The Place Will Comfort You (12 page)

Call her Miss Altbroit, please.

She says you're baking fish today, and fixing vegetables, to go with. To you fish tastes like nothing to be eaten, and of vegetables, only potatoes and cucumbers without the seeds, provided there's no bitterness. Miss Altbroit speaks with an accent. You are interested to know if you must eat in the mess hall with the others.

Beyond the kitchen wall the cafeteria floor sprawls, a flat field of tile planted with tables in rows. The tabletops are laminated with pale green Formica like your classroom desks, but rising much taller, and extending much farther.

“Vus?” she says, as she hands you a sieve. “Such a soft speaker, this.”

You ask again.

“Oh,” she says. “No. No. No. No.”

You hold the sieve, firm-fingered. Everyone till now inferred a mandate where there is none, pressure in a place of calm, insanity where there is only nurturance. The cook pours scrupulously measured quantities of flour, salt, some pepper and some sandy-colored spice. She could proportion all of it by sight, she says, but would you
learn like that? “No,” she says, crystal clear in her instruction. You can see you two will understand each other well. She shows you how to dredge the fish. You replicate the action perfectly, you know, because Miss Altbroit says so as she flays a stick of margarine.

She wields it like a crayon, drawing streaks across a baking sheet the size of seven pavement slabs. “Such a good worker, all the more, deserves good treatment.” She lifts the greased sheet, reveals a dry one beneath, sets the first behind you, gets to work on the next. “That you should have to wait who worked so hard? No. This is policy. The work is done, the workers eat.” Her eyes narrow, and the effect is disconcerting. You perceive this is a smile, less its lower half. Though she moves briskly and with maximum efficiency around the giant kitchen, her voice floats like scattering steam.

“Not to touch with organisms from the halibut,” she says when you're done dredging. “Wash with soap.”

You rush to the dispenser, squeeze the pump. Medicinal pink fumes correct the odor of the sea.

The scent of baking fish isn't as awful as the raw, but when your nose suspends reports you are relieved. You peel potatoes, pausing to shake parings from your wrists. The damp cuffs fall into a deep black pail. Miss Altbroit is cutting up tomatoes. She uses a little gadget, which she has let you hold and test, to gouge out the hard green cicatrices. When you handed her tool back, you saw her coded forearm, flickerings of blue-green ink, and tried not to brush it with your blank one. She hums once in a while. Otherwise, only the gentle sounds of blades.

By now you would have been out of Gym and in Mathematics; from straining the limbs to the same in the brain. Miss Altbroit isn't crazy, you don't think. You will explain about your taste and she will say, That she should have to eat who doesn't like? No! This is policy. She is a reasonable woman.

She drops red chunks onto a mountain of cubed cucumbers and purple cabbage in a steel tub.

“We call this vegetable salad,” she says. “Correct?”

“Correct, Miss Altbroit.”

“Vus?”

“Vegetable salad, Miss Altbroit.”

“This is a quiet and respectful one,” she tells the salad. “We need like her more children in our country.”

She takes the peeled potatoes from you, drops them in a vat of boiling water, hands you a knife. You work on the tomatoes together. The juice bites at your bitten nails.

“A tomato is no vegetable,” she says. “It is a fruit. You knew this?”

You did not.

Naturally not, she says, when most adults don't know what goes into their mouths, how would a child? As for her, it is her job to know. “What makes a fruit a fruit?”

You're no authority.

“Being the ripened ovary of a seed plant. Which, an ovary, is—”

“The nurse already said.” Once is enough.

“So, what a thing to put into a vegetable salad? Fruit.” She laughs, you're fairly sure, a strange idea of a laugh. She wouldn't earn a big part in the annual school play.

The cloudy, steaming water is poured off the hot potatoes; into the vat you and Miss Altbroit add some milk, some salt, five sticks of margarine, crush it all up with coil mashers. The tables are set, bread baskets put out. There are seeds like black ants in the slices.

