Displaced Persons (20 page)

Then, from inside: “Hello?” Sarcastic.

Pavel backed away from the door. Then came back. Shouldn’t he be able to say good night to his son? He knocked.

“I know it’s you, Dad. Just come in.”

Pavel opened the door. “Oh, hi,” said Pavel, casual. “You’re doing your work. Good, good. I won’t disturb.”

Larry pushed the strings of black hair out of his eyes. “Why do you do that? Wait outside the door?”

“You want me to knock, so I knock. I didn’t wait, I don’t wait.”

“Fine, Dad. Fine. Sure. Okay.”

“Why do you have to get so upset?” Pavel said. “A father shouldn’t say good night to his son?”

“You’re telling me I’m upset?” Larry’s tone began to rise. Then he pushed it down. “Okay, Dad. Sure. Fine.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” said Pavel. “I’m not telling you anything.” And closed the door. He walked the four feet back to Helen’s doorway. It was good they had separated them. For this reason alone the move out of the small apartment in Jackson Heights was good. A young man needs his own space, Fela said, but also the fighting—it was something Pavel couldn’t tolerate, fights between brother and sister. The screaming, inside the house. He would tell them, tell them again and again, not to fight, but this was perhaps the most difficult instruction for them to follow. Larry, so sharp in school, so well liked by his teachers, why couldn’t he do a small thing asked by his father? He was the elder, to set the example.

Pavel didn’t remember such fights with his brothers. He told this to his children: he never fought with his brothers and sisters. Never? Helen asked, genuinely surprised, every time Pavel said it. Larry had learned to guffaw at the comment. But it was true; Pavel had not
fought too much with them. He was the eldest, and respected among them, and responsible for so many things in the household and the family business, he did not have the time. His own adolescence he had spent in his grandfather’s house, after his mother’s death, when all the children were scattered among the relatives. Upon Pavel’s return to the home, a year or two after his father remarried, he was already separate, above the rest. He developed a closeness with his two youngest brothers and kept them apart from each other when they became mischievous. He didn’t fight. He made peace.

The light in his daughter’s room was still on. Pavel opened the door.

“Gei schluffen, maidele,
go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Turn off the light.”

“Okay.”

“Now.” The light went off.

L
ARRY WAS TELLING A
story. His mouth was full of salad as he spoke.

Fela looked attentive, smiling with interest as she cut her baked potato, but Pavel found it difficult to concentrate. There was always some complaint! This one was a teacher Larry didn’t respect, had played a joke on, something or other. How Fela could smile at this, Pavel did not understand. How Pavel himself could keep silent, he did not understand that either.

The story came to a dramatic break, Larry flourishing his fork, a piece of lettuce flying off a tine and down to his plate. Pavel emitted a loud sigh.

Pavel, do you need more mustard? said Fela, in Yiddish.

No, no, he said. No. He took a delicate sip from his glass of slivovitz.

Larry’s story continued. A trail of heat from the liquor crept down Pavel’s chest. He began to catch fragments from the tale. The teacher, something about the teacher had made Larry angry, he and his friend. They had gone to look something up in the library, to prove the man wrong, no, to the bookstore, the used bookstore in Jackson Heights, they had gone to ask the owner something and had come upon a meeting of some kind. Just a few men, but why had they let Larry, and his friend, that boy whose hair was too long and always looked dirty, stay?

“So I brought Hell in the next time, one girl and all these men—don’t worry Ma, she was with me the whole time—and he still remembers every book you got from him, didn’t he, Hell?”

“Helen,” she said.

Something about the story was confusing to Pavel. When could this have taken place? Larry was in Hebrew school in the afternoons, or he played with the sports team, track and field. Would Larry have missed a sports practice for this? No. He would not have. Pavel turned his full attention to this interesting event that had pulled his son out of religious lessons.

Larry said, “Shell shock, you know, that thing after World War One, that’s when they named it, shell shock, where the soldiers would come back and hear bombs going off in their heads.”

Pavel swallowed another few drops of slivovitz. Larry’s voice floated from his mouth. He would ask Larry after dinner, what time this all had occurred, he wouldn’t let the whole thing bother Fela—if it would bother her at all, she took Larry’s side about the Hebrew school—he would wait. He would be calm. He would talk to his son with respect, with care. If he didn’t, Larry would probably try to trick him, to lie, and that would be too painful to witness. After all, had not Pavel performed his share of mischief in his youth? Perhaps, but not with school. Once, when he was already in high school, studying late, forgetting something he was to deliver on credit to a neighbor, his own
father had tried to hit him, and he had grabbed his father’s hand and stopped it in midair. He had made his father afraid.

