Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  In September, my grandmother wrote that Paul and Ilse had got a farm-labor visa to England. “Your father and I, of course, have to stay behind. If I had it in me to envy my own children, I would envy Paul and Ilse, who are getting away from Hitler and a nagging mother all in one.”

  “The children have left,” she wrote in October, “and just in time. Two S.S. men came today while we were having breakfast, and we have to vacate by noon tomorrow. When we have a new address, I will write to you.”

  It was 1939. I was living with the Hoopers. It puzzled me that Paul did not come straight to see me. I used to lie in bed and wonder about it. His first job was on a farm in Wiltshire. Use looked after their one-room cottage, and they got themselves a dog. Paul says he had little truck with his fellow workers. The English language was unwieldy to him; he needed all his energies to keep up his work among these professional farm hands. The six weeks’ Hachscharah training had left everything to be desired, and at the end of the season he was let go. Because of the wartime labor shortage, however, he soon found another place. Our news of Paul and Ilse consisted mainly of the announcements of their changes of address.

  I have questioned Paul about this period in his life when I did not know him, and in a letter he described himself for me—using the third person—as a young man “recently cut off from home, ‘welt-fremd’ [unworldly], who at twenty-eight had never had to work for a living and whose ideas about life were formed through a rather unsystematic reading of books … offered the role of father-lover by his new child-wife. They were madly in love. Though she was younger by some eight years, it was he who became her pupil in love, while she, who was quite uneducated, had a vast longing to be led by him into the world of culture.”

  I did not meet Ilse till after Paul’s internment. Ilse wrote that she was coming to see us on her way to London to get Paul back. I remember her walking into my field of vision, which was blurred with excitement; not tall and suave, as I had imagined her, but, like my mother, plump, with brown hair drawn into the simplest back roll—a mere person like the rest of us, looking, in fact, much like her photograph.

  All afternoon, I studied this Ilse who slept nights in my Uncle Paul’s bed. Her eyes were perfectly green in a brown face with a warm down, like a summer berry. I went and sat on the bench close beside her, and she pulled me into the crook of her arm. I remember that the skin on the inside of her arm was delicate and dry and softer than anything I had ever known, and I caressed my cheek against it.

  From London, Ilse wrote my mother that she had been to the Home Office to get Paul released, but the man there had kept saying that Paul was an alien of hostile origin, even though she had explained that he was Jewish and therefore could not be a spy. She wished her English were better, because she couldn’t seem to get the man to understand her.

  From the Home Office, Ilse went to Bloomsbury House and was in the waiting room when an American came in to sign up people willing to settle in Sosua, a farming colony for refugees being established in the Dominican Republic. Ilse asked him what about a man who was interned, and the American said he could arrange for anybody willing to go to Sosua to be released. And Ilse signed up for Paul and herself.

  Sosua was one of those Jewish dreams of an agricultural haven in the New World. In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt had asked Latin-American countries to accept refugees. Trujillo of the Dominican Republic was the only head of government who welcomed the proposal. (It has been so disagreeable to think of the dictator’s doing a goodhearted thing that the Sosuans have been trying ever since to think up some self-serving motive for his action.) Stipulating merely that no settler should become a financial burden on the state, he donated from his own vast holdings the twenty-five thousand acres on the northern coast called Sosua. Here, a group of American Jewish philanthropists established the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, which came to be known as DORSA.

  Paul and Ilse left England with twelve other refugees, eleven men and one woman, and disembarked in Ciudad Trujillo on a tropical morning in February, 1941. A Mr. Langley, the DORSA husbandry expert, was waiting for them at the pier and loaded them and their baggage into the canvas-covered DORSA truck for the eight-hour trip from the capital in the south via Santiago to Sosua, in the northernmost part of the island. Paul has told me that he found it beautiful and interesting. He pointed out to Use the wild green parrots in the cocoa trees. In the course of the morning, they kept noticing how the palm trees called royal palms, which lined the road, extended their smooth gray stems beyond their crowns like umbrella tips and that on the apex of each there sat one bird.

