From his recess he rumbled: “How are you, Miss Sofrankovitch?”
She turned back. “… Okay, thanks.”
“I have newspapers from Belgrade today, a rare event.”
“Ah, I don’t read Yugoslavian.”
“No? You read French, perhaps. I have—”
“Not really. And not German, either,” she anticipated. “I can read elementary Hebrew, Mr…. ”
“Smith.”
“Smith.” She peered at him, and at the darkness behind him.
“My own parents sold newspapers,” she confided.
“Indeed.”
“Yes, in a store. They sold cigarettes also. Candies, notions. Notions—an Americanism—perhaps you are not familiar with it.”
“Haven’t a notion!” He turned his attention to the next customer. Business first, of course; but how urgently Sonya now wanted to describe to him that small round couple, her parents, that pair of innocents to whom she had been born long after they had given up the idea of family. By then the store itself was their issue—a close, warm cave. In it she grew into a tall girl; graduated from high school, from normal school; from it she married a handsome and untrustworthy boy. She kept the marriage going, and the store too, until both parents were safely dead.
Mr. Smith disposed of his customer. Sonya leaned across the shelf of newspapers. The interior, big enough for two if the two were disposed to be friendly, was adorned with magazines clipped to bare boards, and advertisements for beer. The place was redolent of tobacco, the fragrance of her childhood. She remembered Eugene’s bad teeth, made browner still by his cigarette habit. She inhaled. “I sold the place during the Depression,” she told Mr. Smith. He leaned against a poster: loose lips lose lives. She withdrew her upper body from the booth and again stood erect, continuing her history. “I sold the living quarters, too. I rented an apartment and also bought a … house, a house on the shore. It was destroyed by the hurricane, but perhaps here you didn’t know of the hurricane.”
“Oh, we knew of it. We saw photographs. Comment donc!” he said, turning to another patron who must have been familiar, a little Frenchman in a floorwalker’s frock coat and polished shoes.
Sonya turned away and walked up the High Street toward home.
Home? A wallpapered room with a gas fire. A round table and turnup bed and desk and armchair and radio and lamp and battered armoire. A little locked jewel box in which reposed her mother’s wedding ring; the silk handkerchief from the tenor which he himself had received from a famous mezzo; Eugene’s diamond. Yes, home. Her home was wherever she was. “You have no nesting instinct,” her husband had accused when he was leaving. “Lucky for us we never had a child. You would have kept it in a bureau drawer.”
No mail for her. Up the stairs, then. She boiled two eggs on the stove and put a slice of bread on the toasting fork. She had no butter and no jam but she did have a glass and a half of wine in yesterday’s bottle, and she uncorked it gratefully. She read the paper during this repast, saving the obituaries for last, nice little novelettes, it was unlikely that she’d ever recognize anybody on that page until Roly-poly Rosenberg burst a blood vessel; no, really, he wasn’t the apoplectic type, and he was losing weight, anyway … she read of the tenor’s death.
He had collapsed while singing to a large audience of soldiers at Fort Devens. He was seventy-three. His career had spanned six decades. He had sung all the great roles, though never at the Met. His radio program was popular during the thirties. Its signature song was “The Story of a Starry Night.” He left three daughters and eight grandchildren.
There had been only seven grandchildren when she left; otherwise she could have written the obituary herself.
That night she wept for him. Of course she had been wise not to join her destiny to his. She was not meant for the settled life—not she, not Sonya, not this human leaf that had appeared unexpectedly in an overheated notions store and gotten popped, as it were, into a jelly glass by the proud but bewildered storekeepers. Oh, they had loved her, Mama and Papa; and she had loved them; and she had loved her husband for a while, and some others after him; and she had loved the tenor, too. But her love was airy, not earthbound, and so she could be scooped up like a handful of chickweed by Roland Rosenberg and flung onto the stones of London, there to send out shallow creepers into this borough, that block of flats, the derelict basement over by the river. The children. Sleeplessly she counted them. Some were in the city now. There were two small boys living with a mother who had become deranged when the oldest son was shot dead at the border; those tykes took care of her. There was a family with a dim-witted daughter who herself had borne a dimwitted daughter. “That shouldn’t happen; offspring regress toward the average!” Sonya objected, as if laws of heredity would acknowledge the error and revise the little girl’s intelligence. Mrs. Levinger ignored her outburst. There were teenage girls from Munich working as waitresses who refused to confide in Sonya, though they allowed her to buy them dinner. And …
The scratching at the door could have been a small animal. Had it been preceded by footsteps? Sonya was out of bed immediately, her left hand on the bolt, her right on the knob. Was that the smell of cigarettes? She opened the door.
