The Price of Escape

by David Unger

  Oh, Lena. She had been so disappointed, he could see it in her eyes every day after their wedding.

  They had only been married for five months, living in Berlin where Samuel was completing the last few months of a commercial apprenticeship. Lena was terribly unhappy. She would wake up early every morning, bathe, paint her face, and do up her hair to have breakfast with Samuel before he headed out for work. After he left, she would spend the rest of the day tromping through their dark apartment wearing a tan silk robe, eating chocolates, opening then closing books without reading a single page. Sometimes she would play his 78 opera recordings on the gramophone.

  Samuel knew, when he got home from work with groceries in his arms, that she had done absolutely nothing all day. The apartment was in chaos, with her dresses thrown down everywhere. He should have said something to her about it, as he cooked dinner for both of them, suggested that she join some sort of club, uncover some hobby, volunteer at the South African embassy—anything to keep her entertained. He knew he couldn’t stay home and, well, pamper her, keep her entertained, and still earn a living. Even Klingman, who felt no particular affection for Lena—he believed she was just a silly girl, flighty and capricious—warned him that he needed to pay more attention to his wife. But Samuel—like a juggler already balancing ten balls in the air—felt incapable of discussing this with her. What did he know of depression? Whenever Lena mentioned that she felt bored and useless, he clammed up, for he felt immediately accused of having instigated her boredom.

  Samuel knew nothing about sharing his life with a woman.

  And then Lena started drinking, which culminated in a sorrowful incident.

  One night when the South African ambassador had sailed to Capetown on home leave, the chargé d’affaires threw a party at the embassy. It was a wild evening: a hot buffet, two jazz bands, hundreds of guests, the nonstop popping of champagne. Samuel wore a dinner jacket and Lena a long, almost transparent chiffon gown that had certainly cost her—and him—more marks than he cared to know. As soon as they arrived, she went off on her own to the “powder room” and proceeded to get drunk. By nine she was chortling like a chorus girl, gliding back and forth from the dance floor to the trays of champagne while Samuel stayed seated, glumly watching her. She did the Charleston, the fandango, and the rumba with different partners, kicking off her shoes to be in stocking feet, while Samuel grew hopelessly dispirited. Half a dozen times he got up to take hold of her hand or elbow, to escort her outside for a breath of air, but Lena defiantly pulled away. When he told her that he would be departing even if it meant leaving her there alone, she stamped her feet, lifted the hem of her dress in one hand, and turned and grabbed a young Frenchman’s arm.

  She didn’t come home that night.

  Even when she went to the store after lunch and apologized in tears for her behavior, he remained cold and distant. She begged for forgiveness, but her pleading went unheard, not because he wanted to punish her or wanted to rebuke her but because he couldn’t look at her without feeling bruised. Her hand on his arm made him shiver.

  Samuel’s reaction was to simply close down.

  That night, and for the nights to come, they slept in separate rooms. After a few days, they began to talk again, in polite terms. She began to shop and cook for him, she would even tousle his hair from time to time, but he couldn’t let the matter drop. Samuel kept seeing Lena naked in the arms of a Frenchman whose features remained blank.

  Klingman told him he was being unfair, but Samuel was in an arctic freeze, lost under blankets of snow, unable to listen, not allowing her back into his bed.

  Now that he could look clearly at the situation, twelve years later, he had to admit that he had been wrong to blame her. Samuel had forced Lena to behave childishly because he was incapable of expressing his hurt to her, and he had been blaming her for his failings, his coldness, his emotional deadness ever since.

  He had been an unfeeling bastard.

  Samuel shuddered, trying to shake off that image of himself—the statuelike moral rectitude that he had aspired toward. He hated himself: the shrugging wanderer who went from city to city, unwilling to drop anchor, settle down, face whatever crisis or difficulty might erupt. There were so many instances of his peripatetic nature.

  And then there was the issue of his inflexibility. For example, that night at Spielberg’s in Amsterdam: why had he congratulated himself all those years for standing up to a Nazi-courting Jew when, in fact, he had merely slapped his host and retreated? Another meaningless defiance! Over and over he had chosen to live in a bottled-up, protected world, where nothing could really touch him.

