“For crying out loud, I’m fine. Everyone’s making a big fuss over a little bit of indigestion. They call it irritable bowel syndrome. I’ve already boiled the skin of a pomegranate, dried it, and ate it with a dash of beeswax and a spoonful of egg yolk, and washed it down with a shot of vodka, the way we used to do it. Already I’m feeling better. Probably just too much cake. You know, wintertime, that’s what happens. Everyone comes over for tea, and they bring me a cake, I bring them a cake, we eat too much cake.” She drew a breath and then said if she had grandchildren to chase, she would be slimmer and healthier, but because he refused to settle down, she only sat on fancy couches, forced to admire pictures of other people’s grandchildren. While eating cake. “‘He’s so smart,’ ‘he’s the best baseball player,’ ‘she has her mother’s eyes’—do you think I enjoy listening to this, nodding and smiling and feeling humiliated that I have nothing to show for myself? Nothing,” she repeated, more to herself than to him.
He almost mentioned Vera, to stop her lamentations, but he thought better of it. Yes, she was Jewish and Russian, but not his mother’s type of Russian Jew. She would get suspicious. Instead, he would write to his mother about Vera. She couldn’t talk back to a letter. He’d dated Christian girls before, Polish ones from Coney Island, with their dark lipstick and tight sweaters, and his mother had coolly dismissed them, knowing it wouldn’t last. But this was different.
Chapter 31
VERA
February 1945, Santa Monica, California
Vera rang the doorbell, her chest tight with anticipation. When he had dropped her off at Villa Aurora last Saturday afternoon, she doubted that she would see him again, already thinking of their night together as a present she might occasionally unwrap before she returned to the agonizing wait for the war to end.
Then that night when the phone rang, she picked up, half hoping and half fearing it would be him.
“When can I see you again?” he asked, his breath filling the line, and she stammered that she wasn’t sure, her voice thick in the back of her throat, the race of her pulse making her hands shake. He invited her to dinner at his house next weekend, and then the phone call ended as abruptly as it had begun, and she held the receiver, staring down at the little black holes embedded in the mouthpiece as if something of him lingered there.
Over the course of the week, she almost told Elsa that she had seen Lucie in the mirror at the motel the night she spent with Sasha. And that the mirror-Lucie had grown into a beautiful eighteen-year-old who wore a yellow blouse with puffed sleeves, her hair finally brushed. It almost seemed as though Lucie pitied Vera for still being here, tormented by the past, whereas she appeared untouched by it.
* * *
• • •
From across the street, the popping of a toy gun made her flinch. A kid in a cowboy outfit sprawled out on the sidewalk, playing dead, while another boy twirled the gun back into his holster. A girl watched them, her hip jutted out in disapproval. From over the adjoining hedge, an old woman peeked at Vera and clucked her tongue, puckering her thin lips.
Vera felt her cheeks burn, wondering if the woman detected the guilty heat pouring off her, despite how much Vera tried not to feel it.
The old woman still stared, her crooked mouth hanging open.
Vera looked away, studying the power lines overhead, disbelieving that she was actually standing here, on his doorstep, all knotted up with nerves, anticipating how his touch lit her up for those temporary seconds, but then she felt ashamed of this pleasure. Maybe she only saw him to keep the lights on for herself, so that when she found Lucie, there would be something of herself left to give.
The door swung open and Sasha stood there, sweating slightly in a button-down shirt through which she detected the faint outline of an undershirt, a truly American fashion. He broke into a relaxed smile, and explained, while herding her inside, that he hadn’t heard the bell and he was cooking something in the back, and would she like a glass of wine?
A towel dangled from his shoulder, and she tugged it off, twisting it around her wrist.
“Hey, I need that,” he said, pulling her close; he gave her a long searching kiss. He tasted of cigars, wine, pepper. “Keep me company,” he called over his shoulder, and she followed him, taking in the living room, the low-slung chairs and a white wool rug over the blond wood floor, a glass coffee table with slanted chrome legs. Vera followed him into the narrow galley kitchen, and wondered if he could sense her nervous indecision.
