Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  “You don’t like Indian food,” Ruth said.

  “Just the carry I don’t like,” said Edek. He always pronounced curry this way.

  “Indian cuisine is made up of curry,” Ruth said. She looked around her.

  Where were they? “Are you sure you’re going in the right direction?” Ruth asked the driver.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. Edek asked him again. The driver sounded less certain. His reply, in Polish, involved more words.

  “The former Jewish ghetto,” Ruth said. “Where they took all the Jews of Warsaw and imprisoned them,” she said. She had enunciated each word slowly. The driver turned toward her. He looked bewildered. “The ghetto,”

  she repeated.

  Polish people knew very little about Jews and the place they had occupied in Poland. A Polish historian had recently released a report that demonstrated that Polish textbooks usually omitted the Holocaust and Jewish history in Poland from the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Holocaust was depicted as one facet of a planned extermination of the Polish people. No textbooks mentioned German or Polish anti-Semitism.

  “He probably has no idea what I’m talking about,” Ruth said to Edek.

  “They teach them nothing in schools about what happened to Jews.”

  “Shsh, shsh,” said Edek.

  “I’ve got a map in my bag,” Ruth said. She took out the map. Edek looked out of the car window.

  “We are on Swie˛tokrzyska,” he said.

  “Then we’re very close,” Ruth said. The driver slowed down. Ruth showed him the map.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “I know now where you want to go.”

  “How much will you charge to wait fifteen minutes for us while we look at the wall?” Ruth asked him.

  “Fifteen minutes?” Edek said. “Why fifteen minutes? It is only a piece of wall. Five minutes will be plenty.” Edek proceeded to discuss minutes and zlotys with the driver.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  “Five zlotys!” Edek announced. “Not a bad price to wait for five minutes.”

  “Tell him, I’ll pay him ten zlotys and we’ll be ten minutes,” Ruth said.

  Edek and Ruth walked through the archway at 60 Zlota Street and into a courtyard. On the right, at the end of the courtyard, was a three-meter-high red brick wall. This was part of the wall that had imprisoned four hundred and fifty thousand Jews. One hundred and fifty thousand per square kilo-meter. The daily nutritional rations for the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto added up to two hundred and thirty calories a day. Two hundred and thirty calories was less than three apples or three eggs or three slices of rye bread.

  But the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had no apples, no eggs, and very little bread. They had turnips, potato peels, some flour, and some sugar—if they were lucky.

  By the end of 1941, less than two years after the ghetto had been formed, over one hundred thousand Jews had died of exhaustion and starvation. By September 1942, three hundred thousand Jews had died or been transported for liquidation. Imprisoning the Jews in the ghettos killed them as effectively if not quite as efficiently as the concentration camps.

  Ruth and Edek stood in front of the wall. Ruth wanted to cry. She looked at the bricks. They looked like such ordinary bricks. Held together with ordinary mortar. These bricks had done a good job. Very few Jews had escaped the grip of these bricks. Two bricks were missing from this wall.

  They were in the Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C., a sign said.

  Ruth wasn’t sure what the display of these two bricks would do for visitors to the Holocaust Museum. Most of the visitors would never know how drenched in disgust for Jews much of the world was. And that this disgust was why they had bricked the Jews up before disposing of them.

  It was just too difficult to grasp the extent of the anti-Semitism that existed then. It was too hard to understand the hatred that allowed small babies and young children to be starved and shot and gassed and butchered. It was too difficult to comprehend the enthusiasm with which people embraced the murder of a race. It seemed incomprehensible.

  In 1943, in Warsaw, an exhibition was mounted to explain more clearly T O O M A N Y M E N

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  to the Polish people how dangerous the Jews were. The exhibition explained and demonstrated, in slides and lectures and films, that Jews, by their very nature, carried typhus in their blood and lice on their bodies. If you touched a Jew, if you touched Jewish flesh, you would be poisoned, the exhibition reiterated over and over again.

  Schoolchildren in Warsaw were required to attend this exhibition.

