Ghita Schwarz

by Displaced Persons (v5)

  Pavel hadn’t quite caught it. “What did you tell him, Helinka?”

  “I told him we’d be back, we’d be back,” said Helen, gripping his hand, stumbling after him on the wet street.

  “Rego Park has a bookstore, too, shaifele. It’s a good neighborhood. You don’t have to go back.”

  “But I want to!”

  “All right, you want to.”

  “Oh, Daddy, come on.” Her voice was shaky.

  “All right, all right! If we have time.”

  “I have time!”

  “True,” said Pavel.

  “I told him we were going to move, and he said, That’s too bad. That’s too bad, he said, because I’m a very good customer. An excellent customer, in fact.” Helen had dropped her father’s hand, stopped on the sidewalk. “I told him not to worry, he wouldn’t lose our business.”

  Pavel laughed, teeth bared; he couldn’t help it. “All right, mammele, all right. I promise.”

  “Swear?”

  “What?” said Pavel.

  “It’s like a real promise.”

  “Of course it’s a real promise. I promise. Have I ever broken a promise?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Helen.

  “Have I ever refused you anything you asked for?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, looking at her shoes as they scraped along the sidewalk.

  “Ah-hah,” Pavel had said.

  Now, pushed by Fela’s annoyance, he went to Helen’s little room, opening the door as he knocked. The lamp above Helen’s bed was on at its dimmest, as if she would have longer to read the less electricity she used.

  Her hands gripped a yellow-edged paperback. She didn’t look up.

  “Helinka,” said Pavel.

  It was her turn to promise. “Look,” she said. She flipped the book to face him. “Just two more pages.”

  “That’s what you said to your mother a few minutes ago.”

  “It was such a short chapter, it wasn’t fair.”

  “Just to the end of this chapter, you really have to promise now. Okay, shaifele? Please?”

  He closed the door, then stood outside, hearing the page turning. A minute, he would give her, maybe two. He walked to Larry’s room. With Larry he was afraid to go in without knocking, but he didn’t want to interrupt. Pavel tried to glimpse in through the light in the doorjamb. Just to see. Through the crack Pavel could see the outline of his son bent over his blue desk, doing his homework. Diligent.

  Then, from inside: “Hello?” Sarcastic.

  Pavel backed away from the door. Then came back. Shouldn’t he be able to say good night to his son? He knocked.

  “I know it’s you, Dad. Just come in.”

  Pavel opened the door. “Oh, hi,” said Pavel, casual. “You’re doing your work. Good, good. I won’t disturb.”

  Larry pushed the strings of black hair out of his eyes. “Why do you do that? Wait outside the door?”

  “You want me to knock, so I knock. I didn’t wait, I don’t wait.”

  “Fine, Dad. Fine. Sure. Okay.”

  “Why do you have to get so upset?” Pavel said. “A father shouldn’t say good night to his son?”

  “You’re telling me I’m upset?” Larry’s tone began to rise. Then he pushed it down. “Okay, Dad. Sure. Fine.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” said Pavel. “I’m not telling you anything.” And closed the door. He walked the four feet back to Helen’s doorway. It was good they had separated them. For this reason alone the move out of the small apartment in Jackson Heights was good. A young man needs his own space, Fela said, but also the fighting—it was something Pavel couldn’t tolerate, fights between brother and sister. The screaming, inside the house. He would tell them, tell them again and again, not to fight, but this was perhaps the most difficult instruction for them to follow. Larry, so sharp in school, so well liked by his teachers, why couldn’t he do a small thing asked by his father? He was the elder, to set the example.

  Pavel didn’t remember such fights with his brothers. He told this to his children: he never fought with his brothers and sisters. Never? Helen asked, genuinely surprised, every time Pavel said it. Larry had learned to guffaw at the comment. But it was true; Pavel had not fought too much with them. He was the eldest, and respected among them, and responsible for so many things in the household and the family business, he did not have the time. His own adolescence he had spent in his grandfather’s house, after his mother’s death, when all the children were scattered among the relatives. Upon Pavel’s return to the home, a year or two after his father remarried, he was already separate, above the rest. He developed a closeness with his two youngest brothers and kept them apart from each other when they became mischievous. He didn’t fight. He made peace.

  The light in his daughter’s room was still on. Pavel opened the door.

  “Gei schluffen, maidele, go to sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  “Turn off the light.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now.” The light went off.

  LARRY WAS TELLING A story. His mouth was full of salad as he spoke.

  Fela looked attentive, smiling with interest as she cut her baked potato, but Pavel found it difficult to concentrate. There was always some complaint! This one was a teacher Larry didn’t respect, had played a joke on, something or other. How Fela could smile at this, Pavel did not understand. How Pavel himself could keep silent, he did not understand that either.

  The story came to a dramatic break, Larry flourishing his fork, a piece of lettuce flying off a tine and down to his plate. Pavel emitted a loud sigh.

  Pavel, do you need more mustard? said Fela, in Yiddish.

  No, no, he said. No. He took a delicate sip from his glass of slivovitz.

