Ghita Schwarz

by Displaced Persons (v5)

  And perhaps it had been hard for Chaim when Hinda appeared, for the more Pavel had worked hard to connect himself with Kuba, and to bring Hinda into their little house life, the more Chaim and Fela returned to the strange togetherness they had with each other, as if they were conversing in silence, as if they were pretending to be brother and sister again. Chaim had not liked Marek. He rubs at me, he had said.

  It had made Pavel smile. This skinny man? He only senses how intelligent you are. For this reason he is not so friendly.

  But Fela had believed Chaim. You think you know everything, Pavel, but really you are naive, an innocent.

  I, an innocent? He had laughed out loud at the sentence. The man is a childhood friend of my brother-in-law. What is there not to trust?

  But now again in Marek’s apartment Pavel thought, It will be good to return to my sister, even in a new place, even in America. Even if there is a new language to learn and use. It was significant, real blood.

  Aloud to Marek he said, I have had word today. I have a feeling we will be going soon.

  Marek glanced at him. You paid?

  No! Not in money, legitimate. But—and I tell you this in confidence—

  Of course—

  I have something of value.

  Stones, Marek said.

  Pavel started. How could Marek know? Even Fela did not know, even Hinda—he might have mentioned to Hinda that he had valuables, but specifics, never—no one knew. Still he kept himself calm. Yes, Pavel said, I have stones. Who told you?

  I heard you mention it once—you have forgotten, no matter.

  I want to make a deal with them, and I want you to help me. Pavel opened his jacket, reached down into the inside pocket, and took the velvet pouch into his hand. For a brief moment he felt embarrassed, ashamed, almost idolatrous. But he shook away the thought. What had Fishl done with his share of the stones? He had taken advantage early. Now the opportunity was upon Pavel, and he would use it to arrive in the new country with resources, with a way to care for his wife and new child without depending on anyone. He shook the pouch over his spread palm and stretched his hand—glittering—out toward his partner.

  Once, said Marek, you said coffee is better than diamonds.

  It still is, said Pavel.

  Maybe, said Marek, maybe not.

  I do not need luxuries. I need to make a safe journey for my family. If I sell here, I can have a little more safety.

  So?

  So. So I ask you—I don’t want it around that I have this—I worry for interference from the authorities, so close now to the departure. You can take ten percent from me, but I need for you to make the transaction.

  Marek was silent.

  I entrust them to you. Even my wife doesn’t know I—

  Of course! Marek burst in. Why should she know?

  My man is in Hamburg. Not the buyer, but the intermediary. I have an appointment with Yidl Sheinbaum to discuss our papers. You do it, you meet this Hollander, then if you are still here when we go—

  Ah, said Marek. Probably.

  You have him as your connection. And that is that!

  Marek paused. How will he know if they are real?

  Pavel sighed. Marek. He already knows. That is why he wants to buy them. Call to him today, then we will travel tomorrow together to Hamburg. I’ll hold them until then.

  They brought out their ledgers.

  ON MONDAY, PAVEL AWOKE to the sound of light rain. Soft wind hit the windows from the west, and Pavel pulled on his robe to look out. It was unusually dark, although the storm was not heavy. Yes, it would get worse.

  He leaned at the windowpane, staring. Soon—but how long had he been standing there? ten minutes? an hour?—the sky began to brighten. Fela was not yet up. She slept longer now, deeper. She had not even moved when he got up from the bed; she remained on her side, spine curled away from him, body forming a semicircle, as if to protect the baby. This one had gone farther than all the ones before; the camp doctor assured them that this time, this time, things looked different. Fela even looked different, her amber hair lighter and thicker, her fine skin more easily flushed. She was past one of the danger points.

