Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  As the morning advanced, the noise swelled. Everyone seemed to be jumping. In the next compartment, a tall, vivacious girl had organized a game. I went in and found a place to sit, but I couldn’t understand the rules, so after a bit I organized the small girl sitting beside me into playing ticktacktoe on the outside of her paper food bag. Just as we were getting interested, the morning was over and we had to go to our own compartments to eat lunch. I made her promise faithfully that she would stay right there and play with me after lunch, but I never went back to find her.

  The train had become deadly hot. A trance fell. We ate silently. I had bitten into the sausage and found I couldn’t bear the taste, and I thought I would eat it for supper. The sandwiches had become too dry to eat, so I had some dates and cat’s tongues and a piece of cake and then I sat and sucked some candy. I noticed again the noise of the train, which had been quite drowned out in the commotion of the morning, and I fell asleep.

  I woke in the late afternoon. I blamed myself for having slept all kinds of sights away. Now I would stay awake and watch. I concentrated on the little girl sitting opposite me. She held a suitcase on her lap. Her snub-nosed profile was outlined against the gray of the window. I kept my eyes on her for such a long time that her face looked as if I had known it forever. She would not talk with me, and I went back to sleep.

  I looked for the little girl when I awoke, but I couldn’t tell which one she was. I studied all the children in the compartment. None held a suitcase on her lap. The lights in the compartment had been put on and the window was black again. I went back to sleep.

  I started up as the train rode into a station and stopped. The big girl said this was the border and now the Nazis would decide what to do with us. She told us to sit as quiet as we could. There was much walking about outside. We saw uniforms under the lights on the platform. They entered the train in front. I held myself so still that my head vibrated on my neck and my knees cramped. Half an hour, an hour. We knew when they were in our carriage, which seemed to settle under their added weight. They were coming toward us down the corridor, stopping at each compartment door. Then one of them stood in our doorway. His uniform had many buttons. We saw the young woman who was in charge of our carriage behind his shoulder. The Nazi signed to one of the children to come with him, and she followed him out. The young woman turned back to tell us not to worry—they were taking one child from each carriage to check papers and look for contraband.

  When the little girl returned, she sat down in her place and we all stared at her. We did not ask her what had happened, and she never told us. The carriage rocked; the Nazis had got off. Doors slammed. The train moved. Someone shouted, “We’re out!” Then everyone was pressing into the corridor. Everyone was shouting and laughing. I was laughing. The doors between carriages opened and children came spilling in. Where there had been only girls there was suddenly a boy—two—three boys. Dozens of boys. They pulled hats out of the recesses of their clothing, like conjurers, and the hats unfolded and set on their heads were seen to be the hats of forbidden Scout uniforms. The boys turned back the lapels of their jackets and there were rows of badges—the Zionist blue-and-white, Scout buttons, the Kruckenkreuz of Austria—and it was such a gay thing and it was so loud and warm I wished I had a badge or a button to turn out. I wished I knew the songs that they were singing and I sang them anyway. “Wah, wah, la la,” I sang. Someone squeezed my head; I held someone around the waist and someone held me; we were singing.

  The train stopped in a few minutes; we were in Holland. The station was brightly lit and full of people. They handed us paper cups of hot tea through the windows, red polished apples, chocolate bars, and candy—and that was my supper. When the train started up once more, a hundred children from our transport who were staying in Holland (the advancing German Occupation was to trap them there within two years) stood ranged on the platform—the smallest, who were four years old, in front, the big ones in the back. They were waving. We waved, standing at the open windows, and all along the train we shouted “God bless Queen Wilhelmina” in chorus.

  Inside the train the party went on, but I could not stay awake. Someone shook me. “We’re getting off soon,” they said. I heard them, but I could not wake up. Someone strapped my rucksack onto my back again and put the suitcase in my hand. I was lifted down from the train and stood on my feet in the cold black night, shivering. I remember thinking that now I was in Holland, which made five countries, but it was too dark to see it and I wondered if it would count.