  Larry’s story continued. A trail of heat from the liquor crept down Pavel’s chest. He began to catch fragments from the tale. The teacher, something about the teacher had made Larry angry, he and his friend. They had gone to look something up in the library, to prove the man wrong, no, to the bookstore, the used bookstore in Jackson Heights, they had gone to ask the owner something and had come upon a meeting of some kind. Just a few men, but why had they let Larry, and his friend, that boy whose hair was too long and always looked dirty, stay?

  “So I brought Hell in the next time, one girl and all these men—don’t worry Ma, she was with me the whole time—and he still remembers every book you got from him, didn’t he, Hell?”

  “Helen,” she said.

  Something about the story was confusing to Pavel. When could this have taken place? Larry was in Hebrew school in the afternoons, or he played with the sports team, track and field. Would Larry have missed a sports practice for this? No. He would not have. Pavel turned his full attention to this interesting event that had pulled his son out of religious lessons.

  Larry said, “Shell shock, you know, that thing after World War One, that’s when they named it, shell shock, where the soldiers would come back and hear bombs going off in their heads.”

  Pavel swallowed another few drops of slivovitz. Larry’s voice floated from his mouth. He would ask Larry after dinner, what time this all had occurred, he wouldn’t let the whole thing bother Fela—if it would bother her at all, she took Larry’s side about the Hebrew school—he would wait. He would be calm. He would talk to his son with respect, with care. If he didn’t, Larry would probably try to trick him, to lie, and that would be too painful to witness. After all, had not Pavel performed his share of mischief in his youth? Perhaps, but not with school. Once, when he was already in high school, studying late, forgetting something he was to deliver on credit to a neighbor, his own father had tried to hit him, and he had grabbed his father’s hand and stopped it in midair. He had made his father afraid.

  “Daddy,” Helen suddenly said. “You look so sad.”

  “I do?” said Pavel, startled out of his thoughts, taken aback. “When?”

  “All the time,” she said.r />
  He looked at her. His daughter had the ability to shock with three words, four. Larry had to perform a whole dance, to entertain, but Helen, so quiet, could cut him open.

  At last he answered: “But I’m not sad. I’m very happy.” He felt tears coming to his eyes. “I’m happy, happy.”

  Then he stopped. What had he done a moment ago, what had he looked like? A child shouldn’t see her parents sad. There was time enough for that. On the other hand, could it be helped? Was it not a normal part of life, of everyone’s life? He thought suddenly of the people around him at work, at the deli counter where he bought a sandwich or soup for lunch. Were they so different from him? Didn’t they look sad on occasion? It never had occurred to him to notice.

  “Daddy,” she repeated, her voice sounding distant, a false echo of her real voice. “I didn’t mean it. I thought that’s what he meant. Depressed, he said, not sad.”

  Depressed. Now this new word mixed with the old one and rang through him, breaking in his chest a small glass of bitterness.

  “Who said?” he rasped. “Who said?” But he already knew.

  The bookstore owner—moderately tall, sandy hair, thin face, those narrowing eyes—that was what was in them. Examination, inspection, curiosity. Depressed. That was what he thought. Depressed, like a sick man. Pavel looked at his plate, at the chicken cutlet he had sliced into neat rectangles.

  “How can you be so stupid?” said Larry, in the tone of half-awake superiority he used only for his sister.

  Helen blinked.

  “Sha!” said Pavel, turning to face his son, bitterness transforming itself into rage, rising in a wave. “Who taught you to use such a word?”

  But Larry wasn’t to be quieted. A word from his father sparked his energy, opened his lungs, made him sing. “You did, Dad. You say it all the time.” Larry slapped his forehead, mocking Pavel. “Stupid, stupid. How I could forget something so stupid! How I could be so stupid!” Pavel thought he heard, in the scratch on his son’s voice, a faint imitation of his accent.

  “How are you talking to your father!” The familiar growl was burning a hole through Pavel’s rib cage. His jaw was set forward, his teeth clenched, his eyes focused straight at the eyes of his son, who, instead of returning the look, stared off to the side, transfixed. Pavel looked instinctively to his right; his own arm was lifted at an angle, his palm flat, ready to slap.

  Fela said, “Pavel.”

  Her voice was water, a mother’s sound. It was not a reprimand. It was a call back to the table. Pavel dropped his arm, rose up from his seat.

  “Excuse me.” He coughed. And, dragging his bad leg behind him, he moved out of the kitchen toward the hall. He stopped, some meters from the front door, to listen. The family was silent, waiting to hear what he would do. What would he do? He did not know himself.

  He would go out. The apartment was hot; he was hot. Still, he should take a jacket. He opened the closet, pulled his raincoat off the hanger with his right hand, the hand he had raised toward his son, and limped out the door.

  THE STREETLAMPS WERE ALREADY burning when Pavel stepped off the bus in Jackson Heights, two blocks from the bookstore. Eight o’clock. Would it be open? Perhaps. He kept strange hours, the bookstore owner. Probably it was open; it was like a gathering place. For young people to discuss, to get angry.

