Displaced Persons

by Ghita Schwarz

  A half-smile spread on Chaim’s face, and Pavel felt himself filled again with the heat in his chest, like what he felt for his son, but different, almost closer.

  Chaml, Pavel said.

  Chaim nodded at him, perhaps about to answer. But the microphone stopped screeching, and a man’s voice pushed through the mutters and rustles. Then the auditorium fell quiet. The professor would begin.

  Oral Histories

  April 1995

  WITH HIS EAR FOR a tune and facility with languages, Chaim should have excelled at eavesdropping, but he did not. Something went wrong in the step between deciphering and understanding, a failure to move inside the conversation and string all the fragmented phrases together. Sima was more skilled. Through their daughter’s adolescence, she had made daily collections and nightly summaries of small grimaces, soft mutterings, detritus from book bags and coat pockets, little scraps of nothing that maternal interpretation transformed into overwhelming evidence of boyfriends, drugs, minor transgressions. Lola was already thirty, no longer a teenager, but the information Chaim gleaned from listening to her on the phone was no greater than when she had lived with them, making secret plans.

  “Okay, okay. Right. Cool!”

  It was her vacation from work, but Lola missed her home in San Francisco, her exciting neighbors, the coworkers at the homeless shelter moonlighting as musicians. Lola wrote notes as she spoke, and though her pen moved quickly and the pages turned with a flurry, her conversation was limited to a few words: That’s really cool. No. No. Ohmigod, no. Exactly.

  Lola had gotten the idea to make a children’s book with the title of Stinky. Lola’s mother had twisted her nose at the word. “That’s exactly the reaction we want!” Lola had said, between quick sips of coffee. The story of Stinky would be written by Lola and illustrated by the California neighbor, who worked as some kind of social worker, art therapist, with disadvantaged children. The tale was of a homeless child, Lola had told them, who was mocked in school, called names because he often was unwashed. Lola and the neighbor weren’t yet sure whether the child and his mother would move out of the shelter by the end of the story; some part of them thought that ending too optimistic, even for a children’s tale.

  “We just don’t want that to be the focus,” said Lola. “We want it to be about his friendships, how he adjusts or doesn’t in school. You want kids to be aware, not too many illusions, you know? If we have to move him out, I guess we will, but we don’t want that to be the focus.”

  “Why?” Sima responded. “Let him have a home at the end. Does it have to be so depressing for everybody?”

  “Reality, Ma,” Lola said. “You should see how difficult it is for these guys to find a place. It’s the fucking Bay Area. Biggest rent-to-income gap in the country. Worse than New York!”

  Sima straightened her back. “Well, Laiush,” she said, “I don’t care what anyone says about rent-to-income. I know about children. Children do not want to hear something so dark and terrible before they go to sleep. And by the way, why does everything have to be fucking, fucking, fucking?”

  Lola did not respond. There were ten days left on her vacation, and she owed a mother-daughter trip to the museum. Lola would want to go quickly through a short exhibit, and Sima would be hurt; they didn’t have enough time together, what with Lola going on and on with her political discussions with Chaim, things Sima did not feel invited to participate in. How can you say that? Chaim had asked his wife in the privacy of their bedroom, Sima tearful and sullen. But in truth he liked his talks with Lola to be private, even if they disagreed. Sima took offense if he said something she could not agree with, and she hated his cool speeches about politics or religion. Must you talk on so? she would say. I don’t need to be lectured.

  Lola did not feel lectured; Lola argued back. She asked questions. She was rude, yes, she wore lipstick too dark for her mouth and it made everything come out more harsh, especially with her mother. But it was not malice so much as heat. She was socially conscious. He didn’t want to discourage her. It was good to be conscious. Once upon a time he had been someone she would have been conscious about. But Sima felt personally betrayed by Lola’s opinions. Palestinians! Sima would cry. What does she know? And why should the family argue during the brief time Lola spent at home? No, Chaim tried to encourage his daughter to speak; it was good for her to speak, even if she was experimenting with her thoughts. If he silenced her the way Sima silenced her, she would not learn to speak.

