Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (23 page)

They owned a board. Sometimes they were able to borrow chessmen, but usually they rented those of a Lithuanian in the next room, the fervent Messiah’s room. The Lithuanian didn’t care for chess but happened to own the set of his brother, now ashes. He wouldn’t lend, wouldn’t sell, would only lease. Claud had to relinquish a cigarette for the nightly pleasure.

But now … Ludwig parted the shredded canvas that was their door, sat down on the lower bunk beside his uncle. “Look!” he said, and shook the box Sonya had given him like a noisemaker.

Claud smiled and coughed. “The Litvak—he can kiss my backside.”

W
HEN
S
ONYA LEFT THE OFFICE
, Ida resumed typing. She was doing requisitions: for sulfa drugs; for books; for thread; for food, food, food.

Dear Colonel Spaulding,

You are correct that the 2000 calories Per Person Per Day are Supplemented by Red Cross packages and purchases from the village. But the Red Cross packages come unpredictably. Some of our Persons will not eat Spam. And though we must turn a blind eye to the Black Market, it seems unwise to encourage its use. Our severest need now is dried fruit—our store of raisins is completely wiped out—and sanitary napkins.

Yours Very Truly,
Sonya Sofrankovich

Ida ran a hand through her hair. It was as dense and dark as it had been ten years earlier, when she was captured, separated from the husband now known to be dead, oh Shmuel, and forced to work in a munitions factory. Not labor camp, not escape from labor camp, not the death in her arms of her best friend, oh Luba, not recapture, not liberation; not going unwashed for weeks, not living on berries in the woods, not the disappearance of her menses for almost a year and their violent return; not influenza lice odors suppurations; not the discovery in the forest of an infant’s remains, a baby buried shallowly, dug up by animals; not the one rape and the many beatings—nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair. Her hair betrayed her expectance of happiness. And where would she find this happiness? Ah,
b’eretz
, in the Land. Milliners, she had been informed by the emissary from the Underground, barely concealing his disgust … Milliners were not precisely what the Land required. Do you think we wear chapeaux while feeding our chickens, Giverit? Perhaps you intend to drape our cows with silken garlands. Sitting on a wooden chair, hands folded in her lap, she told him that she would change careers with readiness, transform herself into a milkmaid, till the fields, draw water, shoot Arabs, blow up Englishmen. Then she leaned toward this lout of a pioneer. “But if cities arise
b’eretz,
and commerce, and romance—I’ll make hats again.” He looked at her for a long time. Then he wrote her name on his list. Now she was waiting for the summons.

Meanwhile she typed applications for other Persons. Belgium had recently announced that it would take some. Australia also. Canada too. America was still dithering about its immigration laws, although the Lutheran Council of the American Midwest had volunteered to relocate fifty Persons, not specifying agricultural workers, not even specifying Lutherans. But how many tailors could this place Minnesota absorb?

She typed an application, translating from the Yiddish handwriting.
Name: Morris Losowitz
; yes, she knew him as Mendel but Morris was the proper Anglicization.
Age: 35
; yes that was true.
Dependents: Wife and three Children
; yes that was true, too, though it ignored the infant on the way.
Occupation: Electrical Engineer.
In Poland he had taught in a cheder. Perhaps he knew how to change a lightbulb.
Languages Spoken in Order of Fluency: Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.
Strictly true. He could say “I want to go to America,” and maybe a dozen other words. His wife spoke better English, was more intelligent; but the application wasn’t curious about her.

Ida typed on and on. The afternoon darkened further. Her own overhead lightbulb shook on its noose. In the big hall above her ceiling raged a joyous battle: walls were being decorated, the camp’s orchestra was practicing, the Purim spielers were perfecting their skits.

