Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (19 page)

“I’ll do any job,” she said in this interval. “I just don’t want you to count on languages.”

“Do you sing? We find people who sing are comfortable in our work.”

“I am moderately musical.” Very moderately. She thought of the tenor. She could still say yes. But she did not want to become a caretaker.

The fat man’s gaze loosened at last. He looked out the window. “All agencies are working together to get these people from
into England. For this, for all our efforts, we need staff members who are efficient and unsentimental. Languages are of secondary importance. The Joint trusts my judgment.”

She signed a sort of contract. Then she said, “You should know, I am occasionally sentimental.”

A smile, or something like it, landed on his large face and immediately scurried off. She suspected that, like many fat men, he danced well.

Sonya took the train back to Providence. After several months she learned that she would be sent to London and there loaned to another organization, one helping refugee children. She put the books of her clients into order. After several more months, there came a steamer ticket. She stored her furniture, and gave herself a farewell party in the emptied apartment. She took the train again and in New York boarded a ship bound for Southampton. The fat man—his name was Roland, she remembered—showed up to say good-bye, carrying a spray of carnations.

“How kind,” she said.

“It is not the usual procedure,” he admitted.

By the time she arrived in England the displaced Polish-Germans were already rescued or lost. War had been declared. She was sent to Hull for a year, to help settle as domestics German-Jewish women who had already arrived. Then she was reassigned to London.

There the Joint found her a bed-sitter in Camden Town. The landlady and her family lived on the ground floor; otherwise the place was home to unattached people. Each room had a gas fire and a stove. It took Sonya a while to get used to the smells. She had to get used to footsteps, too—there was no carpet, and everyone on the upper floors traveled past Sonya’s room. There was an old lady with twittering feet. “My dear,” she said whenever she saw Sonya. A large man looked at her with yellow-eyed interest. His slow footsteps sounded like pancakes dropped from a height. An elderly man lightly marched. With his impressive bearing and his white mustache he resembled an ambassador, but he was the proprietor of the neighborhood newsstand. Two secretaries tripped out together every morning after curling their hair with tongs. (The first time Sonya smelled singed hair she thought the house was on fire.)

And there was a lame man of about forty, their only foreigner. Sonya didn’t count herself as foreign; she was an American cousin. But the lame man—he had a German accent. He had dark skin and bad teeth. Eyebrows sheltered glowing brown eyes—eyes that seemed to be reflecting a fire even when they were merely glancing at envelopes on the hall table. His legs were of differing lengths—that accounted for the limp. Sonya recognized his limping progress whenever he came up or down the staircase: one pause Two, one pause Two; and whenever he passed her door: ONE T
WO
, ONE T
WO
, ONE T
WO
.

T
HE CHILDREN CAME
, wave after wave of them. Polish children, Austrian children, Hungarian children, German children. Some came like parcels bought from the governments that withheld passports from their parents. These children wore coats, and each carried a satchel. Some came in unruly bands, having lived like squirrels in the mountains or like rats by the rivers. Some came escorted by social workers who couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Few understood English. Some knew only Yiddish. Some had infectious diseases. Some seemed feebleminded, but it turned out that they had been only temporarily enfeebled by hardship.

They slept for a night or two in a seedy hotel near Waterloo station. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger, who directed the agency, stayed in the hotel, too, intending to sleep—they were always tired, for the bombing had begun. But the women failed to sleep, for the children—not crying; they rarely cried—wandered through the halls, or hid in closets, smoking cigarettes, or went up and down the lift. The next day, or the next day but one, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger escorted them to their quarters in the countryside, and deposited them with stout farm families, these Viennese who had never seen a cow; or left them in hastily assembled orphanages staffed with elderly schoolteachers, these Berliners who had known only the tender hands of nursemaids; or stashed them in a bishop’s palace, these Polish children for whom Christians were the devil. The Viennese kids might have found the palace suitable; the Hungarians would have formed a vigorous troupe within the orphanage; the little Poles, familiar with chickens, might have become comfortable on the farms. But the billets rarely matched the children. The organization took what it could get. After the children were settled, however uneasily, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger rode the train back to London, Mrs. Levinger returning to her husband and Sonya to solitude.

F
OR MONTHS SHE NODDED
at the dark man and he at her.

They said “Good evening.”

One day they left the house at the same time, and walked together to the underground.

He lived two floors above her, he said. She already knew that from her attention to footsteps.

His room contained an upright piano left behind by a previous tenant. He managed to keep it in tune. “A piano is so rare in furnished … digs,” he said, seeming to relish the British word.

He was on his way to give piano lessons. His pupils were London children whose parents thus far refused to have them evacuated. She was on her way to her office. He left the Tube first. “I hope we meet again, Miss …”

“Sofrankovitch,” she said. She didn’t tell him that the honorific was properly “Mrs.” Her childless marriage had ended long ago.

After that, as if the clock previously governing their lives had been exchanged for a different timepiece, they ran into each other often. They met on the narrow winding High Street. They bought newspapers at the kiosk manned by their distinguished-looking housemate. They queued at the greengrocer’s, each leaving with a few damaged apples. They found themselves together at the fishmonger’s. Both were partial to smoked fish, willing to exchange extra ration coupons for the luxury.

Often, at night, after he came home from work, after she came home, they sat by her gas fire.

