If we moved there, Kuba would argue, we could be big.
Pavel never knew how to answer him. One did not go from small to big, but from small to less small, to slightly less small, all the way up to not so small. American business, yes, he thought. But Pavel had learned his lesson in Germany after the war. One time, just one time, he had tried to make big money, enough to feel safe to emigrate, and someone greedier, more ambitious—Kuba’s childhood friend, that swindler, that thief!—had almost killed him for trying. Pavel’s bones were still crooked, his skin still scarred, his body still pained. No more. The best progress was slow.
It had taken enormous effort to make it to their current location. In the early years Kuba had sold clothing from a hand truck while Pavel sent money from his black-market coffee business in Germany. It was only four years since an American cousin of Pavel’s lent them the capital to open a tailor shop under a real roof, and the loan was not yet repaid. Of course now it was Kuba who was the sophisticate. Would Kuba even know how to judge a row of inner stitching on a lapel without the skills Pavel had shared, skills acquired basting and sewing pockets for the same cousin? Would Kuba have anything if not for Pavel’s determination to make a family business? It was Pavel himself who had managed to win this latest contract, the third of its kind for them, and as a result they had hired the two cutters, each of whom kept a calendar with photographs of nude women at their workstations.
WHEN KUBA RETURNED HE sat at Pavel’s desk and opened his soup. I think we should talk a little, he began in Yiddish.
Pavel sighed.
About the lease.
Of course about the lease, answered Pavel. Always the lease. Do you have an idea for a better lease somewhere else?
I don’t know why you are against a big loan. It is what everyone does here. Since when are you so afraid? You had a bigger business in Europe, in and out of every zone.
Pavel said, Afraid?
Perhaps not afraid, said Kuba. But I don’t understand it. All the risks you took there! Hinda talks about it still.
Pavel said nothing.
Why, continued Kuba, should we be more cautious here, where here we have so much more safety?
Here we have children, said Pavel. He gave Kuba what he hoped was a righteous look. Mine will go to college, my daughter too.
Who says no? All I say is—
All you say, said Pavel, is that I am afraid. So!
Kuba’s face turned pink. You would think, after all we have done, you could consider how Hinda and I—
All you have done? Pavel said, his voice beginning to scratch. What, letting Fela and me stay in your apartment when we came with the baby? You want the rent back, I give you the rent back. I did not know it was such a favor.
That is not what I am talking about. Kuba made his back even straighter. That is not what I am talking about.
Pavel looked at him. A sound came out, then a sentence. Then what are you talking about, Jakub?
The pink from Kuba’s face subsided a little. But he did not answer.
Tell me. Let us not have secrets! We are family. Tell me!
There is no need to shout, Pavel.
Pavel breathed in. He was not shouting. But he would not dignify the accusation. And so what if he raised his voice? He had earned the right. Pavel’s cousin had started them in the business. Pavel’s friends helped them. But Kuba had friends who had tried to kill Pavel for profit, who could not clean out the stain of the war, who remained violent, criminal, who spread pain at the first opportunity.
What you did for me? Pavel breathed. Your friend, your dear friend Marek, could not even leave me with the coat on my body after he broke me into twenty pieces! Is this what I owe you for?
That is not what he said happened. Kuba looked Pavel straight in the eye and then took a step back, as if to see the impact of his words.
Pavel’s tongue moved in his mouth. What he said happened? Pavel’s voice came out in a low hum, shocked. What he said? You have spoken to him?
Hinda begged me not to say anything to you.
So, say it! It’s already out.
He came to us when you were still in Germany, and said you owed him money.
Pavel stared, uncomprehending. I owed him! he whispered.
He came to us here. He said he would report us as Communists from the past to the immigration authorities.
Communists!
He said you had visited your aunt Ewa in the Russian zone, he said you made deals, he said he could give proof that you, and we, all of us were associated with it, with the Red Army, did business to profit them—
You believed him! You believed him over—
It was not to believe or not to believe, said Kuba. It was a threat. We thought—
What did you pay him?
Kuba told him.
I need to speak to Hinda, said Pavel. I need to speak to Hinda.
Don’t upset her, said Kuba. Let me tell her first.
HIS AUNT HAD BEEN a Communist as long as he could remember, fleeing to Russia even before the war started. In Germany, just before Hinda and Kuba left the displaced persons camp for England, Pavel had come across a British captain with whom he did a little trading, before the restrictions made things too complicated. Indeed, the captain had not paid him in full, and Pavel had laughed off the debt in order to keep things smooth. When they ran into each other again, as Pavel was returning from his visit to his aunt in the Russian zone, the captain had driven him to an abandoned storehouse of parachute cloth. Pavel had wrapped his body in layers of artificial silk, covered the silk with his clothes, and returned home to Celle with material, just enough for a dress for Fela and a scarf for Hinda. He had never seen Hinda wear the scarf.
Hinda had always been jealous. When he married Fela she acted as cold and as careful with Fela as she had in childhood with their father’s new wife. But Kuba she worshipped. And because Kuba loved Hinda too, Pavel found it in himself to tolerate the occasional pretensions. If Kuba liked to make himself bigger than Pavel, so be it.
