Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she would say as she stared at herself and brushed all her red hair. “I’m going to be a bareback rider and my mother promised me a camp with horses.”

  “Jewish camps don’t come with horses,” Miriam said. “You should have figured that out for yourself. Besides, I thought you said you were going to be a poetess.”

  “Oh, I am one already,” Bryna said. “Any time I feel like it, my father prints up all my poems.”

  “In yellow?” said Miriam.

  “In any color I want. Once I wrote a poem about a rainbow and my father made every line in a different color.”

  This sounded like a bubble-gum wrapper and no poem, but watching Bryna trace around her suntan marks in the mirror, Miriam decided not to say it.

  “I could be going horseback riding in Riverdale right now. Where I live, it’s practically the country.”

  “Where you live is the Bronx,” Miriam said. “On your letters you put Bronx, New York, and you even write in a zone number.”

  “It just so happens that lots of people put Riverdale-on-Hudson, and any time I wanted to, I could.”

  “You could,” Miriam said, “but it would probably end up in a museum in Albany.”

  Because their beds were next to each other, Miriam and Bryna shared a cubby; with all Bryna’s yellow labels shining through the shelves like flashbulb suns and the smell of her bath powder always hanging in the air, there was no place that Miriam felt was really hers. Her bathrobe and bathing suits hung like blind midgets in the way; they even got the Bryna bath-powder smell. It made them seem as if they were someone else’s clothes and, like everything else in camp, had nothing to do with Miriam and her life.

  “I could be in a special dramatics camp on a fat scholarship,” Bryna said. “The only reason I told them no was that they didn’t have any horseback riding, but at least there they would have had me starring in a million plays.”

  “I’m in a play here,” said Miriam. It was turning out to be what she had instead of a cubby, and completely faking calmness, she waited for Bryna to faint.

  Who could have believed that anyplace could be as big as Warsaw? Probably not anyone in the play: who they were, all of them, were Jews, Nazis, and Polish partisans in the Warsaw ghetto—but where all the streets, more streets, and streetcars could be, the stage gave no idea and Amnon didn’t ever say. On the stage was a tiny, crowded Warsaw filled with people who had phlegmy, sad Polish names—Dudek and Vladek, Dunya and Renya—just like in Miriam’s mother’s stories, and though they were always fighting and singing, there was no way for them to turn out not to be dead. Even the Yiddish song that Miriam had to sing at the end was about a girl who gets taught by her boyfriend how to shoot a gun, and who, one night in the freezing cold, goes out in her beret and shoots up a truckload of Nazis. When the girl is finished, she falls asleep, and the snow coming down makes a garland in her hair. Probably it also freezes her to death, though all it said at the end of the song was: “Exhausted from this small victory, For our new, free generation.”

  How could a girl who ran out all alone shooting soldiers let herself end up snowed under? And what was the point of people’s running through sewers with guns if all they turned into was corpses? It was very hard to explain to Bryna, whose big question was, “Are you starring?”

  “Nobody is,” Miriam said. “It’s not that kind of a play. Half of the time I fake being dead so that nobody finds out and they leave me.”

  “You mean you don’t even say anything?”

  “I do,” Miriam said, “but what I say doesn’t do any good. I’m a little girl in braids and I sneak out of the ghetto with my big brother.”

  Bryna said, “That’s your big part? What do you tell him?”

  “Nothing. While he’s out getting guns, I hide and I hear some Nazi soldiers being so drunk that they start screaming out their plans. And that’s when I immediately run back to the ghetto and warn everyone.”

  “Oh,” Bryna said. “So the whole thing is that you copy Paul Revere.”

  “The only kind of Paul Revere it could be is a Jewish kind. Everyone dies and there are no horses.”

  Bryna said, “Some play! When we did The Princess and the Pea, I was the star, and then when we did Pocahontas, Red-Skin Lady of Jamestown, I was the heroine. In this moron play, I bet that there isn’t even one person with a halfway decent part.”

  “My part’s good,” Miriam said. “I’m practically the only one who doesn’t turn out to be killed.”

