Other People’s Houses (34 page)

My mother was shocked and hurt and said, “But Omama has always been good to people. During the First World War, we used to get food parcels from the relatives in Hungary, and Omama cooked
hot meals for all the Fischamend children.”

When Paul had closed up the shop, he invited me to come for a walk. He said “
Buenas noches
” to Señora Molinas, rocking to the rhythm of a
merengue
with her policeman boy friend, and made a little bow to La Viuda, and to Dr. Perez and young Juanita, leaning on the balustrade of their
galería
. Paul walked me along a street of good-sized shops, past the
cinema and post office to the little square formal park, where we stood for the flag-lowering ceremony that took place daily at sundown. We had an ice at the Chinese restaurant on the corner. There was a freshness in the darkening air. We started back.

“Mummy says I shouldn’t quarrel with Omama,” I said. “But Omama is impossible. She can order everyone around, but you say one word to her and
she is insulted for the next twenty-four hours.”

Paul said, “Your Omama has a tendency toward paranoia. From her childhood, she seems to have felt that her sisters were in a conspiracy to neglect and insult her.”

“Her sisters! Her children! The whole world! I remember once, in Vienna, we met Omama in a
Kaffeehaus
. She had just come back from a holiday in Baden, or somewhere—I remember how she
was dressed, in a light-gray silk suit with tiny woven black dots, and a hat over one eye. She looked marvelous, and not at all like the Omama from Fischamend in the apron and hairnet. And there was Tante Ibolya, and Sari, and Onkel Pista—a whole bunch of relations—and Omama was telling us about her holiday, how Fräulein So-and-So had bored her with all her conquests, and Frau What’s-Her-Name had
worn a décolletage down to here, and there was an anti-Semitic man who had never said so much as good morning. All of a sudden Omama smiled and said, ‘And then there were
mountains
and
trees.
’ All the aunts and uncles laughed and laughed. No, but Pauli, she does think everyone outside the family is at least carrying a knife with the intention of robbing and murdering us.”

“A notion not altogether
fantastical if you remember that she lived under the Nazis until six years ago, and now, Lorle, in her old age, she finds herself surrounded by people talking a language she doesn’t understand. There she is now.”

We had turned the corner into our street and could see my grandmother on our
galería
, looking this way and that. Her eyes in her peaked white face looked terrified. “I didn’t know where
you had gone,” she said. “I thought something had happened.”

“What is Pastora doing on the
galería?
” my grandmother asked the next morning. “She has been sweeping it for half an hour.”

“She’s leaning on the balustrade talking to the chicken man,” Paul reported. “She has red ribbons in her hair.”

“Disgusting,” said my grandmother.

“Why is it? I’m glad somebody is having fun,” I said. I tried
to catch Pastora’s eye as she went sulkily past me upstairs, but she did not notice. When she came back downstairs, she was smiling, wearing the tortoise-shell brooch the Grüners had brought for me.

“Thief! Robber!” cried my grandmother.

“Maybe it’s not mine,” I said. “I mean, she’s got it pinned right to the front of her blouse.”

Pastora raised her arms and shouted in Spanish.

“She says she’s
an honest woman,” Paul translated. “She says she found it in the wastebasket.”

“Tell her she’s a liar,” said my grandmother.

“Omama! I don’t even want the ugly brooch,” I said. But the next day my watch was missing.

“Paul, call the police,” said my grandmother, and she made Pastora turn her pocketbook upside down on the table.

“You see,” Pastora kept saying. “Nothing. I am an honest woman.”

“You stole it yesterday,” said my grandmother. “You took it home.”

“You come to my home! You search me!” said Pastora.

“Let’s go then,” said my grandmother. “Come, Lore.”

People stared at my grandmother and me walking in the wake of Pastora, who hurried on, bent forward and limping, I noticed for the first time.

“Let’s go home, Omama,” I said. We were leaving the familiar streets and coming
into a different country, where the road was a gash of dried rutted mud, and the shacks looked like dog huts constructed of pieces of wood and corrugated iron. Naked babies and little long-legged pigs played in a ditch that carried sewage downhill. A
merengue
blared.