But this, this debt out of a crime, this payment to a criminal, worse, this idea that there was another version of the tale to which Kuba and Hinda had listened—that Kuba’s childhood friend was anyone but the most treacherous—not just trying to kill, not just stealing from Pavel, but blackmailing Kuba—this did not make Kuba big. It made Pavel small.
He sat in the back office alone, watching the red light of the telephone. Kuba was using the line in the front room, for twenty minutes, a half hour, more. He thought about calling Fela. But she would ask him what the matter was. The quiet background noises of the shop became loud, Grinberg’s steamer pressing the suit trousers, the clacketing of the meter-high sewing machine pedaled by Ramos. He unlocked his front desk drawer and opened the small envelope that held the restored photographs of his mother and father, but looked only for a moment before replacing them and locking the drawer again.
At last the red light turned off. Pavel stared at the phone handle, its dark brown plastic, then at the face of the telephone, the wide finger holes in the clear cover for ease of dialing. When it rang, he jumped.
Pavel. It was Hinda, her words thick, as if her mouth had swollen from the crying. I did not want to tell you.
So! Now I know anyway.
He threatened us, Pavel, he—we were afraid.
How can your husband associate with such animals? How? How is it possible?
He was—Marek was a different person in his youth, Kuba was so happy to find him, he did not know, he did not know what happened to him.
But what he did—he tried to—he wanted to—a murderer!—and then he took the coat off my back as I lay dying, because he knew inside the coat I had—
I know, Pavel, I know, you have told us so many times—
So many times is not too much! You believed him when he told you that I—
We did not believe him, Pavel. She was still crying, he knew, but he could hear that she had lit a cigarette. We just—w
e were afraid.
PAVEL COULD NOT SPEAK all through dinner. It was as if his face was covered in dirt, smudged and sweaty, even in the winter cold. He could feel his children looking at him in curiosity, a little fearful of his quiet as Fela served them their potatoes and chicken.
Pavel, you want more pepper?
Hmm? he said. Yes, mammele, yes. He twisted the mill twice over his food.
I talked to Mrs. Benfaremo about the hot water. She says on her side it comes on sooner.
Hmm? said Pavel.
The hot water. You said you wanted me to—
Yes, yes, we should talk to Weisenfeld.
She said the people below us have always had the same thing. It’s the boiler for our whole line.
Larry interrupted. “May I please be excused?”
Fela looked at his plate. “You didn’t finished.”
“I almost finished. Look.”
Pavel leaned over his son’s plate, scooped off the potato skin and chicken bone and put it onto his plate. Helen passed her plate too.
“Helen! You haven’t eaten nothing!”
“Ma, I’m full. Please. Can I go too?”
“Ask right.”
“May I please be excused?”
The children grabbed their plates and forks, and from behind him Pavel heard a clanging in the sink.
Not everything from Hinda do I like, said Fela. But I like the phrases she teaches them. I forgot to tell you. Last week the mother of Henry, Larry’s friend, told us what a good boy we had. Polite.
Yes, said Pavel.
Fela was silent a moment. So, what happened today?
Nothing, nothing.
Something happened.
What should have happened?
I just ask you, that’s all.
Business, said Pavel. It’s not so good.
HE AWOKE IN THE night, cold but not remembering his dream. Fela stirred only a bit as he sat up. He stepped out of bed, holding the night table for balance as he pushed his feet into his slippers, then limped through the hallway to the kitchen, his hand touching the walls as he went.
His lighter was in his jacket pocket in the bedroom, but he still had a few cigarettes in the pack he kept in the bill drawer. Sometimes they smelled more delicious than food. He drew one out, placed it unlit in his mouth. Just the taste of the paper made him feel better. He took a large wooden match, what Fela used for the candles on Fridays, and struck it against the wide red strip on the box. The flame gave a light to the kitchen, dark in the hours before sunrise.
Hinda would be sleeping now, resting from the agitation of the afternoon. She rested in daylight also, lying in bed for hours at a time, sometimes crying, perhaps sometimes just thinking, too tired to cry. Once in a while Fela went there to help and to cook, and when they were a little younger Pavel would take the boys out to the park with his own children. Lately Hinda’s resting had become more frequent. She went to a psychiatrist. No doubt today’s telephone call had not helped.
What a family they were, Pavel awake at night, Hinda in bed during the day. Everything in reverse. What a thing to pass down to the children. It was true what they said, some people could not recover. Even here, in the golden city spoken of in his youth, where everything was to be made new, where even before the catastrophe people had come in to build and to earn. Even here. But Pavel was strong. He did not let it come over him the way Hinda let it. He did not let the questions sicken him the way they sickened Hinda. Why did he survive? Why he and not another? He did not let the questions sicken him. He was strong. And his children were strong and good. His nephews also were good, if a little wild, the elder already smoking cigarettes, the younger disappearing with the car before he had a license, scaring Hinda and Kuba into calling the police. But Pavel’s children were not wild. They studied. They earned praise. Hinda doted on Helen like she was her own daughter, presenting her with tiny dolls dressed in the costumes of nationalities all around the world, the names of which Helen rolled around her tongue like an expert importer. Cambodia, Dahomey, Brazil.