Leaning against the opposite counter, she watched him stir the sauce simmering on the stove.
“This is a recipe from an Italian lady who used to live one floor up from us,” he said. “Tedora Binaggi. She cooked all day, and I would smell the garlic and the olive oil and tell my mother that she had to cook like that. The Jews and the Italians, we were all kind of crammed together.”
Vera nodded, struggling to imagine how he had lived, recalling her time in New York: looking through the frosted hotel windows out onto other windows, feeling crushed by the rush of businessmen in overcoats barreling down the sidewalks. When she took a few sips of red wine, her limbs loosened, and she felt more at ease.
He talked while he cooked, opening drawers and sprinkling salt and chopping parsley, whereas the rare times when she cooked, she had to concentrate, finding all the cutting and the peeling burdensome, her mind drifting until suddenly the pot boiled over with foamy water, burning out the flame beneath it.
He turned off the stove and transferred the pasta into a colander, tossing it before drizzling it with olive oil. He joked that the army had refined his cooking skills as he reached for plates, and closed a drawer with his elbow.
She watched as he carried their plates to the table, his back moving underneath his shirt, his stride long and confident in his slacks. “Holed up in pup tents, in the middle of the Algerian Desert, feasting on K rations; anything tasted good under those conditions.” The dining table was already set, long thin white candles waiting to be lit.
Vera sat down opposite him.
He poured more wine into their glasses, and for the first time, he seemed self-conscious.
“This is wonderful,” Vera said, draping the napkin across her lap, and he said that she was probably used to cooks and servants. “I can tell, just by looking at you.”
She blushed.
He poured more wine into their glasses. “My mom moved away from the city. She doesn’t lift a finger anymore. They have a maid who cooks and cleans and whatnot, but I think she misses it, doing everything herself. She sure gives the maid grief.”
Vera smiled into her wine. “You must think I’m spoiled.”
He pinched his fingers together. “A little bit.”
She laughed and said the food tasted good. Very good. “See, I’m not spoiled. I even like your spaghetti.”
He leaned back into his chair and gave her an appraising look. “I’ll cook for you anytime. Anything you want.”
She blushed again. He referred to the future so casually, as if it were a given. But it was cruel to entertain it, and cruel she’d even come here tonight, giving him that hope. She took a hasty sip of wine and tried not to look at his open face, and instead asked how the film was going. He sighed and explained that they’d finished the shoot, and now they were cutting the film.
“Are you happy it’s done?”
He smiled halfheartedly and said of course, but the movie he really wanted to make had just gotten rejected by every studio in town. Shrugging, he added, “They only want to see America as one hundred percent good, including any American who ever fought in the war.”
“No ambiguity . . . all black or white?” she ventured.
“Exactly!” Sasha said, newly frustrated.
“They might not understand what war does. How it threatens a person’s”—she searched for the right words—“sense of himself, and of the w
orld . . . undoing all that was previously known and trusted.” She paused, her brow furrowing. “We should see ourselves reflected in your flawed characters. That’s more honest, more truthful, as opposed to some beautiful lie.”
“Yes,” Sasha agreed, gazing at her from across the table. “It’s more interesting that way. More real.”
Vera felt a pang of recognition because he was describing her struggle. She berated herself for leaving Lucie in a country overrun by beasts. In rarer moments, she told herself that she had tried to save Lucie from deportation and death, but she had failed, and she couldn’t stop hating herself for this mistake.
“What are you thinking?” Sasha asked, reaching for her hand across the table.
“You’ve made such a nice dinner, and I don’t want to ruin it . . .” Sweat sprung up between her breasts, trickling down her sides. When she picked up her fork again, her hand trembled, and she felt as if he could see right through her. “You shouldn’t waste your time with me.”