“Daddy,” Helen suddenly said. “You look so sad.”

“I do?” said Pavel, startled out of his thoughts, taken aback. “When?”

“All the time,” she said.

He looked at her. His daughter had the ability to shock with three words, four. Larry had to perform a whole dance, to entertain, but Helen, so quiet, could cut him open.

At last he answered: “But I’m not sad. I’m very happy.” He felt tears coming to his eyes. “I’m happy, happy.”

Then he stopped. What had he done a moment ago, what had he looked like? A child shouldn’t see her parents sad. There was time enough for that. On the other hand, could it be helped? Was it not a normal part of life, of everyone’s life? He thought suddenly of the people around him at work, at the deli counter where he bought a sandwich or soup for lunch. Were they so different from him? Didn’t they look sad on occasion? It never had occurred to him to notice.

“Daddy,” she repeated, her voice sounding distant, a false echo of her real voice. “I didn’t mean it. I thought that’s what he meant.
Depressed
, he said, not
sad.
”

Depressed.
Now this new word mixed with the old one and rang through him, breaking in his chest a small glass of bitterness.

“Who said?” he rasped. “Who said?” But he already knew.

The bookstore owner—moderately tall, sandy hair, thin face, those narrowing eyes—that was what was in them. Examination, inspection, curiosity. Depressed. That was what he thought. Depressed, like a sick man. Pavel looked at his plate, at the chicken cutlet he had sliced into neat rectangles.

“How can you be so stupid?” said Larry, in the tone of half-awake superiority he used only for his sister.

Helen blinked.

“Sha!” said Pavel, turning to face his son, bitterness transforming itself into rage, rising in a wave. “Who taught you to use such a word?”

But Larry wasn’t to be quieted. A word from his father sparked his energy, opened his lungs, made him sing. “You did, Dad. You say it all the time.” Larry slapped his forehead, mocking Pavel. “Stupid, stupid. How I could forget something so stupid! How I could be so stupid!” Pavel thought he heard, in the scratch on his son’s voice, a faint imitation of his accent.

“How are you talking to your father!” The familiar growl was burning a hole through Pavel’s rib cage. His jaw was set forward, his teeth clenched, his eyes focused straight at the eyes of his son, who, instead of returning the look, stared off to the side, transfixed. Pavel looked instinctively to his right; his own arm was lifted at an angle, his palm flat, ready to slap.

Fela said, “Pavel.”

Her voice was water, a mother’s sound. It was not a reprimand. It was a call back to the table. Pavel dropped his arm, rose up from his seat.

“Excuse me.” He coughed. And, dragging his bad leg behind him, he moved out of the kitchen toward the hall. He stopped, some meters from the front door, to listen. The family was silent, waiting to hear what he would do. What would he do? He did not know himself.

He would go out. The apartment was hot; he was hot. Still, he should take a jacket. He opened the closet, pulled his raincoat off the hanger with his right hand, the hand he had raised toward his son, and limped out the door.

T
HE STREETLAMPS WERE ALREADY
burning when Pavel stepped off the bus in Jackson Heights, two blocks from the bookstore. Eight
o’clock. Would it be open? Perhaps. He kept strange hours, the bookstore owner. Probably it was open; it was like a gathering place. For young people to discuss, to get angry.

It would rain; he could feel it in the lower part of his right knee. But Pavel moved quickly, his legs in a stiff gallop, the right following the left. Thirty-seventh Avenue—a street he had walked alone after dinner or with the children on a Sunday, so many times—looked strange and abandoned, spotted by a pink haze that clouded the signs above the beauty parlor and the eyeglass shop. It wasn’t part of his scenery anymore. He had left it. It had left him too, he was sure.

The bookstore was open; Pavel pulled open the door and marched in, back straight, serious. Everything was as it had been: the beige paint chipping from the bookshelves, the man bent at the register with his hands on a crumbling paperback, the smell of dead cigarettes drifting up from the couch. Pavel stood at the entrance of the store, waiting.

“Hello?” A voice from the register.

Ah, it would start. But what would? Pavel stood still, a little afraid. He was here to confront the owner, but with what? He was here to shout at him, to explain to him—why was he here? Perhaps merely to look at the man in the eye, to let the owner observe in person, for as long as he liked, that Pavel’s war-bruised face had already healed into something else, that Pavel was not just eating and breathing, not just walking and working, but living.

