Another Place in Time

by Aleksandr Voinov

  “And no good one. Except that . . . I couldn’t do it.” He wished he could explain the tangle in his chest that had left him making calls and sending funds and doing everything except getting on a train and coming home. He hadn’t been able to face his mother’s church and her preacher and a religious service full of inadequate words in Charlie’s memory. But right now his throat was too tight to add even one more syllable of apology.

  Laura said, “I won’t push you. But someday, you might want to explain it to Mom.”

  He nodded.

  She gave him a soft look. “I was here for her and half the extended family was too. She got through it all right. But she missed you. She pretended to believe all the things you said about no nonessential travel and required overtime, with the plant tooling up for war materials production. But she looked around as if she might catch sight of you, sometimes.”

  He said, “When did you grow up and get smart?”

  “About time one of us did.” She reached up and ruffled his hair. “Now go get tidy. You can’t see Uncle Sebastien with your hair like that.”

  Half an hour later, he headed for the bus stop. He couldn’t help glancing at Stefan’s house as he passed it. From this distance, the faint shape of the swastika could still be made out, despite Stefan’s obvious efforts at cleaning the door. The broken, boarded windows stood like two blackened eyes on either side of a bloodied nose on a boxer’s losing face. The curtains in the house were all drawn, and there was no sign of life. Warren wondered if Stefan worked, and at what. Those calluses on his fingers were surely from more than digging a garden.

  The bus wasn’t too crowded, now that the early rush to work had passed. Warren took a seat and stretched into the aisle to ease his leg. He was long past trying to look tough when it didn’t count. He gazed out the window as his hometown rolled by. There were new buildings, even since last year. Billboards he didn’t remember advertised war bonds and reminded people to plant gardens and “Smash the Axis; pay your taxes.” Well, those and Coca-Cola and Camels, because some things never changed. Philadelphia was geared up for war too, but it wore a more urbane face there. Here it was front and center everywhere he looked.

  When they reached the edge of town, he got off and turned in at the front gate of Uncle Sebastien’s plant. Kerrington Mills assembled medical field kits for the armed forces now. The plant had doubled in size, with a new long building behind the original belt-making factory. Warren let himself in at the office, and the girl at the reception desk looked up cheerfully. “May I help you, sir?”

  “Could you tell Mr. Sebastien Deroyal that his nephew Warren is here?”

  “Of course.” She gestured to a chair against the wall. “Is he expecting you?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  She turned to her switchboard, making a quick call that he couldn’t hear, then glanced back at him. “Sir? He’ll see you in about fifteen minutes. There’s water in the cooler there, if you like.”

  He waved a hand at her. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  It was closer to half an hour, but eventually Uncle Sebastien came down the hall toward him. “Warren. I only have a minute. What brings you here?”

  Warren accepted an over-forceful handshake and pulled up his planned speech. “Hello, sir, it’s good to see you. I’m relocating, planning to live with Mother, for a while anyway. I need a local job and wondered if you might be looking for help in the plant?”

  “Ah yes, your mother.” Uncle Sebastien’s voice dropped to a tone suitable for hospitals and grieving mothers. “Do remind her that she can count on me for anything. As for a job, well, we’re always looking for workers for the production line.”

  Warren hid a wince. Ten hours on his feet was not a great plan. “I did the ordering and inventory for my last place. Got pretty good at scrounging unavailable parts from unlikely sources, if I do say so. I might be useful that way here.”

  Uncle Sebastien snapped, “I’ll have nothing irregular going on here.”

  “Not irregular, sir. Just creative. Um, resourceful.” Was that any better? “All aboveboard, I assure you.”

  Uncle Sebastien peered at him from under narrowed brows, but eventually said, “I can introduce you to Mr. Forrest, I suppose. He does the supplies end of things. He’ll need references, of course.”

  “Of course.” Warren patted his breast pocket where his papers lay.

  “Well. Come this way, then.”

  As he led the way down the hall, Uncle Sebastien said, “I suppose finding a job is harder for a cripple, even in times like these.”