The open French doors allowed in a gentle breeze. From the radio Josephine Baker’s velvety voice was singing, “I’m feelin’ like a million.”
He stood up and held out his hand, urging her to dance with him. Her heart lifted at how little he wanted, while trying to suppress the memory of Max taking her to see Josephine Baker in La Revue Nègre, in celebration of their engagement. They ended the night with cocktails at Fouquet’s, squeezed into a banquette, bathed in the amber glow of the chandelier.
Sasha and Vera danced, maneuvering between the furniture. Luckily, she didn’t know the next song—it only pulsed with this moment. A woman’s low throaty voice sang about love on a summer day that withers away too soon, as short-lived as a rose in full bloom.
The lit candles cast a flickering gauzy light over the walls. Putting her cheek against his chest, she felt his warm palm press into the small of her back, his fingers tapping lightly there, in time with the music. She squeezed her eyes shut, listening to the rise and fall of his breath, focusing only on this moment. Their movements slowed until they stood still, kissing and touching each other in the middle of the room, not even realizing that the radio had cut to a jingle for Palmolive soap, or that when he carried her up the stairs, the candles continued to burn on the table, where they’d abandoned an uncorked bottle of red wine that would spoil overnight.
* * *
• • •
She sat up in his bed, naked under the thin sheet. Now, in the stillness, after that tension she had felt through dinner, almost unbearable, had broken, after their bodies had reunited and intermingled and they knew each other again, she felt a sense of release, sated and hollowed out by their exertions. The air between them was languid and soft, and she enjoyed this interval for its fallow, blank quality, her mind finally quiet, her body motionless, the constant recriminations from that invisible chorus temporarily muzzled.
She stared out at the dark coast. The walls were made of windows, except for the back one, with the bed’s headboard pushed up against it. It was almost the same view from Villa Aurora, but closer and lower, without the grand sweep of things, yet between houses and palm fronds, she glimpsed the ocean. Gathering the sheet around her, she stood up and walked around the room, while Sasha drowsily smoked one of her French cigarettes.
She ran her hand over his typewriter and pressed a key, recalling the sound of work and productivity. A pile of scripts sat on the desk.
“All drafts,” Sasha informed her. “Nothing worth reading.”
Also, on the desk: a tin case of Havana cigars and a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman who looked as if she were from another time. A pretty peasant, Vera thought, tracing the frame with her fingertip. Dark eyes peered out with a look of mischievous melancholy, her hair covered by a scarf, the rest of her body obscured by the thick folds of a skirt and heavy overcoat. The woman stood in front of a wooden house, the chimney emitting spirals of white smoke into the winter air.
“That’s my mother,” Sasha said, the bed creaking beneath him as he sat up. “It was taken when she was young, in Latvia, the year I was born. It was during the war, but she always used to tell me the Germans weren’t so bad then. The Cossacks were the worst. I think she still has nightmares about those raids. When she was a child, she used to hide in the neighbors’ cellar, praying no one would find her.”
Vera nodded, staring at the photograph. “The word ‘pogrom’ was forbidden in our house, as if just by uttering it, you could summon it.” She sat down in his desk chair, tightening the sheet around her. “As a special treat, my father took me to Easter ceremonies at the Russian Orthodox Church. The clanging of the church bells made the ground shake beneath my feet. The priests in white gowns paraded three times around the church, and then a strange old woman sitting next to me kissed me three times while crying out, ‘Kristos voskres!’ At home, to continue the festivities, we ate kulich and paskha and peeled hard-boiled eggs that the cook had decorated with little flowers and crosses on the shells.” She laughed and shook her head. “I loved those pretty little eggs and felt so bad when we broke them.”
He lit her another cigarette, their fingers brushing when he passed it to her. An ambulance bell careened through the night before fading away. She asked to turn on the radio and he nodded.