Something had to be said. It was silent in the store while the manager waited for him to speak.

“Yes,” he said to the man, and looked again.

It wasn’t the owner but someone else. A large fellow, a beard, a battered black cap in the style worn by students.

“Yes,” he said again, slowly, confused. How to explain? “Yes, I would like to buy a book.”

The man looked surprised.

Immediately Pavel understood: it was the wrong thing to say, the
mark of a stranger. People who came here, the regulars, his daughter, they took care of themselves. It was the kind of store where you spoke with the man at the register, but not for help, just for chat. You looked yourself at the books; conversation developed naturally, informally, like gossip among friends.
Have you ever read something by so-and-so? What’s next on the list? How did you like the French history?
Customers here did not ask certain questions; they had information already. Pavel, with his crippled leg and pained accent, his tie and dark jacket, his unschooled knowledge of wool and hard damask, was the wrong type of customer.

But the man was answering. “Well,” he said, in a soft tone, a kind tone, “you came to the right place.”

Pavel gazed at the broad face, the scraggle of hair that matted the chin, the too-thick brown mustache that drooped past the lips, the lips upturned in a smile. A polite, youthful, store clerk’s smile.

“What sort of book?” the clerk continued. “Or should I recommend something from our elegant collection?”

He opened his young arms to emphasize the joke; they were covered in a shirt of bone white. It seemed to Pavel that the color spread over the crowded shelves behind the register, sending a brief light onto the wall of the store.

March 1973

I
F THERE WERE NO
delays, if the plane left New York at six in the evening, Sima would arrive in Tel Aviv at noon the next day. It was an eleven-hour flight, but because of the time difference, it would feel as if eighteen hours had passed. It was irrational, but the extra seven hours made her even more nervous. There was not much time left. Her aunt Zosia, waking her up with a predawn call, had made that clear. Her father had been hospitalized again, this time with bacterial pneumonia, his immune system weakened from the chemotherapy, his lungs at half capacity from the surgery.

Chaim put the suitcase down between them as they waited to check in, then moved with her to the center of the terminal, with its large signs announcing arrivals and departures. Flight 028 was departing on time. He will wait for you, Chaim said in Yiddish. Then, in English, as if to reassure her more, “You’ll make it. Nothing to be afraid of.”

But Sima was afraid. She hated flying anywhere, much less overseas, and the two hours of waiting alone to have her bags inspected gave her time to imagine every terrible scenario: hijacking, bombs, engine malfunction, her body burned, vaporized, drowned, her father dying alone, her daughter motherless. She could have bought a cheaper flight on another airline, but El Al was the safest, and after the disasters on TWA and Swissair she and Chaim had decided that they didn’t want to use another airline, even if the frequent trips since her father had become sick became more of a financial burden. She worried about leaving her daughter for an unknown period of time, alone with Chaim’s casual views of nutrition, with only the promise of visits from Fela Mandl to keep the household from chaos. She dreaded the nausea she got when the plane began to climb, and she did not want to risk an extra tablet of Dramamine, above and beyond the maximum recommended on the label. She was afraid of her father’s face when she arrived, the tubes and oxygen tank her aunt told her he was attached to, his face masked and ashen. She was scared to see his death and she was scared to miss it.

She did not know which outcome would be worse. When she emigrated from Israel it had not occurred to her that she would not be with her parents when they died. But now she realized it had been a fear of theirs. From the fold-out couch on which she spent her teenage years she could hear her parents whispering in the bedroom, and one night she had heard her mother crying, a rare occurrence, the same words over and over again, I hope they were together. They had heard a report from hometown, most of the village shot in the forest behind it, the rest eventually transported to a small camp in the East, one from which no one came out. Her parents did not know where their own parents lay buried, or even whether they were buried. Still for Sima the idea of visiting a grave of a relative seemed abstract, something she read about in books. Until her mother had actually died, Sima had not been convinced it would happen. It was her mother’s
unspoken wish that Sima be there, and she had been, leaving newborn Lola with Chaim. If she had not been there, holding her father’s hand in the hospital, she might not have truly believed it. You’ll be here for me too, her father had said at the rabbi’s office, making the funeral arrangements. When her father had a wish, he spoke it.

“You’ll make it,” Chaim said again as they reached the security gate. He might not go, she wanted to say. It’s pneumonia. Curable. But she remained quiet, embraced her husband, and continued alone to the waiting area.