Lotte stepped across the threshold. Her eyes swiveled from corner to corner. She saw the round table and laid her violin carefully under it. Then she turned and fell into Sonya’s arms.
THEY FEASTED ON BACON in the morning. Lotte had carried it from the farm. Sonya fried it along with a hoarded tomato, and toasted her last two pieces of bread. They dipped the toast into the grease.
“Now we have to talk,” Sonya said, when they had wiped their fingers on her only napkin. Lotte’s fingers were more deliberate than delicate—rather like Eugene’s at the piano.
“The family,” Lotte began. “They were kind. The church organist befriended me. There was a boy at school, too: an English boy, I mean,” and Sonya knew what she meant—the local boy’s attention supplemented but didn’t supplant the calf love of the immigrant boys already attached to her. Such an enchanting sweep of lash.
“The family,” Sonya prompted.
“I left a letter. Don’t send me back. Let me stay here with you.”
It was against the organization’s rules. But the organization’s rules often got ignored. South of the river five teenage boys from Bucharest lived in one room, supporting themselves who knew how, though pickpocketing was suspected. Sometimes Mrs. Levinger hauled them in. “It’s not good for the Jews, what you’re doing.” The boys looked at their feet.
“They endanger our enterprise,” Mrs. Levinger said later to Sonya.
“A couple of them actually work as plasterers.”
“Well, we do need plasterers,” said Mrs. Levinger, deflected. “Rumor has it that they steal only from rich drunks.”
“Rumor! Rumor has it that Winston is planning an invasion. I’ll believe that when it happens. We’re probably going to be invaded.” Sonya imagined Mrs. Levinger picking up the fireplace shovel and banging the heads of Germans foolish enough to enter her office.
Meanwhile the young Romanians lifted wallets in Mayfair. And an unlicensed pair of Polish doctors kept an unlicensed clinic in Clapham Common. Belgians who had arrived with diamonds in their hems sold those diamonds on the black market and decamped for South America, bestowing not one shilling on the agency that had brought them to London, a different agency, but still. “Not against the rules,” Mrs. Levinger mentioned. “Not comme il faut, however.” Sonya thought of Eugene’s mother’s little stone.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Lotte was saying now. “I’ll get a job. I’ll pay my share. You’ll see.”
“WHAT’S THIS ABOUT A FRENCH GIRL?” Mrs. Levinger said a few days later. “I had a letter from a family …”
“She’s with me.”
They exchanged a steady look. “We can manage a small allowance,” said Mrs. Levinger.
“If that becomes necessary,” Sonya said—in
a rather cold voice, since she was almost in tears—“I will let you know.”
It did not become necessary. On Saturday Lotte asked Sonya for a few shillings; also, could Sonya borrow a screwdriver from someone in the building? Well, she’d try. Mr. Smith was at his kiosk. The twittering old lady had gone to live with her daughter. The yellow-eyed man was out. Eugene was of course not in, either. Sonya finally knocked on the secretaries’ door, expecting no luck. But the secretaries owned an entire tool chest; they’d built a hutch for their window. They were raising generations of rabbits. “How … sweet,” said Sonya.
“Cash,” explained one of the young women. “The nobs still love their lapin.”
Sonya came downstairs with the screwdriver to find Lotte returning from the High Street with a brass lock and two keys. Within an hour she had affixed it to the door of the armoire. Then she stowed her violin next to the cognac. She locked the closet. For a moment she sank into the chair. “Safe,” she said, and sighed. Sonya forbore to mention the bombings; perhaps they wouldn’t start again.