  Many children were frightened to walk through the exhibits. They stood clear of the charts and diagrams and photographs in case they were contagious. It was a popular exhibition. Fifty thousand people passed through before the show was packed up and traveled to other Polish cities.

  Ruth wept. “It is just a wall,” Edek said. “It is just a wall,” he repeated.

  But the expression on his face was at odds with his language and his tone.

  He looked as if he was crying. His face was fixed in an expression of grief.

  His eyes and mouth and nose were depressed and bereft. He didn’t know he was crying, Ruth decided.

  “There is a man near that door,” Edek said, pointing to the only other occupant of the courtyard. The man stood up from the step he had been sitting on and walked toward Edek and Ruth. Edek moved closer to Ruth.

  The man spoke to them. Ruth couldn’t understand what he was saying. He smelled of alcohol and his clothes were ragged. “He is asking if we want him to take a photograph of us,” Edek said. The man’s eyesight was obviously sharp, Ruth thought. Her camera was tiny.

  “I told him no,” Edek said. The man looked at Ruth.

  “Why not?” she said to Edek. “It would be nice to have some photographs of this trip.”

  “I don’t think we should give him the camera,” Edek said.

  “He’s not going to run off with it,” Ruth said. “He looks in pretty decrepit condition, anyway. I could easily outrun him.”

  “We shouldn’t let him have it,” Edek said.

  “It only cost two hundred dollars,” Ruth said. “If he steals it, I’ll buy another one.”

  “To you, two hundred dollars is nothing,” Edek said.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I just wouldn’t mind a photograph of us.”

  “Okay, okay,” Edek said.

  He spoke to the man. The man smiled and nodded. Ruth stepped forward and handed the man the camera. He stank. She moved back next to

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  Edek. The man held the camera up to his face. He stepped back. Edek stepped toward him.

  “Dad, he’s not running away,” Ruth said. “He’s stepping back so that he can get us both in the photograph.”

  “I am staying here,” Edek said. “He looks like such a type to me.”

  “Like what type?” Ruth said.

  “Like such a type who will steal,” Edek said. “And who knows what else he will do to us.”

  “Dad, I’m twice his size,” Ruth said.

  Edek spoke to the man. “What did you say to him?” Ruth asked.

  “I told him just the heads will be enough,” Edek said. Ruth saw that her father was genuinely nervous of this thin, drunk, dilapidated man. She stepped forward.

  “A head shot will be fine,” she said to Edek.

  Edek beamed for the camera. “I don’t think we need to look cheerful,”

  Ruth said. “We’re not at Luna Park.” Edek continued to smile. He smiled straight at the camera. All of his teeth were displayed in the smile. Ruth wished that he would get a better set of teeth. He refused to spend any money on his teeth. He’d had them made by some semiqualified dental technologist in an outer suburb of Melbourne. She had begged him to buy better teeth. But he wouldn’t. She could always tell when he had a new pair.

  His new false t
eeth whistled for the first few months. Edek beamed broadly at the camera.

  “One more for good luck,” Edek said to the man. The man looked blank. Edek repeated himself.

  “I think Polish would be better,” Ruth said.

  “Oy, cholera,” Edek said. He spoke to the man, in Polish.

  Ruth didn’t want to touch the man or the camera, after the man had touched it. She held her sleeve over her hand when he handed the camera back to her. Edek took out some zlotys for the man. “Don’t touch him,”

  Ruth said. “Drop the zlotys into his hand.” Edek and Ruth walked back to the taxi. “It was a very moving experience, seeing the ghetto wall,” Ruth said.

  “Why do you wear such a school bag?” Edek said, looking at her backpack.

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  “It’s a backpack, Dad,” she said. “Schoolchildren aren’t the only ones who wear these now.”

  “I’m glad we came here,” Ruth said in the car. Edek looked out of the window.

  “Do you know anybody in the Wiedergutmachung place?” he said.