S
HE HAD NEVER BEEN
in this terminal by herself. She had gone with both Chaim and Lola for the Christmas school vacation, during her father’s second round of radiation treatments, and with Lola at the start of the summer, for the surgery to remove the cancerous section of his lung. Then she had felt hopeful. It had been a nighttime flight, and Lola had been excited to be awake so late, had talked and laughed about the book she was reading. Now Sima counted the passengers in the waiting area ahead of her, awaiting their individual luggage inspections. Eighteen. Now seventeen.

It seemed impossible to her that she was here, that this had happened, that she should be pulled across the earth, one arm here, one arm thousands of miles away, like a doll made of rubber. She had begged her father to move to New York after he had retired. But he had told her not to consider it. What would he do there, without his sister and brother and cousins, alone among men his age, not knowing the language? To be alone was a terrible thing, he had said during one of their discussions, and she had grimaced in guilt.

He had seen her face and taken advantage. You could move back here.

Chaim’s work, she started, looking the other way.

Ha! her father had answered.

It had not come up again, not even three months before, when she had brought Lola. It had been an unusually warm December, and Berel had been happy to see his granddaughter, even if his own daughter displeased him with every move. On a day Lola was at the beach with some cousins, Sima took her father to a nursing home, a reputable one, with green lawns and air-conditioned rooms. Chaim’s raise would pay for what Israeli state insurance would not.

Her father had said nothing through the tour until he stepped into the car, newly thin, jittery from not smoking.

If you put me there, he said, we won’t have to wait for the doctors to kill me. I’ll do it myself.

Sima felt ashamed. You won’t go there. It’s only if you wish.

I don’t wish, he had said.

He had become bitter and depressed, angry at his doctors, angry at her. The summer before, after his surgery, she had stayed with him for a month, making him food without salt. He paced around his tiny apartment in his dark robe, not getting dressed, complaining about her cooking. He wanted cholent. He wanted derma. Sima did not know how to make any of these things. They had rarely been able to afford more than the occasional chicken when Sima was growing up. What her mother had taught her to cook, she had mostly forgotten.

Sima’s aunt cooked for him now. Zosia cooked with no salt for her own husband, who suffered from angina. While Zosia bustled around them, serving, clearing, rearranging, the two men would sit sullen at the table, shaking the pepper onto the food to make up for the lost flavor. After, they would play cards. Berel loved cards. When Sima was in the army he could disappear for two days at a time just to play, and when he returned, Sima’s mother would be waiting for him, furious, silent. Zosia was more tolerant. Berel would go over to her house to play with Zosia’s husband. The summer Lola was there,
Berel took her with him. When her grandfather lost she would cry in loud, hopeless sobs.

A
T LAST
S
IMA WAS
ushered into a private curtained area. No matter how often she had done it, each time Sima passed through the orange curtain, an El Al stewardess already unzipping her black valise, she felt a shudder of anxiety that they would find something dangerous, that someone had managed to slip something in while she wasn’t looking, and that she would be arrested and prevented from getting on the plane. Ridiculous, childish. She should worry more that the stewardess would judge her packing, but of course even in the rushed few hours after the call from her aunt and the purchase of her ticket, she had managed to arrange her clothes neatly.

The white counter on which her suitcase lay open looked to Sima like an operating table. The stewardess wordlessly removed Sima’s bathrobe, blouses, slacks, brassieres, with fingers that were bare of polish but still neat and soft-looking. Sima’s own hands looked terrible, her knuckles chapped, a hangnail at her thumb. She should have gotten a manicure last week but had not had the time, and now this week—well. What a thing to think of. Still she put her hands behind her purse so that the stewardess, a pretty girl, thin as an actress, olive skinned, wouldn’t look at them in passing. She had once tried to be one of those perfect girls, had managed a pale version of that look while in the army, but she had never felt right. She felt more at home in New York than she ever had as a teenager in Israel, trying terribly to fit in.

The stewardess was speaking. “What is the purpose of your trip?”

Sima felt annoyed at the use of English. It was as if people thought she betrayed Jews everywhere by emigrating to the States. She replied
in Hebrew: My father is very sick. She turned her wrist to look at her watch, a stupid gesture, automatic, as if a faster inspection would make her arrive in Tel Aviv sooner. The stewardess motioned to her to zip up her suitcase, her face blank.

“Have a safe flight,” she said in English.

“Thank you,” Sima answered, defeated.