  “I doubt I’ll have much difficulty,” Warren said evenly. “But I’d like to be directly involved with supplying the men on the front.”

  “Of course. We’re doing very important work. Those of us on the home front are vital cogs in the machine. I can see where it would particularly appeal to someone like you, who has no hope of joining in the real fight.”

  Warren managed to say, “Yes,” between clenched teeth. He concentrated on keeping the sound of his steps perfectly even as he followed his uncle down the hall.

  Fortunately, Forrest turned out to be a completely different sort from Uncle Sebastien. At first he eyed Warren warily, but once Uncle Sebastien had returned to his office, they quickly warmed to each other. Within twenty minutes, Warren had shared a story about tracking down a vital refrigerator fitting to a lawn sprinkler factory and buying the next lot out from under them. Mr. Forrest skimmed through his letters of recommendation, pushed them back across his desk, and declared him hired. “When can you start?”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Done.” Forrest held out his hand, a smile creasing his round cheeks. “Eight sharp. See you here, and we’ll get you a badge and a bit of a desk.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Heading back down the hall, he almost ran into Uncle Sebastien coming out of his office. “So, Warren.” Uncle Sebastien gave him a hard stare. “How did you get on with Forrest?”

  “Very well, sir. He seemed to think he might have a place for me.”

  “Huh. That’s good, I suppose. I’m sure knowing you were my nephew helped. Right?”

  “I’m sure it did, sir.”

  “See that you live up to that. We can’t have anyone here who doesn’t pull their own weight, family or not. There’s a war on, you know.”

  “I am aware,” Warren said drily.

  Uncle Sebastien had the grace to look a little less arrogant. “Yes, of course you are. Well, I’m glad you’re back here to look after your mother, in any case. Women are not meant to live alone. It’ll do her all kinds of good to have a man about the house. You must bring her to Sunday lunch with Nancy and me sometime.”

  “Yes, sir.” He’d make a note to take a good, strong dose of Milk of Magnesia beforehand.

  “Well, carry on, young man.” Uncle Sebastien strode off down the hall.

  Warren resisted the childish impulse to make a face at his retreating back and headed out the door.

  Coming home, buoyed by the thought of his new job, he glanced toward Stefan’s house as he passed, quite randomly of course. But he stopped short at the sight of the swastika, freshly renewed to its full crimson menace on the door. “Ah, hell.”

  He looked around rapidly, but the street was as quiet as ever. Three houses down, a child too young for school rolled on the lawn with her dog. Across the street, Mrs. Cleveland’s curtains were suspiciously crooked. But nothing else was out of place.

  He hesitated, but he had his second-best suit on. He turned away and let himself into his mother’s house. The place was still silent, and he assumed she’d not yet come home. He took the stairs as fast as he could, removed his good clothes and hung them, and then paused. He’d brought only one suitcase of clothes with him from Philadelphia and hadn’t included his roughest garments among them. If he was going to use turpentine and paint, he’d be smart to find something else to wear. Dressed only in his undershorts and socks, he he
aded across the hall. The other upstairs bedroom door was shut, and he stood for a long time with his hand on the knob before pushing the door open.

  Charlie’s room looked as if their mother hadn’t touched it since he enlisted, the day after graduation. His sporting medals hung on hooks on the wall, surrounded by pennants of his favorite teams. His bookshelf held leather bound volumes side by side with schoolbooks and dime novels. Many of them had been Warren’s once. Warren stepped toward the shelf and ran his finger over the titles. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rubbed shoulders with an account of Amundsen’s polar expedition, a text on sailing, and a book of Longfellow’s poetry. He half smiled at the array of titles that reflected Charlie’s agile and wildly enthusiastic mind.

  The tops of the books were dusty. Warren pulled out the aging volume of Longfellow, blew on the top, and opened it. The pages separated where the binding was worn. Words jumped out at him from the page.