  “That’s because you’re a girl.”

  “No, it’s not,” Miriam said. “I don’t even know why, that’s just the way the play is.”

  “Listen, Miriam, I’ve been in a million plays. Little girls never get killed in any of them.”

  “Well, in this one they do. In this one the only people who don’t wind up dead are me and Gil Burstein.”

  “You’re in a play with Gil Burstein? You? Just let me come to rehearsals with you and I’ll let you use my expensive bath powder any time you want.”

  “You can’t get out of playing badminton just like that,” Miriam told her. “That’s only for people in the play.”

  But play or not, camp was still camp. At night, cold air flew in through the dark from Canada and mixed on the screens with mosquitoes; 6–12 and whispers filled up the air in the bunk and stayed there like ugly wallpaper. How could anyone sleep? Miriam played with the dark like a blind person in a foreign country: in the chilly, quiet strangeness, her bed was as black as a packed-up trunk, and her body, separate in all its sunburned parts, was suddenly as unfamiliar as someone else’s toothpaste.

  In the daytime, too, camp was still camp: a place dreamed up to be full of things that Miriam could not get out of. Whenever Amnon saw her face, he said, “What’s the matter, Miriam?” It was how he kept starting out rehearsals.

  “Look here, Miriam,” he would say, pronouncing her name the Hebrew way, with the accent on the last syllable. “Look here, Miriam, say me what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Everything’s great.”

  “Why you are saying me ‘Nothing’ when I see you are crying—have been crying?”

  “I wasn’t, I’m not, and anyway it’s not something I do.”

  “All girls are sometimes crying.”

  “Well, not me,” Miriam said. “I don’t believe in it.” For a reason: it sometimes seemed to Miriam that if a person from a foreign country—or even a miniature green man from Mars—ever landed, by accident, in her building and by mistake walked up the six flights of stairs, all he would hear was screaming and crying: mothers screaming and children crying, fathers screaming and mothers crying, televisions screaming and vacuum cleaners crying; he could very easily get the idea that in this place there was no language, and that with all the noises there were no lives.

  But crying was the last thing that Miriam thought of once she got to rehearsals. Still in camp, but not really in camp at all, it felt like a very long fire drill in school when you stayed on the street long enough to be not just a child on a line, but almost an ordinary person—someone who could walk in the street where they wanted, into stores, around corners, and maybe, if they felt like it, even disappear into buses.

  As soon as Miriam put on her costume and combed her hair into braids, there was nothing on her body that felt like camp, and away from the day outside, nothing to even remind her. On the stage, Jews, Nazis, and Polish partisans were wandering through the streets of shrunken Warsaw, and in a corner, where in the real Warsaw there might have been a gas streetlight, a trolley-car stop, or even her mother’s Gymnasium, Miriam and Gil Burstein played dead.

  “What’s the best can-opener?” Gil whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Miriam said.

  “Ex-Lax,” said Gil, and laughed into his Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

  “Rest!” Amnon called out. In the middle of the stage, a Polish partisan had just kicked a Jew by mistake and suddenly
the girl was crying. Nazi soldiers and Jewish resistance fighters started stampeding across the stage and charging, and Amnon, looking at no one, said, “Always they are playing Indians and Lone Rangers. It’s for me completely not possible.”

  “Rest!” he yelled again; what he meant was “Break.” Once, in one of his terrible-English times, Amnon said, “Ninety-Twoth Street Y,” and Miriam, thinking suddenly of a giant tooth-building with elevators full of a thousand dentists, could not stop herself from laughing. Other times she thought of asking Amnon why she and Gil were the only ones who managed to end up not dead, but usually during breaks Amnon sat with his long legs stretched out across a whole row of chairs and just talked. He hardly even noticed who was concentrating on Cokes and who was paying attention.

  “In Israel now it’s not the right climate for art. You understand me?”

  “It’s much too hot there for people to sit around drawing pictures,” Miriam said, and wished that the Arts-and-Crafts counselor could understand this too.