  What was he to do now?

  If he couldn’t go to Guatemala City, he would have to root elsewhere, not as a skulking outcast, but as someone who like the first Zionists in Palestine had to build new lives and new identities in an altogether new landscape.

  So what would the new Berkow be like?

  In his new home, he would teach himself not to curb his feelings. He would be more expressive and learn to open his heart.

  There was so much he could do. He would begin to dress in a more subdued manner, throw off his fancy clothes, the raiment of a Viennese dandy who sips tea twice a day and spends all his time on leisure activities like reading the newspaper and attending concerts. He would stop preening over himself.

  Samuel was in a new world, and he was finally realizing he might want to be a part of it. The lies, the excuses, the rationalizations he had so readily accepted, he would have to forego, come what may. It was time to open his eyes, to live in the moment, to stop seeking shelter in poses and attitudes which, in fact, meant nothing to anyone in Guatemala.

  A stray rooster crowed and two parrots cut across the lip of the bay, flying inland across the pink sky.

  Samuel’s chest ached. He searched around in his shirt and fished out the crucifix that had been nailed over his hotel bed. He stood up rather stiffly, held the blanket tight around his shoulder, and hooked the cross onto a nail sticking out of the shack wall. Christ’s iron arms dangled tiredly from the horizontal beam; his face seemed dull and cheerless now, resigned to his fate.

  Samuel heard a generator turning on somewhere along the pier, setting off a ruckus of cawing in the air. He rubbed his face again, and sat further back against the shack wall with his buttocks against his heels.

  Almost without thinking, he brought the corners of his blanket to his lips and kissed them as if they were the fringes of a tallis. He dropped his head and prayed for the soul of his dead father and for the strength to go on living. He prayed for Joshua’s well being and for his old friend Klingman who had surely been picked up by the Nazis. He wondered how well his Uncle Jacob had fared in getting his mother out of Germany. He even prayed for Lena, for having borne his grudges unjustly over all these years.

  For his coldness and his betrayals.

  For his stony hardness.

  For denying her his forgiveness.

  Samuel threw the cowllike blanket over his head.

  And in as much as he was in a mood of compassion and forgiveness, he couldn’t keep his lips from wishing for Heinrich’s death—he begged God to spew an invisible acid onto his flesh so that his skin would burn ever so slowly. He imagined him scoured by his own malice and cruelty for the rest of his life. And after all this, Samuel closed his eyes and recited the only Hebrew words that he remembered from his Bar Mitzvah in Hamburg twenty-five-odd years ago:

  Barechu et adonai hamevorach

  Baruch adonai hamevorach le’olam va ed.

  Let us praise God, to Whom our praise is due

  Blessed is Adonai, the source of blessing.

  Saying these words, Samuel felt chills running up and down his body. He wiped his nose, then looked up at the shack wall. The crucifix had fallen onto the ground. He picked it up, kissed it, and wrapped his hand around it.

  A deep orange mist festooned the horizon. Samuel stood up, stretched, and yawned as if he had spent the
last three days cramped in a trunk. He folded the blanket Joshua had given him and placed it back inside the shack in case some other troubled soul might need it in the future.

  When he stretched again, several bones cracked. He placed the crucifix back on the nail. He urinated on the ground next to the shack, then walked over to the water. Shafts of yellow light raced across the surface of the bay, turning the white freighter resting against the pier into a glowing gas lamp.

  Samuel looked down toward his feet where the gurgling water lapped the lichen-covered rocks. On a flat stone, just inches above the water, lay his passport. He picked it up and gently patted the pages one by one against his pants. He noticed that the ink had run a bit and blurred his name, but that most of the other information about him—his age, his place of birth, the color of his hair and eyes—remained legible.

  He placed the passport in his pants pocket, feeling strangely elated at this apparent miracle. Was his luck finally changing?