Returning the screwdriver, Sonya ran into the landlady. “I have a … guest.”
“I noticed, dearie. I’ll have to charge a bit more.”
Every day Lotte went out looking for work. She came back disappointed. At night they went to concerts. It was like having Eugene back. “At St. Aidan’s—there’s a choir singing tonight,” Lotte would say; or “A basso over at Marylebone—just got here from there.” Scattered musicians formed makeshift ensembles.
“How did you hear about this?” Sonya asked as they drifted home from a trio.
“I went to a music store looking for a job … met some other string players …”
Lotte began to play on street corners. Sonya warned her to watch for policemen. At first she played in outer London. But though small bands of admirers collected (she reported matter-of-factly to Sonya), too few coins fell into the open case at her feet. She moved toward the center of town. She played in Picadilly; in the Strand; near Whitehall. “I saw Churchill,” she exclaimed. Everyone knew that Churchill was directing the war from underground offices, but there were rumors of look-alike doubles, hundreds of them, deployed to fool the enemy and maybe the populace.
In Lotte’s new sites she collected enough money to meet the landlady’s rise in rent, to buy cheese and smoked fish and peaches, to insist that Sonya always take the greater share. “You are my patron, my benefactor, my angel.”
“I repudiate those roles. This peach is heavenly.”
“My mother, then … no, no, you are too young.”
“Hardly too young.”
“Big sister!”
Sonya was still on loan to Mrs. Levinger from the Joint, but Mrs. Levinger’s mandate had altered. Few refugees managed to get in now, but there was plenty to do for the ones already here. Families were starving. Sonya made rounds with ration books, with money, sometimes with piecework from factories—she might have been a foreman sweating workers. Lotte fiddled for coins.
One spring evening Sonya decided to cross the river before going home. No raids for a long time now, just a few planes every so often, scared off by the ack-ack guns. On the embankment she saw a clown … no, it wasn’t a clown, it was a girl. Yes, it was a clown: Lotte.
She was near a bombed-out site beginning to be rebuilt. Those plasterers—were the Romanian boys among them? Lotte wore wide plaid trousers underneath her usual skimpy jacket. She had found a diplomat’s homburg—snatched it, maybe—and she had blacked the space between her upper teeth and darkened some of her freckles. Her pale hair foamed beneath the hat. She played the street repertoire that she practiced at home—Kreisler, Smetana, Dvorák—with exaggerated melancholy and exaggerated vivacity. “To make their eyes water,” she’d explained. “To give them a swooping finale.”
After the swooping finale she walked among the loiterers, her hat upside down in her hand. When she came to Sonya she bowed. Teasingly she shook the hat. Sonya reached into the pocket of her raincoat but Lotte moved on.
The listeners drifted away. A smiling Lotte returned to Sonya. “Let’s feast!”
“Those clothes!” Sonya smiled back.
The homburg turned out to be a trick hat, collapsible. Lotte shed the wide trousers with one twist of her nimble hips, revealing a pleated skirt, one of the two she owned. With trousers and hat in one hand and the violin in the other she led the way to a pub.
They sat in a corner booth, the two of them—three, counting the instrument. Lamplight streamed through stained-glass windows into the noisy place.
“I did well today,” Lotte said, handing the money to Sonya, who knew better than to refuse. “But I would prefer a steadier income.”
“You should be at school,” Sonya moaned.
“Soon I will find a place in an orchestra. Or a nightclub.”
Sonya ordered a second whisky.
Roland Rosenberg appeared the next week and stayed for forty-eight hours. Though still fat he was thinner and worn. But: “You are losing weight, Sonya Sofrankovitch,” he had the nerve to say. “Take care of yourself.”
And then—Lotte’s mad dreams came true. A restaurateur heard her, hired her, provided crepe trousers and a sequined jacket. Café Bohemia was a hodgepodge of banquettes, murals, gilt, and salvage. Sonya dropped in one or two nights a week.
There were no more eye-watering swoops, no more glittering glissandi. She played Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn. She looked twice her age, Sonya thought. But then Sonya herself probably looked twice hers.
