Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  I said, “This is silly. I can’t begin to look for anything in this mess.” We stepped outside, into what must have been Pastora’s kitchen, because there were three charred bricks supporting one of our old coffee tins, full of rusty water.

  “Where have you hidden the watch?” my grandmother shouted at Pastora, pointing to my wrist. “Do you want me to go to the police? Policía? Sí? Policía?”

  “Sí, sí, la policía,” said the chicken man, who was suddenly standing there, too. “Hay justicia aquí. Ella” (he pointed at my grandmother) “le hace acusación a esta señora” (he pointed to Pastora) “de robar. Son testigos ustedes!” He pointed his forefinger around the group of little children and pigs who had gathered. “Es testigo usted!” (“There is justice here. She has accused this lady of being a thief. You are witnesses! You are a witness!”) He jabbed his finger at me. “La policía, sí, sí, sí!” he yapped, with his face so close to mine that I was staring down the black hole of his toothless mouth.

  “Let’s go, Omama.”

  “We’ll see you at the police station. Policía! Adiós,” said my grandmother.

  In the evening, Paul took a quarter pound of butter over to Señora Molinas’ galería to ask the advice of her policeman friend, and it seemed the police knew all about the chicken man with a monomania about slander laws. “Es un loco.” The policeman made a moron face and tapped himself on the forehead. It was always the same story, he said. First, this man would hang out with the maid; then the maid was caught stealing some worthless object; then something else was missing, and when the maid was accused, suddenly there was the chicken man, threatening slander. “But he always fouls it up somehow. Take you, now—the only witnesses he has are from that street over there, and your own mother and niece. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of everything for you, my good friend, and for your charming family.”

  We never saw Pastora again. Every morning now, a boy with a tender new goatee came up our street, hung with chickens and singing, “Llego las gallinas! Llego las gallinas hermosas!”

  Sunday, after lunch, the shop was closed. Señora Rodriguez was to send her chauffeur for us. My mother dressed my grandmother’s fine gray hair. My grandmother wore her best dress of pewter-colored silk, which made her old woman’s face gleam a rare, pale gold. She had taken off her glasses.

  “Omama, you look beautiful with your hair loose—and without your glasses.”

  My grandmother waved the compliment away with a rejecting right hand, but she was pleased. She said, “Now that I think back, I must have been a pretty girl, but then I only knew I had a big nose. Ibolya was the beauty; she had a little nose. Sari had a little nose, too, but too thick. Pista had a nice strong nose for a man—” and my grandmother went down the gallery of her brothers and sisters as to noses. “I’ll never forget the time I was waiting for Joszi in the Kaffee Norstadt, and Miklos Gottlieb came up and said, ‘Frau Rosa, you haven’t changed.’ For years, I thought he meant my nose. However, now I remember what he said was, ‘Your eyes are as black as ever.’ I’ll never forget how he stared at me.”

  Señora Rodriguez seemed devoted to her house and to her garden, which flourished in a green profusion in the middle of the dusty, burnt-out landscape; her cabbages grew large; her hens laid eggs; her geese cleaned themselves with their beaks till they were immaculately white. Her cook was black and wore a decent blue linen dress. The señora showed us around the house. She herself had widened the handsomely tiled galería that surrounded it on three sides. We sat in the shade, in large cushioned chairs, where plants in copper pots spread huge tropical leaves. Rodriguez, a slim, very handsome man who looked a good many years younger than his wife, came out to join us. He had a fine military carriage and wore his hair cropped so close to his skull as to give the effect of baldness. Señor Rodriguez sat down between my mother and my grandmother. The cook came with a tea trolley, followed by a delicate Negro girl in a childish dress, whom Señora Rodriguez introduced as Teresa.

  Teresa carried the cups and plates of thin buttered bread from guest to guest with a pinched little smile of extraordinary sweetness, saying, “Bitte, Sie wollen?” to each in turn.

  “Teresa, you can sit beside Señorita Groszmann.” (I looked up surprised—that was me.) “Practice your German. I’m taking Teresa to Germany next year, when I visit my parents. She is going to become a Protestant this Sunday.”