S
IMA BIT DOWN ON
her chewing gum as the plane rose into the night, clutched at the skin of her forearms, a nervous habit. She had a window seat, two rows behind the exits at the wing, close enough to escape quickly, but not so close that she would have to figure out how to open the emergency doors. The seat next to her was empty, and an older woman had the aisle.

When Sima was a child her mother had a little folktale she repeated on the High Holidays—the sky opening, a chance to see the home of God and perhaps to make a wish. One was supposed to see three stars, and then the angels would write the stargazer into the book of life. Sima had thought of a big composition book, her own ugly handwriting, and the scratchy pencils provided by the refugee aid organizations, and could not understand her mother’s pleasure at the idea. Still, looking into God’s house sounded interesting: warm light, meat on the table, enough bread. In Palestine, her mother had said, the oranges are more plentiful than potatoes.

When Lola was smaller Sima had tried to explain the story to her, but she had forgotten its details and had filled in her own. Stars like fruit trees, blazing chariots of angels, all the dead smiling down, covered in silver raiment. Lola thought planes were temporary stars, their green and red lights cutting across the cold night sky without the help of God or a holiday. No, no, Sima had said, but when she called her father to help her fill in the outline of the folktale, he said he did not know what she was talking about.

He had gone along with her mother’s pretty stories for most of his life, but now that he was ill himself he had abandoned the practice. It was eight years since her mother’s death. She was sentimental, she knew, even a little superstitious, but she thought that her mother would watch over, guard her and her father, make sure she arrived in time. She looked at her watch again. 6:15 p.m., New York. She would not adjust her watch until the very last minute. In no time at all she would be there. She looked at the magazine lying unopen on her lap, thought about opening it, decided to wait. She would sleep for the second half of the flight and afterward find her luggage right away. She would go straight to the hospital from the airport, kiss him, comfort him, then take a quick taxi ride to his apartment to pick up fresh clothes for him. She imagined the apartment, his pajamas folded neatly under his pillow, the odor of his sheets and blankets. Her father would come home, and his bed would be undisturbed, just as he had left it. Or perhaps she would do a washing. He might expect her to. She thought of the wallpaper of her parents’ bedroom, the gold flowers skimming green stripes. Her mother had pasted the paper up herself, more than fifteen years ago. Her father kept it just as clean as her mother had. It still looked new.

S
HE EXAMINED HER TRAY
of hot food. The smell of the meat nauseated her, but she could pick at the roll and the cold margarine that came with it. Chaim would take Lola out for pizza tonight, she thought, and would let her have a soda. Well, once in a while it was not so bad.

I don’t think it will rain when we arrive, she heard. She turned—her neighbor on the aisle seat was speaking, her thin lips moving on a face spotted from the sun. They hoped so, of course—the woman added, nodding to Sima. It has been so long. But I don’t think it will.

Sima smiled, nodded. The woman might be the age her mother
would have been. I think you are right, Sima said. Not today.

May I look at your magazine?

Oh! Yes, of course. She handed it to her. I’m not paying attention to it. Keep it.

No, no, I just want a look.

A native Israeli, Sima thought. Not from Europe. Not just the accent but the boldness. Her mother never would have asked a stranger for a magazine. How her mother had sheltered her, protected her. Not that those acts were enough to eliminate the constant fear and hunger, of course—but the stories she told her—lies, even—had kept Sima calm, at least in the moments of the telling. In Russia, when Berel had disappeared, sent away to hard labor, and she and her mother had been alone, her mother had spent night after night quieting her with stories, folktales, small events from her hometown before her marriage, the lives of her sisters, her brothers, the dry goods store the family had owned, the small cousins who tore down a shelf of dishes one awful day. Her mother had a superstition for every event, a little tale for every night. Why couldn’t Sima remember them? That one about stars and the wish bothered her in particular. She could remember conversing about it, her mother’s small round face, but not the tale itself.

If we had a calendar it would be easier, Dvora had said one night. But it is around that time. We can approximate. So get ready for your wish.

What should I wish for?

It’s your wish. Only don’t wish for something foolish, like bread or meat. That’s the kind of thing God doesn’t have any control over.

Sima had looked at her mother’s face, serious and focused.

And you don’t have to wish for your father to come home either, because I’ve already taken care of that with my wish.

You wish for him to come back?

I wish for all of us to get out of here alive, so your father coming back is included. It’s wasteful to have two of the same.

Maybe it’s better if two people do it.

Believe me, think of something else, something bigger.