Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “Now you fill the trenches and make a real Jamaica Bay.”

  Helen was proud of this assignment, running back and forth with her can, half the water splashing out before she could pour it in.

  “Go slow,” I instructed.

  “Let’s make it bigger,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” I told her. I did not even want to do this today, never mind make a promise about doing it again.

  The sand sucked up a lot of the water, but even so, the water level kept rising. It was a good thing that 5-year-olds can run forever.

  “That’s enough,” I finally said.

  She kept going.

  All it took was one can too many for the entire scene to collapse. The little islands disappeared; the trench around Barren Island filled with sand; Barren Shoal was completely under water. Helen began crying. “Fix them!” she wailed. “Put them up again!”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, just to stop her crying.

  “Promise,” she said, wiping her nose on her arm.

  A couple of weeks after discovering the little set of toes on the barge, Joey announced he was leaving school for a job on the pier. I do not know how his brothers arranged for him to get this job while others were begging and the pictures in the newspapers showed the breadlines still growing. Some said the Pessara brothers had a grip on things, especially Massimo. People were always saying things like that about other people. Other people said it was something about the mysterious circumstances under which their father died.

  “Mr. Pessara died in the influenza epidemic,” I reminded Sofia, who was restoring order to the broken clamshells between our houses.

  She rolled her eyes. “You believe everything you’re told.”

  “So maybe I shouldn’t believe about the baby bones.” I was half helping her by spreading the shells around with my foot.

  “Don’t be stupid. You’d need a reason to think Joey lied.”

  Sofia was right. Joey was so primitive, so downright dumb, that while he might mistake one thing for another, he was not clever enough to make this story up.

  Joey was now officially a receiving raker, directing the larger carcasses to the butchering room and the smaller pieces to a trolley that went straight to the chutes. The crew began its 12-hour shift at 6:00 a.m. Every morning Joey greeted the filthiest, most corrupted, stinking garbage that ever traveled New York. He also greeted the scavengers, the poorest of the poor, who took for themselves all the tails, hooves, blood, skin, and head meat they could manage. They even sucked marrow from the maggot-infested bones. Like I have said.

  If Joey’s brothers—not including the one four years older who was handed off to the cousin as a servant and never heard from again—if Joey’s brothers ever cared that Joey might be starving too were it not for what he scavenged from the barges, I never heard it. Maybe, like Sofia and me and who knows how many others, the only thought the brothers ever said about Joey was that he had Hollywood looks and that he was disgusting. Who knows. Maybe the brothers simply did not care, their parents dead and no one else willing to make them bother.

  On our way to school, Sofia and I saw Joey scavenging beside the girl in the brown dress, who had become a regular. We knew neither her name, nor where she slept, nor anything else. I cannot even say that she still wore that same brown dress. She was like those seagulls she scavenged with, who also disappeared at night. Whatever dress she had on was hidden by a grease-stained coat that was too long and which she cinched at the waist with rope.

  When we got right up near Joey, we could see him excavating what was left of a blackened banana, extracting the last little piece from the place where the peels meet just above the nubby stem. I know that there is a name for that, but who can remember? A banana was a rare find among the animal cadavers. Joey tossed the peel into the transport cart and returned to shoveling.

  “Disgusting,” said Sofia, who was watching him carefully.

  “Double disgusting,” I agreed. I was not as fascinated as Sofia by this episode, but it seemed the thing to say. This was the boy who used to steal our sandwiches, who cursed at us. Had we ever observed anyone else taking pity on him or any pity on the other people who picked their meals off the scows? I am rationalizing, of course. I wish I could say instead how we were more virtuous than we were.

  Joey and his discovery of the foot popped back into my mind later that day when Miss Finn read current events aloud from the newspapers. There was more about the famine in the Ukraine. Thousands of people starving to death. I have no idea how Sofia already knew about it, but she did.

  “Who will locate The Ukraine for us?” asked Miss Finn.