  CHAIM AND SIMA DROVE to their monthly card game at the Elbaums in Forest Hills. Tonight they arrived a little late. The others were already deep in conversation about the oral history project from Hollywood. Steven Spielberg. Chaim listened with interest. He was the youngest of the men by more than ten years, and among the few in the room who had the stomach to sit through Schindler’s List. Still the rest read of the director’s every move with pride and thrill, every article strengthening their bond with the genius that had brought their miserable history to life.

  Lily was trying to convince the group to join. “We should not be the only ones out,” said Lily, in English. “The Glicks do it. The Treppmans do it.”

  “Birds do it, bees do it,” sang Charlie. “Even da-da-da-da fleas do it.”

  “We did it,” Pavel announced. Fela took a small cluster of grapes from the central bowl, put them on her plate, and brought one to her mouth.

  What? exclaimed Lily, in Polish, excited, almost angry. With the Spielberg people?

  Why not? answered Pavel, in Yiddish. They came to the house.

  To the house? What, with the camera, everything?

  A whole crew, answered Pavel. And very professional, no, Fela?

  Oh yes, said Fela.

  You know, said Pavel, Helen wanted me to do it. A few years ago, there were some people from Yale. She tried to get me to do it. To go there, they have a whole center for it in New Haven.

  So? What happened?

  He wasn’t ready! You have to be ready! cried Abek.

  I was ready! protested Pavel. But I didn’t like them. I wanted her to go with me on the train, and they had said yes, of course, but she can’t be in the room.

  So what? said Dovid. Why should she be in the room?

  I didn’t want her in the room either! It was the way they said it. Why should they decide where I put my family? So I didn’t return their calls. Let them find some other idiot, who lets them order the family around.

  Fela looked at Sima. See? she said.

  But Spielberg, Pavel continued, the Spielberg project, they come to one’s home. That is different. A different story.

  Did you do it too, Fela? asked Lily. Chaim could hear the envy pressing down on her voice.

  I wasn’t feeling so well that day, said Fela, folding her napkin into her lap. I was tired. But I told them they were invited to my house anytime.

  It’s important to do it, someone said. To save for posterity.

  Should we be the only ones without something on television?

  What do you mean, without something? Spielberg isn’t enough? All over the world people see it. He’s a millionaire from that movie.

  He’s a millionaire already!

  We don’t have anything big. We have that crazy museum, it made me crazy to go there.

  No, no, not a museum. You have to go all the way to Washington for that. I mean on television. The black people have it. You know, there was—what was it?—Roots!

  Roots was many years ago! Roots was twenty years ago! How can you mention that to prove anything?

  Plus, they deserve it, after all they went through!

  I’m not saying anything against them. No, no. Roots was a good program.

  I learned something, said Sima, I didn’t understand what it was all about until that program. My aunt was here from Israel when it was on; she was very impressed by it, by what went on here.

  You see? We should have a big program like that!

  There was the miniseries with M
eryl Streep, that one, with Tovah Feldshuh, remember?

  Please! That was garbage, pure garbage!

  Shouldn’t we too have a Roots, something for everyone to understand? Is it more important, slavery, than what we went through? Now they want a museum too, so why shouldn’t we have a television program, but a good television program? Should they have everything?

  I don’t think we need to compare, said Charlie. I don’t think we need to compare. Slavery was bad too.

  Sima smiled, sincere, approving.

  Chaim saw something interesting last week, didn’t you?

  Hmm? said Chaim, startled.

  “On Channel Thirteen,” Sima said in English. “The civil rights? You couldn’t take your eyes off.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Chaim. “Very interesting.” He paused but could think of nothing in particular to mention. His daughter had recommended that he watch it, a repeat on public television of a long documentary. He had watched the first portion. He liked to have something to talk about with his daughter, something to agree upon but also debate, without too many hurt feelings on either side.

