Ghita Schwarz Read online

  Now, if asked, he had something to say to the British: “I live in a house.” Pavel was proud of the English sentence, the phrase that made him more than an ordinary refugee stumbling over single words. The house might be modest, but it appeared to the world to be his, and he soon felt a lightness about sending the widow off. If he had trouble falling asleep at night, it was more often from the memory of taking a dying man’s spoon in camp. No, taking possession of the house might have been an ugly act, but it was one that enabled him—and two others!—to live. He had a warm drawer to hold his parents’ photographs and all the scraps of brown paper on which he had written the names of places where family members had last been seen. He had a home, or if not a home, a resting place, with a woman to care for his needs and a young boy to look after. He was a man.

  THAT FIRST MORNING FELA came downstairs at sunrise, shoulders wrapped in the blanket she had slept in. Her shoes, uncomfortably wide, flapped from her heels.

  Good morning! Pavel emerged from the washroom.

  Ah! she cried. Then she collected herself. I’m—good morning.

  His clean-shaven face sparkled with a few drops of water his towel had missed, and he reached for his cap. Did I scare you? he said. But there is nothing to fear. The old woman—already she is a few towns away. She has a daughter. No one will come to disturb us.

  No, she said. Of course not. Where do you go?

  He pushed out his bicycle from behind the door. Now that we have a household, we need more than she stored here. He cleared his voice. I don’t go far, he said. Just for sugar and eggs. There’s a bit of a loaf I left for you in the kitchen.

  At the word sugar Fela felt a flinch inside her belly.

  Sugar and eggs, Pavel repeated. And I still have a coupon for bread. Don’t worry. He averted his eyes from her bare arms. Then the door shut gently behind him, and Fela heard his bicycle creaking down the street.

  She opened the washroom door. Clean toilet. A round mirror hung above the white basin. She kept her face to the side of the mirror, not yet ready to see herself, ugly and swollen, the face of an old woman on a young woman’s hungry body. Instead she splashed herself with cool water, wiped the night’s sweat from her chest and neck. She could bathe now, with Pavel out of the house, or she could wait until Chaim awoke to keep watch should strangers seek to enter. She peered out from the bathroom window. The garden, sprouting with the summer vegetables the old woman had cultivated, seemed frightening, an open space in which a human being was a target. Perhaps they would have felt safer in the refugee camp, surrounded by British soldiers.

  She shuffled to the sofa to peer at Chaim, sleeping with his mouth open, covered with a coat. With his eyes closed he looked helpless, pale, not a trace of the sophistication and cunning he had displayed when they had met, finding her in a corner of the market at the provincial center, a city neither of them knew well, a small distance from her hometown, only a day after she had seen her family’s house for herself. She had been in the first trains from Siberia for the repatriated Poles, and she had expected—but she did not remember what she had expected. Now that she had seen the reality—once-familiar neighbors looking at her with curiosity, even hostility, a man she did not know installed in her father’s dry goods shop—she could not remember what she had thought she would recognize.

  But Chaim had recognized her. He had known—from what? from her fear?—that she was a Jew, even as he, in his Polish army uniform, tapping her on the shoulder, had fooled her.

  “Buongiorno,” he had said. “Buongiorno, signorina.”

  She had felt something cold etching down her chest. It wasn’t any language she had known. She was silent.

  He switched to Polish. You look like you want to go to Italy.

  Why do you say that? she managed. I have no desire to cross any borders. I am here looking for—

  Or perhaps you are Greek.

  Greek? No, no.

  Are you sure? His eyes were sharp blue but friendly, and for a moment he looked almost childlike. I know a Greek song. That is why I ask. He began to sing: One, one, who knows one? One, one. I know one.

  His voice was soft but clear. Against the music of the buying and the selling of eggs and milk, no one else could hear, but she could: Hebrew. A little Passover song.

  He went on. Two, two, who knows two? Two, two. I know two.

  She opened her lips. That is not Greek, she murmured in Polish.