  He bent back down, got on his hands and knees, and dampened his face in the bay. He could see the minnows scurrying away from his fingers each time he dipped them into the water. Everything felt fresh and cool and damp in the morning light.

  He let the water drip from his face, setting off circular waves in the bay. He felt so welled up with emotion that his heart was almost in his mouth. He smiled foolishly and looked back out across the bay. The sun was inches above the horizon now, no longer in his eyes, and Samuel could see the boats anchored in the deep water. He heard more cawing sounds and saw several egrets wading in a marshlike estuary, pecking into the water with their beaks, trying to slurp small fish.

  Samuel turned to glance at the pier and saw a man in the distance throwing a fishing line into the harbor.

  Two loud train whistles rang out. Samuel picked up his suitcase and began moving again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Samuel rounded the corner of the station and saw the train flush against the single platform. Several workmen were down on the tracks, tapping the rail car wheels and tightening bolts with giant wrenches. Every once in a while, there was a loud whoosh from the front of the train and the cars and the workers would be temporarily obscured by steam.

  The platform bustled with the sort of activity that Samuel had only seen in Puerto Barrios on the ferry to Livingston. He saw a group of Indian women wearing colorfully patterned white blouses, ankle-length wraparound skirts, a blend of silver, obsidian, and coral around their necks. Next to them were baskets heaped with strange tropical fruits and vegetables, gourds spilling over with spices, rope hammocks, large sacks of rice and several colored beans, straw hats, painted clay jars, burning incense, plump chickens, squealing piglets.

  Samuel felt excited. It was like the Saturday market on Hamburg’s Lutterothstrasse, only here it was more colorful!

  He was so thrilled by the women jabbering to one another in a strange dialect that for a moment he forgot all the fears that had tormented him throughout the night. He knew he should be more cautious, yet he paraded the length of the platform—suitcase in hand—smiling at the women lounging beside their wares. They giggled and smiled back, hiding their faces from him.

  By the ticket booth Samuel saw a teenage Indian girl picking lice out of a child’s head and behind her, a woman nursing a baby by a large basket of yellow mangoes. As Samuel passed her, she took the child off her breast and it began to cry. The mother jammed her other nipple into its gulping mouth and the baby immediately began smacking its lips and wiggling its fingers in the air. The mother hummed evenly. When she caught Samuel eyeing her, she merely pulled the infant closer to her chest, picked up a mango, and offered it to him. He shook his head, dropped a few coins in her lap, and walked on.

  Seeing the woman breast-feeding unsettled Samuel, but in a good way. He realized he was weary of being alone, packing and unpacking his suitcase in strange rooms. The child and mother made him imagine a house filled with color and sunlight, and inside, a man much like himself, sitting on a sofa reading a book. His wife would be sitting with him, and a flock of children, three or four of them, playing happily at their feet.

  If he met the right woman, he believed, he would remarry and things would work out differently. He wouldn’t worry so much about how he should comport himself, but rather devote himself to keeping his young wife and family happy—

  Another train whistle shot up, longer and louder than the previous one, and more steam flooded the platform. There was a scurrying and pattering of feet—the train was about to leave.

  When the steam cleared, Samuel walked to where people were being escorted on board by a porter who simply shoved them into the three passenger cars. He saw Father Cabezón sitting cross-legged on a straw mat down a ways demonstrating to a group of Indian men how his magic candles worked. The priest’s face lit up when he saw Samuel. “Guten tag, guten tag!” he called out.

  “Hello, Father, I have a train to catch.”

  Cabezón waved him over. “It’s just for a minute. Let me show you something.”

  “You’ve already shown me your tricks,” Samuel said spunkily.

  “I have? Well, never mind then.” He looked at Samuel’s suitcase and said: “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “Perhaps I can.”

  “If you come back to Puerto Barrios, would you bring me some more candles? There’s a store near the Parque Centenario in Guatemala City that sells boxes of these.”

  Samuel smiled. “I may not be going to Guatemala City.”

  The priest pointed to his robe. “And I was hoping you could go to the cathedral and get me a new cassock. As you can see, this one is in shreds.”

