Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  Smoke rose, dark gray and thick, and the sounds she heard now were sirens and further explosions and buildings crashing and shrieks, and footsteps, her own among them, for she was running across the park, her apple still in her hand, toward the bomb, because the place of the bomb was the place of that church, wasn’t it? And they were rehearsing this noontime, weren’t they? She ran across the King’s Road; and now she was part of a mob, some rushing along with her, some against her. Sides of houses had vanished. Faces were black. She stumbled over a woman, stopped; but the woman was dead. She ran on. An arm poked out of a heap of stones. She stopped again and this time helped a fireman dig at the stones and extricate a woman, still alive thank God, and a baby protected by the woman’s other arm, the baby too was alive thank God thank God. The smoke made it hard to breathe. Buildings kept falling. There was the smell of scorched flesh. Sonya reached the street of the church. The church was blasted. There was already a cordon; how fast the municipality had worked; no more than ten minutes had passed; these brave people; but she would simply have to get under the rope. Her apple was gone. She stooped. “Miss!” Somebody strong yanked her by her hips. She whirled into the arms of a red-faced man in a helmet and saw, over his shoulder, Eugene, his brow dark, bruised in fact, and Lotte, filthy. They were holding hands. In her free hand Lotte held the instrument case. They had not been in the church, they explained when she reached them. They had lingered at home.

  THE BARRAGE CONTINUED for months. Only storms kept the planes away. Sonya prayed for a hurricane. Churchill conceded that London was under attack. The flying bombs did not cease until three weeks before victory.

  But earlier still—five weeks before victory—Lotte and Eugene left for Manchester. The director of the new civic orchestra there had heard Lotte playing with the quartet, had offered her a job. There would be pupils for Eugene.

  Lotte had been sharing Eugene’s bed since the day the doodle-bug struck the church. But the night before leaving, she scratched on Sonya’s door. She put on the old clothes—the hat, the plaid trousers. She played “Someday I’ll Find You” and “I’ll See You Again.”

  In the morning all three walked to the Tube and rode to the station. Even next to Eugene and Lotte, Sonya saw them as if from a distance—two gifted émigrés, ragged, paired. Father and daughter? Step-siblings? Nobody’s business. As soon as they boarded the train they found a window and stared through it, their loved faces stony with love of her. She wondered how long Lotte would flourish under Eugene’s brooding protection, how soon she would turn elsewhere. She was French, wasn’t she, and Frenchwomen were faithless … His mother’s diamond! She lifted her left hand in its disreputable glove and pointed toward the place of a ring with her right index finger.

  On the other side of the window Eugene shook his head. Yours, he mouthed.

  So Sonya sold the ring. It fetched less than she’d hoped—the stone was flawed. She bought a voluminous raincoat made out of parachute material. She bought new gloves and some dramatic trousers. She stashed the rest of the money.

  IV.

  “IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME,” Sonya said, once Mrs. Levinger had left them alone.

  “Oh, I wanted to visit,” Roland said. “When I was in Lisbon, in Amsterdam … But each time, something sent me elsewhere.” He shifted in his ill-fitting jacket. He had lost more weight. Mrs. Levinger had hinted that he was some kind of hero.

  They left the office and walked into wind and rain. Sonya’s new coat swirled this way and that; it got drenched though it was supposed to be water-repellent; it dragged her backward. Finally she lifted its skirts, so as to be more easily blown to wherever he was taking her.

  A pub. They sat down. Sonya knew he would not mention the nature of the work he had done, and he didn’t—not during the first beer, not during the second. So: “Where now?” she asked, resting her worn-out hands on the worn-out table.

  He told her about the Displaced Persons camps. He was going to the one at Oberammergau. “I hope you will join us. Your persistence, your intelligence, your accommodating nature …” She waved away his words with her right hand and he caught it midair. “I will stop this talk, though it is not flattery. I invite you to Oberammergau.”

  “I speak no German.”

  “But you are musical,” he reminded her. He caught her other hand, though it couldn’t be said to be in flight, was just lying there on the table. “Sonya Sofrankovitch. Will you come?”