  “What do you do to become a Protestant?” I asked Therese, making conversation.

  “I wear white dress. I sing hymns,” said Teresa, sitting very straight and smiling her ingénue smile.

  My mother and Señor and Señora Rodriguez were talking about music. I saw my grandmother holding her teacup. She had an embarrassed smile on her golden face. She was not wearing her glasses, but below her silvery dress her old woman’s lace-up shoes stood a little sidewise to the party.

  On Monday afternoon, Rudi Griiner came to give me my first Spanish lesson. The family tiptoed behind us. When we were finished, my grandmother brought coffee and cake and asked Rudi if he didn’t think I would soon be speaking perfect Spanish. Rudi sat stolidly, with his head drawn into his shoulders like a boy in the presence of his parents’ friends, and said I was doing brilliantly.

  When he had gone, my mother asked me how I liked him, and I said, “Very much. He looks like a steamed suet pudding without the treacle.”

  My grandmother said, “Lore is like my sister Ibolya—too choosy.”

  Rudi came back on Wednesday, and I did brilliantly again except that I had a little difficulty with my first irregular verb. Over coffee I asked Rudi questions about life in Santiago, where he had lived since he was nine years old, but he had little to say and he asked me no questions at all.

  Afterward, we saw him stop outside the Perez galería, chatting to Juanita and illustrating his conversation with an animation of face and hands that made him look like a Dominican boy.

  In the evening came the Grüners with a letter from the Freibergs, who had arrived in Vienna. The fellows of Sigi’s old glee club had met them at the airport with songs, and, except for the omnipresence of the Russians, they wrote, Vienna was—well, Vienna. Imagine, on Sunday they were going for a picnic on the Kahlenberg!

  On Thursday came the Sosua truck.

  On Friday, Rudi gave me my third lesson, and I had the same difficulty with the first verb that I had had in my second lesson. And afterward, Rudi leaned over the railing of the Perez galería and kidded with Juanita.

  I stood around the shop. I said, “I want to sell something.” But my grandmother said that I gave overweight. I should let my grandfather do it; and later, in the kitchen, she said I didn’t wash the green peppers beautifully enough, I should let my mother do it.

  When Paul put on his straw hat to go to the post office for our mail, I said I would go along—hoping I hardly knew for what.

  While we were gone, my grandfather happened to be alone in the shop when two boys came in. One asked for a box of Chiclets, and the other for half a pound of cheese, and while my grandfather was weighing out the cheese the first boy ran away with the Chiclets, leaping over the galería railing, and the second boy leaped after him, and Grandfather ran around the counter and down the galería, and he stood in the street shouting. That evening, he had another heart attack.

  “He’s not doing badly at all,” said Dr. Perez, “but we must keep him in bed. No walking up and down stairs.”

  “You hear, Joszi?” said my grandmother.

  My grandfather stroked his mustache and said, “Ja so, but now I feel much better.”

  “I’ll tell you when you feel better,” Dr. Perez said and winked at me with the leer he seemed to feel my due as a woman.

  My mother asked me to stay with my grandfather when the afternoon rush started.

  “Is it very busy now in the shop?” asked my grandfather.

  “That’s not your problem, Opapa,” I said. “Paul and Omama and Mutti can manage without you, you know, perfectly well
.”

  “Ja so,” said my grandfather.

  We sat looking at one another. I wished I had a book. I said, “Tell me a story. Did you really go to school with the robber chief?”

  “Until I was thirteen years. Then my father sent me to Vienna to be an apprentice in a draper’s shop. The owner was called Benedick, a cousin of your Omama. He arranged the marriage, but that was many, many years later.”

  “What does an apprentice do?”

  “Tidy the shelves and put everything in good order before the shop is opened. He waits on customers and makes deliveries. We were three boys—Pista, from my village, and Karl, from Vienna and older. Every morning, he and Pista pulled the blankets away at five o’clock in the morning to make me light the stove.” My grandfather smiled mildly at the jokes of his youth.