  Wiedergutmachung was what the Germans called the minuscule amount of reparation money that was paid to the few Jews who had survived Nazi concentration camps. Wiedergutmachung. Literally translated, it was “to make good again.” Ruth found the word offensive. Surely they could have thought of a more plausible word. Even an imbecile had to acknowledge that not a fraction of what was done could ever be made good again.

  “How would I know anyone in Germany with a connection to the Wiedergutmachung department?” Ruth said to Edek.

  “You told me you had a German client,” Edek said. “I thought maybe the client knows someone, in Germany. The Wiedergutmachung people refused me an extra hundred dollars a month. They give some people a bit extra if a doctor says they need it. I told the doctor I couldn’t sleep. So he wrote a letter for me.”

  “You’ve needed sleeping pills for years,” Ruth said.

  “But I did not know they did pay extra,” Edek said.

  “Why did they say no?” said Ruth.

  “They did not tell me,” Edek said. “That is why I asked you if you did know somebody in Germany.”

  “My client is a Lufthansa executive,” Ruth said. “I don’t think he’d know anyone in Germany. He’s been in New York for years. I flew Lufthansa once,” she said. Edek interrupted her.

  “They are the best,” he said.

  “You haven’t flown Lufthansa,” she said.

  “But I know they are the best,” he said. “For sure.”

  “Well, they certainly know how to take off,” Ruth said. “They take off like no other airline I’ve been on. This Lufthansa plane went straight up into the sky. At such a steep angle, I felt sick. Each leg of the flight was the same. Straight up, into the sky.”

  Edek shook his head. “They are the best, for sure,” he said.

  “How come we’re admiring the Germans?” Ruth said.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  “Because they are very good,” said Edek.

  “You think maybe they had reason to believe that they were the master race?” she said. She had meant this as a joke. Edek didn’t laugh.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  An hour later, they were on their way to Lódz. It was a relief to be on the way to Lódz. Ruth thought that maybe Edek would calm down now.

  He had been restless and eager to leave Warsaw from the moment that he had arrived. He had been so impatient and so edgy that she had forgotten to show him the Wedel chocolate shop. She made a mental note to take him there when they got back to Warsaw.

  Edek was quiet. When the driver had arrived at the Bristol to pick them up, Edek had rushed out to greet him. Edek shook hands with the driver and put his arm around him in an affectionate gesture. “There’s no need to embrace him,” Ruth had said to Edek. Edek had glared at her. “He understands English,” Edek had said to her in Yiddish. Ruth wasn’t fluent in Yiddish, but she understood most ordinary, everyday, domestic Yiddish.

  She knew how to say I’m tired, my head hurts, I’ve got a stomachache, and my children are killing me. Not a very useful set of phrases and sentences.

  “He understands English,” Edek repeated in Yiddish.

  Edek sat in the front of the Mercedes with the driver. They were half an hour out of Warsaw. He had been quiet for most of the trip. Ruth was relieved when he started to chat to the driver. The driver seemed happy, too. He switched off the radio as soon as Edek began to talk. Ruth tried not to listen to the conversation. She checked her bag to make sure she had taken everything out of the Bristol’s safety deposit box. Her passport and Edek’s passport were still in the manila envelope she had packed them in.

  Her wallet was there. Her travelers’ checks, and both sets of airline tickets were there. She was relieved.

  Edek and the driver were now talking flat out. The talk was of highways and expressways. Ruth couldn’t understand most of it. She heard Edek say

  “Long Island Expressway.” Why, Ruth wondered, would Edek be talking about the Long Island Expressway to the driver? Edek was animated. One sentence poured out after another. He sounded as if he was having the time of his life.

  They drove past several small farms. Polish people were very neat farmers. Everything was meticulously laid out. Perfectly square fields of potaT O O M A N Y M E N

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  toes. Parallel rows of cauliflower and rows and rows of beans. Rows of green cabbage, next to rows of red cabbage. The spaces in between the rows were scrupulously clean. Ruth couldn’t see a stray twig or weed in farm after farm. The animals looked just as tidy. The black and white cows had shiny pelts. Even the pigs looked spick and groomed.