  By noon, the temperature inside the truck had become monstrous. The immigrants fidgeted and drowsed through the long afternoon. It was almost evening when they heard a shouting and clattering of hoofs, like the approach of Indian hordes in American Westerns. They looked out, and there, coming toward them along the shallow valley, was a troop of young, sunburned riders, their open-necked shirts flapping against their bodies, shouting, “Wie geht’s? Grausliche Reise, nicht wahr?” in familiar Austrianand Polish-Jewish accents. The riders fell in with the slowing truck, surrounding it like a convoy.

  “Horrible trip, isn’t it?” said a curly-haired young man, keeping his horse’s nose just inside the truck. “I’m Otto Becker. I suppose you are married to him?” he said to Ilse, who was holding Paul’s hand. “Oi-yoi. Didn’t you bring any girls?”

  “There’s Renate in the corner sleeping,” Ilse said.

  Otto was an extremely good-looking, fair young man around twenty-five, with a flat stomach and strong arms covered with shiny reddish-gold hair. He peered with frank lechery into the darkness of the truck. “So that’s Renate, is it. She’s no use. She’s engaged to Michel Brauner. He’s been frantic for her. He’s the only one of the Germans not married.”

  “Germans!” said Paul and Ilse.

  “From Germany—like you are the ‘English’ from England. You’re from Vienna, aren’t you? So am I. Those Germans—I can’t stand them—they were settled out by Laguna eight months ago, but they still come to DORSA for handouts. I work in the office. Three pesos pocket money and nothing to spend it on. Do you know the joke about the canaries? There are two canaries sitting in their cage. One says to the other, ‘Where are you going tonight?’ Ha, ha, ha. God, how I wish you had brought some girls.”

  The truck had stopped on a green cliff. Otto said, “That’s the administration building over there with the white fence around it; there’s the machine barn. Those are the barracks—one for us bachelors and one they’re just putting up for you married couples.” Paul and Ilse saw two Dominican workmen struggling to get a mattress in through the narrow door of a low building of new white wood. Otto lifted the girl, Renate, down from the truck and stood her, newly awakened, on the ground. “Otto Becker is the name,” he said.

  “Ilselein, look! Our new cage!” Paul said. The green cliff dipped down to white sand lying like a pair of arms around the blue water of the bay.

  Sosua fed its two to three hundred immigrants living in the Batey (an Indian word, Paul thinks, meaning “the place from which the settlement started”) in two communal kitchens. “Any news?” the diners at the long tables called out to the newcomers. “Is Hitler dead yet?”

  “Not dead yet.”

  “Then there’s no news.”

  Otto Becker brought his plate and sat by them. Afterward, the new refugees stayed for a briefing by Mr. Langley, who spoke in German with a prominent American accent. He explained the DORSA plan: Newcomers were put through an intensive training in agricultural procedures, after which they formed groups of as few as two families or as many as a dozen, to set up co-operative homesteads. For these homesteads DORSA supplied land, tools, seed, livestock, and one house per family. Each settler was debited with his share of the cost, which was to be repaid on time after the farms became self-supporting. Until homesteads could be built and everybody settled, they would be living in the barracks. If anybody had any
questions, he should not hesitate to bring them to the DORSA office in the administration building—agricultural questions to him, questions of policy and so on to Mr. Sommerfeld, the director, who would very soon welcome them personally. Mr. Langley said he would meet the men in the field tomorrow, after breakfast. The two women should report for duty in the kitchen.

  They came out into bright dusk. Ilse took Paul’s hand and drew it through her arm. “Pauli, could we go for a walk and look around?”

  “Oh, do let’s!” cried Renate, keeping close to Ilse, because the impertinent Otto had taken her arm. This left little Michel Brauner, her fiancé, walking next to Paul.

  Michel said, “Renate tells me you have farm experience. Maybe, after Renate and I are married, we could form a group and apply for a homestead?”

  “I don’t have enough experience to run a farm,” Paul said, “but enough to know I don’t. As Socrates said, ‘I know that I know nothing; others don’t know even so much,’” and, hearing his professorial tone, he laughed apologetically.

  Michel said, “Nobody in Sosua knows anything. You just start applying for a place.”