  I saw in my inner eye the back room of a shop and furnished it with shelves of boxes and bales of fabric, arranged precisely like the storeroom behind my grandfather’s shop in Fischamend, except that there were three beds in it; it was winter, dark, at five A.M., the stove unlit—and my mother came in, wearing a sleeveless cotton dress and bringing my grandfather’s supper tray. “I should come down, if you are too busy,” said my grandfather. “I’m feeling much better.”

  “You heard the doctor, Vati!” my mother said.

  But the next morning when Paul came into the shop to open up, my grandfather, fully dressed, was standing on a ladder arranging the coffee tins in a tidy pyramid.

  Paul was very angry. He helped my grandfather down and led him upstairs, saying, “Now I want you to walk very, very slowly, please.”

  After that, we never left my grandfather alone. My mother sat with him in the mornings. She taught him Spanish words out of a grammar book. When my grandmother finished cooking, she would go up. I remember I stood at the bottom of the steps, listening, because I could not imagine what they might have to say to one another. I heard my grandmother say, “Setz dich. Sit up, Joszi. I will plump your pillow.” In the afternoon, when my grandmother was needed downstairs in the shop, I went to sit with my grandfather.

  “Tell me a story,” I said. “Why did you need a third person to arrange your marriage?”

  “Because I was busy working in the shop, saving my money so I could open a shop of my own, so I could get married,” said my grandfather.

  “Opapa, do you remember the first time you saw Omama?”

  “Oh, yes,” said my grandfather. “I remember the day Benedick took me up to the flat. Your Omama was sitting by a window with one of the babies on her lap. And all the time she kept watching me with her big black eyes. She had black hair, like a gypsy. Your Omama was always a good wife. She is a good businesswoman in the shop.”

  “Hey, Opapa!” I cried. “Why are you getting out of bed? Where do your think you are going?”

  “I just thought I would open the shutters.”

  “Then why don’t you ask me to do it? That’s the Molinas’ yard, isn’t it?” From the window, I could see the neighbors I knew only from their public galería life in the intimacy of their back yard. The yard was square and had a mud floor, with scarlet flowerpots all around the pink walls, and a lemon tree growing in the middle. Under this lovely tree sat Señora Molinas, brushing América Columbina’s hair. Mercedes was sweeping with an outsize broom and doing a silly head-wagging dance to distract the squirming baby.

  “Do you remember, Lorle, our yard in Fischamend?” my grandfather asked.

  At supper, I asked my grandmother if she remembered the first time she saw Opapa.

  “Yes,” said my grandmother. “My father had asked Cousin Benedick to find a husband for me, because I was already twenty-four. I could have married Miklos Gottlieb.” My grandmother pulled her shoulders up and dipped her head, in something between a shrug and a sidewise nod. “He dressed very well. He was very handsome, always with some girl. Once he said to me, ‘Fräulein Rosa, I am a man who cannot be without a woman, but you see I always come back to you.’ But I wouldn’t speak to him. He didn’t marry till four years after I married Joszi. Her name was Rosa, like mine.”

  “Do you remember Opapa in those days?”

  “Yes. He had a bad temper.”

  “Opapa had a bad temper?”

  “Yes. The week after we were married, I told him to borrow some money and stock up properly. He threw an ink bottle at me. Aber ich hab’ ihm’s Wilde abig’räumt,” my grandmother said in pure Austrian, meaning, “I stripped the wildness off of him.”

  “But Muttilein,” said my mother, “he took poor Ferri in after your mother died, and Ibolya when she got divorced, and he was good to Grandfather when he came to live with us.”

  My grandmother acknowledged her husband’s virtues with her shrugging nod. “He didn’t drink and he didn’t gamble. Miklos Gottlieb, you know, drank. Once I went to see my father in the shop, and he and Miklos were drinking wine together in the back. His wife—that Rosa Frankel—she wasn’t good for him. But then, I wasn’t good for Joszi,” my grandmother said. “I wouldn’t have been good for any man,” and she made a gesture with the right hand, like the downward half of a wave, that had the effect of someone pushing away a plate of food or an unpalatable condition.

  On Wednesday, Señora Rodriguez came for her last piano lesson. They were moving back to the city and would return to Santiago at Christmas. She brought a jar of marmalade made from her own oranges, for “poor Herr Steiner.”