  She was silent for several moments. His odd smile—would she ever get used to it, to him?—told her how much he wanted to hear yes.

  “Yes,” she said.

  PURIM NIGHT

  CAMP GRUENWASSER WAS PREPARING for Purim, that merry celebration when you must drink until you cannot distinguish the king from the villain, the queen from the village tart.

  “Purim?” Ludwig inquired.

  He was twelve—pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin Before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat.

  “Purim is a holiday,” Sonya said. She was fifty-six, also pale and thin by nature. She had spent the war in London; now that it was over she was codirector of this camp for Displaced Persons. What a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty, they were; homeless, they were; despised. “Purim celebrates the release of the Jewish people. From a wicked man.”

  “Release. Released by the Allied forces?”

  “No, no. This was in Shu, Shu, Shushan, long ago …” She said long ago in English. The rest of the conversation—all their conversations in the makeshift, crowded office where Ludwig often spent the afternoon—was conducted in German. Ludwig’s was the pedantic German of a precocious child, Sonya’s the execrable German of an American with no talent for languages. Her Yiddish was improving at Camp Gruenwasser, though. Yiddish was the camp’s lingua franca, cigarettes its stable currency.

  “Shu, Shu, Shushan,” Ludwig repeated. “A place of four syllables?”

  Sonya briefly closed her eyes. “I was repeating an old song, a line from an old song.” She opened them again and met his reddish-brown gaze. “Haman was the name of the wicked man. The heroine was a queen, Esther. Speaking of queens …”

  “We were not.”

  “We were not what?”

  “We were not speaking of queens.”

  “Even so,” Sonya said. “A set of chessmen came in with the allotments yesterday. It is lacking only a pawn. A stone—can you employ a stone?”

  “Yes. Also my uncle keeps his corns in a box for just such purposes.”

  Sonya dragged a rickety chair to the wall underneath a shelf, and climbed up on it, and retrieved the box of chessmen. She gave it to Ludwig.

  He was scurrying off when Ida said, “Wait.” Ida was the secretary, a Person who had been a milliner Before. “I will tell about Purim, you should know, a Jewish boy like you.”

  He paused mid-flight, back against the wall, eyes wide as if under a searchlight. “In Shu, Shu, Shushan long ago,” Ida said in English, with a nod to Sonya, then continued in German, “there was a king, Ahasuerus; and a general, Haman; and Mordecai, a wise Jew who spent his time by the gates of the palace. King Ahasuerus’s queen offended him so he called for a new queen. Mordecai …” and she used an unfamiliar word.

  Sonya ruffled through her German-English dictionary. “Procured? I’m not sure …”

  “… procured his niece, Esther,” Ida said, her dark eyes insistent. “Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman arranged to murder the Jews. Esther, the new queen now, urged Ahasuerus to stop the murder. The Jews were saved.”

  “Procured …” Sonya still objected, and Ludwig, still pinned to the wall, said, “It was a miracle, then.”

  “A miracle,” Ida said, and nodded.

  “I do not believe in miracles, especially miracles accomplished by the fuck.” The word wedged its Anglo-Saxon bluntness into the German polysyllables. The vocabulary of children had been augmented
by American servicemen. But the GIs were not responsible for the hasty and brutal lovemaking Ludwig had witnessed in forest huts, in barns by the side of the road, in damp Marseille basements.

  “A girl with good looks and a beautiful hat can work miracles,” Ida said. “Withholding the fuck. And that word, Ludwig, it is improper.” She returned to her typewriter. Ludwig ran away.

  Sonya, who had more to do today than three people could accomplish in a week, strolled to the narrow window. It was February, mid-afternoon. Shadows were deepening in the courtyard formed by the long wooden barracks so hastily abandoned by the Wehr-macht that Persons continued to find gun parts, buttons, medals, and fragments of letters (“Heinz, Leibling, Der Kinder …”). There was still a triangle of sunlight in the courtyard, though, and ragged children were playing within it, and Ludwig should be among them, would have been among them if he weren’t a peculiar child who preferred the company of adults.

