Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  “You sound like a superannuated hippie,” Ruth said.

  “What did you say?” Höss said.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “I needed to escape the frivolous, unhealthy, and morally corrupt life of the cities,” Höss said.

  T O O M A N Y M E N

  [ 7 3 ]

  Ruth realized that she didn’t have enough time to shower before breakfast.

  “I found the woman I had longed for during all my years of loneliness,”

  Höss said. “It felt like we had known each other our whole lives. This com-patibility and unity and harmony stayed with us throughout our life together. We were like this during the hardships and during the good times and during the bad times. We were not influenced in our love for each other by anything that happened in the outside world.”

  “Hey,” Ruth said. “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “What is wrong with what I am saying?” Höss said.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Ruth said. “Anyway, you used the word

  ‘during’ three times in the one sentence.”

  “I understand much more than you think,” Höss said.

  “I’m going,” said Ruth. She had had enough. She turned sharply on her heel and walked away. Höss screamed. It was the cry of a man in pain. She turned back to where she imagined he was. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing, nothing at all,” Höss said. He sounded fragile.

  “Then why hold me up?” she said. “I’m in a hurry.” She turned and walked away again. Höss screamed louder. Ruth tried to stand in a position that she imagined might be facing Höss. “What’s up?” she said very firmly.

  “Can’t you bear farewells?”

  “I can tolerate everything,” Höss said. Ruth turned away, in disgust.

  The scream that came from Höss hurt her ears. She stopped.

  “This has nothing to do with anything that you are doing,” Höss said.

  “Really?” Ruth said. She went over her previous movements slowly. She dug her heel in the ground, as though she was going to turn. Höss cried out. She tried it again. He screamed.

  “This has nothing to do with anything that I am doing?” she said.

  Höss was silent.

  “I’m going,” she said. She walked briskly along Krakowskie Przedmiescie. She felt good.

  Chapter Five

  R uth almost didn’t see her father. He was sitting in an armchair, in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel. He was nearly buried in the stuffed and puffed-up body of the chair. His shoulders were slumped. His head was bent. His chin touched his chest. His cheeks and his mouth had slipped and shifted to a lower position on his face than they usually occupied. He had the stillness of a corpse. For a moment, Ruth was alarmed.

  Then she saw his eyes move. He watched her walking toward him.

  “What are you doing, Dad?” she said

  “Waiting for you,” said Edek. “We did have an arrangement that I should meet you at eight o’clock.”

  “But why are you waiting here?” Ruth said. “Why didn’t you go into the restaurant?”

  “I am very comfortable here,” Edek said. “Why should I go into a restaurant by myself?”

  “Oh, okay,” she said. He looked tired. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Of course I am all right,” Edek said. “What is not to be right?”

  “The way you were sitting,” Ruth said. “I thought that something might be wrong.”

  “What should be wrong?” Edek said. “I am here in Poland, with my daughter. Just like you wanted. It does not always have to be something wrong.” He stood up and looked at Ruth.

  T O O M A N Y M E N

  [ 7 5 ]

  “You look shocking,” he said. “Maybe it was not such a good idea to come to Poland?” He looked at her again. “You do not look heltzy,” he said. “We can call the whole trip off. We can have a dinner in a nice restaurant tonight, maybe some pierogi, then we can change our tickets. I will come back to New York with you for one week or maybe two weeks.”

  Edek’s pronunciation of healthy usually made her laugh. She had tried to teach him the correct pronunciation many times. “Healthy,” she said.

  “Heltzy,” he always replied. It didn’t make her smile this morning. “If you really want to leave Poland, we can leave,” she said. “I never wanted to force you to be here.”

  “I don’t think about calling the whole thing off for myself,” Edek said.

  “I am fine. There is nothing wrong with me. You look terrible.”

  “I think I ran for too long this morning,” Ruth said. “I was out for over an hour.”