She stopped, and covered her typewriter with the remnants of a tallith. She locked the office and went into the courtyard. Two members of the DP police stood there, self-important noodles. They grinned at her. She passed children still playing in the chill dark. She entered the east building. What a din: groups of men, endlessly arguing. And those two Hungarian sisters, always together, their hands clasped or at least their knuckles touching. She’d heard that they accompanied each other into the toilet. In the first room there was a vent to the outdoors and somebody had installed a stove, and always a cabbage stew boiled, or a pot of onions, and always washed diapers hung near the steam, never getting entirely dry. Hers was the next room, hers the first cubicle, where a nice old lady slept in the bed above, preferring elevation to the rats she believed infested the place, though there had been no rats since the visit of a sanitary squad from the British occupation zone. But the lady expected their return, and never left her straw mattress until mid-afternoon.

She was up and about now, gossiping somewhere. From beneath the bed Ida dragged a sack and dumped its contents onto her own mattress—a silk blouse, silk underwear, sewing utensils, glue, and a Wehrmacht helmet, battered and cracked. And cellophane; cellophane wrappers; dozens of cellophane wrappers, hundreds; some crushed, some merely torn, some intact, slipped whole from the Lucky Strikes and Camels that they had once protected … She began to work.

S
ONYA, EJECTED FROM HER OFFICE
by the solicitous Ida, had only pretended to be taking a walk. When out of range of the office window she doubled back to the south building. Two women there were near their time, though neither was ready to be transported to the lying-in bungalow. In their room they were being entertained by three men rehearsing a Purim spiel: a Mordecai with a fat book, an Ahasuerus in a cloak, and a fool in a cap with a single bell. A fool? The Purim spiel had a long connection to the commedia dell’arte, Roland had mentioned. This fool played a harmonica, the king sang
Yedeh hartz hot soides
—Every heart has secrets—and Mordecai, his book open, rocked from side to side and uttered wise sayings.

Sonya next went to the storehouse. Someone had stolen a carton of leftover Chanukah supplies donated by a congregation in New Jersey. Not a useful donation—the camp would be disbanded by next December, every resident knew that for a fact, all of them would be housed comfortably in Sydney, Toronto, New York, Tel Aviv … Still, shouted the Person in charge, this is a crazy insult, stealing from ourselves; why don’t we rob the swine in the village?

The TB hospital next, formerly the Wehrmacht’s stable. The military nurse who ran the place snapped that all was as usual, two admissions yesterday, no discharges, X-ray machine on its last legs, what else was new. Her assistants, female Persons who had been doctors Before, were more informative. “Ach, the people here now will sooner or later get better probably,” one said. “They’ll recover,
nu
, if God is willing, maybe if he isn’t, if he just looks the other way. Choose life. Isn’t it written?”

Sonya went to her own bedroom. As camp directors she and Roland occupied private quarters—a single narrow room with a triple-decker bed. Roland slept on the bottom, Sonya in the middle, once in a while an inspector from headquarters occupied the top, where else to put him? There was a sink and a two-drawer dresser. Sonya opened the lower drawer and reached into the back. Why should she too not dress up for the Purim party? Choose life, choose beauty, choose what all American women long for, a little black dress. She grabbed the rolled-up garment she had stashed there two years ago and brought it into the weak light and raised it and shook it. It unfurled reluctantly. She took off her shirt, slipped the dress over her head, stepped out of her ski pants. The dress felt too large. There was a piece of mirror resting slantwise on the sink—Roland used it for shaving. She straightened it. Then she backed away.

A witch peered at her from the jagged looking glass. A skinny powerless witch with untamed gray hair wearing the costume of a bigger witch.

She had been a free spirit once, she thought she recalled. At the young age of fifty she had dwelled on a Rhode Island beach; she had danced under the moon. She had known the Hurricane. She had lived in a bed-sitter in London and had worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. She had saved some children. She had known the doodlebugs. In a damp pub in 1945 she had accepted Roland Rosenberg’s invitation to run Camp Gruenwasser with him. She had allowed his fat, freckled hand to rest on hers.