Pastora threw open the door of one of the shacks—a single room the size of a closet. It had a littered mud floor and no windows,
though light seeped in between the wooden slats on which Pastora had pinned an over-life-size face of Betty Hutton. I remembered it from a copy of
Life
that had lain around our bathroom for weeks. Pastora’s bed was a wooden chest without a lid, which seemed to double as a wardrobe, for it was filled—like the counter of a bargain basement—with pieces of stuff. I recognized my grandmother’s calico
apron.

I said, “This is silly. I can’t begin to look for anything in this mess.” We stepped outside, into what must have been Pastora’s kitchen, because there were three charred bricks supporting one of our old coffee tins, full of rusty water.

“Where have you hidden the watch?” my grandmother shouted at Pastora, pointing to my wrist. “Do you want me to go to the police?
Policía? Sí? Policía?
”

“
Sí, sí, la policía,
” said the chicken man, who was suddenly standing there, too. “
Hay justicia aquí. Ella
” (he pointed at my grandmother) “
le hace acusación a esta señora
” (he pointed to Pastora) “
de robar. Son testigos ustedes!
” He pointed his forefinger around the group of little children and pigs who had gathered. “
Es testigo usted!
” (“There is justice here. She has accused this lady of being
a thief. You are witnesses!
You
are a witness!”) He jabbed his finger at me. “
La policía, sí, sí, sí!
” he yapped, with his face so close to mine that I was staring down the black hole of his toothless mouth.

“Let’s go, Omama.”

“We’ll see you at the police station.
Policía! Adiós,
” said my grandmother.

In the evening, Paul took a quarter pound of butter over to Señora Molinas’
galería
to ask
the advice of her policeman friend, and it seemed the police knew all about the chicken man with a monomania about slander laws. “
Es un loco.
” The policeman made a moron face and tapped himself on the forehead. It was always the same story, he said. First, this man would hang out with the maid; then the maid was caught stealing some worthless object; then something else was missing, and when the
maid was accused, suddenly there was the chicken man, threatening slander. “But he always fouls it up somehow. Take you, now—the only witnesses he has are from that street over there, and your own mother and niece. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of everything for you, my good friend, and for your charming family.”

We never saw Pastora again. Every morning now, a boy with a tender new goatee
came up our street, hung with chickens and singing, “
Llego las gallinas! Llego las gallinas hermosas!
”

Sunday, after lunch, the shop was closed. Señora Rodriguez was to send her chauffeur for us. My mother dressed my grandmother’s fine gray hair. My grandmother wore her best dress of pewter-colored silk, which made her old woman’s face gleam a rare, pale gold. She had taken off her glasses.

“Omama, you look beautiful with your hair loose—and without your glasses.”

My grandmother waved the compliment away with a rejecting right hand, but she was pleased. She said, “Now that I think back, I must have been a pretty girl, but then I only knew I had a big nose. Ibolya was the beauty; she had a little nose. Sari had a little nose, too, but too thick. Pista had a nice strong nose for a
man—” and my grandmother went down the gallery of her brothers and sisters as to noses. “I’ll never forget the time I was waiting for Joszi in the Kaffee Norstadt, and Miklos Gottlieb came up and said, ‘Frau Rosa, you haven’t changed.’ For years, I thought he meant my nose. However, now I remember what he said was, ‘Your eyes are as black as ever.’ I’ll never forget how he stared at me.”

Señora
Rodriguez seemed devoted to her house and to her garden, which flourished in a green profusion in the middle of the dusty, burnt-out landscape; her cabbages grew large; her hens laid eggs; her geese cleaned themselves with their beaks till they were immaculately white. Her cook was black and wore a decent blue linen dress. The señora showed us around the house. She herself had widened the handsomely
tiled
galería
that surrounded it on three sides. We sat in the shade, in large cushioned chairs, where plants in copper pots spread huge tropical leaves. Rodriguez, a slim, very handsome man who looked a good many years younger than his wife, came out to join us. He had a fine military carriage and wore his hair cropped so close to his skull as to give the effect of baldness. Señor Rodriguez sat
down between my mother and my grandmother. The cook came with a tea trolley, followed by a delicate Negro girl in a childish dress, whom Señora Rodriguez introduced as Teresa.

Teresa carried the cups and plates of thin buttered bread from guest to guest with a pinched little smile of extraordinary sweetness, saying, “
Bitte, Sie wollen?
” to each in turn.