  Inside the ship, I lay between white sheets in a narrow bed, wide awake. I had a neat cabin to myself. I had folded my dress and stockings with fanatical tidiness and brushed my teeth to appease my absent mother. A big Negro steward came in with a steaming cup, which he placed in a metal ring attached to the bedside table. I said, “Is that coffee for me?,” to let him know that I spoke English. He said, “It’s tea.” I said, “Brown tea?” He said, “English tea has milk in it.” I searched in my mind quickly for something more to say to keep him with me. I asked him if he thought I was going to get seasick. He said no, the thing to do was to lie down and go to sleep at once and wake up on the other side of the Channel in the morning. And then he put the light out and said, “Remember now, you sleep now.”

  When I was alone, I sat up and prayed God to keep me from getting seasick and my parents from getting arrested, and I lay down and woke next morning on the English side of the Channel, with the boat in dock. For years I wondered if I could count having been on the ocean, since it had all taken place in my own absence.

  We waited all morning to be processed. We waited in the large, overheated crimson smoking room. It had little tables and chairs so heavy that they wouldn’t budge, however hard we tried to rock them. For breakfast we finished what was in our lunch bags. I had to throw my sandwiches in the wastepaper basket—they were so dry they curled—but when I came to the Knackwurst, which was beginning to have a strange smell about it, I remembered my grandmother always said that there was always time to throw things out. I put the sausage back in the bag.

  Newspapermen had come aboard. All morning they walked among us flashing bulbs, taking pictures. I tried to attract their attention. I played with my lunch bag: “Little Refugee Looking for Crumbs.” Not one of them noticed. I tried looking homesick, eyes raised ceilingward as if I were dreaming. They paid no attention. I jumped happily; I tried looking asleep with my head on the table. I forgot about them. I was bored. We fidgeted and waited.

  My number was called late in the morning. I was taken to a room with a long table. Half a dozen English ladies sat around it, with stacks of paper before them. One of the papers had my name on it. It even had my photograph pinned to it. I was pleased. I enjoyed being handed from one lady to the next. They asked me questions. They smiled tenderly at me and said I was finished and could go.

  I stood in the corridor and wondered where. The boat seemed almost deserted. I walked up some stairs and through a door and finally came out into the open air onto a damp deck. There was a huge sky so low it reached down to the ground in a drizzle as fine as mist. A wide wooden plank stretched between the boat and the wharf. There was no one around to tell me what to do, so I walked up the plank.

  I stood on land that I presumed was England; the ground felt ordinary under my feet, and wet. A workman was piling logs. I stood and watched him. I don’t know if it was a man or woman who came and took my hand and led me into a shed so huge and vaulted it dwarfed the three or four children who were at the other end and swallowed the sound of their walking. I was told to find my luggage. I walked among the rows of baggage; the floor was covered with it from end to end. It seemed utterly improbable that I should come across my own things. After a while, I sat down on the nearest suitcase and cried.

  Some grownup came and took my hand, and led me to my belongings (following the numbers until we came to 152), and showed me the way to the waiting room. It was full of children and very warm. The photographer
s were there taking pictures. I pulled my suitcase a little away from the wall and sat on it, looking dreamy. I think I fell asleep.

  It seems to me that then and for weeks to come I was in a state of excitement and at the same time constantly sleepy. Scenery and faces shift; we were always waiting. At the wharf we waited for hours. There was another railway carriage, a new station, other platforms where we stood in columns four deep, photographers taking pictures. At the end of the day, we arrived at Dovercourt. There was a fleet of double-decker buses waiting to take us from the station to a workers’ summer camp where we would stay while the Committee looked for foster homes. I began to take notice again. I had never seen double-decker buses before. This at last must be something English. I remember asking if I might ride on top. I sat on top and in front, and was the first to see, through the dull gray winter dusk, the camp, like a neat miniature town on the edge of the ocean. I remember wishing, as we drove in, for some glow of sunset, some drama to mark our arrival.

