Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “I’ll do any job,” she said in this interval. “I just don’t want you to count on languages.”

  “Do you sing? We find people who sing are comfortable in our work.”

  “I am moderately musical.” Very moderately. She thought of the tenor. She could still say yes. But she did not want to become a caretaker.

  The fat man’s gaze loosened at last. He looked out the window. “All agencies are working together to get these people from into England. For this, for all our efforts, we need staff members who are efficient and unsentimental. Languages are of secondary importance. The Joint trusts my judgment.”

  She signed a sort of contract. Then she said, “You should know, I am occasionally sentimental.”

  A smile, or something like it, landed on his large face and immediately scurried off. She suspected that, like many fat men, he danced well.

  Sonya took the train back to Providence. After several months she learned that she would be sent to London and there loaned to another organization, one helping refugee children. She put the books of her clients into order. After several more months, there came a steamer ticket. She stored her furniture, and gave herself a farewell party in the emptied apartment. She took the train again and in New York boarded a ship bound for Southampton. The fat man—his name was Roland, she remembered—showed up to say good-bye, carrying a spray of carnations.

  “How kind,” she said.

  “It is not the usual procedure,” he admitted.

  By the time she arrived in England the displaced Polish-Germans were already rescued or lost. War had been declared. She was sent to Hull for a year, to help settle as domestics German-Jewish women who had already arrived. Then she was reassigned to London.

  There the Joint found her a bed-sitter in Camden Town. The landlady and her family lived on the ground floor; otherwise the place was home to unattached people. Each room had a gas fire and a stove. It took Sonya a while to get used to the smells. She had to get used to footsteps, too—there was no carpet, and everyone on the upper floors traveled past Sonya’s room. There was an old lady with twittering feet. “My dear,” she said whenever she saw Sonya. A large man looked at her with yellow-eyed interest. His slow footsteps sounded like pancakes dropped from a height. An elderly man lightly marched. With his impressive bearing and his white mustache he resembled an ambassador, but he was the proprietor of the neighborhood newsstand. Two secretaries tripped out together every morning after curling their hair with tongs. (The first time Sonya smelled singed hair she thought the house was on fire.)

  And there was a lame man of about forty, their only foreigner. Sonya didn’t count herself as foreign; she was an American cousin. But the lame man—he had a German accent. He had dark skin and bad teeth. Eyebrows sheltered glowing brown eyes—eyes that seemed to be reflecting a fire even when they were merely glancing at envelopes on the hall table. His legs were of differing lengths—that accounted for the limp. Sonya recognized his limping progress whenever he came up or down the staircase: one pause Two, one pause Two; and whenever he passed her door: ONE TWO, ONE TWO, ONE TWO.

  THE CHILDREN CAME, wave after wave of them. Polish children, Austrian children, Hungarian children, German children. Some came like parcels bought from the governments that withheld passports from their parents. These children wore coats, and each carried a satchel. Some came in unruly bands, having lived like squirrels in the mountains or like rats by the rivers. Some came escorted by social workers who couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Few understood English. Some knew only Yiddish. Some had infectious diseases. Some seemed feebleminded, but it turned out that they had been only temporarily enfeebled by hardship.

  They slept for a night or two in a seedy hotel near Waterloo station. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger, who directed the agency, stayed in the hotel, too, intending to sleep—they were always tired, for the bombing had begun. But the women failed to sleep, for the children—not crying; they rarely cried—wandered through the halls, or hid in closets, smoking cigarettes, or went up and down the lift. The next day, or the next day but one, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger escorted them to their quarters in the countryside, and deposited them with stout farm families, these Viennese who had never seen a cow; or left them in hastily assembled orphanages staffed with elderly schoolteachers, these Berliners who had known only the tender hands of nursemaids; or stashed them in a bishop’s palace, these Polish children for whom Christians were the devil. The Viennese kids might have found the palace suitable; the Hungarians would have formed a vigorous troupe within the orphanage; the little Poles, familiar with chickens, might have become comfortable on the farms. But the billets rarely matched the children. The organization took what it could get. After the children were settled, however uneasily, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger rode the train back to London, Mrs. Levinger returning to her husband and Sonya to solitude.