  I have a joke, a good joke, said Lily. You know, Dovid, what I told you in the car.

  Too dirty, said Dovid, shaking his head. Too dirty.

  Chaim sat back in the chair, his belly expanding with milky tea. In the documentary, a young black boy had come to visit his relatives in the South and made a flirtatious remark to a white girl. White men had come to his uncle’s house in the night and demanded that the uncle give up the boy. The son of the uncle had told the tale for the film cameras, and he had skipped the most terrible portion, the portion where the uncle, faced with the guns and the threat that every person in the house would be killed, had gone up to retrieve the child, sleeping, at peace in his soft bed. The boy had been taken and killed, and the case had become something large. The trial had been famous, newspapers had declaimed, politicians had made speeches, but that small moment, the moment where the uncle was forced to deliver a child of his family, that was erased. Too terrible to speak it, the uncle’s moment of obeying the murderers.

  Chaim couldn’t fault it. A story was supposed to end in triumph. And facts? Sometimes it seemed pointless, all this documentation. What did it serve? The world did not change.

  Still he had been impressed with the mother of the murdered boy in the documentary. In an act of great innocence, the innocence of thinking that anyone cared, she had given to the newspapers the photograph of her mutilated son. Anyone who knew anything knew the photograph would do nothing. And yet, in this one case, something happened. Men were arrested and tried. The killers went free, of course they went free; but they went free with the whole country watching their escape, the whole country implicated in their freedom. To want to have justice, one had to be unrealistic. One had to make a fantasy out of one’s observations and pursue the fantasy as if it were real, as real as a piece of bread or a warm home.

  IN THE CAR, WITH Chaim driving home, Sima put her hand on his lap. What do you think about it?

  Hmm? said Chaim. Soon after the Germans came to the small town he was born in, they ordered each family to bring one young male to the square to be hanged. The head of each family had to choose, and all the members of the family had to watch. Chaim had been ten years old. The lot had fallen to his eighteen-year-old brother, no longer a boy, but not yet married and responsible for a wife and children. It was the only decision that made sense. Sense. That was what the soldiers did: they made the victims into killers, into perversions of their own stories, five hundred Abrahams leading their sons to the sacrifice. Chaim did not look at the face of his brother, who had had to wait more than half the day for his turn. He looked at the boy next to his brother, a neighbor he did not know well, whose red curls, blowing lightly in the fall wind, flopped and waved over his ears. The crowd had been oddly quiet—or perhaps that was just the way he remembered it—and Chaim had wondered if the redheaded boy had been able to hear his mother’s weeping while he waited.

  I said, What do you think about it?

  He knew what Sima meant, but still he asked: About what?

  Chaimke, you know.

  I don’t think I can do it.

  Think of Lola—something to give to her. To her children.

  They were at a red light. Chaim looked at Sima. She was taking the earrings out of her ears, and in the reflection from the streetlights he could see that they were red, sore from the pressure.

  To tell you the truth, Sima continued, I had called them before. Fela gave me the number. She turned to face him.

  Fela didn’t even do it herself!

  So? Pavel did. I made an appointment for next Saturday. After Lola leaves, when we have time.

  He looked at the road.

  Of course we can cancel it, she murmured. She dropped the earrings into her purse, ran her hand over her hair. Hmm, Chaim? Ten years from now we’ll be glad we did it.

  THE SPIELBERG PEOPLE WERE to arrive at the house at 10 a.m. Sima had cleaned until nine in the night on the Friday, in honor of the apartment’s capture on film. Then she had stayed up three more hours, writing notes for herself, to make sure she touched on certain points for the video. Sima would go first, then Chaim after lunch. She sent Chaim out for fresh food soon after the men came in, set up the umbrellas they used to control light, arranged Sima in the center of the dark red couch.