Lotte found a trio—two old men and one old woman—who wanted a second violinist. “They play very well,” Lotte commended, “though none of them is Jewish.” The recitals were free, but the performers were paid, sometimes, by a foundation in Canada. Lotte had to rifle the account she shared with Sonya to buy a blue dress with a collar—the sequined outfit was not considered appropriate.
She had every right to rifle the account. She was contributing more than Sonya. She bought a fold-up cot and no longer had to sleep on the floor. She bought a second geranium, and whisky, though she herself drank only an occasional glass of wine. And when Sonya turned fifty-three, Lotte bought a pair of train tickets. They journeyed to Penzance for a weekend and stayed in a hotel and walked on the beach, holding hands like sisters.
ONE pause TWO. ONE pause TWO.
A Sunday afternoon. Lotte was out playing with the quartet.
ONE TWO, ONE TWO.
Sonya opened her door. This time it was he.
THE WAR HAS GONE ON so long it seems like peace, Sonya wrote to her aunt. One day is like another. No new horrors, just old ones. She wondered if the letter would get by the censors.
Eugene was busy. Perhaps, to compensate for his unfair internment, someone was pulling strings. So many people were making so many unseen efforts. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger continued the quiet tasks of their agency, more and more of them against the rules. The yellow-eyed man upstairs spent weeks at Bletchley Park, the center of code-breaking efforts. Lotte fiddled on corners when she had a free afternoon. Mr. Smith, so adept at inviting confidential disclosures, was discovered to be a spy and was arrested.
Eugene wrote reviews for newspapers. Sonya helped occasionally with sentence structure. New families wanted him to teach their children, who were practicing Czerny in formerly grand neighborhoods now sparkling with shards. He gave performances, too. He joined Lotte’s quartet from time to time and played trios with Lotte and the cellist and duets with Lotte. When the two could, they practiced in the church where Eugene and Sonya had listened to the Czech brother and sister. “Such a good piano,” Eugene said.
Sonya brought her families to the concerts—the couple and their retarded daughter, once; the half-crazy mother and her little boys, several times; the young waitresses; the pickpocket plasterers.
Of course—she told herself—all couples who played together developed affinities. Some had affinities from birth—consider those Czech twins, consider the Menuhins. Eugene and
Lotte were not brother and sister, though they could be father and daughter. Twenty years lay between them. She calculated again. Twenty-four! She thought of the tenor … Eugene’s brown profile bent over the keys. His mouth grimaced, sucked. Lotte nestled her chin onto her handkerchief. The fingers of her left hand danced. There were dark patches under the arms of the blue dress. At night, on her cot, she sometimes cried out, in French.
One evening Sonya came home to an empty room smelling of cigarettes. She put the milk she was carrying on the sill next to the geraniums. There was a chapel a block away—an ugly little dissenters’ place. She went there and sat in a back pew and rested her brow on the back of the pew in front of her, and lifted her head, and brought it down again on the wood, and lifted it, and brought it down.
III.
THE FIRST OF THE DOODLEBUGS struck a week after the D-day landings. They struck again and again. They were not like the bombs of the earlier Blitz. There was no time to get to a safe place; there was no safe place. People simply flattened themselves, waiting to be hurled, impaled, shattered, blown to bits, buried alive. If they were far enough away from the site they might be spared.
“The end is near, the end is near,” the landlady told Sonya. “The end is near,” sighed the parents of the damaged daughter. “Hitler’s last gasp,” Mrs. Levinger declared. Sonya thought that the Führer seemed to have a lot of wind left in his lungs, but all she said was that the demented mother and her boys must be gotten out of London. “Maybe that house in Hull.” For half an hour they discussed the pros and cons of the children being incarcerated in a virtual bedlam, each woman supplying the other’s arguments like the friends they had become. They resolved on a more farm-like retreat, and Sonya made the arrangements.
Work continued, rebuilding continued; even concerts.
One day at half past noon Sonya was eating an apple on a bench in Hyde Park when she heard the familiar hum. She continued to chew. She saw the flying bomb, there was just one, it was only a bomb, they were all only bombs. Some, she’d been told, failed to explode. This one exploded, south of the park. She was still chewing.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 15
