom.
“What happened?”
“I cut myself on a knife.”
“Is it deep?” A mixture of guilt and panic clutched at my insides.
Her face crumpled as she nodded. “It’s on my index finger.”
I took her hand and applied pressure over the cut.
She drew a sobbing breath. “If it heals badly, I won’t be able to play.”
When the bleeding slowed, I unwrapped the towel. A deep, inch-long cut split the skin and tissue over the joint. It should have had stitches, but I shrank from attempting such a thing. There would be Mercurochrome in my parents’ medicine cabinet. I shuddered, remembering how much it stung when my mother had used it to treat my cuts and scrapes.
Upstairs, I found her medicine cabinet similarly stocked. She sat on the edge of the tub and didn’t cry when I ministered to her. Once I’d disinfected the cut and wrapped her finger in gauze, I settled her in bed with her hand resting on a pile of pillows and went down to brew a pot of tea.
Alone, my hands shook so much I could barely fill the teakettle. If I’d brought on the storm that afternoon because I’d pursued the secrets of our dream world, I had caused Mira’s injury, too. While I waited for the water to boil, I searched the kitchen for the note, but it wasn’t in the waste can, in a drawer, or even between the pages of the cookbooks.
Tea things assembled on a tray, I tucked the physics book under my arm and hurried back upstairs, forming another plan to get around the rules. I almost changed my mind when I saw her looking so pale. I set the tray in the middle of the bed and poured two cups. “No more cooking until you’re healed. Agreed?”
“All right.” She took a sip.
Settling back against the headboard next to her, I opened the book.
She smiled. “Are you going to read me a bedtime story?” Then she looked at the cover. “That will put me to sleep in no time.”
“Just hear me out. It turns into a love story.” I cleared my throat. “Once upon a time, time stopped moving forward in a straight line. It looped and coiled and touched other points in time.”
She wrapped the red silk cord of her locket around her uninjured hand and wove it through her fingers.
I remained silent for a few seconds, and when the earth failed to rumble beneath us, I took a sip of tea and pressed on. “Once it did, the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Time Management realized that time, manipulated in this way, could reunite people who had been separated—but clearly belonged together—”
Too late, I felt the tilt and pull of the reverse gravity. As my teacup fell from my hand, the amber droplets hung motionless in the surrounding air, as if together the tea and I had gone weightless. As the room grew smaller, darkness gathered around Mira, spotlighting her on the bed. Then I was gone.
15
“Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
Mira’s voice sounded far away. As I struggled to sit up, a man’s voice cut in.
“You should take it easy, sir. That was a nasty fall.”
Confused, I squinted into the bright sunlight and peered up at the two strangers who knelt over me. The man took me by the arm and helped me sit up.
The woman twisted the top off a water bottle. “Here. You’re probably dehydrated. Drink this.” She didn’t sound all that much like Mira. She was lots older than Mira, too.
But still, it was nice of her, and I felt better after I’d taken a sip. “What happened?”
“You tripped on the curb.” She leaned down to check the back of my head. “You’re not bleeding or anything, but I think you blacked out.”
The guy pulled out his cell phone. “Do you want me to call you an ambulance?”
“No. I am just want
ing to go home.”
“You could black out again. We’ll walk you.”
“You are not needing to do that. It is not far. I will be fine.” But when I tried to stand, I couldn’t support myself. There was no way I was getting up off the sidewalk without help. They each took one of my arms and pulled me to my feet.
“Maybe is better if you are walking with me a little way, right?” It was slow going. When I got woozy, they made me stand in the shade until I felt better. By the time Benny’s bodega came into view, I was wiped out.
At my building, I fished out my keys, and I thought I’d give the nice couple a few bucks for their trouble. But when I put my hand to my back pocket, my heart sank. “Oy vey. I think I lost my wallet.”
The woman bit her lip. “It wasn’t on the sidewalk. We’d have seen it when we helped you up.”
“Yes, yes, okay. But I am having it when I left home. I was going to a restaurant for lunch.”