His children were good. They would not be affected, he thought, because he and Fela tried, they kept things private, they did not let the children hear of anything they worried about. Hinda too tried. She did not speak of any past, even to Pavel. Perhaps she spoke with Kuba, but Pavel thought not. Kuba cared for her like she was a wounded soldier. He was a good husband—he let her stay quiet. When Pavel decided to go to the first commemoration of the Belsener displaced persons, Pavel asked them to go, and without even looking at each other both gave him the same look of doubt, even disdain. It upset Hinda to think about anything at all, and in Kuba she had an ally.
But sometimes she could not escape. Some things were too public, blared in the news, not just in the Yiddish weeklies she refused to read but also in the American papers and magazines, the capture of a war criminal in Argentina, the beginning of a trial in Israel. She had gone to bed this last time just after the High Holidays, when the trial was already under way some months. Pavel had almost not noticed her disappearance. Instead he had been calling Fishl twice a day, once after reading the morning papers and once after reading the evening papers. The numbers, the statistical testimony, consumed him but also gave him some relief. It was true, it was true, it was true. And if the American papers printed terrible photographs, images he had to skip over, at least the text of the articles gave counts and countries, cold figures. Everyone saw it was true.
They already know it is true, said Fela. They knew it was true long ago. Just no one did anything before.
They did, said Pavel. They did. Even in Hamburg, even in Celle there were trials.
Ha, said Fela. Ha! Celle! The man had a chicken farm not a mile from Belsen, even closer to the DP camp than we were! Didn’t you read how the Americans caught him once, then let him go? They believed lies a child would not believe! He was allowed to leave Germany before we were!
Yes, they were stupid. Sometimes I myself do not believe it was true.
Maybe you did not believe, but they believed. They knew it was true before any trials, Pavele. So! Only Jews are willing to put in the time to search out and punish.
Pavel stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, lit another. What had Hinda said to him once? If you came out of camp, you came out punished. Kuba had told something like this to her. But Pavel did not want to have come out punished. He did not think he had. Punished! She was using it as an excuse for Marek, that thief, no words were enough to describe him, every time Pavel heard the man’s name evidence of another crime came out, attempted murder, thievery, now blackmail. Could one be punished before one had committed crimes instead of after? Did Marek commit his crimes to justify the earlier punishment and suffering? Was that what Hinda was trying to say?
But why have compassion for Marek and not for her own brother? When Hinda looked at Pavel he knew she saw a broken face and a crippled body. He wanted to laugh at her—could she not see how strong he still was, how his children thought he could lift a building? But something in her face when she looked at him—he did not like it. And yet here she was, full of pity for Marek, the man who had made Pavel this way.
Stealing from one’s own people—was that not a bigger crime, well, perhaps not bigger, not as big, but still, it was enormous, it was unexplainable—and for Marek to do this next thing to Kuba, the lying, like stealing from a brother! Almost worse than the original injury to Pavel. Imagine Fishl doing this, or Yidl Sheinbaum, who had sent them their largest customer not too long ago. It was impossible. One did not have to cripple another to walk straight oneself. That was American business. One got ahead, yes, but by stealing from others? By blackmail? A young man had gone to see his aunt in the Russian zone, had kissed the last remaining evidence of his mother’s blood-line, and another man had accused this pitifully small family reunion, a reunion of two, of being a front for communism. Enough to ruin a family.
If he could make all his own personal trials, Marek Rembishevski would be
one of the accused. Not the first, not the priority, that honor would belong not just to the grand leaders who made paper orders but also to the specific soldiers and guards and commandants, who had done what he still did not know to his brothers, his baby sister, his father, even his stepmother, poor woman. His cousins, his aunts, his uncles. His girlfriend—how long since he had thought of her, a curvaceous girl who liked sweets—he could make his own long list of the accused, and if Marek were not at the top of the list, he was not at the bottom either. Even Kresser, that tormentor, that shame upon his people—but Pavel did not even like to think the name. No, Marek was not at the bottom of the list. Pavel felt the smoke from his cigarette burn against his ribs. Could a person really be so confused that he could mistake theft from a fellow Jew after the liberation for the fighting for food and blankets during the war? That was the first question Pavel would ask at Marek’s interrogation. A simple question. Could a person really be so confused? That was what a trial was for, to ask the questions and await the painful answers. Pavel wanted to know how Marek would answer. It would make him feel better to know.
Hinda did not ask questions. She did not feel better from the news of the trial in Israel. She felt sick, just as sick as some of the times before. Fela too did not seem so happy. After the children got up from dinner each evening she watched Pavel read the same news stories over and over, until he could memorize the passages in English, not leaving the room until the table and sink and counter were spotless and he picked up the telephone again to call Fishl.
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