Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  “Oh, hush,” Shelby says, but she smiles too, so I understand she is not really cross. She stands and throws the remains of her sandwich in the trash. I do the same with my apple core. And then Shelby takes my arm so we can walk back inside the building together.

  My father is a good businessman, just like Ezra Rosenstein. Even now, I imagine him in Switzerland with his new wife, spending his days drowning in correspondence from the book he edited and put out into the world, and which, I imagine, has made him a millionaire several times over.

  Even before the war, we always lived well, and after we were hiding, he worried about his business, Opekta, a company that distributed pectin used to make jams. One time there was an important meeting down in the office below us, and he wanted nothing more than to attend. “Why don’t you listen at the floor?” I suggested, and his wide smile was my reward. The space was too tight for him, though; he grew cramped, so I offered to listen for him. Of course, my sister insisted on coming along. She fought so much with Mother, but Father was hers; she couldn’t give him to me, even for a moment.

  I strained my ears and forced myself to record the conversation, boring as it was. All the talk about the price of pectin and importing and such. I recorded it in shorthand in a notebook.

  My sister fell asleep, her head lounging against my knee, and I dared not move for fear I’d startle her awake, she’d make a noise, and we’d be discovered. Finally she awoke and sat up, and she immediately grabbed the notebook, and off she went to find him.

  “Pim,” she said cheerily. “Oh, Pim, we have conducted business on your behalf today.” Father kissed and hugged her and read the notes, that he seemed to assume were her notes, and I thought they meant a lot to him because he mumbled things to himself and took down some notes of his own to tell Mr. Kuglar the next time he came up.

  “Did I do well, Pim?” my sister asked.

  “Indeed you did,” he told her, smiling at her, and only her, as if he had forgotten that I was even in the room. He kissed the top of her head. “Indeed you did, my little Anna.”

  I think of that moment even now, when I think about my father, as I often find myself doing. I have written him a letter in my head many times in the past few years. He is my father, the only piece of my family left, and when I realized he was alive after I discovered my sister’s book, I had the urge to reach across the ocean and pull him back to me. But whenever I sit down and try to write the words I think, I find myself looking through my sister’s book again, and I cannot bring myself to commit a single word to paper.

  The problem is this: I am not his daughter anymore. I am not even a Jew. And if he were to know I am still here, I would not go back. I could not. I do not want the world to know me, as they know him, and my sister.

  And also, there is something else. I think of how he looked right past me that morning, just at her and her only. Father and I did not fight. We did not yell. But still, it was so clear to me, even then, how he felt about my sister.

  I am still afraid of many things in my American life, but what I am most afraid of now is how my father might look at me if he were to know what I have done. If he were to know the truth about what happened with the two of us, me and my sister, just before the very end.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, JOSHUA BUZZES ME INTO HIS OFFICE and asks me to shut the door behind me. “I want you to do something for me, Margie,” he says. “But you can’t mention it to anyone else here, especially not my father, or Miss McKinney.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly, not sure yet whether to be excited or upset about what he is going to ask of me. My brain is foggy again, since I’d stayed up late last night, then fallen into restless sleep after dialing P. Pelt’s number once more, just to make sure I had not, indeed, made a mistake dialing. The same woman answered, and I’d hung up. Then I’d called the operator back to double-check I’d written the number down right. I had. It still could be a mistake, I’d been telling myself as I’d been tossing and turning in bed all night. Though what kind of mistake, I cannot wrap my brain around now.

  “I’m going to write down the address,” Joshua is saying now, and I realize I have missed a bit of his instructions.

  “The address?” I ask.

  “Miss Korzynski’s address,” he says, and my heart falls into my stomach, a place it is so often used to tumbling. “I want you to stop by and see her after work today. Find out how many others she thinks will join her suit. Get their names and contact information and bring them back to me, okay?”

  “But your father . . .” I say, my voice breaking.

  “Don’t worry about my father,” he says quickly. He picks up his pen, writes Bryda’s address on the yellow legal pad on his desk, tears the sheet off, and then holds it out to me.

  I hesitate before taking it, because I do not want to seek out Bryda Korzynski, to watch the way her brown eyes call me a liar by looking through me. Maybe she looks at everyone that way. Maybe her eyes are dead too.

  “Couldn’t we just call her instead?” I finally say.

  He shakes his head. “Let’s keep this all out of the office, all right?” He pauses. “And besides, it’s always better to do these things in person.” He thrusts the paper closer to me, and I have no choice but to take it from him. “I’d like to get the ball rolling. Leave a little early this afternoon so you’re not working any later than usual, all right?” My whole body tells me to say no, to run out of his office, to quit my job and move back to the safety of Ilsa’s house in Levittown. But I love working here, in this office, for Joshua, and I cannot really imagine leaving it all behind just because of one crazy woman. I have survived worse, hidden from worse. So I breathe deeply, and I tell myself to stay.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Joshua says. “But you understand how important this is, don’t you? Please, Margie. This is really a very big deal for me. And I need your help here.” His gray-green eyes, they plead with me in their softness. And I think guiltily of the way Bryda’s voice shook as she called her boss a Nazi. This is a good thing that Joshua is trying to do, an honorable thing. And what will Joshua think about me if I refuse to help him?