  Otto asked Renate and Ilse to come swimming on the beach the next afternoon.

  “Won’t we be busy in the kitchen?” Ilse asked.

  Otto said, “Nobody in Sosua is busy.” He and Renate were pulling ahead because of the extreme slowness with which Paul and Ilse seemed to be moving. After a moment’s hesitation, Michel went to take Renate’s free arm, and soon the three of them were lost in the rapidly descending darkness.

  Paul and Ilse walked on until they reached the edge of the cliff. They lay down together in the night grass. “Pauli,” she asked, “that Michel Brauner, is he a good person to run our farm with?”

  “Michel Brauner’s capacities don’t worry me nearly as much as Paul Steiner’s. You realize, Ilselein, that in England, between October, 1939, and August, 1940, I was thrown out of three jobs?”

  “The last job you didn’t get thrown out of. You were interned, and you said yourself how much you learned that year.”

  “That’s true,” Paul said. “In that last job I was beginning to feel on firmer ground. I know more than most of these people here. Do you know, Ilselein, I’m raring to get down to work? I want to provide, for you and our children, a house and food, and have something over to begin to pay off the debt we are going to owe DORSA. Poor Mutti!” Paul said in a voice that was suddenly very gay. “At thirty, with the assistance of Hitler, her boy has grown up. So I’m not a poet; I won’t lead any revolutions—did I ever tell you about the time in the Dolfuss days a policeman stopped me on the way to my Socialist cell? I was carrying a bunch of pamphlets, but I got out my wallet full of pictures of my little niece, Lore; then he showed me pictures of his two boys, and we parted great friends. A lot of cloak-and-dagger nonsense in the name of an honest new Austria! Now all I want is to get my parents out of Vienna and be quit of the whole European mess.” In the darkness below them, the ocean swished and heaved. The black air was warm and very soft. Paul’s wife made herself comfortable in the crook of his arm, and Paul said, “Ah, Ilselein, one might almost be happy here!” And it turned out that the future Paul had pictured for them was precisely what Ilse wanted for her happiness.

  Inside, the barracks had a long, narrow corridor, with washrooms at either end and rooms leading off it, rather like the compartments in continental trains. Each room was furnished with an iron bedstead, a washstand, and two wooden chairs, and was separated from its neighbors by wooden partitions. Paul named their room the “Badekabine” for its resemblance to a swimming-pool cabaña. Ilse said the whole of Sosua felt like a summer-holiday place; you got out of bed in the morning and pulled a dress over your head and off you went.

  On the way to the kitchen for breakfast, Paul told Ilse that he expected no holiday in the fields. The intellectual, he said, had a disadvantage as a farmer. Nothing came to him directly, by instinct. He was a man looking at the world through spectacles; he must have everything explained so he could understand the theory of what to do in practice. But there was this advantage—he could master in years what took the peasant generations.

  Mr. Langley met his new trainees in a field that had been cleared of rocks and tree stumps by two native employees of DORSA. There was a plow to which a mule was hitched, and a barrel of yam plant—a long green tangle of stalk and leaves, which Mr. Langley told them to cut into foot lengths and lay in furrows in the ground. Mr. Langley asked if anyone had plowed before, and Paul said he had, but never with a mule. The older, blacker of the Dominicans, called Jesús, demonstrated how to guide the animal with one hand while steadying the plow with the other. “It needs practice,” Mr. Langley said. “I will be back presently to see how you are doing.”

  They watched him ride away down the sea road toward the Batey. “I bet he’s rich,” said Farber, who had been a traveling salesman in Poland. “I asked him how he knew German, and he said he studied to be a veterinarian in Frankfurt, but now he breeds cattle in America. He must be a millionaire.”

  “America, America. Land of Opportunity,” said Max Godlinger, a man with a bald head and a pointed, old man’s stomach.

  The two Dominicans in the far corner of the training field were cutting down the tall grass. They sang rhythmically as they walked, swinging their machetes.

  Paul, who had been experimenting with the plow, said, “Someone come and hold onto this animal. The plow is going every which way. Hold still, you.”