The guy’s attitude went from helpful to defensive. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but we didn’t take your wallet. We walked you, like, eight blocks out of our way. If you wanna call the police, go ahead. But we’re not sticking around. We did our good deed for the day.”
He took the woman by the arm, and she looked back once as he pulled her away. I guess I should’ve explained. There wasn’t much to lose in that wallet. Maybe twenty bucks in cash. No credit cards or checks. I never had a driver’s license. But it was better not to let strangers into the building anyway, right? My hand shook as I unlocked the door, and I took the stairs slowly. When I went inside my apartment, there was my wallet, on the kitchen table.
***
I came to New York on a steamer ship in 1947, and when I arrived, I met with an agent at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society office at Ellis Island. I never would have ended up here without my uncle Saul, who was my father’s older brother. He located me through the HIAS and sponsored me.
For a refugee kid like me, education wasn’t as important as the will to work hard. My caseworker at HIAS had asked me questions to test my employable status, and he was glad when I said I’d had some vocational training to be a plumber. I bet he could tell I was so emotionally beaten down that I’d take any job without complaint and work like a draft animal—hard, but with no thought of rising above my position.
When I was finished with the processing at Ellis Island, my caseworker gave me a voucher for discount train fare and sent me on to New Jersey. My uncle lived in Weequahic, the Jewish section of Newark. He and my cousin, David, who was seven or eight years older than me, met me at the train station.
Uncle Saul resembled my father, and when I saw him, my heart surged. I had known my father would not be there, but for that one moment, I thought it was him. My brief elation was overtaken by sorrow. My father would never be there to meet me, not at this station or any other. I’m sure I looked like a scared rabbit. Uncle Saul cried as he embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks, but it was awkward for me, as we had never met before. The first time I heard them speak, I wondered, So this is English?
At first, I stayed with David, his wife, Ruby, and their little boy, Aaron, in their one-bedroom apartment on Elizabeth Avenue. It wasn’t a lot of space, but it felt like a palace after the way I’d been living. Ruby, who wasn’t that much older than I was, made up a bed for me behind a curtain in a corner of their bedroom.
I spoke very little English, and though Uncle Saul spoke German and David did a little, Ruby and Aaron did not. I communicated with them mostly in broken Yiddish and gestures.
In the evenings after he came home from work, David liked to listen to Dodgers games on the radio. Even though I knew nothing about baseball, I’d sit in the room with him, listening and trying to pick up the language. Eventually, I could understand most of what the announcers said.
About a week after I arrived, Aaron turned four. When I watched him blow out his candles in his paper-cone hat, memories of my own childhood parties came rushing back, like I was looking at my father’s snapshots of Mira and me blowing out our candles.
Instead of applauding for Aaron like David and Ruby did, I drew a long, choking breath and ran from the room. I had barely closed the bedroom door before the torment of my own memories left me lying on the floor, sobbing and howling like an animal caught in a trap. It humiliated me that something as normal as a birthday party could devastate me that way.
That night, I heard David and Ruby arguing in fierce, low tones. I couldn’t understand much of what they said, but I knew it was about me.
The next afternoon, Uncle Saul came to the apartment to take me to Brooklyn for a Dodgers game. I stumbled getting on the escalator at the train station, because I’d only been on one a few times before. Crowds thronged the platform, jostling me, and while we waited for the train, I broke out in a cold sweat. I felt a little better when I saw it was a real passenger car with seats and windows, but still I was so nervous I could barely step on.
Seeing a baseball game in person differed from what I’d imagined, and I found I understood and enjoyed the game. Uncle Saul and I each had a hot dog and shared a bag of peanuts. I had a soda and he, a beer. A couple times, out of the corner of my eye, I thought Uncle Saul was my father, and that tinged the otherwise pleasant afternoon with sadness. I could never do things like this with my father. Yet Saul had David, and David had Aaron.
