Displaced Persons (15 page)

She caressed her son’s head without looking.

October 1961

O
N THE TABLE BETWEEN
them lay a bolt of silk the color of dark wheat. Pavel’s old friend Fishl Czarny had delivered the material straight to Pavel, a remnant from a manufacturer going out of business. For the first time in several weeks, perhaps longer, Pavel felt calm, his bad leg stretched out to the side, his hand caressing the cloth, taking in the fineness of the weave. The silk could make a lining for a dozen suit jackets, and with an important contract for a small retailer due in two weeks, the order would be completed with a touch of elegance.

His brother-in-law was speaking to him. “I go down to get a soup,” Kuba said. “Should I bring you a coffee?”

Why the pretense of English when they were alone? Pavel thought. It was a battle they fought silently every day, each trying to last as long as possible in the language of his choosing, as if Kuba were afraid of his mother tongue, as if Pavel would be able to teach him otherwise. But Pavel was in a good mood today, and his brother-in-law would not
spoil it. He could be generous for a moment, he thought, and reply to Kuba in English. “Beautiful, no?”

Kuba’s round face was a mask. He said, “What have we given away for it?”

Pavel sighed. He was not angry, but he might become angry, and it was stupid to enter an argument without full command of one’s words. He answered in Yiddish. I don’t give away. I make business. Shouldn’t he have a suit from us, for all he does?

So he deals in fabric now? Kuba relented halfway, spoke in Polish.

He has a friend, yes, who has occasion to supply—take a look! What it will add to the Steiner order! Pavel spread the silk across his palm and wrist, stretched out his arm toward Kuba.

It’s the bartering that I don’t like. Like peddlers in a village. We can’t account well for it.

What is to account? There is no man I trust more.

Ah. Kuba looked at him, half-cold, half-hurt. Of course.

But Pavel didn’t regret his words. Of course! Of course! He was with me in—

Yes, yes, I know, Kuba interrupted.

He’s a religious man! More, he is a loyal—he and I—

“I have not yet eaten,” Kuba said. “Do you want I should bring you a coffee?”

No, said Pavel. No—I—He was standing, he suddenly realized. “No, thank you,” he said, slowly, to make himself calm. “No.”

He stood another moment after Kuba had left. Another argument was coming, this time about the space for the shop. Pavel wanted to lease from the landlord the space next door when they expanded. Kuba hated their location, a few blocks north of the garment district, on crowded Forty-sixth Street near the electronic shops and jewelry dealers. But Pavel loved it. He liked being outside the center, apart and distinctive. And in the seven years he had been in New York, seven lean years after the hell of waiting four years after his accident
for new visas, he had made for himself a skill not just in cutting but in handling cloth, and had built for the family a network of connections with his friends in the nearby businesses. So what if they were outside the main pole? They made for themselves another small pole, catering to people who made their money on other things, who introduced Pavel to luxuries at a discount, a slim chain for his wife, a good wallet for himself, and the watch for his nephew, his sister’s firstborn. Could Kuba have forgotten the watch? Even if Pavel had to push himself up the narrow staircase to his shop and office, grasping the railing with one hand and his cane with the other, even if on occasion the accountant next door complained of the noise made by the steamer and sewing machines, the location was ideal.

But nothing was too good for Kuba. Even if here they were more secure, with cheaper rent and plenty of customers who found them convenient, Kuba wanted something in the center. On occasion they went together to the wholesale dealers and damp workrooms on Seventh Avenue to look at the shops of some of their suppliers, and Pavel could sense Kuba looking at the jobbers’ shop floors with a bit of envy. He knew what Kuba longed for, a view every day of workers bent over long rows of wood and metal, a factory setting, where every item that changed hands was exchanged for money, American dollars, not favors or promises of future assistance from a button dealer or a ribbon salesman fallen on hard times.