  Sofia’s hand shot up even quicker than Marie Dowd’s, who was the smartest one in the class and who was applying to Hunter College. Marie settled back into her wooden seat, a smirk on her face like she was waiting for Sofia to trip up.

  “The Ukraine,” Sofia announced on her way to the globe, “is the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.”

  Sofia rotated the globe a couple of times. “Where’s Greece,” she said aloud to herself. Once she had established her bearings on the world, Sofia ran her little finger from Athens north to Thessalonica, near the village where her mother was born, then across to Istanbul, which on Miss Finn’s old globe was still Constantinople. Having found Constantinople on the globe, Sofia ran her finger due north across the Black Sea, where it finally hit land at Odessa.

  “The Ukraine’s capital city is Kiev,” said Miss Finn, “an important trading partner for Soviet goods through what is now called Istanbul, not Constantinople.”

  Sofia’s hand was resting on the globe, one finger on Kiev and another on what Miss Finn called Istanbul-not-Constantinople.

  “Where did you learn so much about The Ukraine?” asked Miss Finn.

  Sofia shrugged. “Just do.”

  “From your father,” I said. A guess.

  Sofia glared. She was right: sometimes I was so childish.

  “What about your father?” asked Miss Finn.

  “He showed me a map in the newspapers.” She did not mention that the newspaper was The Daily Worker. She did not mention that after Mr. Stavros’ gruesome death in the loading chute Mr. Paradissis began getting The Daily Worker from Parson Otis, one of the men who piloted a garbage barge. Everyone knew Captain Otis, a sallow little man with a handlebar moustache, because he was always drunk and always talking about himself to himself: Captain Otis got a stinkin’ load; Captain Otis got this goddamned low tide; Captain Otis is dockin’. Sofia would read The Daily Worker aloud for her father after dinner. Mr. Paradissis, who could read just fine in Greek, was never at home in the English alphabet. I mean the Roman alphabet. Or the fact that Constantinople was now called Istanbul. He was no fan of the Turks, and who can blame him?

  Mr. Paradissis would burn the newspaper in the stove when they finished because Mrs. Paradissis got frantic about it sitting out where someone could see it. I did not need to speak Greek to understand that she was afraid. Everyone on Barren Shoal, except the blacks who were descended from slaves, was afraid of being shipped back to the country where they came from. As if Immigration & Naturalization could still find those places, what with borders and names changing all the time. The black people would not have even known where to go to if they could have gotten the money to leave, what with the way the traders sold their ancestors here and there without records of where they came from. I think now that some of those black people on Barren Shoal remembered grandparents or great-grandparents who were born as slaves. Oh yes: there have been enough atrocities all around. I am not digressing. I am keeping track; I am enraged.

  Sofia returned to her seat. Miss Finn finished reading the article on the starving Ukrainians. “We should celebrate our good fortune about living in a place where few, if any, people starve.”

  Even I knew that this was not true. The Daily Worker said plenty of Americans were starving. I got a bad taste in my mouth, like sucking on a penny. I raised my hand. “If The
Ukraine is the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, how come those people have no food?”

  “Oh, Marta,” said Miss Finn, her voice sounding very, very tired. “It’s complicated.”

  The color rose in my cheeks. It’s complicated. More complicated than what? Just like “fuck,” this was a phrase that did not always say what it meant. In fact, Marie Dowd had used the same exact words when I interrupted her class report to ask why, if there were plenty of other crops being shipped over to England, so many Irish starved during the Potato Famine. She also said “it’s complicated.” What was there to it I could not understand? The Irish starved 100 years ago; the Ukrainians were starving now. Even a child could see the inevitability of more people starving soon.

  “We don’t have enough information,” said Miss Finn. “Some say there’s a drought. Others say that it’s because of new Soviet policies for collectivizing farms. And others—the officials in Moscow—say that there’s no such famine. There are even newspaper reports of huge harvests. But the same newspapers run eyewitness reports of starving villagers and warnings of cannibalism.”