  I see the patient mother read,

  With aching heart, of wrecks that float

  Disabled on those seas remote,

  Or of some great heroic deed

  On battle-fields, where thousands bleed

  To lift one hero into fame.

  Anxious she bends her graceful head

  Above these chronicles of pain,

  And trembles with a secret dread

  Lest there among the drowned or slain

  She find the one beloved name.

  Apparently some things never changed. He closed the book and reshelved it, loosing another puff of dust that rose into his eyes, making them water and sting. He thought he should come back sometime and do a little cleaning, if Mother wasn’t up to it. Later, perhaps.

  For now, he was after those old clothes of his which he knew she’d hung in Charlie’s closet, to be used or altered at need. He resolutely stopped looking around, strode to the closet and opened it. With steady hands, he slid Charlie’s shirts and sweaters to the side. In the corner, there was an old shirt of his own, the cuffs and collar frayed. Draped over the hanger beside it was a pair of pre-war Levi’s, the knees worn white and thin. Under them he found once-good black trousers that had seen better days.

  The Levi’s didn’t fit over his hips anymore, to his dismay, but the trousers did. The shirt buttoned all right, if a little snugly. Warren told himself he’d muscled up since his college days. He closed the closet softly and strode out of the room, unreasonably aware of the little shortness of his every other step.

  Down the stairs, into the kitchen for the naphtha soap and rags, out to the shed for turpentine and half a can of white paint. He didn’t stop until he was standing on Stefan’s porch, looking at the obscenity on the door. Only then did it occur to him that perhaps he should have waited and asked . . .

  No, be damned to that. He wasn’t having Stefan coming home to this. These were the true local Nazis—the young, stupid toughs who turned on a man for no reason, for the sound of his voice, the look of his face. This was the same kind of hate that had brought on all the whole, huge, sorry mess of the war. The superior race, master race, marching with their heads high, arms snapping, on the cinema newsreels. Destroying men, peoples, whole nations, for not following the Aryan plan, for being different. And now these boys were looking at an innocent man and returning the hate.

  Stupid, vicious fools. He scrubbed harder. These boys were brave, weren’t they, defacing a solitary man’s door? Wait until they faced real Nazis, real guns. Wait until the red was blood, not paint. Would they figure it out then, what hate led to? He stopped, flexing cramped fingers, and realized he’d taken the door down to bare wood in spots.

  And still a few pink lines marked the grain of the wood, resisting his efforts to remove them. He opened the white paint, mixed it up with a twig, and covered the entire door to within an inch of the frame all around. It came out pretty well, clean and fresh. He tied a rag on the doorknob as a warning of wet paint and retreated to his own porch. There was that railing of Mother’s, which needed scraping first. Then the worn edge under the eaves. He kept himself busy until the paint ran out.

  His mother came home as he was tidying things away. He looked up and saw her at a distance, and at first took her for some unknown old lady, from her slow, tired steps. Then there was that moment of realization, when perception shifted and she became his mother. He hurried down the front stairs and across the sidewalk to reach for the string bag she carried. “Here. Give me that.”

  She smiled at him. “Thank you! I only meant to go round to the shops for a minute, but then someone said there was fresh bread out at the bakery. I haven’t felt like doing my own. And I saw some nice greens at the grocer’s for your dinner. But time got away from me. Did you eat anything yet?”

  “No. I’ve been busy.”

  She glanced around as they went up the steps. “So I see. The place looks better already. Oh, I am glad you’re home.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  By nightfall, he’d managed to take care of a dozen other little repairs, and he convinced his mother to make it an early evening and head to her bed, not stay up to entertain him. He kept noticing how worn she looked. Thinner, greyer. It was partly his fault. He should have come back home earlier. He should have been there for her. He’d been selfish, hoarding his pain to himself like no one else would understand.

  Well, he was back now.

  He was writing a shopping list for the hardware store when there was a knock on the front door. His worries for his mother had taken over his thoughts to the point where he was startled to see Stefan, standing on their stoop, his hat in his hand. “Yes?”