  Chaim had his paper on the bus, but he couldn’t read it; he looked out the window instead, at the women in T-shirts and long skirts wheeling their toddlers in heavy blue strollers, at the broad young men bouncing home from a morning at the gym. The neighborhood had changed. A kosher butcher’s was now a real estate office. A bookstore was now a pharmacy. The specialty food store, a fixture for immigrants and striving middle-class families as long as Chaim had lived in the United States, had expanded to cover almost the whole block.

  On Saturdays it was filled with young professionals packing up ready-made foods for their after-work dinners. He went first to the fish counter. Sam, Sam, the smoked-fish man, Lola would sing as a girl. Sam was old already, bent at the neck, his once-round face now thin and spotted, but he still called out to Chaim, casually, to let him skip in front of the others on line. When Lola was a child Sam would give her slices of pickle, when the store was small and the fish counter was the centerpiece. Sima would take fish cut only by him; Sam reminded her of her father, and in any case he was the only man who really cared to make the slices so thin they could dissolve in the mouth. Chaim had once asked Sam for a cut of Scottish salmon that had been on sale. Sam had refused: he cut only American fish. The smell of the salmon through the wax paper mixed with the odor of meats at the deli counter, absorbed into the saliva in his mouth, trickled down his chest. A throb of fear fluttered through his abdomen.

  There had been a fight with Lola, just before she left for California, about the Spielberg film. Sima had gotten upset.

  “So even Schindler’s List is not good enough for you?”

  “I didn’t say that, Ma. I said there were problems. Why does everything have to be so extreme? I mean, let me have an opinion for chrissake!”

  “I see. Now we have Jesus Christ involved.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean. What do you think, that Germans understand already? You may think so, you may have friends, what do I care. But they do not understand.”

  “All I’m saying is—it’s cheesy. Cheesy! Why do they have to make the guy such a hero, with the Jews all little mice? And that ending, with them singing a Zionist song. It was like it was all worth it to create the state of Israel, practically! It grossed me out. I heard in Israel they cut that part out—the propaganda was too naked for them. People can understand subtler things, Ma. They can.” Lola’s voice was beginning to shake, losing its authority—almost plaintive.

  “So tell me, Lola, how should people understand? Only on Lolatime? Only with Lola-language?”

  Lola stood u
p from the kitchen table. “It’s a beautiful day, I’m going out.”

  Sima turned to Chaim, silently sipping his tea. “Just like her father, marching out in the middle of an argument!”

  Why do you look at me? Chaim answered in Yiddish. I didn’t say anything!

  Exactly. You did not say a thing.

  I do not say anything because there is no reason to fight over something like this. A movie!

  But how she answers me!

  Yes, yes, but you provoke her, Sima.

  I provoke her? I provoke her? You hear what she says to me, Chaim. Sima was pale, her eyes bright. But no tears were in her eyes. “Yes, Ma, you care about homelessness here, but what about Arabs being evicted in East Jerusalem? Yes, Ma, you say this. Yes, Ma, you say that.” But let me ask you, Chaimke, do you think she feels superior only to me, not to you too?

  Sima. You’re being terrible.

  Now I am the terrible one. I don’t know why I do anything for you anymore, or for her. She’s on vacation, I bring her all her favorite foods, she won’t eat them, this one is bad for her, that one has too much dairy. Why do I do it? I should forget it. I should forget everything.

  Chaim sipped. He wanted to get up to add more hot water to his mug, but to get up, even to move to the stove with his back to her, would be to prove her right, that he fled rather than fight.

  “I’ll say something,” he said in English. “I’ll talk to her.”

  He waited until the next morning to approach. He found his daughter in the kitchen, scooping large amounts of coffee grains into the filter.

  “Maybe you can put it a little less harshly when you speak to your mother,” he began.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to discuss it.”

  “I wasn’t going to discuss anything,” Chaim said. “I just wanted to say it.”

  They poured their coffee in silence.

  “Your mother has arranged for us to make a little film.” The words came out of his mouth before he realized he was raising the subject.