Kuba made good accounts of the ledger books, and he oversaw Enzo’s tailoring with as much authority as was credible for someone with not too much expertise. He claimed to know textiles from his childhood, but the story seemed always to change, always to put Kuba, with each revision of the tale, in a wealthier, happier position before the war. The history was part of Kuba’s argument, that it was natural for him to oversee a group of workers. But Pavel did not like that image, everyone in a row at a long table, sweating and squinting, the buzz of machines like a broken orchestra. He did not like it. He pre
ferred the family business small and customized, selling to his friends and his friends’ friends, people who knew they would be purchasing an expert suit often altered from someone else’s manufacture, once in a while stitched on their own as contract for another company. That was why he managed the relationships with suppliers and redrew the designs from their oral specifications, because they trusted him. Everyone knew him, and he knew everyone. Sometimes people brought in suits purchased elsewhere, because Freddy in the shop knew how to fix it just so, not just with the machine, but by hand. Was there something better? How would their little shop stand out among the bigs on Seventh Avenue?

If we moved there, Kuba would argue, we could be big.

Pavel never knew how to answer him. One did not go from small to big, but from small to less small, to slightly less small, all the way up to not so small. American business, yes, he thought. But Pavel had learned his lesson in Germany after the war. One time, just one time, he had tried to make big money, enough to feel safe to emigrate, and someone greedier, more ambitious—Kuba’s childhood friend, that swindler, that thief!—had almost killed him for trying. Pavel’s bones were still crooked, his skin still scarred, his body still pained. No more. The best progress was slow.

It had taken enormous effort to make it to their current location. In the early years Kuba had sold clothing from a hand truck while Pavel sent money from his black-market coffee business in Germany. It was only four years since an American cousin of Pavel’s lent them the capital to open a tailor shop under a real roof, and the loan was not yet repaid. Of course now it was Kuba who was the sophisticate. Would Kuba even know how to judge a row of inner stitching on a lapel without the skills Pavel had shared, skills acquired basting and sewing pockets for the same cousin? Would Kuba have anything if not for Pavel’s determination to make a family business? It was Pavel himself who had managed to win this latest contract, the third of its kind for them, and as
a result they had hired the two cutters, each of whom kept a calendar with photographs of nude women at their workstations.

W
HEN
K
UBA RETURNED HE
sat at Pavel’s desk and opened his soup. I think we should talk a little, he began in Yiddish.

Pavel sighed.

About the lease.

Of course about the lease, answered Pavel. Always the lease. Do you have an idea for a better lease somewhere else?

I don’t know why you are against a big loan. It is what everyone does here. Since when are you so afraid? You had a bigger business in Europe, in and out of every zone.

Pavel said, Afraid?

Perhaps not afraid, said Kuba. But I don’t understand it. All the risks you took there! Hinda talks about it still.

Pavel said nothing.

Why, continued Kuba, should we be more cautious here, where here we have so much more safety?

Here we have children, said Pavel. He gave Kuba what he hoped was a righteous look. Mine will go to college, my daughter too.

Who says no? All I say is—

All you say, said Pavel, is that I am afraid. So!

Kuba’s face turned pink. You would think, after all we have done, you could consider how Hinda and I—

All you have done? Pavel said, his voice beginning to scratch. What, letting Fela and me stay in your apartment when we came with the baby? You want the rent back, I give you the rent back. I did not know it was such a favor.

That is not what I am talking about. Kuba made his back even straighter. That is not what I am talking about.

Pavel looked at him. A sound came out, then a sentence. Then what are you talking about, Jakub?

The pink from Kuba’s face subsided a little. But he did not answer.

Tell me. Let us not have secrets! We are family. Tell me!

There is no need to shout, Pavel.

Pavel breathed in. He was not shouting. But he would not dignify the accusation. And so what if he raised his voice? He had earned the right. Pavel’s cousin had started them in the business. Pavel’s friends helped them. But Kuba had friends who had tried to kill Pavel for profit, who could not clean out the stain of the war, who remained violent, criminal, who spread pain at the first opportunity.

What you did for me? Pavel breathed. Your friend, your dear friend Marek, could not even leave me with the coat on my body after he broke me into twenty pieces! Is this what I owe you for?

That is not what he said happened. Kuba looked Pavel straight in the eye and then took a step back, as if to see the impact of his words.

