Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  His father held out a hand to Stefan, who just stood there.

  “Do you smoke a pipe?” he asked his father.

  His father started. “Is that a joke? No, I don’t smoke. I can’t.”

  Stefan moved from the tiny hallway into the living room, and beyond to the kitchen and dining room. Each room was full of built-in wooden cupboards, and thickly trimmed near the floor and up at the ceiling in the same gleaming wood which also made up the window frames and the staircase. It was like being in a box.

  He turned to see Sasha and his father embracing the way Eastern European leaders did on TV—with large showy gestures that camouflaged their real feelings.

  “No Christmas tree,” he said aloud.

  After a silence, his father said, “There wasn’t time.”

  And Stefan looked away, embarrassed, knowing Sasha was probably glaring at him, trying to get him to simmer down.

  “I’m as tall as you are,” he said to his father, who smiled and nodded.

  “How about something hot to eat? The food on the train must have been very bad.”

  Sasha headed for the kitchen, where the windows were steamed over. “It wasn’t really food,” he said. “The idea of food, an image.”

  Stefan sat at the round table. “The sandwiches were okay,” he said, more to be contrary than anything else. And he glanced around the kitchen, which seemed blank and unrevealing.

  “I just moved in last summer,” his father said, lifting the lid of a pot on the stove. “That’s why things seem a little bare.”

  It was as if his father had read his criticism.

  “I had planned on taking you on a tour of the campus and a drive, but I think we might have to stay in for a while. They’re predicting a lot more snow.” His father stirred the pot and closed it. “Let me show you your rooms, and then we can eat.”

  On the way to the stairs, they passed his father’s small study, which barely had room for a leather couch and chair opposite the long crowded desk.

  Heading up the staircase, his father said, “Sasha’s right near the stairs, you’ll be with me,” and Stefan wildly thought his father wanted to share a room with him. Then he realized from the way his father was pointing, that he was at the end of a hall, by himself, but next door to his father. The room was about the same size as Sasha’s back home, and very bland—like a room in a department store advertisement. Stefan put down his suitcase by the bed, avoiding too long a glance at the window, where the thick snow lashed and eddied.

  “You could lie down, if you want.”

  His father stood in the doorway, hands in his pants pockets, looking as tired as Sasha. It’s me, Stefan thought, it’s me being here that makes him sad. But why should that be true? Why couldn’t he have the easy relaxed connection that Louie had with his father, who was always smiling at him, saying, “You make me proud. Just like I knew you would.” And Louie wouldn’t talk back or make a joke then, just nod, accepting the praise like the honest gift it was. Why did Stefan have to have this stranger as his father, this man who wanted something from him and seemed disappointed because he knew Stefan fell short.

  “I slept on the train. But I’m still tired.”

  His father showed him the bathroom, and the linen closet for extra blankets and pillows. Stefan closed the door and slipped out of his clothes in the warm anonymous room, dropping them in a pile near the closet door. Just getting undressed made him think of Louie, and defiantly, he got into bed imagining Louie already there. He rolled onto his stomach and rubbed and rubbed away, glad that he would be messing up his father’s sheets.

  When he woke up it was dark and he felt sweaty under the thick down comforter. He pulled out his bathrobe from the suitcase and went to shower. The large shiny bathroom was neat, he had to admit—black and white tiles everywhere, and the tub was raised off the floor on a little platform set into an arch. He took a long time showering. He dreaded having to emerge and face his father and Sasha. And he enjoyed the hot water covering and massaging him from six different spray heads.

  Toweling his hair dry, he stood nude in front of the long mirror, comparing his body to Louie’s, comparing his face to his father’s, and Sasha’s.

  Something smelled great when he headed downstairs.

  “Goulash,” his father said, setting a place for Stefan. “We’ve already eaten.”

  Stefan wolfed down the delicious stew, wiping the plate with bread several times.

  “Aren’t you thirsty?” his father asked, and Stefan shook his head.