  “Okay,” I finally agree.

  “Thank you,” he says. I nod and stand. “And remember,” he says, before I open the door, “not a word to anyone.”

  “What was that all about?” Shelby whispers, when I’m back at my desk.

  “What?” I say, innocently enough.

  “I was watching through the glass. It looked . . . steamy.”

  “Steamy?” I say, my voice uneasy. I shake my head. “No. It was nothing, really.”

  “He didn’t tell you what they were fighting about, did he? Ezra’s still miffed about it.”

  “That’s not my place,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes at me. For a second I think she might call me a paragon of virtue. But then she says, “If you find out, you tell me. I’m dying to know.”

  “Of course,” I say. But Joshua needn’t worry. I am good at keeping secrets. I am wrapped in them now, the way I am wrapped in lies, like my sweater, clinging tightly to my skin, even on the hottest of days.

  When the big clock by the elevator strikes four o’clock, I lie to Shelby and tell her I have a doctor’s appointment and have to leave early.

  “Everything all right?” she asks. I nod and stare past her, in through the glass window by Joshua’s office. He has the phone slung between his shoulder and his ear, and his brow is ripe with concentration as he’s talking. He notices me gathering my things, and he waves me toward the elevator and shoots me his uniquely Joshua smile. I smile back.

  But in the elevator, I am no longer smiling. I hold tightly to the yellow paper with Bryda’s address in my hand. I can lie about this, I think, the way I have lied about so much else already. I can tell Joshua I went and not go. I can crumple up the paper in my hand and walk my usual rou
te down Market Street toward home.

  But I also know that Joshua is a meticulous lawyer, and that he will almost certainly follow up with Bryda with a phone call, and that tomorrow, also, he will expect a list of names and numbers from me.

  I have a choice, I think as the elevator doors open into the lobby and Henry tells me to have a good afternoon. I can do as Joshua asks. Or I can walk out the door of this office building and not come back. There would be other jobs, and there is always Ilsa’s house.

  I think about the way Joshua just smiled at me, the way he is filled with so much goodness, and I know I will do what he asks. I do not want another job. And besides, I think as I step out onto the sidewalk, Ezra will never let Joshua take this any further.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I HAVE TO TAKE TWO CITY BUSES TO GET TO BRYDA’S APARTMENT, and the whole way there I think about what I will say to her. If she accuses me again, I will tell her that she knows nothing about me. I will be strong, and I will be firm, which are both things I am used to, and quite good at, being.

  I lean back against the hard bus seat and take a few deep breaths. I am glad to be sitting now, because my legs, they already feel unsteady.

  In Amsterdam, before we went into hiding, Jews were no longer allowed on buses, so we walked everywhere, even in the heat of the summer, even with packages to carry. We walked and we walked, our yellow star across our hearts, right there, like a target.

  In Philadelphia, it is easy to take a bus, and for this I am grateful. There are so many, you just have to read the map to know which one and pay a little money to be able to navigate around the city.

  I have never been to Bryda’s part of town before, and as the bus pulls closer, I can see why. The buildings are shabby row houses with crumbling striped awnings and low brick apartments, flanked by beggars on the street. I think of Jodenbreestraat, the street in the center of Amsterdam where Jews lived, that began to crumble just before we went into hiding. So many Jews taken away. There was no one left to take care of the street any longer.

  As the bus comes to a stop, I look out the window and consider not getting off at all. There are beggars here too, even at the bus stop. I could stay on the bus until it loops back again closer to Center City, I think.

  But I find myself standing slowly, walking toward the door and then onto the street, where I find myself staring into the face of a wan beggar.

  She is a young girl, her hair pulled in a messy braid, her face streaked with dirt. She holds out a cup and looks at me with wounded brown eyes. She is too thin. Her dirty plaid dress falls over her.

  I reach into my satchel, pull out a shiny nickel, and drop it in her cup.

  Sometimes I am haunted by my sister’s eyes. It’s hard to remember them the way they were, when we were girls, living on the Merwedeplein, or even when we lay next to each other quietly in the annex, writing in our diaries. I cannot remember their inflections of joy, or the way they darkened with jealousy when she asked if she could read my diary and she read how I felt about Peter, or even the way they fell when she cried, as she did so often. All I can remember is the way they looked, at the very end. She was skin and bones by then, her face barely even a shape, her eyes sunken and huge. They were brown, the color of almonds, with small green flecks. They were too big for her face. They begged me to help her.

  I try to shake the thought away as I walk to the stairwell in Bryda’s brick apartment building, then up three flights to her floor. The smell of garbage in the stairs overtakes me, a smell like rotting putrid rats, and I gag, because suddenly I am there, again, hauling trash with my sister. Her eyes. Like saucers. Begging me to carry her.