  FOR MONTHS SHE NODDED at the dark man and he at her.

  They said “Good evening.”

  One day they left the house at the same time, and walked together to the underground.

  He lived two floors above her, he said. She already knew that from her attention to footsteps.

  His room contained an upright piano left behind by a previous tenant. He managed to keep it in tune. “A piano is so rare in furnished … digs,” he said, seeming to relish the British word.

  He was on his way to give piano lessons. His pupils were London children whose parents thus far refused to have them evacuated. She was on her way to her office. He left the Tube first. “I hope we meet again, Miss …”

  “Sofrankovitch,” she said. She didn’t tell him that the honorific was properly “Mrs.” Her childless marriage had ended long ago.

  After that, as if the clock previously governing their lives had been exchanged for a different timepiece, they ran into each other often. They met on the narrow winding High Street. They bought newspapers at the kiosk manned by their distinguished-looking housemate. They queued at the greengrocer’s, each leaving with a few damaged apples. They found themselves together at the fishmonger’s. Both were partial to smoked fish, willing to exchange extra ration coupons for the luxury.

  Often, at night, after he came home from work, after she came home, they sat by her gas fire.

  “Providence,” he mused. “And the place of the hurricane?”

  “Narragansett.”

  “Naghaghansett,” he rolled out, his vowels aristocratically long, his consonants irreparably guttural.

  “Something like that,” she said, and smiled into the shadows.

  Eugene had never visited the United States, though as a young man he had studied piano in Paris. “Yes, I heard Boulanger.” Except for that heady time he had not left Germany until three years earlier, when one of the other refugee agencies helped him emigrate to London. Still short of forty then, his parents dead, his sister safely married in Shanghai, his ability to make a living secure—he was one of the easy repatriation cases, she supposed.

  His father, he told her, had fought for the kaiser.

  She had been a young woman during that war. Yes, she knew that Germany had once been good to its Jews, its Jews faithful to their rulers.

  He stretched his long, unmatched legs toward the meager blue flames. “I’m glad we met.”

  One noontime—mirabile dictu, the New York fat man might have said—they ran into each other far from home, in Kensington Gardens.

  “I am attending a concert,” Eugene said. “Come with me.”

  “My lunch break … not much time.”

  “The performers also are on lunch break,” he said. “You won’t be late. You won’t be very late,” he corrected, with his usual slight pedantry.

  They hurried along the streets leading toward the river, passing bomb craters and shelters of brick, of cement, of corrugated iron. Their own shelter, back in Camden Town, was an underground bunker, a crypt, safer than these. But it trembled sometimes, and then little children cried and women paled, and men too. Sonya so
othed whichever toddler crawled into her lap, and smiled encouragement at the child’s mother. It was hard to breathe. Suppose the thing should cave in—they would all suffocate. Being struck above ground, being blasted, being shattered into a thousand pieces like her beach house, that would be better than not breathing … There were times she did not go into the shelter at all, but stayed sitting on the floor in her blacked-out room, arms around shins. Behind her on the windowsill bloomed a sturdy geranium, red in the daytime, purple in this almost blindness. And if the house should be hit, and if she should be found amid its shattered moldings and heaps of glass and smoking bricks, her head at an odd angle, her burnt hair as black as it had been in her youth … if she should be found in the rubble, people would think, if they thought anything at all, that she had slept through the siren. She might have taken a bit too much, the wineshop keeper would say to his wife—he no doubt guessed that his customer sometimes sacrificed food for whisky. She was working so very hard, Mrs. Levinger would remark.

  Eugene led her to a church. Sonya looked up at the organ loft. A few parishioners on their own lunch breaks settled into the empty pews. One slowly lowered his forehead onto the back of the pew in front of him, then lifted it, then lowered it again.