  No? The young man had smiled. How strange, he said. Because I have a Greek passport. He took it out of his pocket and showed it to her. You see? Greek.

  A passport could get her into the western zones, where the British and American soldiers would protect them from the locals. A woman alone was not safe in the Russian zone, with the Red Army soldiers going after any woman they saw. Accompanied by a boy in a uniform, she was perhaps more protected. I have a ring, she said. As she said it, she touched the small blue stone in its tight setting. The one possession she had kept, but to give it up now seemed easy.

  Ah, no, said the boy—she could see, suddenly, that he was a boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen, disguised in his uniform—no. Keep it until we board the truck. That ring can pay for both of us.

  Was it generosity that he did not take it from her? He could have taken the ring and abandoned her to cross into Germany alone, but he had not. They rode with several others, Romanians, four men and a woman, whose dark clothes and mouths emitted a muddy odor. They murmured small greetings in Yiddish, nothing more. If they were to communicate it was to be in Hebrew, which sounded like Greek, the boy said. Fela knew very little Hebrew. Only the boys had religious lessons in her family, modern though her father had tried to be. Chaim—he had given only his first name—had some difficulty himself. His hometown was not so far from her own, Mlawa, but if he had had a religious education at all, it must have stopped with the war. But he had the phrases, could rearrange words from prayers to make a sentence. He could make a sentence in any language, he said, with a seriousness that made her decide not to call him a braggart, not to joke with him. Even sitting in the back of the truck he was careful and alert. He stretched and brushed the dust off his uniform every hour until they crossed into the British zone in Germany. She grew fond of him on their journey, as she would a brother with whom she had lived all her life but only just now started to know.

  YES, SHE WOULD WAIT to bathe until Chaim awoke to keep watch. She moved into the kitchen. The widow had kept the sink clean, but dust from the bombings had gathered on all the shelves, a thick layer of white and gray. She would have to clean the house from top to bottom. There was little furniture—two beds, one sofa, one chest of drawers—and only a bit of crockery. Yet the rooms were wide and the wallpaper in good condition. Perhaps the possessions had been sold.

  Chaim came in as the coffee boiled, dressed in a shirt left for him by Pavel and the pair of trousers he had worn to sleep, his feet in a pair of torn socks.

  He sat in a chair as she put a plate before him. Has he gone for more food?

  She nodded. The coffee burned her tongue a little. She put the cup down again and blew at the steam. Chaim had a slow way of speaking, rolling his words around his tongue. He spoke slowly, but he ate fast. In the smugglers’ truck he had murmured words to himself, Polish and German and Russian, talking himself to sleep. Meat, soup, spoon, fork, knife. Once she had looked at him directly as he moved his lips, and he had seen her, but he had not stopped. Milk. Chicken. Chocolate. Porridge. Potato. Still a child.

  Careful with the bread, Fela said. You lose crumbs when you rush.

  Her own place at the table was clean, and she smoothed out the paper she had found in the widow’s drawer and looked down at her letter. Bluma, it said. Dearest Bluma.

  What do you write there? His mouth was full with bread and coffee.

  I write to my sister. I know she—I think she—but the others. Fela looked at the neat Polish letters on the page. I am alive.

  That was all she had written. She
wanted to think out her words before she scratched them onto a valuable scrap of paper. Chaim was looking at her. She is in Palestine, Fela added. That’s why I know she—I believe she—of course maybe she has heard something—her address I always remember. I remembered it everywhere.

  So write to her, said Chaim. Don’t let me disturb you.

  If you don’t want to disturb me, eat.

  I have heard nothing. Who else has written to you?

  Are you reading my letter?

  No, no.

  You look like you are reading it.

  She got up to pour him more coffee. Pavel said he would try to find sugar from someone. Do you know where he will get it?

  I can guess, said Chaim. He leaves this area, that’s certain. Did you see at the end of the street? There’s a row of rubble, then half a house, just open, no roof, no upper floor. Yet in our row of houses it looks as if nothing has happened.