  There must be something soothing about growing your own food, Ruth thought. Her life was so far removed from the planting and gathering of essential sustenance. What did she do? She provided expensive letters for people who could no longer form their own words. She felt very flat.

  She was jolted by the sudden, raucous laughter coming from the front seat. Edek and the driver had been chuckling quietly, but now they were laughing out loud. Edek roared with laughter. He turned around to Ruth.

  “He told me a not so nice joke,” he said. “Should I tell you?” “No thanks,”

  she said.

  They were on the outskirts of a small town. Ruth could see the town ahead of them. They passed a large industrial building. On the side of the building someone had drawn a penis. A Star of David was drawn across the testicles and the initials LKS were written along the length of the penis.

  Ruth had seen anti-Semitic graffiti in Poland before. It had shocked her each time. They had removed the Jews from Poland but anti-Semitic graffiti had stayed and thrived.

  She tapped Edek on the shoulder and pointed to the graffiti. “Ask him what that is.” she said to Edek. Both men looked out of the window. The driver offered Edek an explanation.

  “He says it is a joke,” Edek said to Ruth.

  “Does he think it’s funny?” Ruth said.

  “Of course not,” said Edek. The driver added something else. “He says they didn’t mean anything bad by it,” Edek said.

  “LKS is the local soccer team, and they’re losing,” Ruth said. “So, the locals put Jude, Jew, or a Star of David on references to the team.” Edek didn’t say anything. “Do you understand, Dad?” she said. “They’re using the Star of David to signify the weak ones, the losers.”

  “I understand,” Edek said. They drove in silence for several miles.

  “Would you like to stop at the house of Chopin?” the driver said loudly to Ruth.

  “No thanks,” she said.

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  L I L Y B R E T T

  “Zelazowa Wola, Chopin’s home, is very interesting,” the driver said.

  “No thank you,” Ruth said.

  “Why not?” said Edek.

  “Because we’ll never get to Lódz,” said Ruth
. “Come on, we’ll stop for five minutes,” Edek said.

  “I’ll stay in the car, then,” she said. “I’ve seen Chopin’s home. I’ve seen Chopin’s piano, Chopin’s mother’s piano, Chopin’s bedroom, Chopin’s mother’s bedroom, Chopin’s bathroom, and Chopin’s garden.” Edek ignored her.

  At Zelazowa Wola, Ruth stayed in the car and read. The two men returned from their tour of Chopin’s house in good spirits. The driver was humming La Polonaise. Edek asked Ruth if she would take a photograph of him and the driver in Chopin’s garden. She got out of the car and took the photograph. “Take one more photograph in front of the Mercedes,” Edek said. She photographed both men in front of the Mercedes. They looked so happy together. They looked like brothers.

  Edek and the driver started talking as soon as they got back into the car.

  The driver was telling Edek something about Chopin’s mother. Edek was also discussing Chopin. Ruth didn’t know he knew anything about Chopin.

  The two men talked and talked.

  Ruth was puzzled. Edek was never as garrulous as this in Australia. And then it dawned on her. Of course, in Australia he was forced to speak English. A halting, faulty English. Here he could speak Polish. Perfect Polish.

  Polish, the language of his childhood, the language of his mother and father. No wonder he was at home here. He was at home. It was a sobering thought.

  “Is it nice for you to be able to speak as much Polish as you want to?”

  she said to her father.

  “It is all right,” he said. “I can speak Polish, I can speak English, I can speak German.” He paused. “Do you know what they called the path to the gas chambers? Himmel Weg. The road to heaven.”

  “What made you think of that?” Ruth said.

  “What, are you stupid or something?” he said. “What else am I thinking of? You think I am not thinking about things. This morning it was a big trauma for me.”

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  “What was?” said Ruth.

  “What do you think I am talking about?” Edek said exasperatedly.

  “The ghetto wall, of course.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?” Ruth said.

  “Why should I tell you every little thing?” he said.