  “You’re just like I was as a boy. I could eat and eat, but I never gained weight.” His father leaned back against the sink, beaming. Was the smile for Stefan or for the memory of himself?

  Sasha was sitting opposite Stefan, and he held a shot glass up to his nose, sniffing. Then he sipped from it.

  “Vodka?” Stefan asked, intrigued because Sasha rarely drank.

  “You want some?” his father asked, reaching for a bottle on the nearby counter.

  Stefan shrugged, momentarily sated. He pushed his chair back, and looked from his father to Sasha and back. He couldn’t help imagining his mother there, too—as if the family they had been had been transported to this out-of-the-way little house.

  “Cool shower,” he said.

  “It’s not original. It was added in the late Thirties.”

  “You own this house?”

  His father nodded.

  “So it’s mine too?”

  “In a way. It can be.”

  Sasha rose to pour himself more vodka, and Stefan’s father said, “Let’s sit by the fire.” Stefan dutifully followed the two men to the living room, which was furnished with thick-armed chairs and couch covered in a maroon material with gold threads running through it. The rug was maroon and gold too. The room looked warm.

  His father took the poker hanging by the open fireplace, stoked the fire, the light flaring across his face. He did look sick to Stefan: thin and even a little frail.

  Sasha was on the couch, eyes closed, head back, and when Stefan’s father sat in the chair opposite Stefan, Sasha snored, lightly.

  They both smiled, and Stefan looked away, into the fire.

  “I like it here,” his father said.

  “How’d you know I was gonna ask you that?”

  His father shrugged. “You’re my son.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  Eyes down, his father said, “That’s true, I suppose.”

  Stefan suddenly felt sorry for his father. It was almost too easy to score points off a man who might be dying.

  “Dad, are you really sick?” he asked quietly.

  His father looked up, surprised, perhaps, by the change in his voice. He nodded. “Maybe I was too quick to call you. But I was afraid something could happen, and then it would be too late.”

  His father explained about tests he needed to take, and the details blurred for Stefan, who felt overwhelmed to be there, to be talking to his father without harshness and distance. If only it could always be like this—sitting by a fire, warm and comfortable.

  “What about Mom?” Stefan asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Do you ever talk to her?”

  “We are very cool,” his father brought out, and the words sounded like something he had memorized.

  “Where’d you learn English?” he asked. His father frowned. “Because the way you said cool, it sounded like you were from England or something.”

  “Well, you know Poland and England had very close ties before—”

  Stefan had read about Poles who had escaped the Nazis and fought with the British. “Were you in the Polish Legion?” he asked, excited, sitting up, leaning out of his chair.

  His father sighed. “No. I was not a hero. I didn’t have a chance.”

  “Then what were you? Why is everything this great big secret, and nobody wants to tell me about the War?” Stefan almost went on to ask his father if he had been a traitor or a spy
, but he was suddenly afraid of his own eagerness.

  Sasha snorted and sat up sharply, blinking, looking around. “I was asleep?”

  “Coffee?” Stefan’s father asked Sasha. And he looked at Stefan too, eyebrows up.

  “I don’t drink it much,” Stefan said, getting up to go to the bathroom.

  “No coffee for me,” he heard Sasha say as he left the room. From the downstairs toilet, he could hear his father and Sasha talking loudly, but it didn’t exactly sound like an argument. What language were they using? It wasn’t Polish or Russian, it sounded a little like German. Dutch? Why would they be talking in Dutch?

  When he opened the door he heard Sasha hiss, “Shah.” No one spoke.

  “I’m going to bed,” Sasha finally said. “I’m exhausted.” And he gave them both curt good night nods.

  “I have some work to do,” his father said, face flushed, and Stefan found himself moving towards his father, to take his hand. Instead, he threw his arms around his father and squeezed, thinking all kinds of wild thoughts. He would come to college here in Michigan and live with his father. But before that, he would tell his father about Louie, tell him everything. His father would understand, he would have to understand.