  I take a deep breath once I’m in the hallway, practicing in my head what I will say to Bryda, how I will keep the conversation all business, only about Joshua. But the smell in the hallway is not much better than in the stairwell. The air is stagnant and I fight the urge to vomit as I wrap my sweater tighter around my chest.

  I reach my hand up to knock on her door. Apartment 3C in the north section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. It is a long way from Auschwitz, Poland. But as I knock, I understand it is not as far as you might think.

  “You,” Bryda says, when she opens the door, her voice thick with disgust.

  “Hello,” I say, as cordially as I can, given the circumstances, and then quickly spit out what I have just rehearsed in my head. “Mr. Rosenstein asked me to stop by and talk. Can I come in?” I don’t want to come in. Every bone in my body is telling me to run. Run. Take two buses back to Market Street. Then run again, to my neighborhood, where the rats stay hidden—or at least Katze sometimes keeps them at bay when he feels like it, and the smells are of blooming spring flowers and taxicab fumes.

  She opens the door a little wider, and I step inside. The room is tidy, but smaller than mine by at least half, a little box room without a trace of a kitchen, only a hot plate on a table, next to a wooden chair. There is a cot in the corner, where I imagine she sleeps.

  Even in the annex, at the height of the war, we had more than this.

  “So,” Bryda says. “What you want?”

  Her hair has tumbled out of the bun, after what I imagine was a long day of sewing for her, and today she wears a blue Robertson’s Finery uniform, with a sleeve long enough to cover her number. For this, I am grateful. Though I notice the way Robertson’s Finery is stitched in yellow, just across her heart—it is so much like the color and placement of the yellow star we once wore.

  I clear my throat. “Mr. Rosenstein asked me to come over and visit with you and gather up the names and contact information for any people you found to join you.”

  “Group litigation?” she says. I nod. “So he really do help me?”

  “Maybe,” I say, because I am still entirely unconvinced about Joshua’s being able to go anywhere with this case after the screaming match in his office with Ezra, and also because I don’t want to get Bryda’s hopes up. Perhaps she deserves a lot. The war is over; the Nazis are done. But it is still quite hard to be a Jew, even here, in America, and also to live openly without fear. I have considered before what might happen if I were to walk down Ludlow in the summer, wearing a sleeveless dress without my sweater, my Jewishness right there, so obvious, out in the open, for everyone to see. I imagine the terrible way people might look at me, as if they knew everything.

  “I have two names,” I realize Bryda is saying now, and I swallow hard, trying to erase the bitter taste in my mouth that comes with fear. “I tell them to you, you write them down.”

  “Okay,” I say, pulling the yellow legal pad that I took from the supply closet at work out of my satchel.

  “I do not write anymore,” she says. She holds out her right hand, which I did not notice before is missing the forefinger. I turn away at the sight, not wanting to imagine how she received that horror. “It not what you think,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say again, because, of course, I am thinking it was the Nazis’ doing, that it happened in the camp. But I don’t ask her what really happened—I don’t want to know, and besides, I am suddenly having trouble speaking. Bile rises in my throat. The air is too warm; it’s suffocating, drowning me under the weight of my second skin, and the sweater. She tells me the names, and I scribble them quickly down.

  When I look up, she is staring directly at me, squinting until she reminds me of a hawk, perched at the edge of a cliff, searching for prey. “What?” I finally say to her, and somehow I think I am able to disguise the fear in my voice as annoyance.

  “You know what worse than Gestapo?” She pauses and clucks her tongue. “Snake,” she finally says.

  I run down the steps in Bryda’s building, to the street. I run so fast that it is hard to breathe. I run past the bus stop I came from, to the next street over. And it is only here that I slow my pace and attempt to take slow deep breaths. Even now, so many years later, the mem
ory of the camps, of staying hidden, it is a muscle memory, one that neither time nor distance can completely erase, and it takes so little for me to slide back into my fear. Over and over again. Bryda, her voice, the smells of her terrible apartment, our shared horror, they are everything about my past that I am running from, all the things I try to avoid in my American life. And now I understand that these terrible things, they are only a bus ride away from the safety of the Jewish law firm, which in so many ways reminds me of the comforts of my childhood, before the war. This is perhaps the most terrifying thought of all.

  It takes me a few moments to catch my breath on the street, and when I do, I look around. Here, on this street, the buildings look even worse. One has been ravaged by fire, and the bricks are black and ashy, the glass of the windows blown away. I hear a child crying from somewhere in the near distance, and my head begins to ache as I remember a similar sound from the camp. It is a particular wail of pain or hunger or desperation. I confuse them now.

  I hear footsteps behind me. Heavy. The gait of boots. The Green Police or the NSB. I do not turn to face them, but I run again, faster, farther, up the street to where I see a city bus pulling into a different stop. I have no idea where the bus is going, if it will take me anywhere near to the right place, but I do not even care. I run up the steps, hand my coin to the driver, and fling my body into a seat.

  Even when I am sitting there, against the hard seat, my eyes peering out the dirty window as the bus drives away and the broken buildings fall from my reach, I do not feel even the smallest sense of safety. I have no idea where the bus is headed.