  “I wanted to thank you,” Stefan said quietly, and memory returned.

  “Oh! It was nothing.” He hesitated. “How did you know it was me?”

  Stefan smiled wryly. “Besides the fact that you are the only person here who would think to do such a thing?” He nodded at the fresh, white porch railing. “I had a clue.”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway.” Stefan hesitated. “Was there . . . something new there? On my door?”

  “No. Well, just the same thing. They’d redone the swastika. Callous louts. And in broad daylight. They should have been at work, not roaming the neighborhood making trouble.”

  Stefan shrugged. “Perhaps they are not employed, or on a later shift? In any case, I am grateful for my clean front door. It was . . . good, to come home to a kind gesture and not an ugly one.”

  Warren said, “You’re welcome. Would you like to come in?”

  Stefan ducked his head. “I had thought, perhaps, if you were not busy, you might like to join me in that beer that I did not have for you yesterday. I brought home a few bottles.”

  Stefan’s hair was damp, as if from a bath, and the shy, eager look in his eyes made Warren feel warm. He glanced back into the house, but his mother was probably asleep by now in her room. There was no reason not to be . . . neighborly. “Let me write my mother a note.” On the back of the hardware list he scribbled, “Gone round to a neighbor’s for a chat. Back a bit later. W.” He set it on the little table in the hall. “There. Now lead me to the beer.”

  By some kind of common agreement, they skirted the hedge and made their way back to the kitchen door. Stefan let Warren in and closed and immediately locked the door behind them. Warren sat down at the little table and stretched out his legs as Stefan went to the icebox, popped the caps off bottles of beer, and passed one over.

  “I hope that is all right? Do you want a glass?”

  “Nah. This is great.” Warren took a long pull at the bottle without even looking at the label. He was no snob; any beer was good beer.

  Stefan drank more slowly, eyeing him over the top of the bottle.

  Warren said, “So, what work do you do?” A few years ago, he wouldn’t have asked, because it hurt a man to admit to none. But now it was safe conversation again.

  Stefan gave him a wry look. “I mend roads.”

  “Seriously?” Warren gave him another o
nce-over. The forearms below his rolled-up sleeves were wiry, but not what Warren would call muscular. His shoulders were nice, but not brawny. All of Stefan screamed lithe elegance, with strength perhaps, but not brute force. “That seems like a waste of your talents. I mean, you clearly know two languages very well.”

  “Four,” Stefan said softly. “Five if you count German and Switzerdeutsch separately.”

  “Huh?”

  “We speak German in Switzerland, but there are differences. So I speak both dialects, plus French, Italian, and English. My mother was a teacher, and French and Italian are also Swiss languages. English she thought might be of use to me one day.”

  “Foresighted woman, your mother.” Warren raised his beer in a little salute.

  “Yes. She was.” Stefan’s voice was soft, but not sharply pained. If his mother was gone, it didn’t seem like a recent loss.

  Still, Warren changed the subject. “That’s why I can’t see you building roads. I’d think a lot of places would love to get their hands on someone with your translating skills. Maybe even military intelligence. Right up their alley.”

  Stefan’s eyes shuttered to dullness. “I’m not so unique. There are many women, Swiss women among them, who have those skills. There are far fewer able-bodied men left who can push a barrow and shovel tar all day.”

  “Perhaps, but . . .” Warren stopped. The thin set to Stefan’s mouth suggested he didn’t want to pursue the topic. Perhaps he’d tried to enlist and for some reason been turned down. “I suppose not being an American might make it difficult. The Swiss aren’t official allies, even if you’re really on our side.”

  “Do not fool yourself.” Stefan flashed him a quick look. “Oh, yes, the people of Switzerland, the man on the street, is far more against the Nazis than for them. But many do not wish to take sides, and for some—the bankers, the politicians—neutrality is exactly what it says.” Stefan’s faint accent thickened. “They will take gold from anyone, pass it to anyone. The ring cut from an old Polish woman’s finger is no different from honest coin once it passes into their hands.”