  The buses drew up in front of a huge structure of glass and iron, and we all got out. Inside, it was big and hollow, like a railway terminal. We sat with our baggage at long trestle tables, while a small man with an enormous bald brow stood on a wooden stage, out in front, and talked through a megaphone. He explained that he was the camp leader. He called us by number, divided us into groups of four—three small children, and one older one to be our counselor—and told us to go and leave our things in the cottage assigned to us and come right back to have our supper.

  The camp consisted of a couple of hundred identical one-room wooden cottages built along straight intersecting paths. To the right, at the bottom of every path, we could see the flat black ocean stretching toward the horizon over which we had come. Back of us was England.

  Our little cottage had little curtained windows that gave onto a miniature veranda. We thought it was sweet. We squealed, choosing our beds. The counselor, a thin girl of fourteen or fifteen, held her nose and asked what the horrid smell in here was. “Whew!” said all the little girls. “What a horrible smell! What can it be?”

  I knew it was my sausage, and was badly frightened. Like a pickpocket whose escape has been cut off, I mingled with the crowd. I held my nose, looked ostentatiously in corners, and helped curse the dirty, idiotic, disgusting person who was responsible for stinking up the place. It felt so good to be mad at someone I almost forgot it was me we were yelling at.

  “All right, everybody!” said the counselor. “Let’s go, then.”

  I told her I didn’t feel very well and did not want any supper. I would stay in the cottage and go to bed. As soon as the others were gone, I fetched the brown paper bag out of my rucksack and looked the cottage over for some place, some corner where a sausage could be hidden so as not to smell. I kept thinking that I would presently find such a special niche for it. Meanwhile it was cold in the unheated cottage. I took off my shoes and got under the blanket. I laid my head back against the chilly little pillow. I got up again. I thought of starting a letter to ask someone to be a sponsor for my parents, but instead I went and knelt at the bottom of the bed with my elbows on the window sill and looked out. In the direction of the assembly hall the sky glowed with light. I wished I had gone along with the others. I was thinking of putting my shoes back on and going to look for my roommates, when I heard them coming along the path and I remembered my sausage. Now it seemed that what I needed was a long stretch of time to take care of it—and here were feet already on the veranda steps. The door opened. I was lying between the sheets, breathing hard, having just in time skidded the Knackwurst into the corner under my bed.

  The children did not let me forget it. The counselor, who slept next to me, said “Someone must have made in her bed!” I hummed a song to show I did not feel myself meant in the least, and one of the little girls asked me if I had a stomach-ache, to be making such a horrible noise. The counselor giggled. Finally, they went to sleep.

  During the night the temperature dropped; the memorable, bitter winter of 1938 had set in on England’s east coast. By morning, the water in the sink in our cottage was a solid block of ice. The tap merely sputtered. We could not wash our faces, and we set out guiltlessly for breakfast with unbrushed teeth and our mothers not even betrayed.

  Outside, the vicious cold wind from the ocean knocked the breath out of us. We bucked it with lowered heads. The hall had been constructed for summer use. At our first breakfast, we watched the snow that had seeped between the glass squares of the roof and the iron framework fall in delicate drifts through the indoor air. It sugared our hair and shoulders and settled briefly on the hot porridge, salt kippers, and other wrong, strange foods. It was rumored that one of the girls had had her toes frozen off. We were fascinated. It seemed right that the weather should be as unnatural as our circumstances. (As long as we stayed in that camp, we slept in our stockings and mittens and we wore our coats and caps all day.)

  My mind during that first breakfast was on my sausage. I had to do away with the sausage without doing away with it. It was difficult to focus on the problem; I kept forgetting to think about it, yet, all the time, the place where the sausage lay on the floor against the wall, under the bed, remained the center of my guilt, a sore spot in my mind.

  I ate in nervous haste. I meant to get to the cottage before the others came back, but when the meal was done we all had to sit and listen to the camp leader make announcements through his megaphone. He told us the camp regulations—that the ocean front was out of bounds, that we were to write letters to our parents, that we must stay in hall because some English ladies from the Committee were coming to choose children to go and live with families in different parts of England. We were going to learn to dance the hora, he said, for the ladies.