Though I had made it to America, I still did not belong. The established families in Weequahic were mostly German Jews who’d settled the area a hundred years before I’d gotten there, and some of them acted like they were too good to associate with penniless greenhorn refugees like me.
But other newcomers to the neighborhood saw the established families as role models. They didn’t keep to themselves the way I did. They married, started businesses, went to temple, and sent their kids to the public schools. Their kids grew up speaking English without accents, moved out to the suburbs, joined country clubs, and sent their kids to college.
I lacked the confidence to try to fit in. I told myself I’d never belong to the country club set. But as long as people in the neighborhood spoke Yiddish, I figured I could get by.
***
The following week, Uncle Saul took me to meet Mr. Gittelman, a rotund, hairy man with a stout wife who stood a good three inches taller than him.
My uncle explained that now that I’d had some time to get used to living in America, I was to work for Mr. Gittelman as a plumber’s assistant for ten dollars a month plus room and board.
Mrs. Gittelman showed me to an alcove off their sitting room. It was very much like the one I’d had at the Judenhaus. Inside, with the curtains drawn, I felt every bit as lost as I had when Mrs. Schloss had kept Mira and me away from each other.
With no confidence or reason to go anyplace else, I plodded through my daily tasks, and in the evenings, I stayed in the flat. I didn’t care for amusements, and I didn’t try to make any friends.
For a long time, my only regular purchase was stamps and writing paper. I sent weekly letters to the Red Cross, requesting information about Mira and my parents.
Mrs. Gittelman resented my presence. She fed me grudgingly and badgered me to venture outside the apartment in the evening to give her and Mr. Gittelman some privacy—just so she could holler at him for his own good without me listening in.
One afternoon, when I came home from work, she took me by the arm and walked me across the street to a storefront with a “For Sale” sign in the window. “You should buy yourself a little business, Peter. Like this laundromat—you can take one of the upstairs apartments for yourself and rent the others. Build up a nest egg and find a nice girl. Settle down. What are you waiting for already?”
At that I’d shrugged, casting down my eyes. I didn’t want to find just any girl and settle down, and I refused to defile Mira’s name by speaking it to Mrs. Gittelman. Mira was mine and min
e alone. Other young men flirted and kept company with the girls who worked as store clerks and secretaries, but I couldn’t do that. Instead, I relived every moment of my friendship with Mira. I would imagine what it would be like to live with her instead of with the Gittelmans until it felt as though she were just in the next room.
For years, I held out the hope that I’d find Mira and we would be together. Then one month, I did not send my usual letters to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Red Cross. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe I figured if I quit making inquiries and never learned the truth, then Mira would never truly be dead to me.
Instead, I envisioned her out there somewhere in the world, living an exciting life. Yet for most of mine, I was only marking time. If God had ever had plans for me, I am sure I fell short of His expectations.
16
I didn’t dream the night of my fall.
My head felt better the next morning, and by afternoon, I was ready to make a trip to the bodega. As I trudged downstairs, my landlady was piling boxes in the foyer near the front door. She set down a box of books with a thump and wiped her brow.
“You never came down to go through the stuff the tenant in Four-A left behind. You never saw such a mess! I’ll be moving boxes for weeks.”
“Apartment Four-A? I was thinking it was another apartment.”
“We’re having a lot of turnover this month. Don’t you remember me telling you?”
I did not. A book caught my eye. “Is okay if I am looking now?”
“Yeah, sure. Take whatever you want. Otherwise it’s going to the junk hauler.” Mrs. Simmons went back into the unit for another load.
The cover and the edges of the pages showed signs of wear, but looked very much like Mira’s father’s copy of the Peerless Atlas of the World. I pulled it gently from the box, careful of the broken spine as I opened the cover. It was the same edition. I sat down on the stairs, book across my knees, and turned the brittle pages. When I got to the maps of the Caribbean islands, my breath caught in my throat. The X, drawn in Mira’s red crayon, was there. It was the same book. Somehow, it had survived the war and ended up here, in my neighbor’s apartment.