“When you were little, did you know . . . that you were Jewish?” he asked, turning onto his side as he leaned on his elbow, as if he were at the beach. She didn’t know if he would ever fully grasp where she came from: a place where people didn’t walk around proclaiming themselves to be Catholic or Jewish, where one didn’t constantly point out where one was from, wearing it like an honorary badge as they did here, as if being from Iowa or New York or Chicago demanded praise. At a low volume, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte played in the background; it soothed her.
Vera swiveled in the chair. “Growing up, we never set foot in a synagogue, and we knew very few Jews. Only a tiny fraction of us were allowed to live in St. Petersburg. Most were bankers, like my father, or industrialists and lawyers, and almost all of them had been atheists since the Enlightenment.” She paused, musing at the smoldering end of her cigarette, and recalled her father’s dismay when reading about the Israelites in the paper. She had asked him, knowing that they were Israelites as well but in some secret way, the better kind, why he didn’t just have the family all baptized if being one caused so much distress. She must have been seven or eight, around the time when a child starts to ask such questions. He paled, and then murmured that they would never convert, as if she had suggested something ungodly. He rose from his velvet chair and wandered out of the room, dropping his newspaper on the Persian rug as he went. He had just returned from the Egorov baths, where he often went in the afternoons, and his skin glowed a dewy pink from the steam and birch branches used to improve blood circulation. She pictured his hair, wet and combed back from his forehead, the grooves left by the comb visible, but her question had immediately drained the freshness from his face, and he suddenly appeared gaunt and ashen.
Vera bored her cigarette into the ashtray. He was dead now and she had converted to Catholicism in ’39, hoping that might save them. She sighed, aware that Sasha was contemplating her from the bed, probably still thinking about how she went to church and celebrated Easter and didn’t know any other Jews. In Paris, they had continued to live this way, whereas he described his childhood as teeming with Jews, all of them squeezed together in tenement blocks, frequenting the same shuls and shops, a closed but boisterous community whose borders he could trace on a map.
He asked more questions about her parents, and how she met Max, and what she studied at university. Unaccustomed to talking about herself in this way, she imagined as she spoke that he was twisting open a brightly painted matryoshka doll, and each period of her life tumbled out.
Through the windows, the first purplish tints of dawn appeared.
She motioned to the photograph on his de
sk. “Your mother looks like she’s in love.”
“Yeah,” Sasha said, his voice catching. “I think she’d just met my father when that picture was taken.”
“What happened to him?”
From the radio, clapping flooded into the room, sounding like heavy rainfall occurring in some far-off place.
“I don’t know.” He looked at her, his eyes deepening. “I don’t know who my father is. When the war started, her husband left to fight the Germans, and my mother had an affair with another man. A German soldier. At least that’s what I think happened.”
“And then, when her husband came back?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Sasha stared down at the hardwood floor, his forearms resting on his knees. “He died before he could find out.”
The orchestra began playing one of her favorite pieces, the Largo from the second movement from Dvorák’s New World Symphony. It always reminded her of the sky just before dawn, as it looked now, a deep blue-violet lightening the edges of it, the birds calling out to one another in the newly minted air. “Did you ever meet your father? Do you remember him at all?”
“Yes,” Sasha admitted, his voice breaking. “But it’s so faint, sometimes I don’t know if he’s real . . . He left when the war ended. I must have been around three.” He looked away from her. “I’ve never told anyone this.” He stubbed out his cigarette before lighting another one. “I shouldn’t talk about it . . . I’m sorry.”
“You did nothing wrong,” she said, growing upset on his behalf, at the shame marking his face. “You were just a child, born into this world. They gave you a name, and they gave you this past. You didn’t choose it.” She went over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, careful not to press down too hard.
“What do you remember?” she whispered. When his father left, he had been younger than Lucie, but he still remembered, even as an adult, and this fueled her with the promise that Lucie wouldn’t forget, even if years passed until she found her, even if she never found her.
Those Who Are Saved Page 23