  In the evening, the Grüners came to sit with my grandfather. “What are these bad things we hear of you?” they said to him.

  “Ja so,” said my grandfather.

  “We had a letter from the Freibergs,” said Frau Grüner. “Imagine—poor Erna has broken a leg and Sigi has to nurse her. She says her sister is always busy with the boy, and he is cheeky in return. Sigi wants us to send him some tortoise-shell pins, to start an import-export business. Sigi has talked to his friends in the glee club about the Nazis, but all they want to talk about is the Russians.”

  “And how is Rudi?” asked my grandmother. “He didn’t come with you?”

  “He was going to come, but you know young people,” said Frau Grüner. “They don’t like illness.”

  “He hasn’t been to see us for weeks,” said my grandmother, “though we see him all the time on the galería with that Juanita Perez, climbing all over one another. He’s become a real native, hasn’t he?”

  Frau Grüner rose, bristling. She bent over my grandfather, saying, “Now, we want you to get better soon. You are a good man. We are all very fond of you,” and she led her husband downstairs without saying good-by.

  My grandmother sat grinning. She said, “Well, children, on to Ciudad Trujillo. I’ve insulted everyone in Sosua and I’m halfway through Santiago.”

  My grandfather seemed to have accepted the fact of his illness and to be actually looking frailer. The fingers that stroked his mustache looked transparent and trembled a little. He no longer asked questions about the shop, but spent the day propped against his pillows, watching the workday life in the Molinas’ back yard. One day he said to me, “So she is opening a shop next door, just as I always thought.”

  “Who? Señora Molinas? Whatever makes you think so? I mean, I know she’s not.”

  “Look,” said my grandfather. “They are folding up the linens.”

  “Opapa! That’s only Mercedes shaking out the tablecloth.”

  My grandfather said, “We always used to display the linens—tablecloths, dish towels, and handkerchiefs—in the window facing the Fischamend Square, do you remember?”

  That weekend the rainy season set in. I had never seen such a furious, inexhaustible descent of water. América Columbina and all the children came out and played in the flooded gutters, but the grownups went inside and closed their doors.

  When Paul came downstairs in the morning, he found Manuela, our new maid, sleeping on the floor. She explained that she couldn’t go home in the rain. She would get her hair wet, and if one got one’
s hair wet, one got pneumonia and died.

  “She can’t go home in the rain, but she can sleep on the floor,” said my grandmother. “They’re not our kind of people.”

  I said, “What’s so great about our people? All you ever do is quarrel with them.”

  This was rude. My grandmother went out into the kitchen and didn’t talk to me the rest of the day.

  And day after day it rained, at times in a fantastic downpour—as if an immense bucket was being upturned over Santiago—until the water rushed turbulently down the gutters. Then the rain settled back to a steady, muted rustling, without hope of any end. I woke up in the mornings to hear my grandmother in the next room setting my grandfather’s tray across his bed, saying, “Sit up, Joszi,” and then my mother called us to breakfast.

  The shop remained empty. Paul sat in the rocking chair, studying his course in remedial exercises. “This is near criminal,” he said. “The information is laughable, and they propose to teach by correspondence exercises impossible to understand except in practice. But I know all this. What I need from them is a diploma, so I can get work. Then maybe we can all move to the city.”

  The Freibergs wrote my mother. They were so sorry to hear about poor Herr Steiner’s illness. They were coming back to Santiago; Vienna was nothing for our people any more. What with the Russians everywhere and business so poor and stoves having to be lit now that autumn had come and maids not four dollars a month as in the Dominican Republic but three times that a week—ridiculous! They would be back before the end of the year. They sent their best to everyone in sunny Santiago.

  From the bed where my grandfather sat propped against his pillows, he looked across the muddy yard. “Look! Señora Molinas is talking to a salesman in the back room—you see, where the light is on,” said my grandfather. “He has his sample case with him.”

  “But Opapa, that’s Señora Molinas’ policeman friend—don’t you remember?—who always sits on the galería and sends Mercedes for five cents’ worth of butter. He brought his suitcase. I suppose he is moving in.”