  I pictured Joey’s fingers and their telltale stains. Everything was connecting; I understood how people will do anything, eat anything, so as not to starve. I pictured the Paradissis family, including the already-withered, widowed Grandma Paradissis in steerage on the ship from Piraeus to New York with a sack of salted cod, a sack of fresh lemons, and a string of dried figs hanging like pearls around each of their necks. I pictured my own parents arriving at Ellis Island. What did my parents eat on their crossing? Cans of smoked sprats is all I remember, but what else? I never asked. I asked instead where our family came from. “Belarus,” said my father, “which is either in Poland or Russia depending on who’s just won what war.”

  “Am I Polish or a Russian?”

  My father frowned. “You’re a Jew,” he said. “You’re a beautiful Jewish girl.”

  “That’s not a place, Dad.”

  “You were born in my heart, in your mother’s soul.”

  My father loved speaking in sentimental terms. I knew better than to correct him with scientific details that I learned from Miss Doctor Finn’s book.

  Could people be citizens of an idea instead of a place? I might have become a believer if some kind of voice had said Yes, this can be. But I heard nothing. And what about nomadic people, the Gypsies, the Inuit and Bedouins, Mongols, Laps, and Travelers? I mean the Romany? The questions sent the globe inside my head spinning. Everyone, including 10-year-olds, wants certainties. Every single person wants guarantees.

  “Come here,” Yorgos called to Sofia after school that day. We were outside the schoolhouse, debating whether or not we had time to go to the salt marsh before our mothers expected us home.

  “What?” Sofia asked him.

  “This,” said Yorgos. He slapped her on the back of her head.

  “What’s that for?” cried Sofia.

  “For showing off.” Yorgos slapped her again. “And opening your fat mouth about Ba.”

  “But I read about The Ukraine in the paper and I didn’t say it was Daddy’s anyway and...”

  “Shut up,” Yorgos shouted. “And keep it shut.”

  “But I never...”

  “That’s right,” said Yorgos. “Never open that fat little trap of yours again.”

  My mother was frying eggplants with tomato and garlic when I got home. The garden was bulging with purple skins now that the days were shorter and the harvest season was at its peak. More tomatoes were simmering in another pot, these destined for the mason jars and a shelf in a shallow cupboard against the back wall of the house.

  “Momma,” I began. I had planned to ask her about the foot that Joey found, how it could be that a little baby foot got mixed in with hooves and ropes of horse intestines and why Mr. Paradissis was reading The Daily Worker and why my own father did not.

  “Momma, can Sofia sleep over?” I asked instead.

  “On a school night?” Stir, stir, stir.

  “We have a lot of work. It will go faster,” I reasoned.

  “That teacher should be more careful about you girls, all that homework she gives.”

  “It’s our Odyssey project, Momma, not Miss Finn. It takes so much time.”

  “What does Mrs. Paradissis say?”

  Had my mother come to me, had she poured quiet cups of tea for us instead of standing with her back to me working at the stove, spooning bits of garlic in the sizzling oil, I would have told her about Yorgos hitting Sofia; I would have cried about what Joey found on the barge. I could have asked her about a lot of things.

  “She says fine.”

  “You promise to be serious up there?”

  I was afraid that if Sofia slept at home that Yorgos would hit her again. I was just as afraid of the thing that had already happened, the slaps across her face when I said nothing.

  “Cross my heart, hope to die.”

  “Heaven forbid!”

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning, like all of our mornings, was announced by the usual mad chirping of the sparrows and plovers and other small birds that flocked to Jamaica Bay. They could have nested someplace more beautiful than Barren Shoal, but the birds returned every year to the dune grasses and weeds, to the reedy thistles that in summer choked the salt marsh. I do not know if all birds have a sense of smell or what it means to them, but it is plain enough to see how the birds’ reactions were different than our own. On Barren Shoal, their busy chirping threaded with the wailing of the gulls, which lived there by the hundreds, their endless feeding frenzy made possible by all the garbage. The ever-busy gulls were our sentries, warning us of any new barge crossing the bay.