  The first time she had lost a pregnancy, Chaim had discovered her, kneeling by her bed, dress dark with blood. Chaim had had the good sense to leave her there and bicycle for a military doctor; when he returned he had vomited the whole night through, Pavel pacing, witnessing the two of them in their sickness. Blood scared him also, especially the blood of a woman. His own mother had died within a day of giving birth to his youngest brother, so long ago. But the sight of both Fela and Chaim, their insides spilling, made him contain himself. He could remain composed, the eldest keeping watch. Chaim had been a nightwatch himself in the forest, he had told them—but now look: just a child, made ill and frightened by a terrible sight.

  She would be a mother, Fela. She had a mother’s instincts: leave this place. She had wanted to go to Palestine when Chaml had left—they had clung to each other when Chaim departed, and Pavel himself had wept. But Pavel had wanted to wait for the chance at America. And now he felt he had been right.

  HAVE YOU HEARD? SAID Yidl. It was the next afternoon, and Yidl’s face was bright, excited but not upset.

  No, said Pavel, cigarette loose in the corner of his mouth.

  Kresser, said Yidl. He hanged himself.

  Pavel looked at him. He felt his hand move toward his mouth, take out the cigarette, feel the heat come closer to the tips of his fingers.

  He managed a word: No. But as Pavel said it he realized he had already known, known on his way out of the kitchen this morning, belly warmed with sweet coffee, knew on his way up the stairs, as he’d looked at the calm face of Yidl’s secretary, as he’d sat down in Yidl’s wooden chair. He had already known when he left the jail yesterday, when Kresser had smiled, so lightly, as Pavel turned on his way out the door. Still Pavel said, No. Impossible.

  Yes, said Yidl. He did. In the end we were spared. Now there will be no trial after all.

  The committee would arrange for the burial. Would Pavel come? Of course, Pavel said, of course. But he wanted to go in his own car. He could not, he would not engage in the politics, the committee talk that would scatter in and out on the hour-long drive to Bremen.

  I will join you, he said. But I first—I had an appointment, I did not expect—

  Marek waited for him in the entryway of the Roundhouse office. He shrugged as Pavel changed the directions; they would go to Bremen, make their plans on the road there.

  Pavel, you are upset, said Marek. Let me drive. You have the money?

  Of course I have the money. Pavel frowned. Sewn inside. I’ll show you when we get there.

  It was true, Pavel was too agitated to drive. He slipped into the passenger seat and gave Marek the key. The noise of the motor soothed him. Perhaps Marek would not expect Pavel to speak right away. He had surprised himself the day before with his ability to speak even a few words to Kresser. Speak, speak, Yidl had urged him as they had walked into the American jail. But Yidl was completely without inhibition about speaking. He could recite the most painful events, horrors about which no one wanted to hear, not the victorious armies, certainly not the vanquished. He could speak with great eloquence if not detail. Yidl would transform this terrible thing, this Kresser death, into a fable, a morality tale, or better, into a tiny, invisible item in the camp news, to be read only in Yiddish by refugees.

  He hanged himself. Pavel heard and reheard Yidl’s rushed words: He hanged himself.

  Once Kresser had almost killed Pavel. And now Pavel had had a hand, perhaps not a hand, but a push, a light push, in Kresser’s end. One more death. Did it matter? And what a one! A criminal, a piece of human dirt, refuse.

  But also a man, a criminal man. He was surprised at his own shock and horror: that a man could die like this, and that Pavel could think on it and think on it. His own wife’s miscarriages had been less strange—more painful, more grievous, but l
ess strange. It was odd, unfamiliar: the death of one man, alone in a cell, meant something. One death meant something important.

  Yes, it was a new time he was in, a new time, if he could think on one death. Death would continue, but it would be individual and strange, mourned. Kresser would have his own grave, and men would cover his coffin with dirt.

  Funny. Pavel would know where Kresser was buried, but not the site of the body of his own father. His father had always said he would not allow himself to be gassed, he would be shot first, he would force them to shoot him, and Pavel hoped he had had his wish. But many had pledged this to themselves and then held on to the last shreds of hope that what they knew would happen could not happen. But his father, so stubborn, so rigid, surely he had gotten his wish—

  Very difficult, said Marek.