  The year was 5707 by biblical reckoning and 1947 by the Christian calendar. The Purim party would begin after dinner. There would be pastries—hamantaschen: Haman’s hats. Without those pastries the holiday might as well be ignored; without those pastries the megillah—the tale, written on a scroll—might as well be stuffed into a cistern. Tonight’s necessary hamantaschen—they would be a joke. Men who had been chefs Before knew how to bake Sacher tortes, linzer tortes, all kinds of sweets; but where was the sugar, where the nuts? Today, using coarse flour and butter substitute and thin smears of blackberry preserves, they would bake ersatz hamantaschen, one or two per individual. Sonya did not know whether the practical bakers considered babies individuals, though babies certainly counted to the Red Cross and the American command—each infant received its own vitamin-laced chocolate bars and its own Spam and its own cigarettes. Sonya could not procure sufficient tinned milk, however … As for the meal preceding the party, it would consist of the usual dreck: watery spinach soup, potatoes, and black bread. Eisenhower had decreed that the Displaced Persons camps be awarded two thousand calories per Person per day; decent of him, but the general couldn’t keep count of newcomers, they came in so fast.

  “In my atelier I served the most distinguished and cosmopolitan women,” Ida mused, her hands at rest on the typewriter keyboard. “I fashioned turbans and cloches and toques.”

  “Cartwheels and mantillas,” encouraged Sonya, who had heard this reminiscence before.

  “I spoke five languages. I made —”

  “Sonya!” came the voice of Roland, Roland Rosenberg, Sonya’s codirector. “Sonya?” and he followed his voice into the office, his eyes flickering over the beauteous Ida and coming to rest on Sonya’s narrow visage. He still had a fat man’s grace, even a fat man’s circumference, though he was losing weight like all the staff. “Sonya, the Chasids in the north building refused to share their megillah. They boycotted the general service.”

  “The Enlightenment Society also boycotted,” Ida remarked. “They held a seminar on Spinoza.”

  “The blackberry jam—there’s so little of it. Goddamn!” Sonya said. She was subject to sudden ferocity these days. It was the Change, Ida told her knowingly, though Ida herself was only thirty-five.

  “Poppy seeds—why couldn’t they send poppy seeds,” said Roland. “I requested poppy seeds.” Consulting a list, he left as unceremoniously as he had entered.

  “Roland, it’s all right,” Sonya called after him. “The kindly German farmers—they will certainly butcher some calves for our party.” She was in the doorway now, but he had rounded the corner. “Whipped cream will roll in like surf.” She raised her voice, though he was surely out of earshot. “General Eisenhower—he will personally attend.”

  “Sonya,” Ida said in a severe tone. “It is time for your walk.”

  ABOUT PURIM LUDWIG HAD DISSEMBLED. Feigning ignorance was always a good idea; know-it-alls, he’d observed, tended to get beaten up or otherwise punished. In fact, he’d already heard the story of Esther, several times. First from the young man in the room next door, the one with the radiant face. Ludwig, recognizing the radiance, predicted that the young man would get caught in the next X-ray roundup. Meanwhile the feverish fellow did a lot of impromptu lecturing, even haranguing. Did he think he was the Messiah? grumbled Uncle Claud. One day last week he’d gathered a bunch of children around him and recited the Purim tale. He made a good thing of it, Ludwig thought from the periphery of the circle; he almost foamed at the mouth when reciting the finale, the hanging of Haman and his ten sons, the slaughter of the three hundred conspirators. Then the story had been taken up in the schoolroom on the second floor of the north building, where grimy windows overlooked in succession the one-storied kitchen and the grubby garden, all root vegetables—well, this was a stony patch, said Uncle Claud, his voice rumbling like a baron’s; we cannot expect the chanterelles we scraped from the rich soil in the south of France. Past the garden a road led between farms to the village of tiled roofs. Beyond the village green hills gently folded. The Judaica teacher, not looking through the window at this familiar view, had begun the Purim story by reading it in Hebrew, which maybe half a dozen kids could understand. He translated into Yiddish and also Russian. His version, a droning bore in all three languages, insisted that the Lord, not Esther, had intervened to save the Jews. The history teacher said that night that there was no justification for this interpretation in Scripture. A day later the philosophy professor referred to the story as a metaphor.