  In the Batey, Ilse sat beside Renate in the sun behind the kitchen. They were peeling yams, which DORSA imported by the truckload from the market of Puerto Plata, on the far side of the bay. They could see the white beach below, and three young men running down toward the water. The Atlantic spread before them, so still it might have been made out of solid blue, except that, way out, the sun glimmered and seesawed on little waves.

  By noon, the sun stood directly over the square of the training field, and where it glanced off the waves it pierced the men’s eyes like motes of dust. To the right, the mountains quivered behind a haze of heat. Paul walked after the mule, lifting his boots to a rhythm that had come uncalled into his mind:

  Mensch, was du liebst,

  In das wirst du verwandelt werden:

  Gott wirst du, liebst du Gott,

  Und Erde, liebst du Erden.

  Pools of sweat had collected at the back of his knees and made little runnels down his calves.

  “Hey, Steiner, look behind you!” Farber called to Paul, and Paul turned and saw how the furrows, which started out parallel, ran indistinguishably into one another across the field.

  “Who needs yams,” said bald Godlinger. He came from Vienna and was a furrier by trade. “We did perfectly well all these years without yams.”

  “I’d like to remind you that we did by no means perfectly well in Vienna,” said Paul out of dusty lips. He picked up a hoe.

  “What are you doing?” wailed Godlinger. “You’re not going to straighten them by hand?”

  “It might make up for lost time,” Paul said, “if some of us would start cutting up the yams.”

  “Godlinger, roll up your sleeves,” said Farber. Godlinger obediently rolled his sleeves up over his pink and hairless arms.

  The green tangle out of the barrel seemed to have no beginning or end. They called Paul over, and Paul said they might begin by stripping the mess of leaves and blossoms off the stalks.

  The two Dominicans had packed up their tools and stood awhile watching the field full of working white folk before they took the road toward the native village, which lay in the direction opposite from that in which Mr. Langley had disappeared in the early morning.

  Mr. Langley had not returned by late afternoon, when the trainees had all the neat, finger-thick stems laid in the makeshift furrows, so they collected their hoes and walked the mule back to the Batey.

  After the white-hot road, the inside of the barracks felt like a cave—dark and damply c
ool. Paul found Ilse sitting on the bed, her hair wet. She had spent the afternoon on the beach with Renate and Otto and what seemed like dozens of young men at loose ends. She fetched Paul cold water and a clean shirt. Paul told her about the ruined yam field, and the poem by the seventeenth-century mystic, Angelus Silesius, that had gone around in his head. Ilse sat on her haunches on the bed, looking up at Paul, who stood in his underwear and raised his chin, like a singer, to recite:

  “Man, you will be transformed

  To that which you hold worth;

  God, if you love God,

  Earth, if you love earth.”

  He was both delighted and surprised that Ilse had no difficulty whatsoever with the concept of becoming the thing loved, and he told her how, on the road walking back, he had found the last line for a poem he had been carrying around in his head for years. “I even remember where the first line came to me. Down by the Danube, in Fischamend, there is a footpath.…”

  [“Ich denke und du düngst.…”]

  “I think thoughts, you grow things.

  And if my thought in your mind’s night

  May seem no matter—”

  Paul grimaced. “A very Karl Kraus sort of pun,” he said.

  “… yet my mind brings

  To light the seed that you manure.”

  Then comes this nineteenth-century sort of idea. Paul suddenly longed for Dolf, who would have recognized each derivation and applauded each happy stroke. Marking his rhythms like a conductor, Paul went on:

  “And when our shadows which we cast shall rest,

  That in life’s flick’ring light had wildly swung,”

  Paul raised his chin.

  “I shall be turned to thought, you into dung.”

  [“Alsdann wirst du zum Dung, ich zum Gedanken.”]

  After supper, Paul and llse gave the slip to Renate, who was bickering with Michel. They walked up the road to see the yam field, and Paul talked to Ilse about Angelus Silesius, and Karl Kraus, about Heine, and his poet friend Dolf. Ilse said, “Renate says you won’t be happy living in Sosua, because you are an intellectual.”