“Now,” she says, “food for the workers.” She puts a slice of bread on a blue plate. “Self-service,” she says, and passes the plate on to you, and then a huge metal spoon. She holds your serving wrist and guides, as if you're blind. You scoop up mashed potatoes, her arid
forearm against yours. “And fish for protein,” she says. “And for the vitamins the salad. Always for a growing girl some salad.” Surprisingly, you choose the biggest piece of fish, and take not one, but two heaping spoonfuls of the salad. “With good appetite,” she says, half-closes her hooded eyes, smiles her lacking smile, lets go.

Small, cubed vegetables can be swallowed like pills. The food goes down in slow-traveling lumps. With the breath held, flavor can be censored to salty, bitter, sour and so forth. But before long, you'll have to breathe. You tuck bits of fish into forkfuls of mash, and that helps. Miss Altbroit eats with the thoroughness and industry of her kitchen work and does not seem to see you there, with her, at the table in the back of the school kitchen. And then, she does.

“You're my best worker, so far. I'm telling you it's not often I come across a girl so civilized. The children here, ah.” With her fork she chases her last cube of cucumber. “What is this culture from? This pushing and the shoving.” She wipes her plate immaculate with her bread, chews, swallows. “Like you I was a good, quiet girl, I had respect, there were ways. They're gone. What's gone is gone.”

Her eyes rest on you while you render the food swallowable, chewing gently, trying not to extrude flavor, but also not to choke.

“More of anything?” she says. “No? Smart girl. Seconds should wait until you're done. I tell these girls,” she says. “Appreciate, don't just assume, but in your case I see you understand. Someone has raised you to be prudent with your portions.”

She draws a breath, fills up her chest and empties it, nods at you, seems to want you to observe her closely, and you're helpless in the face of this permission. Spun-glass hair contained by netting, penciled-in replacement brows, a face of wax. Lips open and lips shut. The cook accompanies your meal with a story.

Miss Altbroit isn't a good teller, no enthusiasm for the subject. The boredom in her voice means she cannot believe, even of you,
even of such a worker, such a quiet and respectful kitchen hand and such an eater, that you'll take her in. She is right. You've heard this one. You've heard it in museums, by monuments, in History class, in Literature. And in the school gymnasium, a lectern draped with a black cloth, a candle lit, an old man talking. In the back rows, giggling. (Shhh! Shame!) Note, though: They have always told the story to the group, not just to you. It's not a story just for you; it's not a story for one child on her own to swallow. She should know this. She
does
know; that's why so flavorless. She cannot stop herself, but tries to spare you all the same. You feel only an increasing sense of fullness, full to bloat, so that you almost welcome, suddenly, a piquancy.

“My legs!” she says, her flat voice effervescing, eyes a little predatory, winsome, flirting. “It was always such a struggle with my weight, but they became so slim, especially I thought the calves, which until then—” She fades out shyly like a girl, half-closing her eyes. Then back to offerings more familiar in this kind of story: ghetto, trains, camp, wire, gas. But, listen now: The Liberators! This you savor. This will wrap things up as they should be wrapped up, dessert.

“Russians,” the cook says, without the fanfare you'd expect. “Russian soldiers they were,” she says. Trains, she says again. But this time it's a good word, a stouthearted word, humane, delivering the slender, starving girls with their fine legs.

She says the soldiers forced them in the aisles. “Forced us,” she repeats. She looks to you for some response. “Each one of them chose one of us,” she says. “Or more than one of them chose the same one of us, you understand?” she asks. “They shared. Now if you slept you spared yourself the precise details of, but on the other hand if somehow you could not awaken then your influence upon duration, as it were. You understand?”

Not yet, no. You insist no. No.

You nod.

“The only place that's safe for us is here,” she says. She clears away your tableware, now that your plate is empty, and your palate stunned. “But look,” she says. She plucks at the black net binding her hair. “What am I, senile? To forget the special treat.” She beckons with her coded forearm.

Pudding? A nice piece of cake? You follow.

“Ay!” she says, reproaching herself still. “Of all the girls, my champion kitchen hand deserves a taste.” She halts, facing a door you hadn't noticed, plastered with a poster of the seven blessed crops. She tells you you're her guest and, so, that you should turn the handle. It gives easily. She urges you to advance in. She tugs a chain. A yellow light illuminates the deepest pantry in the world.