  Fela pushed her letter to the side of the table. I don’t want anything to stain it.

  What do you tell her?

  Nothing. I tell her nothing. There is nothing to tell her. Just like you. Nothing to tell.

  Chaim got up from his plate. I told Pavel my name last night. Traum. We don’t have to be brother and sister now.

  All right, said Fela.

  I’m going to wash, he said.

  Fela shook her pen. Still a little ink. She wanted to write: Do you remember Sieresz, who bought leather on credit from Father every Christmas? I saw his brother. He asked me: For what did you come back? That to me was worse almost than—

  But instead she would be brief. I lost Moshe, she wrote. I am alone.

  IN JUNE PAVEL ORGANIZED a second bicycle. The German girl who sold it to him had tied a wooden crate onto a piece of metal above the back wheel. She used the crate as a basket to carry food back from the market. He could see on the girl’s face her regret at giving up the bicycle; but hunger was bigger than regret. So she would walk! He had the girl ride alongside him until half a kilometer away from the house. He gave her an extra tin of pork for her trouble, and in the look on her face he saw not just gratitude for the food, but relief. Yes, they were still a little afraid, these Germans who had lived near the large camp during the war. Now that the armies were here, ready to condemn and to hang, these Germans were afraid of the Jews.

  Pavel presented the gift to Fela in the garden. He called out to her from the front of the house, near the kitchen window. He stood in between the two bicycles, his face somber. He did not want to look too arrogant to her. Still, look what he had done in an hour at dawn! A good piece of craft, this little thing.

  But she looked skeptical when she saw him.

  He felt offended. For you, he said. I didn’t steal it.

  No, no. Her neck flushed; a red spot appeared on each cheek. I do not know how, she said.

  No? Pavel smiled.

  My father never permitted us, she said. But I always loved the way it looked, a group of young people, especially the girls, with their skirts floating over the wheels. It was always the very sophisticated ones in the town who went off on outings. They knew how to ride so as not to entangle their clothing.

  I will teach you, said Pavel. It is very easy.

  She unbuttoned the lowest button of her dress, so as not to rip the cloth over the metal frame. He could see she was unsure about letting him touch her. He let her lift herself onto the seat of the bicycle. One foot, on tiptoe, still touched the ground.

  Don’t worry, he said, walking behind her. I have you. He held the basket at the back of the seat steady. His arm did not even brush her dress, which fluttered a bit at the waist. Look, even if you lift your foot, you won’t fall.

  She pedaled hesitantly, one meter, two meters, the bicycle shaking under her weight. Pavel stepped quickly after her, right hand gripping the crate. He could see his forearm tensing. Yes, his arms and hands grew thicker and stronger every day.

  Oop! she cried. And dropped her foot down to brake herself.

  Good! said Pavel. Very good.

  No, no, said Fela. I’m afraid. Too afraid for it. But she started again, slower than before, the bicycle leaning from side to side.

  If you go a little bit faster, said Pavel, just a little bit, it won’t shake so much.

  She stopped again, unbuttoned another button near the hem of her skirt.

  Pavel trotted behind her as she moved her pale legs. Many times he had perched girls on the frame in front of him, grasping them by the waist, cycling in the forest behind his grandfather’s town so as not to create a scandal. But here he was, so many years later, no community to scandalize, no one left to be shocked, and he was careful, more careful than he ever had been.

  IN THE EVENINGS THE three of them smoked in the garden, playing card games on a folding table they had found in the pantry. A few times Chaim brought home a friend he had met at his job in the camp print shop. The friend brought camp newspapers and bulletins in exchange for the food Fela made. Pavel approved. He liked that his house should welcome refugees as a camp could not. And it was good Chaim had a friend. Everyone needed a companion, Pavel thought. A young boy especially. A wheel on its own would not go anywhere, but attached to a frame and another wheel it could be a bicycle, and a bicycle could travel, move, carry, and work. God gave Moses the commandments in two stone tablets. Two was a stronger number than one.