“Providence,” he mused. “And the place of the hurricane?”

“Narragansett.”

“Naghaghansett,” he rolled out, his vowels aristocratically long, his consonants irreparably guttural.

“Something like that,” she said, and smiled into the shadows.

Eugene had never visited the United States, though as a young man he had studied piano in Paris. “Yes, I heard Boulanger.” Except for that heady time he had not left Germany until three years earlier, when one of the other refugee agencies helped him emigrate to London. Still short of forty then, his parents dead, his sister safely married in Shanghai, his ability to make a living secure—he was one of the easy repatriation cases, she supposed.

His father, he told her, had fought for the kaiser.

She had been a young woman during that war. Yes, she knew that Germany had once been good to its Jews, its Jews faithful to their rulers.

He stretched his long, unmatched legs toward the meager blue flames. “I’m glad we met.”

One noontime—mirabile dictu, the New York fat man might have said—they ran into each other far from home, in Kensington Gardens.

“I am attending a concert,” Eugene said. “Come with me.”

“My lunch break … not much time.”

“The performers also are on lunch break,” he said. “You won’t be late. You won’t be very late,” he corrected, with his usual slight pedantry.

They hurried along the streets leading toward the river, passing bomb craters and shelters of brick, of cement, of corrugated iron. Their own shelter, back in Camden Town, was an underground bunker, a crypt, safer than these. But it trembled sometimes, and then little children cried and women paled, and men too. Sonya soothed whichever toddler crawled into her lap, and smiled encouragement at the child’s mother. It was hard to breathe. Suppose the thing should cave in—they would all suffocate. Being struck above ground, being blasted, being shattered into a thousand pieces like her beach house, that would be better than not breathing … There were times she did not go into the shelter at all, but stayed sitting on the floor in her blacked-out room, arms around shins. Behind her on the windowsill bloomed a sturdy geranium, red in the daytime, purple in this almost blindness. And if the house should be hit, and if she should be found amid its shattered moldings and heaps of glass and smoking bricks, her head at an odd angle, her burnt hair as black as it had been in her youth … if she should be found in the rubble, people would think, if they thought anything at all, that she had slept through the siren. She might have taken a bit too much, the wineshop keeper would say to his wife—he no doubt guessed that his customer sometimes sacrificed food for whisky. She was working so very hard, Mrs. Levinger would remark.

Eugene led her to a church. Sonya looked up at the organ loft. A few parishioners on their own lunch breaks settled into the empty pews. One slowly lowered his forehead onto the back of the pew in front of him, then lifted it, then lowered it again.

Downstairs, in a small chapel, a dozen people waited on chairs and two performers waited on a platform. The standing young man held a viola by its neck. The young woman sat at a piano, head bowed as if awaiting execution. A note on the mimeographed program mentioned that these twenty-year-old twins had recently arrived from Czechoslovakia. The performance began. The sister played with precision. Eugene’s fingers played along, on his thighs. The brother made love to his instrument. In the intervals between selections the attentive audience was entertained by faint sounds of organ practice from above. The concert lasted less than an hour. When the twins and their guests filed upstairs, Sonya looked for the parishioner who had banged his forehead against the pew back, but he was gone.

As Eugene had promised, Sonya was not very late getting back to work. Still, Mrs. Levinger had already returned from lunch. She was on the telephone. She gave Sonya a distracted nod and hung up.

“The next batch is here,” she said. “The French ones.”

T
HE USUAL SETUP
: at one end of a large room, volunteers stood at bridge tables; at the other end, a trestle table holding loaves of bread, and biscuits, and plates of sausages, and jugs of milk.

Forty children who had been fending for themselves for six months now huddled in the middle of the room as if, were they to approach the food, they would be shot.

One girl’s hair was the color of lamplight.

Mrs. Levinger hoisted herself onto a folding chair and grasped its back for a moment while her rump threatened to topple her. Then she stood up. Once standing she did not falter or shake.

Sonya made note of various details—it was part of her job. There was a small pale fellow who looked sick, but the doctors hadn’t detained him. Hunger and fatigue, probably. Two little girls gripped each other’s hands. Many children carried smaller children.

The fair-haired girl carried an instrument case.

Mrs. Levinger welcomed them in French. They were being sent to villages in the Cotswolds, she said. Hills, she elaborated. They could keep their belongings. Siblings would not be separated. The host families would not be Jewish. But they would be sympathetic.

“I am not Jewish, either,” said a dark boy.

“Ah, Pierre,” reproved a bigger boy. “It’s all right, in this place.”

The children made their slow silent way to the trestle table.

Soon all were eating—all except the tall blond girl with the instrument. She seemed about to approach Mrs. Levinger. But it was a feint. She swerved toward Sonya. “Madame …”

“Oui,” Sonya said. “Voulez vous—”

“I speak English.” Her eyes were gray. She had a straight nose, a curly mouth, a small chin. “I do not wish to go into the countryside.”

“What is your name?”

“Lotte,” she said with a shrug, as if any name would do. “I am from Paris. I wish to stay in London.”

“Your instrument …”

“A violin,” Lotte said. “I tried to sell it when we ran out of food in Marseilles, but no one wanted to buy it. I am skilled, madame. I can play in an orchestra. Or in a café—gypsy music.”