  Neither the birds nor the gulls were able to camouflage the sounds of human screaming.

  I heard Helen screaming, my mother screaming, Helen screaming faster, my mother screaming louder, the pitch of Helen’s screams rising higher. Then nothing. Then my mother screaming Helen, Helen, Helen.

  I do not remember kicking down my blankets or jumping out of bed or trampling the schoolwork that I had worked on the night before or Sofia’s paper cutout sex dolls. I do not remember if Sofia was awake or sleeping. I do not remember racing down the stairs nor getting the wood splinter in my foot, where I still have a scar 70 years later. I do not remember my mother plunging her bare hands into the washtub or her pulling Helen’s body from the scalding water. I did not know if Helen was already dead or if she was in the process of dying right there in my mother’s arms. How can these be memories when I still live them again and again? I hear both of them screaming and the cries that were Helen’s last sounds. I see my mother clutching Helen’s burning body against her own.

  “My father!” I cried to Sofia. How long had she been standing there?

  My mother folded herself over Helen, hiding Helen’s face against her breast. The pitch of the moan coming out of her was a sound I never heard before and I have never heard again since. The cry of pain so deep always sounds new.

  “We’ve got to find my father,” I cried. “Now! Now!”

  My mother was clutching Helen. Noah, as usual, was nowhere to be seen.

  My mother must have heard me cry that I was going for my father. I grabbed Sofia’s wrist and pulled her out the door. I do not know why I did not ask her to wait with my mother, or why I did not send her for my father alone. It does not matter. Nothing would have changed the agonizing, unbearable facts, the unbearable horror of what had happened.

  We ran barefoot over clamshells and cigarette stubs, across the weeds that grew as fast as we pulled them. We trampled the last of the tomato vines and the first new winter squashes that were just beginning to show, tight green globes as hard as bocce balls. Between my toes I could feel the dew that the just-ended night left on all things, hard or soft. Dirt packed the cut on my foot and slowed the bleeding. The air was soaked with the stench of drying seaweed and the stench of the garbage scows and the stench from the factory. And the sweet smell
, too, of the sea, like the taste of salt on my lips. I could hear the birds in the little gardens we flattened and the gulls even louder as the piers came into view; I could feel the new sun rising against my neck.

  A girl could run from the cabins where the families lived down to the docks in less than ten minutes by taking these shortcuts through dunes instead of the more formal, more circuitous route on the island’s cleared path. Though the factory’s stern, tapered smokestack was in view the whole time we were running, the more it filled my frame of vision, the farther away it became. I even believed that if I found my father right away, he would run home and save Helen. This was me reaching for anything that might change things. If it meant making things up, so be it. Was it any different than being taught to believe in the unbelievable?

  People were pointing and laughing as Sofia and I ran past them because we were still in our nightclothes. Some people looked curious and others looked surprised, but no one came after us or helped us or got in our way. Joey was on a barge when we got to the dock, where he was maneuvering a small horse that had been flayed except for the coat on its head. It was illegal to sell those hides—some said that they carried anthrax—but the scavengers had to cut through them to get to the meat. I bet that they took whatever hides they could and sold them anyway. But what business was it of mine if they took the hides? Why am I so bothered by this now?

  “My father!” I yelled on I don’t know what breath, panting so hard. Something in my cry made Joey turn. Perhaps there is a pitch of terror that everyone can recognize. Joey jumped onto the pier.

  He was in front of us now, charging like a gladiator through the factory gates, his shovel rising up and down in his hand like a piston, Sofia and me following behind him, me bellowing, “Dad, Dad, Dad.” Bigger, stronger men jumped out of his way. Others did double-takes. Someone recognized me because soon I heard deeper voices calling Eisenstein. Eeeeyyyyesenstein.