“Teresa, you can sit beside Señorita Groszmann.”
(I looked up surprised—that was me.) “Practice your German. I’m taking Teresa to Germany next year, when I visit my parents. She is going to become a Protestant this Sunday.”

“What do you do to become a Protestant?” I asked Therese, making conversation.

“I wear white dress. I sing hymns,” said Teresa, sitting very straight and smiling her ingénue smile.

My mother and Señor and Señora Rodriguez
were talking about music. I saw my grandmother holding her teacup. She had an embarrassed smile on her golden face. She was not wearing her glasses, but below her silvery dress her old woman’s lace-up shoes stood a little sidewise to the party.

On Monday afternoon, Rudi Griiner came to give me my first Spanish lesson. The family tiptoed behind us. When we were finished, my grandmother brought
coffee and cake and asked Rudi if he didn’t think I would soon be speaking perfect Spanish. Rudi sat stolidly, with his head drawn into his shoulders like a boy in the presence of his parents’ friends, and said I was doing brilliantly.

When he had gone, my mother asked me how I liked him, and I said, “Very much. He looks like a steamed suet pudding without the treacle.”

My grandmother said,
“Lore is like my sister Ibolya—too choosy.”

Rudi came back on Wednesday, and I did brilliantly again except that I had a little difficulty with my first irregular verb. Over coffee I asked Rudi questions about life in Santiago, where he had lived since he was nine years old, but he had little to say and he asked me no questions at all.

Afterward, we saw him stop outside the Perez
galería
, chatting
to Juanita and illustrating his conversation with an animation of face and hands that made him look like a Dominican boy.

In the evening came the Grüners with a letter from the Freibergs, who had arrived in Vienna. The fellows of Sigi’s old glee club had met them at the airport with songs, and, except for the omnipresence of the Russians, they wrote, Vienna was—well, Vienna. Imagine, on Sunday
they were going for a picnic on the Kahlenberg!

On Thursday came the Sosua truck.

On Friday, Rudi gave me my third lesson, and I had the same difficulty with the first verb that I had had in my second lesson. And afterward, Rudi leaned over the railing of the Perez
galería
and kidded with Juanita.

I stood around the shop. I said, “I want to sell something.” But my grandmother said that I gave
overweight. I should let my grandfather do it; and later, in the kitchen, she said I didn’t wash the green peppers beautifully enough, I should let my mother do it.

When Paul put on his straw hat to go to the post office for our mail, I said I would go along—hoping I hardly knew for what.

While we were gone, my grandfather happened to be alone in the shop when two boys came in. One asked for
a box of Chiclets, and the other for half a pound of cheese, and while my grandfather was weighing out the cheese the first boy ran away with the Chiclets, leaping over the
galería
railing, and the second boy leaped after him, and Grandfather ran around the counter and down the
galería
, and he stood in the street shouting. That evening, he had another heart attack.

“He’s not doing badly at all,”
said Dr. Perez, “but we must keep him in bed.
No
walking up and down stairs.”

“You hear, Joszi?” said my grandmother.

My grandfather stroked his mustache and said, “
Ja so
, but now I feel much better.”

“
I’ll
tell you when you feel better,” Dr. Perez said and winked at me with the leer he seemed to feel my due as a woman.

My mother asked me to stay with my grandfather when the afternoon rush
started.

“Is it very busy now in the shop?” asked my grandfather.

“That’s not your problem, Opapa,” I said. “Paul and Omama and Mutti can manage without you, you know, perfectly well.”

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather.

We sat looking at one another. I wished I had a book. I said, “Tell me a story. Did you really go to school with the robber chief?”

“Until I was thirteen years. Then my father
sent me to Vienna to be an apprentice in a draper’s shop. The owner was called Benedick, a cousin of your Omama. He arranged the marriage, but that was many, many years later.”

“What does an apprentice do?”

“Tidy the shelves and put everything in good order before the shop is opened. He waits on customers and makes deliveries. We were three boys—Pista, from my village, and Karl, from Vienna
and older. Every morning, he and Pista pulled the blankets away at five o’clock in the morning to make me light the stove.” My grandfather smiled mildly at the jokes of his youth.