  Downstairs, in a small chapel, a dozen people waited on chairs and two performers waited on a platform. The standing young man held a viola by its neck. The young woman sat at a piano, head bowed as if awaiting execution. A note on the mimeographed program mentioned that these twenty-year-old twins had recently arrived from Czechoslovakia. The performance began. The sister played with precision. Eugene’s fingers played along, on his thighs. The brother made love to his instrument. In the intervals between selections the attentive audience was entertained by faint sounds of organ practice from above. The concert lasted less than an hour. When the twins and their guests filed upstairs, Sonya looked for the parishioner who had banged his forehead against the pew back, but he was gone.

  As Eugene had promised, Sonya was not very late getting back to work. Still, Mrs. Levinger had already returned from lunch. She was on the telephone. She gave Sonya a distracted nod and hung up.

  “The next batch is here,” she said. “The French ones.”

  THE USUAL SETUP: at one end of a large room, volunteers stood at bridge tables; at the other end, a trestle table holding loaves of bread, and biscuits, and plates of sausages, and jugs of milk.

  Forty children who had been fending for themselves for six months now huddled in the middle of the room as if, were they to approach the food, they would be shot.

  One girl’s hair was the color of lamplight.

  Mrs. Levinger hoisted herself onto a folding chair and grasped its back for a moment while her rump threatened to topple her. Then she stood up. Once standing she did not falter or shake.

  Sonya made note of various details—it was part of her job. There was a small pale fellow who looked sick, but the doctors hadn’t detained him. Hunger and fatigue, probably. Two little girls gripped each other’s hands. Many children carried smaller children.

  The fair-haired girl carried an instrument case.

  Mrs. Levinger welcomed them in French. They were being sent to villages in the Cotswolds, she said. Hills, she elaborated. They could keep their belongings. Siblings would not be separated. The host families would not be Jewish. But they would be sympathetic.

  “I am not Jewish, either,” said a dark boy.

  “Ah, Pierre,” reproved a bigger boy. “It’s all right, in this place.”

  The children made their slow silent way to the trestle table.

  Soon all were eating—all except the tall blond girl with the instrument. She seemed about to approach Mrs. Levinger. But it was a feint. She swerved toward Sonya. “Madame …”

  “Oui,” Sonya said. “Voulez vous—”

  “I speak English.” Her eyes were gray. She had a straight nose, a curly mouth, a small chin. “I do not wish to go into the countryside.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Lotte,” she said with a shrug, as if any name would do. “I am from Paris. I wish to stay in London.”

  “Your instrument …”

  “A violin,” Lotte said. “I tried to sell it when we ran out of food in Marseilles, but no one wanted to buy it. I am skilled, madame. I can play in an orchestra. Or in a café—gypsy music.”

  “I wish,” Sonya began. “I cannot,” she tried again. “There is no arrangement in London for refugee children,” she finally said. “Only in the villages.”

  “I am no child. I am seventeen.”

  Sonya shook her head.

  The lids dropped. “Sixteen. Truly, madame.”

  “Call me Sonya.”

  “Merci. Madame Sonya, I am sixteen next month, if I had my papers I could prove it, but my papers were lost, everything was lost, even the photographs of my father, only the violin …” Lotte swallowed. “I will be sixteen in three weeks. Please believe me.”

  “I do.” Mrs. Levinger was glancing at them; other children needed attention. “You must go to the Cotswolds now,” Sonya said. “I’ll try to make some better arrangement.”

  Lotte said, “Empty words,” and turned away.

  “No!” Was she always to be denied sentiment, must she be only efficient forever?—she who was moderately musical. “I love gypsy tunes. Look, this is my address,” she said, scribbling on some brown paper. “I will try to find you a café, or maybe a …”

  Lotte took the paper. Sonya’s last sight of her was on the train, a different train from the one Sonya herself was taking. Lotte stood in the aisle, clasping the violin to her thin chest.

  “I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU A RING,” Eugene said.

  “Oh!”

  “I may be interned.”