  The trestle tables had been cleared away. There was some ragged singing going on. “Dance!” said the camp leader to a small circle of children he had collected in the center of the hall. He bobbed at the knees encouragingly. His eye roved the hall. He went trotting from one group of children to another. “Come on, everybody! Let’s show the English people how we can dance!” No one moved. The camp leader wiped his brow. He took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His arms were covered with a perfect sleeve of hair. I was rooting for him. I would have gone myself, but I didn’t know how the dance went and I wasn’t sure if he meant me when he said “everybody.”

  I went and stood with some children watching workmen install two extra stoves. They were big black stoves with fat black L-shaped chimneys that carried the smoke out through the roof. When the stoves were lit, they created rings of intense heat in which we stood all morning jostling for places, for the warmth made no inroad on the general chill.

  The camp leader had found some of the older children who knew how to do the hora. They danced in a ring, their arms around each other’s shoulders. I looked for the camp leader and saw him standing with a group of ladies in fur coats. He had put his jacket back on. He was bowing and bobbing his head to the ladies. He walked them all around the hall. They stopped and talked to some of the children. I stalked the party with my eyes. I would ask them about getting a sponsor for my parents and the twins. They were moving toward me. I felt flushed; it came to me that I did not know the words to say to them. A cloud of confusion blocked the ladies from my sight, though I knew when they were in front of me and when they had passed. I saw them going out to inspect the kitchens. The camp leader held the door for them.

  Before I knew what I had decided, I was walking out of the hall into the freezing air, going around the outside of the building toward the kitchens. It had stopped snowing. A door opened and a man in a long white apron came out with a steaming bucket, which he emptied into a trash can. He was whistling the tune of the hora. He waved to me and went back in and shut the door. The trash can went on steaming.

  For a moment there, I saw what to do with my sausage. The idea of throwing into the trash can what my mother had gone especially to buy me, bec
ause I had lied that I wanted it, brought on such a fierce pain in my chest where I had always understood my heart to be that I stood still in surprise. I was shocked that I could be hurting so. I started walking toward the cottage, weeping with pain and outrage at the pain. I had a clear notion of myself crying, in my thickly padded coat and mittens that were attached to one another by a ribbon threaded through the sleeves and across the back. And my hair was light brown and obstinately curled. No wonder the photographers had not taken my picture. I noticed that I had stopped hurting. I suspected that I was somehow not crying properly, was perhaps only pretending, and I stopped, except for the sobbing, which went on for a while.

  When I came to the cottage, I walked around to the back, having decided that I would bury the sausage. I found a piece of wood and scraped away the top layer of snow, but, underneath, the earth was frozen and unyielding. I scraped and hacked at it with my heel. Tufts of muddy iced grass came loose. I stood looking around me. The wind had dropped and the air froze silently. And then I saw something; I saw where, in the middle of a semicircle of snow that must in summer have been a flower bed in a grassplot behind the cottage, there grew a tall, meager rosebush with a single bright-red rosebud wearing a clump of freshly fallen snow, like a cap askew. This struck me profoundly. I was a symbolist in those days, and roses and the like were just my speed. It excited me. I would write it in a letter to Onkel Hans and Tante Trude in London, saying that the Jews in Austria were like roses left over in the winter of the Nazi Occupation. I would write that they were dying of the cold. How beautifully it all fell into place! How true and sad! They would say, “And she is only ten years old!” I ran around the cottage and up the veranda steps. I emptied my rucksack onto the blanket, looking for pen, paper, and my father’s list of addresses with a rapidity that matched the rate at which my metaphor was growing and branching. I wanted to be writing. I was going to say, “If good people like you don’t pluck the roses quickly, the Nazis will come and cut them down.” I hopped onto the edge of the bed, and, hampered by coat and gloves, with freezing ears, plunged with a kind of greedy glee into my writing.