  “I certainly won’t be coming back here.”

  Father Cabezón said something back, but three sharp whistles drowned out his words. The train lurched forward a foot and stopped. There were final hugs on the platform, and passengers hurried onto the train with their bags and sacks and baskets of wares.

  Across from Samuel a uniformed inspector leaned out of a compartment and shouted that the train would be leaving in two minutes and there were plenty of empty seats in the first class car immediately behind the coal bin and locomotive.

  Samuel said goodbye to the priest and walked down the platform toward the front of the train. He passed some Indians with bloodshot eyes and unsteady feet embracing one another. He saw three soldiers by a post talking, sharing the same cigarette. Samuel sauntered up to them and asked for the correct time.

  Anyone else would have known the soldiers didn’t own watches, but Samuel was in a state of near reverie, as if tempting fate. The thinnest soldier, the one with a bullet belt around his waist, looked him up and down and said through his teeth that it was nearly seven and if he were leaving, he’d better get on the train.

  Samuel was about to tip his hat when he remembered he had lost it. He smiled awkwardly and walked ahead past the first passenger compartment and the coal car, toward the locomotive. He greeted the engineer who was running through the final tests of his instrument panel. The man waved and went back to work.

  Then a railway official grabbed Samuel’s arm. “The train’s leaving. Do you have your ticket?”

  “No, I haven’t bought it—”

  “You can purchase one from the conductor on the train.” He pointed to the carriage, gesturing for him to go on up now.

  Samuel took back his suitcase and climbed slowly up the car’s metal steps—scurrying to a seat would have seemed unbecoming. He went into the car and almost laughed aloud when he saw wooden seats—what could possibly make this a first-class car? Ten years ago these seats had had cloth and straw batting cushioning.

  Samuel placed his suitcase on the seat facing his and sat down. At least the car was nearly empty.

  The train soon lurched forward. Samuel was sitting backward since he preferred to see the landscape once the train had passed it. He lowered his window and noticed several policemen on the platform talking and motioning to one anothe
r. A man in a blue uniform came up to them and began talking animatedly. There was a clanking of chains, a series of flat, short whistles, and the train actually rolled backward ten feet.

  Samuel shook his head. What was happening? Was the train about to drive itself straight into the harbor?

  Then he saw Mr. Price running down the platform frantically looking up into the windows, followed by a soldier with an amused smile. At each carriage, the dwarf jumped into the air, trying to peer inside. Seconds later, Samuel saw that Mr. Price had the homburg gripped tightly in his left hand, almost as if it were a warrant for his arrest.

  Samuel jerked back, flattening his head against his seat, as the train shifted forward. The dwarf was coming closer to his carriage. When he jumped up at Samuel’s window, his eyes widened in recognition. Samuel simply leaned out of the carriage and snatched the homburg away from him.

  “Damn you, you murdering bastard!”

  Mr. Price’s hand was obscured as billowing smoke filled the compartment. When the smoke had cleared, the train was beyond the platform and skirting past a gang of workers drinking out of ceramic cups near a shed. A flock of barn swallows rose like potshot into the air.

  Samuel put the hat back on his head. Had Mr. Price been inside the restaurant, after all?

  The train picked up speed and Samuel’s eyes absorbed the passing landscape. Each chug of the engine, each turn of the wheels, marked another day of life, another mile away from captivity. It bore slowly through some thick banana groves, which darkened the inside of the compartment; after passing a few shacks, the train began winding out of the jungle.

  As the train climbed, the edges and colors of the trees and shrubs sharpened in the distance. Soon it was riding the crest of a plateau that balanced precariously between a pocket of fog and a fluffy green valley below.

  Samuel took deep, even breaths. This is what he needed, to be in a landscape where he could see things in the distance, not feel walled in by brush and vines. He was happy while the train continued in a straight ascent, but when it plunged into the valley the locomotive seemed to groan. The train slowed down, and appeared to be swallowed up again by thick walls of fronds, vines, and leaves similar to the Puerto Barrios landscape.