  It would rain; he could feel it in the lower part of his right knee. But Pavel moved quickly, his legs in a stiff gallop, the right following the left. Thirty-seventh Avenue—a street he had walked alone after dinner or with the children on a Sunday, so many times—looked strange and abandoned, spotted by a pink haze that clouded the signs above the beauty parlor and the eyeglass shop. It wasn’t part of his scenery anymore. He had left it. It had left him too, he was sure.

  The bookstore was open; Pavel pulled open the door and marched in, back straight, serious. Everything was as it had been: the beige paint chipping from the bookshelves, the man bent at the register with his hands on a crumbling paperback, the smell of dead cigarettes drifting up from the couch. Pavel stood at the entrance of the store, waiting.

  “Hello?” A voice from the register.

  Ah, it would start. But what would? Pavel stood still, a little afraid. He was here to confront the owner, but with what? He was here to shout at him, to explain to him—why was he here? Perhaps merely to look at the man in the eye, to let the owner observe in person, for as long as he liked, that Pavel’s war-bruised face had already healed into something else, that Pavel was not just eating and breathing, not just walking and working, but living.

  Something had to be said. It was silent in the store while the manager waited for him to speak.

  “Yes,” he said to the man, and looked again.

  It wasn’t the owner but someone else. A large fellow, a beard, a battered black cap in the style worn by students.

  “Yes,” he said again, slowly, confused. How to explain? “Yes, I would like to buy a book.”

  The man looked surprised.

  Immediately Pavel understood: it was the wrong thing to say, the mark of a stranger. People who came here, the regulars, his daughter, they took care of themselves. It was the kind of store where you spoke with the man at the register, but not for help, just for chat. You looked yourself at the books; conversation developed naturally, informally, like gossip among friends. Have you ever read something by so-and-so? What’s next on the list? How did you like the French history? Customers here did not ask certain questions; they had information already. Pavel, with his crippled leg and pained accent, his tie and dark jacket, his unschooled knowledge of wool and hard damask, was the wrong type of customer.

  But the man was answering. “Well,” he said, in a soft tone, a kind tone, “you came to the right place.”

  Pavel gazed at the broad face, the scraggle of hair that matted the chin, the too-thick brown mustache that drooped past the lips, the lips upturned in a smile. A polite, youthful, store clerk’s smile.

  “What sort of book?” the clerk continued. “Or should I recommend something from our elegant collection?”

  He opened his young arms to emphasize the joke; they were covered in a shirt of bone white. It seemed to Pavel that the color spread over the crowded shelves behind the register, sending a brief light onto the wall of the store.

  Flight 028

  March 1973

  IF THERE WERE NO delays, if the plane left New York at six in the evening, Sima would arrive in Tel Aviv at noon the next day. It was an eleven-hour flight, but because of the time difference, it would feel as if eighteen hours had passed. It was irrational, but the extra seven hours made her even more nervous. There was not much time left. Her aunt Zosia, waking her up with a predawn call, had made that clear. Her father had been hospitalized again, this time with bacterial pneumonia, his immune system weakened from the chemotherapy, his lungs at half capacity from the surgery.

  Chaim put the suitcase down between them as they waited to check in, then moved with her to the center of the terminal, with its large signs announcing arrivals and departures. Flight 028 was departing on time. He will wait for you, Chaim said in Yiddish. Then, in English, as if to reassure her more, “You’ll make it. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  But Sima was afraid. She hated flying anywhere, much less overseas, and the two hours of waiting alone to have her bags inspected gave her time to imagine every terrible scenario: hijacking, bombs, engine malfunction, her body burned, vaporized, drowned, her father dying alone, her daughter motherless. She could have bought a cheaper flight on another airline, but El Al was the safest, and after the disasters on TWA and Swissair she and Chaim had decided that they didn’t want to use another airline, even if the frequent trips since her father had become sick became more of a financial burden. She worried about leaving her daughter for an unknown period of time, alone with Chaim’s casual views of nutrition, with only the promise of visits from Fela Mandl to keep the household from chaos. She dreaded the nausea she got when the pla
ne began to climb, and she did not want to risk an extra tablet of Dramamine, above and beyond the maximum recommended on the label. She was afraid of her father’s face when she arrived, the tubes and oxygen tank her aunt told her he was attached to, his face masked and ashen. She was scared to see his death and she was scared to miss it.

  She did not know which outcome would be worse. When she emigrated from Israel it had not occurred to her that she would not be with her parents when they died. But now she realized it had been a fear of theirs. From the fold-out couch on which she spent her teenage years she could hear her parents whispering in the bedroom, and one night she had heard her mother crying, a rare occurrence, the same words over and over again, I hope they were together. They had heard a report from hometown, most of the village shot in the forest behind it, the rest eventually transported to a small camp in the East, one from which no one came out. Her parents did not know where their own parents lay buried, or even whether they were buried. Still for Sima the idea of visiting a grave of a relative seemed abstract, something she read about in books. Until her mother had actually died, Sima had not been convinced it would happen. It was her mother’s unspoken wish that Sima be there, and she had been, leaving newborn Lola with Chaim. If she had not been there, holding her father’s hand in the hospital, she might not have truly believed it. You’ll be here for me too, her father had said at the rabbi’s office, making the funeral arrangements. When her father had a wish, he spoke it.