  They played rummy, and a version of poker Fela would not reveal how she had learned. Before the war, Pavel didn’t play cards. But early on, after he had fled to a town not yet clean of Jews, he had stayed with a family he knew only slightly, and the father and daughter had taught him to play in the evenings, when no one was allowed out. They knew him only by a false name, Miloch, but he became close with them, especially the daughter and her husband, and he learned the game fast. He could make his face a mask and trick the others into thinking his prospects were bad. It was a good skill.

  The war had ended, but still he played with deep concentration, breaking his thoughts only to watch as Fela cast out a card, or mocked a mistake of Chaim’s, or laughed as she laid out her winning hand. Fela made fun of his gloomy expressions.

  So serious! she would say. We’re still alive, even if you lose the game!

  He would want to answer, Who says I will lose? But he kept quiet, instead letting out a mournful sigh as he shifted in his seat.

  He saw that Fela was the most cheerful when she played cards. The rest of the day, her chores and her cooking, her letters to Palestine and to Poland, her squinted reading of the camp newsletters, she approached with grim drive. He liked to keep her playing cards as late as possible, so he could hear her shouts of victory and affectionate jokes before he went to sleep.

  PAVEL AWOKE IN THE middle of the night. He got up and went to the drawer where he had placed his wallet and a little envelope of his pictures. He caressed the brown packet. He did not need to take the pictures out. If he stopped moving altogether, he thought he could hear Fela rustling in the bedroom across the corridor, Chaim’s hard breaths in the living room. They seemed at peace. In the day it was easier for him than for them—Fela afraid to go into the garden, Chaim lying on the sofa and humming—but at night they were free. Perhaps their thoughts exhausted them during the day, and their bodies had no choice after the sun went down. Meanwhile Pavel was alone, trying to explain things to himself without the help of a night companion or a fellow traveler. When Fishl had been with him there had been an understanding. He had been a guide, recognizing Pavel in the entry room of the death camp, advising him how to keep alive. The skills he and Fishl had taught each other kept him alive even now. Yet now Pavel was confused, more confused than he had been in years. He could speak more languages than a military interpreter, but still he did not know what to call this house and these companions. He needed an instruction manual to tell him how to wait calmly for food, how to talk with confidence to a soldier, how to sleep.

  He returned to the bed. When they were children, his mother ha
d given each of them a piece of chocolate in bed each night, in the dark. After her death, when he was sent east to live with his grandparents, his grandmother did the same. Now, the memory of the taste made him close his eyes, trying to fool himself into sleep. Had his brothers and sisters been given chocolate in the homes of the aunts and cousins where they had been sent? He had not thought to wonder before this moment. After his father remarried and he was returned to his home in Katowice, he did not remember chocolate. Well, he was already an adult then, almost fifteen, and his grandfather was ailing, his grandmother preparing to live with one of her surviving daughters. His mother’s family knew how to take in the grieving and the abandoned without making them feel as guests or burdens.

  Pavel let his eyes close, tried to push into his mind pleasant images, half-conscious dreams. He saw his grandmother, standing and smiling, blind to the men loading wagons with her precious possessions. Silver, china, his grandfather’s leather-bound Talmud, everything in piles like so many old rags. No, his grandmother did not see. Instead she called out to him, her voice more aged than he remembered. Eat, eat, you rascal, she said in Polish. Her croaked words caused him to give a nervous laugh, and his mouth began to itch. Her hand held out a bit of almond cake, and he knew that the almonds had come from the tree that had burst into blossom behind the house. His grandmother’s voice turned softer, to Yiddish: Eat. Skinny boy. Do you understand?

  Yes, he answered. But her words seemed to bounce against his ears and skull without falling inside him.

  Eat, eat. Do you understand?

  Yes, he repeated. And he almost did. But now it was she who did not seem to hear him. Her face was removed, yellow, as in a picture or film. Yes, Grandmother, yes. He said it in every language he thought that she knew, Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, German. Yes, yes.