  “No,” Amnon said. “For me it means in my own country even people are not interesting themselves in my work. Here it’s not my language, it’s not my country, there is no place for an Israeli writer, there is nothing to do.”

  Gil Burstein said, “He could always take and autograph butcher-store windows or foods for Passover. I’m getting sick of this. Who wants a Coke?”

  “Me,” Miriam said, but knew the truth was that she didn’t mind at all. From lying stretched out on the wooden stage for so long, her mind felt empty and the whole rest of her seemed dizzy in a sweet, half-sleepy way. Soon, in this dark auditorium, only the stage would be full of light and the plain wooden floor would hold up for an hour all the mistakes of a place that once had existed. A girl with braids and a too-long dress would run out into the mixed-up streets, and sitting in the audience with many other people, Miriam’s mother would know what this place once was like way before and could tell how it actually looked. The girl with braids would sing the last song, and all Miriam’s days of camp would finally be over.

  Parents Day did not start out with Gil waking people up with his bugle; instead, from the loudspeaker in the office came records of Israeli songs—background music for the whole day, as if it were a movie. The melodies ran out quick and flying, and framed by the music, the whole camp—children, counselors, little white bunks, even trees and grass-seemed to be flying away, too, as if after all these weeks they were finally going someplace. Not exactly in the movie herself, Miriam went to the clothesline in the back, checking to make sure no bathing suit of hers was still left on it.

  “Miriam, you better come in the front,” Phyllis said. “There’s a whole bunch of people here and they’re looking for you.”

  Right outside the bunk, some girls in a circle were doing the dances that belonged with the melodies, and squinting there in the sun, practically trapped inside the dance, were Miriam’s aunt and uncle, and with them a couple she had never seen before. The man, very short and with gray, curly hair, was dressed just like her uncle: Bermuda shorts, brown cut-out sandals with high socks, and a kind of summer hat that always looked to Miriam like a Jewish baseball cap. His wife, who was taller, had thick, dark braids all across her head, and though her skirt was very long in the sun, there was such a round, calm look in her clothes and on her face that Miriam was sure she had never had to be anybody’s mother.

  Miriam’s aunt said, “There’s my niece. Here she is. Miriam, this is Mrs. Imberman and that’s Mr. Imberman, they came up with the car.”

  Miriam’s aunt looked exactly the same: every part of her heavy face drooped like the bargain bundles she always carried, and stuck to her cheeks like decals were high pink splotches the color of eyelids—extra supplies of tears she kept up to make sure she was always ready.

  “What are you doing here?” said Miriam. “You’re not my mother. Who asked you to come?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Imberman came here to see a play,” her aunt said, “and we’re staying right next to them in the same little hotel, and it’s not far, and they came with the car, so here we are.”

  “I didn’t say what are they doing here. I said what are you doing here? And where’s my mother?”

  “Your mother couldn’t come. She was going to write a letter and tell you, but I told her not to because I know you, Miriam, that if you knew about it you’d make a fuss, and now I see how right I was.”

  Turning around, Miriam stared at all the trees and grass that she had there: if they were so wonderful, the least they could do was pay attention to the music and do an Israeli dance.

  “For you, your mother is your mother, but for me, she’s still my little sister and there are plenty of things still that I have to tell her.”

  The trees, with all their millions of leaves, did not do even half a grapevine, and Miriam’s uncle said, “Imberman, feel how hot it is already here and it’s still early. Can you imagine what it’s like a day like today in the city?”

  “Hot,” Mr. Imberman said. They stood there, the two of them, with their Jewish baseball caps, and Miriam thought how her uncle looked when it got too hot in his apartment: he would walk back and forth in his shorts and undershirt, fan himself with a newspaper, and say in Yiddish, “It’s hot today in the city. Oh my God, it’s hot!” If her uncle and midget Mr. Imberman got together, they could both walk back and forth in a little undershirt parade, fan themselves with two newspapers and, in between saying how hot it was, could have little fights about which countries were faking it with Socialism.

  Miriam said, “If my mother were here, she would take me home.”