  “Oh, Stefan,” his father said softly.

  Stefan said good night and headed upstairs. But even though he knew he was tired enough to sleep until the next afternoon, he couldn’t. He tried jerking off, because that sometimes made him sleepy, but he didn’t want to leave where he was, even in fantasy. He found his robe, belted it tightly, and crept to the door as if there were ghosts lying in wait outside. The floor was cold, colder out in the hallway, and the house creaked. He realized that he hadn’t been hearing clanking radiators like back home as he made his way to the top of the stairs. He could see a light from his father’s study.

  In the doorway, he saw his father slumped at the desk, head buried in his arms.

  “Daddy, are you asleep?”

  His father looked up, and Stefan was appalled to see that he had been crying. It was his heart attack, Stefan thought.

  “Sometimes I wish I were dead,” his father said, wiping his eyes with a sleeve.

  Stefan felt pulled into the room as if caught by an undertow at Rockaway. He shivered when he sat on the leather chair, and his father pointed to an afghan on the couch. Stefan got up, wrapped it around himself and nestled into the chair.

  “What does my life mean? I grade examinations, give lectures, read papers at conferences—but it’s all false.”

  He must be drunk, Stefan thought, looking around for a bottle. What else could account for all this? His father was talking to him as if they were equals, as if he knew who his father was. Or maybe it was something else, maybe his father was talking as if he wasn’t there, talking to himself.

  “I don’t know how else to say this,” his father said, head high. “But to say it, is so terrible, so terrible.…”

  “What, Dad? Say what?”

  Covering his face with both hands, his father murmured, “I am Jewish. Your mother is Jewish, Sasha is Jewish. We were born in Poland, but we were never Poles, not really. Not to them.”

  “I’m Jewish?” Stefan said, and he laughed because the words were so ridiculous. “You’re crazy,” he said.

  Now his father sat up straight, and looked right at him. “No, I’m stupid. I thought we could protect you. That’s why we couldn’t stay in Europe after the War. We came here, to hide, to change our lives. But I couldn’t protect you against myself. I had to tell you. I couldn’t face dying with such a burden.”

  “I’m Jewish?”

  His father shrugged.

  Trembling, Stefan pictured himself grabbing his father out of the chair and beating him against the wall, over and over, until he denied it, denied everything, said it was a joke, a mistake, a test. He shut his eyes, but what he saw was worse: The No-Jew Club, and the argument about Winter Eyes, the anxiety about Israel’s war, and the perpetual sadness at Christmas. It was like a horror movie, with everyone huddled in a deserted farmhouse, hoping they could escape the creature, but finding out that the creature had always been inside, disguised as one of them. Everything had been false from the beginning.

  “You lied to me. You always lied. You and Mom and Sasha. I hate you,” Stefan shot, but the words didn’t have any power to destroy his father, which was what he most wanted.

  His father just nodded. “I know.”

  “No wonder Mom always bragged about how her English was so good—it had to be. And that was Yiddish, wasn’t it?” Stefan said. “When you and Sasha were talking before, loud, and you thought I couldn’t hear. So what did you do when I was little—wait till I was asleep to talk Yiddish?” And he felt horribly excluded at the thought, cheated and fooled. He wanted to rush out into the snow and bury himself and never come out, never return.

  “No. We didn’t risk it. We grew up with Polish and Russian too, so—” And his father seemed on the edge of a smile, as if pleased he could maintain the front for all those years.

  “I want to get out of here!” Stefan fled from the door, but at the first window he saw, he stopped. The snow was piled high, getting higher, falling thick and fast, almost to the windows. The one road he could see was like an iceberg—a huge block of white. Stefan stalked through the living room and back, turning on lights. “I want to get out of here.”

  Sasha was coming down the stairs, face as rumpled and creased as his dark blue pajamas.