  “Metaphor?” Ludwig inquired, and presently learned the meaning of the term. He loved learning. He liked to hang around the office because Roland, without making a big thing of it, let fall so many bits of knowledge, farted them out like a horse. Sonya, too, was interesting to observe, hating to argue but having to argue, hating to persuade but having to persuade. She’d rather be by herself, reading or dreaming, Ludwig could tell; she reminded him of his mother … And Ida with her deep beautiful eyes and her passionate determination to go to Palestine; if only Uncle Claud would fuck her, maybe all three would end up in the Holy Land, well, not so holy, but not a barracks, either. He’d heard that people there lived in tents with camels dozing outside. But Uncle Claud preferred men.

  Even without the story, Ludwig would have noticed Purim. The Persons in the camp—those who were not disabled, paralyzed with despair, stuck in the TB hospital, too old, too young, or (by some mistake in assignment) Christian—the Persons were loudly occupied with the holiday. In the barrack rooms, behind the tarps and curtain strips that separated cubicle from cubicle, costumers rustled salvaged fabrics; in stairwells, humorists practiced skits; in the west building, raisins fermented and a still bubbled. In the village, Persons were exchanging cigarettes and candy bars for the local wine. “Sour and thin,” sneered Uncle Claud, who hid among his belongings a bottle of cognac procured God knew how. Uncle Claud smoked most of his cigarette allotment and also Ludwig’s, and so he rarely had anything to barter. The cognac—Ludwig thought of it as a foretaste of the waters of Zion. “Zion has no waters,” Uncle Claud insisted. Every night he gave Ludwig a fiery thimbleful, after their last game.

  They owned a board. Sometimes they were able to borrow chessmen, but usually they rented those of a Lithuanian in the next room, the fervent Messiah’s room. The Lithuanian didn’t care for chess but happened to own the set of his brother, now ashes. He wouldn’t lend, wouldn’t sell, would only lease. Claud had to relinquish a cigarette for the nightly pleasure.

  But now … Ludwig parted the shredded canvas that was their door, sat down on the lower bunk beside his uncle. “Look!” he said, and shook the box Sonya had given him like a noisemaker.

  Claud smiled and coughed. “The Litvak—he can kiss my backside.”

  WHEN SONYA LEFT THE OFFICE, Ida resumed typing. She was doing requisitions: for sulfa drugs; for books; for thread; for food, food, food.

  Dear Colonel Spaulding,

  You are correct that the 2000 calories Per Person Per Day are Supplemented by Red Cross packages and
purchases from the village. But the Red Cross packages come unpredictably. Some of our Persons will not eat Spam. And though we must turn a blind eye to the Black Market, it seems unwise to encourage its use. Our severest need now is dried fruit—our store of raisins is completely wiped out—and sanitary napkins.

  Yours Very Truly,

  Sonya Sofrankovich

  Ida ran a hand through her hair. It was as dense and dark as it had been ten years earlier, when she was captured, separated from the husband now known to be dead, oh Shmuel, and forced to work in a munitions factory. Not labor camp, not escape from labor camp, not the death in her arms of her best friend, oh Luba, not recapture, not liberation; not going unwashed for weeks, not living on berries in the woods, not the disappearance of her menses for almost a year and their violent return; not influenza lice odors suppurations; not the discovery in the forest of an infant’s remains, a baby buried shallowly, dug up by animals; not the one rape and the many beatings—nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair. Her hair betrayed her expectance of happiness. And where would she find this happiness? Ah, b’eretz, in the Land. Milliners, she had been informed by the emissary from the Underground, barely concealing his disgust … Milliners were not precisely what the Land required. Do you think we wear chapeaux while feeding our chickens, Giverit? Perhaps you intend to drape our cows with silken garlands. Sitting on a wooden chair, hands folded in her lap, she told him that she would change careers with readiness, transform herself into a milkmaid, till the fields, draw water, shoot Arabs, blow up Englishmen. Then she leaned toward this lout of a pioneer. “But if cities arise b’eretz, and commerce, and romance—I’ll make hats again.” He looked at her for a long time. Then he wrote her name on his list. Now she was waiting for the summons.