  “It won’t happen,” she said, fervently. But it was happening every day. Aliens suspected of being spies—Jews among them—were shut up in yellow prisons.

  Eugene said, “My other suit, my piano scores—they can fend for themselves. But my mother’s ring—I owe it respect. It eluded German customs, it eluded also my own conscience.”

  She glanced at him. In the light of the gas fire his skin looked as dark as the geranium.

  “I should have sold it to repay my rescuers,” he explained. “But it is only a little diamond. And it meant much to my mother.”

  “Ah … your father gave it to her.”

  “Her lover gave it to her. My mother was born in Lyon; in Berlin she retained her French attitude toward marriage. And then, of course, my father was so much older.”

  “Older?” A dozen years separated Sonya and Eugene—she had recently turned fifty-two without mentioning it.

  “Twenty years older.” Eugene fished in his pocket. Something twinkled. He put it into her palm.

  Two weeks afterward he was taken away.

  II.

  BY THE BEGINNING of Sonya’s second year in London she had acquired women friends and men friends and a favorite tearoom and two favorite pubs and several favorite walks. She had adopted the style of the women around her—cotton dresses, low-heeled shoes—but she spurned the brave little hats. She swept her gray hair back from her brow and pinned barrettes behind her ears. Her hair curved like annoyed feathers below the barrettes.

  She knew where to get necessaries on the black market. Occasionally, for her small clients, she used that knowledge. Sometimes she used it for herself—a bottle of contraband cognac was stashed at the bottom of her armoire waiting for Eugene’s return.

  She went to lectures in drafty halls. She went to briefings with people who had recently returned from Vichy and Salonika and Haifa. She went to patched-together concert operas and to stunning theatricals—once, in a theater, she heard Laurence Olivier’s voice rise above the sound of bombs.

  She attended exhibitions of new watercolors. A few times, during the summer, she bathed at Brighton. “You must play!” Mrs. Levinger ordered. She received letters from friends in Rhode Island and her aunt in Ch
icago and the fat man in New York and the tenor and Eugene. She kept track of that first tubercular boy, visited him in his seaside sanatorium. The Yiddish of her childhood stirred, necessarily, during the early visits, but after a few months she discovered that the new words he was learning stuck to him like burrs. Soon they spoke only English. Together they watched the slate-colored sea. Sitting next to his little chaise, his translucent hand in hers, she told him about the hurricane that had sliced her own life in two. “A tall wave smashed onto our cove.”

  “A hill of water,” he experimented. “Yes, yes! A mountain.”

  She kept in touch with the sister, too, in her berth in a cottage. A year after the boy was taken away, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger presided over the reunion of the children, the girl rosy, the boy pale but free of disease. The foster mother agreed to take him, too. “For she pines, she does,” said that kindly soul.

  “OF COURSE YOU REMEMBER Roland Rosenberg,” Mrs. Levinger said.

  “Of course.” They shook hands. He was a little less fat, but it would be tactless to say so. They spoke of work in an unnecessary way—it was as if she knew by heart the papers in his shapeless briefcase, as if he could trace each line on her face back to the situation that had drawn it there. But they did talk, some, in a gloomy restaurant. His table manners were terrible. His handkerchief was a disgrace. That peculiar smile recurred now and again—upturned lips, a look of wonder. Mark Twain, he told her, was a passion with him. Someday he wanted to follow Twain’s journey around the world.

  “And the composers you like?” she idly asked.

  “Franz Lehár is my favorite.”

  Lehár: beloved by Hitler. “Oh dear,” Sonya said.

  “Shameful, isn’t it. The Joint should fire me.”

  There was no cab. When was there ever a cab? He walked her home. “I will be back someday,” he said.

  “Good.” Good? What were they doing to Eugene?

  “THE NEW YORK TIMES, please,” she said one evening, and took the paper from the distinguished gentleman. Standing at the kiosk, she looked at the front page. The war occupied most of it, though there were city scandals, too. The Dakotas were suffering a drought. She folded the paper under her arm—she would read it by lamplight, at home; there were no air raids nowadays.