The shelves lining the sides are whale's ribs. The many rounded organs blur together in the dimness, but it's clear that they go on and on and that they're pickle jars. Some of the glass is clean, some crusted. Vegetables of every kind float in the shadowy solutions, and fruit, too, now you know. Those are fruit.

“The recipe is mine that I developed,” says Miss Altbroit. “See can you guess the secret in the brine.”

She takes down a jar of pygmy cabbage heads, dark khaki-green, bobbing in yellow liquid, softly flapping their disintegrating outer leaves. “Everything was so mild,” she says, “and what the meal was really missing we forgot. Some zing. How about these? Are you familiar? Brussels sprouts. Or there are baby eggplants, pearl onions, okra, cherry tomatoes, anything and everything. Even boiled eggs. Walk to the end.”

After she seats you back at the table, brings a glass of milk, sits opposite you, peering; after Miss Altbroit's awkward, fingertip pats on your shoulders, more like a tap-tapping to awaken than a consoling touch; after she tells you there was no need to cry, she never makes anyone eat what they don't like, only what's on their plate,
that she's no monster; after all this, you are the server, eyes dry but pinched-feeling, apron only a little stained, nauseous stirrings below your waist from the uncustomary lunch. Girls in pink and gray walk up to the steam table. You serve, with Miss Altbroit prescribing the balance. When this is done, you stand behind the kitchen door and watch the cook patrol the tables. And there's Shlomtzee, her stretched eyes upon you as she squirts a jet of bottled lemon juice onto a helping of baked fish.

Soldiers have taken over the school, good soldiers, our soldiers, and all the girls are evacuated to the boys' yard across the way.

At this time yesterday you were flipping halibut in flour. Now the girls' schoolyard is overrun with olive-drab, the boys' with pink, what a day, what a day, your kind of day. Girls kick an abandoned ball around the dusty soccer court until the teachers indicate that this must stop. Skirts are flying, it's unseemly. It's disruptive to the boys, who are in session. Their windows show vague shapes of blueclad torsos, skullcapped heads. The sixth-grade girls maintain precarious poise.

Then the normal order is reinstated. Soldiers hold up traffic as you're herded back to school.

The Civil Defense man with the hankie on his head stands at the gate, his chair surrendered to Miss Altbroit. He holds a glass of water to her lips, presses his big, old man's hand on her shoulder, murmurs in a language of old folks. Miss Altbroit strums at the black netting on her hair. The nurse comes with a pill.

It's over. “Done,” the Prophets teacher says in class. You must all settle down if you expect an explanation.

A Suspicious Object was found in the cafeteria pickle pantry, she says. As it turned out, an antiquated toolbox, which would indicate a workman's oversight predating all of us here, even poor Miss Altbroit. To resume: the siege on Jericho.

•   •   •

“You left it there on purpose,” Shlomtzee says.

“Says who?” You stretch your legs along the bus-stop bench and flex your toes inside your shoes. The stiffness of the day's last lesson leaves your muscles easily, as smoothly as choked tears flow into spite and opportunity. “Maybe you also know who told them to let crazies next to children?”

Shlomtzee slides down the pole. The ridged roof shudders. “Was your mom mad that the army blew it up?”

“What do you think? It wasn't cheap. I have to do the dishes for a month.”

The bus will arrive soon and take Shlomtzee home. In sixth grade she will wear a bra. Sometimes in gym she'll be exempted. You will find another friend.

“It was stupid-looking,” Shlomtzee says. “What do you need a thing like that.” She settles down beside you, centers her belt buckle, smoothes her uniform blouse and her gray school skirt. The skirt is houndstooth, to be accurate, minutely broken-checked with black and white. The eye tires and cheats.

Over the course of months and years you'll find your palate coarsening. Progressively you'll seek out flavors more and more assaulting.

But today you eat white bread. You let it soften to a porridge on your tongue. You wait. No one is here but you and Shlomtzee, four legs kicking, perfectly coordinated in a rhythm so placating, even the growl of the approaching bus lulls like a baby mumbling her own song, in no one's tongue, with no one's memories.

A Pillar of a Cloud