  “A mishegaas, this running,” Edek said. “To run to somewhere where there is no need to run is a mishegaas. People should run if they are in a hurry, but to run just for nothing is meshugge.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said. Meshugge was one of the first Yiddish words she’d learned. It meant stupid, mad. A mishegaas, was a stupidity, a madness.

  Ruth looked at herself in the mirror, in the lobby. She looked pale, but not terrible.

  “You look shocking,” Edek said. She looked at Edek. He looked tired.

  Years older than he had looked when he had stepped off the plane last night.

  “You did run for more than an hour?” Edek said. “That is why I did have to wait for you in this chair.” Ruth looked at her watch. It was two minutes to eight.

  “I’m not late,” she said. She knew she wasn’t late. She was always punctual. She tried hard not to be obsessively punctual. But she couldn’t help it.

  She was perpetually punctual. It didn’t matter how rushed she was, she was still never late for anything.

  Ruth thought that her inability to be late was unhealthy. She had tried to do something about it. She had tried to be late for a few unimportant events, but she had been unable to succeed. The anxiety of the tardiness had been too much for her. She had modified her ambition. She had tried

  [ 7 6 ]

  L I L Y B R E T T

  to curb her need to be early. “You’re always early,” the podiatrist, the dentist, the dry cleaner, and anyone else she had appointments or arrangements with said to her. She had given up. She had accepted that it was her destiny to be on time.

  She also tried not to weigh herself more than once a week. She had had to force herself not to step onto the scales in the bathroom at the Bristol Hotel this morning after her shower. She knew that the Bristol’s scales would be in kilograms, and she had forgotten exactly how to convert kilograms into pounds. She knew that 1 kilogram was 2.2 pounds. But was it approximately 2.2 pounds, or exactly 2.2 pounds? She didn’t know. And she couldn’t tolerate having a rough approximation of her weight.

  She had been tempted to weigh herself. She was always tempted to weigh herself when she thought that she might weigh less. She wanted to rush to the scales on mornings when she had had a particularly good bowel movement, or had sweated excessively during her workout.

  This morning, after she had vomited up what appeared to be most of last night’s meal and a large amount of body fluid, had seemed to Ruth an ideal time to step onto the scales. But she had resisted. She was proud of herself for that. At home, she was proud if she forgot to exhale before weighing herself, or if she inadvertently left her watch on while she was on the scales.

  “Let’s go and have some breakfast, Dad,” Ruth said. She felt quite hungry.

  “I do not want anything,” said Edek. “Maybe one egg and something to drink, and that’s it.”

  “Oh, God,” Ruth said. “I forgot to tell you not to drink from the tap or brush your teeth with tap water.”

  “You did tell me, maybe ten times before I did leave Melbourne,”

  Edek said.

  “But I forgot to remind you,” said Ruth.

  “I am not so old that I forget what someone did tell me ten times,”

  Edek said.

  “So, what did you brush your teeth in?” she
said.

  “The water that my daughter did order for me,” Edek said.

  “I’m glad the hotel remembered,” Ruth said.

  “They remembered all six big bottles,” Edek said. “Six bottles for one day.”

  T O O M A N Y M E N

  [ 7 7 ]

  “I didn’t want you to feel worried about running out of water,” Ruth said.

  “I would have more to worry about if I did drink all the water,” Edek said. “I would burst. I did pack the other five bottles, in my suitcase, to take to Lódz.” Ruth chose a table, near the window, in the Bristol’s restaurant. “This looks like a good table,” she said.

  “A table is a table,” Edek said.

  “Buffet or à la carte?” a waitress asked them.

  “I will have a boiled egg please,” Edek said.

  “Dad, this hotel does one of the best buffet breakfasts I’ve ever seen,”

  Ruth said.

  “I am not so hungry,” said Edek.

  “Dad,” she said, “I want you to look at the buffet.”

  “Is there a boiled egg on the buffet?” Edek asked the waitress.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  “In that case, I will get my egg from the buffet,” he said. “See how I listen to my daughter?” The waitress smiled at them both.