Pavel’s tongue moved in his mouth. What he said happened? Pavel’s voice came out in a low hum, shocked. What he said? You have spoken to him?

Hinda begged me not to say anything to you.

So, say it! It’s already out.

He came to us when you were still in Germany, and said you owed him money.

Pavel stared, uncomprehending. I owed him! he whispered.

He came to us here. He said he would report us as Communists from the past to the immigration authorities.

Communists!

He said you had visited your aunt Ewa in the Russian zone, he said you made deals, he said he could give proof that you, and we, all of us were associated with it, with the Red Army, did business to profit them—

You believed him! You believed him over—

It was not to believe or not to believe, said Kuba. It was a threat. We thought—

What did you pay him?

Kuba told him.

I need to speak to Hinda, said Pavel. I need to speak to Hinda.

Don’t upset her, said Kuba. Let me tell her first.

H
IS AUNT HAD BEEN
a Communist as long as he could remember, fleeing to Russia even before the war started. In Germany, just before Hinda and Kuba left the displaced persons camp for England, Pavel had come across a British captain with whom he did a little trading, before the restrictions made things too complicated. Indeed, the captain had not paid him in full, and Pavel had laughed off the debt in order to keep things smooth. When they ran into each other again, as Pavel was returning from his visit to his aunt in the Russian zone, the captain had driven him to an abandoned storehouse of parachute cloth. Pavel had wrapped his body in layers of artificial silk, covered the silk with his clothes, and returned home to Celle with material, just enough for a dress for Fela and a scarf for Hinda. He had never seen Hinda wear the scarf.

Hinda had always been jealous. When he married Fela she acted as cold and as careful with Fela as she had in childhood with their father’s new wife. But Kuba she worshipped. And because Kuba loved Hinda too, Pavel found it in himself to tolerate the occasional pretensions. If Kuba liked to make himself bigger than Pavel, so be it.

But this, this debt out of a crime, this payment to a criminal, worse, this idea that there was another version of the tale to which Kuba and Hinda had listened—that Kuba’s childhood friend was anyone but the most treacherous—not just trying to kill, not just stealing
from Pavel, but blackmailing Kuba—this did not make Kuba big. It made Pavel small.

He sat in the back office alone, watching the red light of the telephone. Kuba was using the line in the front room, for twenty minutes, a half hour, more. He thought about calling Fela. But she would ask him what the matter was. The quiet background noises of the shop became loud, Grinberg’s steamer pressing the suit trousers, the clacketing of the meter-high sewing machine pedaled by Ramos. He unlocked his front desk drawer and opened the small envelope that held the restored photographs of his mother and father, but looked only for a moment before replacing them and locking the drawer again.

At last the red light turned off. Pavel stared at the phone handle, its dark brown plastic, then at the face of the telephone, the wide finger holes in the clear cover for ease of dialing. When it rang, he jumped.

Pavel. It was Hinda, her words thick, as if her mouth had swollen from the crying. I did not want to tell you.

So! Now I know anyway.

He threatened us, Pavel, he—we were afraid.

How can your husband associate with such animals? How? How is it possible?

He was—Marek was a different person in his youth, Kuba was so happy to find him, he did not know, he did not know what happened to him.

But what he did—he tried to—he wanted to—a murderer!—and then he took the coat off my back as I lay dying, because he knew inside the coat I had—

I know, Pavel, I know, you have told us so many times—

So many times is not too much! You believed him when he told you that I—

We did not believe him, Pavel. She was still crying, he knew, but he could hear that she had lit a cigarette. We just—we were afraid.

P
AVEL COULD NOT SPEAK
all through dinner. It was as if his face was covered in dirt, smudged and sweaty, even in the winter cold. He could feel his children looking at him in curiosity, a little fearful of his quiet as Fela served them their potatoes and chicken.

Pavel, you want more pepper?

Hmm? he said. Yes,
mammele
, yes. He twisted the mill twice over his food.

I talked to Mrs. Benfaremo about the hot water. She says on her side it comes on sooner.