  “Why should she take you home? It’s good for you to be outside and it’s good for you to get used to it.”

  “Why should I get used to it if I don’t like it?”

  “Look how nice it is here, Miriam,” her uncle said in Yiddish. “Look what you have here—a beautiful blue lake, a sky with sun and clouds that’s also blue, big strong trees you can see from a mountain—with birds in them, wide, empty green fields with only grass and flowers. Look how nice.”

  “The lake is polluted,” Miriam said. And it seemed to her that he was describing someplace else entirely—maybe a place in Poland he remembered from when he was young, maybe even a picture on a calendar, but definitely not camp on Parents Day. All the empty green fields were filling up with cars, the grass and flowers were getting covered over with blankets and beach chairs, and pretty soon the birds from the mountain would be able to come down and eat all the leftover food that people brought with them. Except that there was no sand, the whole camp could have been Orchard Beach.

  “Let me tell you something,” her uncle said. “First I’ll tell you a little story about your cousin Dina, and then I’ll give you some advice.”

  “I don’t want any advice from you,” Miriam said. “You can’t even figure out which countries are faking it with Socialism, and if you’re supposed to care about it so much, why don’t you just write a letter to a person in the country and ask them? All they have to tell you is if they’re selfish or if they share around the things they’ve got.”

  “Straight from her mother,” said Miriam’s aunt. “With absolutely no sense that she’s talking in front of a child.”

  “And don’t think I can’t understand it either. My mother calls him Stalin.”

  Mrs. Imberman said, “Sweetheart, are you in the play?” She bent her head in the sun, and for a second her earrings, turquoise and silver, suddenly turned iridescent.

  “Yes,” Miriam said and looked up at her: somewhere a man with a sombrero and a mustache had gotten off his donkey and sat down in the heat to fold pieces of silver so that Mrs. Imberman could turn her head in the sun and ask questions of strange children.

  “Ah hah,” Mrs. Imberman said, “an aktricekeh. That’s why she’s so temperamental.”

  “I am not an actress,” Miriam said. “I never was one before and I don’t plan on being one again, and what I’m definitely not going t
o be is an explorer, so I don’t see why I have to get used to so much being outside.”

  “Listen, Miriam,” her uncle said. “Let me tell you what happened with Dina in case she was embarrassed to tell you herself. It happened that Dina didn’t feel like giving in her chocolates to the counselor, so she put them under her bed and only took out the box to eat them when it was dark in the bunk at night and she was sitting up in the bed and setting her hair. She figured out that if anyone heard any noises she could tell them it was from the bobby pins and curlers.”

  “Such a woman’s story,” Mr. Imberman said in very Polish Yiddish. “I didn’t know, Citrin, that you knew such women’s stories.”

  Miriam’s aunt said, “You know my Dina. She could set her hair anyplace.”

  “Anyway, what happened, Miriam, is that once somebody put on a light and saw her, and that’s how she made some enemies, and that’s why she didn’t always love it here.”

  “I don’t set my hair,” Miriam said. “It’s the one thing I’m lucky about—it’s naturally curly, and now I have to get it put in braids for the play, so good-by.”

  “So quick?” her aunt said. “Good-by, Miriam, look how nice and suntanned she is. Nobody would even know she has a sour face.”

  Just behind the curtain, Miriam waited bunched up with everyone in their costumes on the hot, quiet stage. Sunk into the scenery, not even Gil Burstein was laughing, and all the Jews, Nazis, and Polish partisans were finally without Cokes in their hands. Amnon, still walking around in his same very short pants, gave Miriam a giant Israeli smile that she had not seen before and could not feel a part of. He said, “Now I don’t worry for the play and I don’t worry for the audience.”

  But why anyone would worry for the audience, Miriam could not see. All through the play she kept looking out at them—a little girl in braids and a too-long dress who would end up not dead—and could not tell the face of anyone. Who they were she did not know and did not want to think about: people, probably, who cried and screamed in their houses, fanned themselves with newspapers, and took along hard-boiled eggs if they went in a car for a half-hour.