  “You bastard,” Stefan said to him. “You could have told me anytime. I feel like such an asshole! All those Christmas trees! And the fucking presents! And feeling sorry like a jerk because Louie’s parents really knew how to celebrate. Of course they do! It’s their holiday!” He was shouting now, arms crossed, beating at himself with clenched fists. His father and Sasha stood side by side and he imagined the roof caving in and crushing them.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he snarled at Sasha.

  “That was the agreement. If you lived with me, I had to hide everything.”

  Stefan stopped pacing, his arms dropped to his side. So he hadn’t even won’the battle to live with Sasha. That too was a lie. They had let him believe they were giving in.

  “Why did you do this to me?”

  “We wanted to save you,” his father said, pale and shaken.

  “From what?”

  Sasha hesitated, looked at Stefan’s father, who nodded. “From the past. We were all three in concentration camps. That’s where your grandparents died, and almost everyone else from my family, your father’s.”

  Stefan rushed for the phone. “I’m calling Mom!” But there was silence when he picked up the receiver; he banged it down and listened again. Nothing.

  “The snow,” his father said. “It must be the snow.”

  Stefan ripped the phone from the table, yanked until the cord came out of the wall and then hurled it into the fireplace. Its bell rang, and ashes and bits of wood splattered out onto the rug.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, starting to cry.

  He was trapped.

  Part Three

  Connections

  8

  “How come you never talk to anyone?”

  Stefan shrugged.

  Jenny grinned. “See what I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he brought out, wondering how long Jenny would make him stand there in front of her building. He was safe from being invited upstairs, he knew, because her mother didn’t like company. Jenny leaned back against one of the low ornamental gray stone urns that made the Exeter—already grim and worn, its beige brick dark brown with filth—look more depressing. Jenny had been on the city bus with him but on the other side of a knot of Catholic school girls, all plaids and cursing, so she didn’t talk to him until they got off.

  “You sure you don’t know?” Jenny asked, meaning more than he wanted to understand.

  Stefan shrugged again.

  “See you tomorrow,” she sighed, striding off into
her building. Her legs were very long, he thought, moving off down the crowded block; little kids on and off pushcars were screaming for attention. He crossed Broadway to his quieter, cleaner block and fell into a more even, less anxious step; it was never until he was actually very near home that he began to feel safe. Leaving school, on the bus, or at any point between school and home, disasters flitted at the edge of his thoughts, teasing him almost: cars lurching onto the sidewalk, masonry tumbling off a roof edge, someone gone crazy firing a gun out into the street. They were all much the same to him—sudden, final. And so when he stepped into the beige marble lobby, keys ready, opened the heavy glass-paned door to the coffer-ceilinged and pillared inner lobby, he no longer expected that “anything” could happen.

  The building was safe—riding the elevator was safe—coming in and hearing Sasha with a pupil was safe. He would close the kitchen door and make coffee, leaf through a magazine, half-listen to the radio, check the calendar if a concert was coming up. Most months had at least one red circle—it was these, mostly, that pulled him from day to day. Once, in the school cafeteria, some classmates had been discussing what they believed in. And as assertions and questions hung over their table thickly, like cigarette smoke, he thought that all he believed in was that things went on. He didn’t know what that might mean, completely, but he knew it was true for him. He wondered then what Sasha believed in. Music, probably.

  “So? How was your day?” Sasha would join him in the kitchen for coffee and they’d exchange their days. Then there was dinner, which Sasha still insisted on making by himself (“It relaxes me after a day of false notes”). Stefan would play sometimes, or read, or something. His life had been like this all the years he’d been living with Sasha since the divorce, his father’s illness and recovery, and his mother’s remarriage: ordered, repeating, with the only change the advance from grade to grade, and that didn’t mean very much because he did no better and no worse year after year. Even his playing didn’t seem much improved.

  And Sasha was not his father, not that Stefan ever said that to anyone, but he never said anything else either, so when Stefan was with Sasha and they met someone from school or their parents, it was always “Hello, Mr. Borowski.” Stefan didn’t make introductions or correct the mistake.