  “It is lucky that you have got me here,” Edek said. “I can speak to all the waiters and waitresses for you.”

  “You were speaking to her in English,” Ruth said.

  “Oy, cholera,” said Edek.

  Edek stood transfixed in front of the selection of fish on the buffet.

  There was smoked trout, smoked mackerel, smoked salmon, whitefish, fresh sardines, and several varieties of herring.

  “I will take a piece of fish,” he said eventually. He put one piece of smoked salmon in the middle of his plate.

  “Dad, we’re paying for this,” Ruth said, “so we might as well eat it.”

  “That is right,” said Edek. He put several slices of mackerel and whitefish on his plate.

  “Look what’s over there,” Ruth said. “Polish ham.”

  “Not for me,” Edek said. “I have some fish and that’s it.”

  “But you’ve talked about Polish ham for years,” said Ruth.

  “I don’t eat so much for breakfast anymore,” Edek said.

  “I’ll take some ham to our table and you can decide if you want it,”

  Ruth said. “And look at the bread. The Poles make great bread. Look at that rye bread! Doesn’t it look stunning? I’ll get some for you.”

  [ 7 8 ]

  L I L Y B R E T T

  “No, no, no,” Edek said. “I don’t eat so much bread. You want me to get fat? I watch what I eat, today. I have to be careful. Get me only one piece of rye bread.” Ruth chose a small slice of rye. “Where is the boiled eggs?”

  Edek said. “I always have a boiled egg for breakfast.” They found the eggs.

  Ruth carried Edek’s food to their table. She went back to the buffet to get her own breakfast. When she got back Edek had finished his plate of fish. “This fish is out of this world,” he said.

  “I’m so glad that you enjoyed the fish,” she said. “It looks wonderful.”

  “What are you eating?” Edek said. “What is that?”

  “It’s muesli,” she said. “I’ve added flax seed and sesame seed to it.”

  “This stuff is for birds to eat, not for people,” Edek said. “Why don’t you eat some scrambled eggs? They got plenty of scrambled eggs. As a matter of fact it looks out of this world.”

  “I don’t like eggs,” she said.

  “What is not to like about an egg?” Edek said. “An egg is just an egg.

  Everybody eats an egg except my daughter. She pays twenty-five dollars to eat some seeds what birds eat.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel bad?” Ruth said.

  “I am trying to make you feel better,” Edek said. “If you eat something normal you will feel better.”

  Edek was quiet while he ate the rest of his meal. Ruth was grateful for the silence. She ate her breakfast slowly.

  “That’s it,” Edek said suddenly. He pushed all of his plates away from him. “I did finish,” he said. Ruth looked over at him. “That’s it,” he said again. “Finished, for me.” There was nothing left on any of Edek’s plates.

  All the fish was gone, all the ham was gone, the eggs were gone, and there was no sign of the rye bread.

  “Would you like tea or coffee, sir?” the waitress asked Edek. Ruth had already ordered a chamomile tea.

  “Do you have a hot chocolate?” Edek asked the waitress.

  “Of course, sir,” she said.

  “I will have a hot chocolate,” Edek said. “Maybe I will have a piece of cheese with my hot chocolate?” Edek said to Ruth. “The cream cheese looks especially good. They did have always a very good cream cheese in Poland.” A few minutes later Edek returned with a mound of cream cheese and several slices of bread. “It is a very good cream cheese,” he said.

  T O O M A N Y M E N

  [ 7 9 ]

  Ruth finished her muesli. Eating had made her feel better. Food often did. Jews were more attached to food, she thought, than most other people.

  She had noticed, in a photograph of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in session, that most members had food on the table in front of them. Jews rarely held a meeting or function of any sort without catering the event.

  And the food seemed to be of equal importance to anything else on the agenda.

  At the few Jewish fund-raising events Ruth had attended in New York, the quality of the food served seemed to captivate the guests’ imagination more than the amount of money raised. She had expected New Yorkers to be more sophisticated than that. But they were as engrossed in the merits of the stuffed chicken breast and roasted red peppers as any Jews in Melbourne.