  Hmm? said Pavel.

  The rain makes it difficult to see.

  Pavel looked over at the steering wheel, the hands of Marek, thick and dry. He thought suddenly of a young boy he had recently hired to act as a messenger for him, a German boy, with pale, delicate fingers. Not a rural one. And young—too young to have been in the army. Clean hands, perhaps. A quick rage flew through Pavel, rage at this boy, who surely would know where his parents were buried. Pavel had asked—for no reason, it had just fallen out of his mouth—where the boy’s parents were, and the young man had answered. He felt his forehead steaming, and he leaned against the car window. What had the boy answered? Father is wounded, he sits at home. Mother, she—

  The boy had continued talking, but Pavel did not remember what he had said. He had not wanted to know what this German boy’s mother did to help them scrape for food. Where was Pavel’s mother? Buried, thank God, buried, for this they were lucky, but the graveyards—he had heard that the Jewish cemetery in Krakow was a great rubble, the wall and stones crushed. He had a sudden vision of his mother’s grave as it had been when he last saw it, steady and whole. The urge seized him, coursed through him like water—he would go before leaving for America. He had been to Berlin, to the Russian zone, when he heard that his aunt, his mother’s youngest sister, had survived, come back from Russia to take a job with the Communists, he had surprised her and she almost fainted—why had he not gone to Poland to see the grave?

  Kresser would have a grave. Perhaps not a completely right burial—it would be hard to find a rabbi to bury a suicide, not to say a criminal, an accomplice to murderers—but a grave, his own dark space. And a group of men saying Kaddish, a tainted Kaddish, to be sure, but a Kaddish.

  This man would have a grave. How strange, how strange, that a man with a hand in others’ deaths would survive to die, to take his own life and rest alone, with a private coffin and a private grave. This man, of all men, would have a grave.

  The car made a quick swerve. Pavel’s side of the car almost collided with a barrier. Marek! he said.

  Ay, said Marek. This road hasn’t been the same since the bridge was rebuilt—

  So drive more slowly, answered Pavel.

  Early on in the war Perla’s father had stopped Pavel from certain suicide. Pavel had met him only once, having been pulled into a minyan against his will, he was hiding—when the police had broken in and taken several of the men. Pavel had jumped out a window. Then they threatened to kill all of them—this was at the start of it, when they still threatened first—unless Pavel turned himself in, and Perla’s father had stopped him. Miloch, the father had begged. Miloch, you have everything to live for. An enormous bribe had been paid, and all but one of the men had been freed, although what happened to them later—and of course the one man, Weil—how by chance it all was—and no doubt Perla’s father himself was long since ash—but Pavel’s choice, Miloch’s choice, had been different, Kresser’s soul had been sick—

  Marek made a quick turn, swinging the car on Pavel’s side centimeters from a lamppost.

  Marek! Pavel said again, suddenly present. You are always a good driver! What is it now?

  Perhaps something is wrong with the car, said Marek, not looking at him. I don’t feel I have control over the steering.

  It was in order this morning when I drove it. Pavel peered through the fog of the window at the hammering rain. It was still morning, but the sky was a night sky, gray as charcoal, striped with flashing light.

  It really is hard to see, protested Marek.

  Something in his voice scratched at Pavel. A tickle of doubt. But there were lights coming up, coming closer.

  A train station, said Pavel. We’ll stop there and I’ll drive. I do not know what is wrong with you.

  Another swerve, a shouted curse from someone—was it his own voice?—and his body twisting and spinning.