  “We’ve got three and a half hours before we leave for Lódz,” Ruth said to her father. “The driver is picking us up at 12:30 P.M.”

  “I know that,” Edek said. “I did organize it.”

  “I was just reminding you,” Ruth said.

  “You think I am so old I forget everything?” Edek said.

  “Of course not,” said Ruth. “There’s a small remnant of the wall that surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto left standing,” she said. “I’d like to go and see it.”

  “You want to see a piece of a wall?” Edek said.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Ruth said.

  “I will do what you do,” Edek said.

  “Oh good,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk around Warsaw first.”

  “What for?” said Edek.

  “Just to look around and see what’s here,” Ruth said.

  “You know already what is here,” Edek said. “A city and some Polish people.”

  “Dad, you don’t have to come,” she said. “Stay here and read a book.

  There’s a very nice library in the hotel.”

  “I got my own books with me,” he said.

  “I won’t be long,” she said. “Not more than an hour. Then I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to the ghetto wall together.”

  “Okay, I will walk a bit, with you,” Edek said.

  “Dress warmly,” Ruth said to him. “It’s cold.”

  [ 8 0 ]

  L I L Y B R E T T

  “This cold, I told you, does not get to your bones,” Edek said.

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen minutes,” said Ruth. She decided that she would buy her father an overcoat while they were out walking. By the time she found a menswear shop, she thought, he would be cold enough to agree to the purchase.

  Ruth thought that she would have to walk more slowly with Edek accompanying her. But Edek strode briskly in front of her. He walked too fast to see anything. “Slow down, Dad,” she said. “What for?” he said. She gave up and let him run ahead. She walked briskly in order to keep Edek in her line of vi
sion. She walked along Krakowskie Przedmiescie, Nowy Swiat, and Aleje Ujazdowskie. She passed the monument to Adam Mick-iewicz, the Polish romantic poet. She passed the eighteenth-century Carmelite church, Kosciól Karmelitów, the Museum of Caricature, the Potocki Palace, the Radziwill Palace, the Church of the Nuns of the Visita-tion, the Ethnographic Museum, the Kazimierz Palace, the Holy Cross Church, the Staszic Palace, the monument to Nicolaus Copernicus, the Ostrogski Palace, the Zamoyski Palace, and the Polish Army Museum.

  Edek hadn’t looked up once. He had been running, with his head facing the ground. Suddenly he stopped outside a restaurant. “Look,” he said, pointing to the Restauracja Hoang Kim. “A Chinee restaurant. A Chinee restaurant in Poland.” He started to laugh.

  “A Chinese restaurant in Poland does look pretty funny,” Ruth said.

  “It is pretty funny,” Edek said. Two minutes later he stopped again.

  “Look this restaurant has flaki and kapusta, ” he said, and read the rest of the menu out aloud. “I did not have flaki since Mum died,” he said. Ruth liked flaki, tripe, too. “Maybe we’ll have flaki one night for dinner,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Pierogi!” Edek shouted a minute later. “Meat pierogi, cheese pierogi, potato pierogi, mushroom and cabbage pierogi.” He was standing outside a small bar, the Bar Pod Gole˛biami. Bars, in Poland, were not primarily for drinking. They were small, cheap eating establishments.

  “Would you like a pierogi?” Ruth said.

  “No, not for me,” Edek said. “Why don’t you have one?”

  “I’m not really hungry yet,” she said.

  T O O M A N Y M E N

  [ 8 1 ]

  “I am not hungry, too,” he said. He looked into the window of the bar.

  “They make a schnitzel and a barley soup,” he said.

  “Why don’t you have something to eat?” Ruth said.

  “No, not for me,” he said.

  “I know it’s only been an hour since we finished breakfast, but you’ve walked a long way, and you were walking pretty fast,” Ruth said.

  “It has been one hour and a half, not one hour,” Edek said.