  IN CAMP, TIME HAD passed in anguished routine, the morning roll call, the distribution of bread, the march to work, the evening roll call, repeated and repeated, the routine interrupted only by violent incidents of the day, by waves of sickness in the barracks, by the arrival of a new transport, by selections, by the liquidation of one camp and the miserable journey to the next. Now, again, he was in another place where time passed but did not pass, he saw things in a fog of pain, not the fever pain of typhus, not the pain of a beating, but a pain so long, so deep in his bones that it became his body, the soul of his body, radiating from his shattered leg to his jaw, carving through his abdomen and back when they lifted him to feed him juice through a straw, a pain interrupted only by the injections of morphine he received every few hours, the doctors speaking quietly to the nurses, never to him, the tiny young nun turning him over and emptying his bedpan. Once he thought he saw Chaim, standing at the doorway, but awaking knew he was gone, the light-haired man must have been—who could it have been? The way Pavel knew to mark time passing was by the appearances of Fela, who, the first day he was conscious of seeing her, looked large, swollen, like the woman he had met almost five years before, malnourished, bloated, in mourning and beautiful.

  Had he gone back in time? He tried to say something—to ask her if she had enough to eat—but he could hear it as a groan, and a nun hurried over with a syringe.

  Sometime later he saw Fela again, her belly even more round against her slim frame, and he understood, his mind was clear, he could not move the muscles at his jaw, but he tried to signal her with his eyes. He could see she sensed him awake and lucid, he was there with her, she knew, because she began to talk to him more slowly, the words moving through his pounding head in soft drops of water, soft drops of milk, the baby would be healthy, one did not want to say too much of course, bad luck, but it was a healthy pregnancy, and soon it was only three more months, only two more months, only one more month.

  Emigration was out of the question now. Hinda, having left England for New York with Kuba and their infant, told him in a letter read to him by Yidl that he would not be able to come, that there had been a change, that their cousin Mayer, waiting in the American zone, would be next. Yidl had read it lightly, and Hinda’s words did not go into detail, but Pavel had heard about it enough times that he understood. Americans did not want the injured, did not want those who would become what they called a charge to the public, dependent, unable to provide for their families, poor. It had been hard enough as Jews—the visas seemed to go only to the gentiles fleeing the Russians, it was Russia who was now the world’s enemy—it had been hard enough, and now—well, now, where would he go with his family? Palestine would take them, would take anyone now that the borders were open, but how would Pavel make a living there, so broken, when all there would be for him was manual labor, physical work?

  He lay there shaking, pushing out a question to Yidl, a name he would not let himself utter in front of Fela: Where is Marek Rembishevski? Where is Marek Rembishevski?

  Yidl kept his face blank. Your wife wanted to find him, but we heard he went to America.

  After Yidl left with the letter, Pavel turned his neck to the wall. There was no window here. When they came in to feed him his liquid food, he pushed it away. No.

&
nbsp; He could not open his lips to whisper to Fela when she came to talk to him that evening, nor the next morning. She took his hand and stroked it, as she had in the early days of their marriage, and said, Pavel, Pavel, what has happened?

  He wanted to answer her, comfort her. But when he opened his lips slowly, slowly so as not to injure his jaw further, he felt his mouth aching with shame. She hurried out to find a doctor, to insist that someone take a look, give her some answer, perhaps the food they were giving him had turned in his belly—

  But when she had left, after the examinations, after the nurse gave him another pill ground up in his water, he heard the doctor speaking, not softly, not carefully, but casually, to the nurse: He will not survive this.

  Pavel strained his hearing, but the doctor was speaking in a pleasant, clear voice. Pavel had heard correctly. He will not survive this.

  Pavel forced himself upright, his lower back throbbing, his neck pulling—I will not survive this? Pavel cried—he was shouting, or perhaps it was only amplified in his head—I will survive you, Herr Doctor! Another German telling me to die? I will survive you!

  After that, after the doctor stared at him, still shaking his head, and called the nurse to bring another syringe full of painkiller, after Pavel shuddered with rage through his heavy sleep that night, he awoke at the sound of a motor outside. It was still dark, and a nurse was nodding off in a chair next to his bed. Something felt different. His head was clouded but no longer pounding, no longer a hammer. He lay in his bed until breakfast, feeling the fog roll around in his head, moving, shifting, at moments letting in clear shafts of water and light.