She peered closer at the tiny witch in the glass. And then some disturbance in the currents of the air caused the mirror to hurl itself onto the wooden floor. There it splintered.

Roland would have to shave without a mirror. Maybe he’d grow a beard. She was attempting to pick up the shards when he came in.

“Sonya, stop.” He walked down the hall and fetched the communal broom and dustpan—a large thistle on a stick, a piece of tin. She was sucking her finger when he returned. He looked at the cut. “Run it under water for a long time.” She ran it under water for a long time. When she turned around the damage was swept up, the implements had been returned, and he was lying on the lowest bed, eyes closed, as if it was this recent effort that had exhausted him, not two years of constant toil.

She closed their door. She unbuckled his worn belt. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt. What color had it been originally? It had long ago faded to the yellowish green of his eyes. She unbuttoned the cuffs, too, but did not attempt to remove the shirt—it was up to him whether or not to take it off; he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? Was he? He had all the vitality of a corpse. But when she roughly rolled down his trousers and pulled them off and rolled down his undershorts and pulled them off, she saw that he was ready for her. When had they done this last—three months ago? Six? For them, as for the Persons, one gray day got sucked into the next. Yet there were joys: letters from relatives thought dead, meat sometimes in the soup, and tonight a party … She stood and lifted her little black dress over her witch’s body. It ruffled her witch’s coiffure. She left the dress lying on the floor. She straddled Roland’s erection, brushing him back and forth, side to side, until she felt a spurt of her own moisture, and he must have felt it, too, for, alert, he gripped her upper arms and turned them both over at once as if they were a single animal, a whale in green flannel maybe. She looked up at him. “Roland, I love you,” she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders, the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. Were these not things to love? Oh, and the kindness. He thrust, thrust … “Ah,” she said. And even in her pleasure, her witch’s pleasure, she heard the stealthy opening of the door. She turned her head and met Ludwig’s rodent gaze.

B
Y THE TIME
R
OLAND AND
S
ONYA ARRIVED
at the great hall—a big room with a little stage—the thrown-together orchestra was playing: strings, one trumpet, woodwinds, an accordion, a balalaika, three guitars, one drum. Candles in tin cans were burning side by side on the rim of the stage and on a ledge around the room and at the windows. Each thick candle, Sonya noticed, was made up of a clutch of little, twisted candles, the Chanukah kind. There were also several chanukkiyahs. A broad table held a mountain of hamantaschen. Another table sagged under bowls of liquid. “Let’s hope no one got hold of the methanol,” Roland said. At another camp, mostly Polish Persons, two men had gone blind from drinking the stuff.

Roland was dressed, he claimed, as Dionysius—that is, two sprigs of juniper were pinned to his scant hair, one falling onto his forehead, the other nestling within his humble nape.

Most costumes were equally rudimentary. Where could Persons get fabric, jewels, gauzy shawls? Yet some had indeed procured such items. A wife had made a royal garment for her husband. It was a short black silk cape, formerly the lining of their only coat. They wouldn’t need a lined coat in Palestine, this loving spouse explained to Sonya. She had adorned the cape with little white fur tails which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins. Several young Mordecais wore, in front of their ears, scholarly coils: the strapping tape from Red Cross packages. One Esther had saved a beaded dress from her dead mother’s wardrobe. Another wore a dirndl skirt and a jersey shirt that said
ENGLEWOOD HIGH SCHOOL
. A Catholic family slipped in shyly wearing Easter finery; after years in a cardboard valise the clothing too seemed to be cardboard. Ludwig and his uncle Claud had encased their upper bodies in splintery barrels that had held potatoes. Their heads were crowned by circlets of dry leaves.
SCHWARZ KÖNIG
was painted on Ludwig’s barrel. Uncle Claud was the white queen.

King, queen, wise man, and the occasional hero: cigar stubs identified Churchill, a cigarette holder Roosevelt. No one came dressed as Haman. Haman adorned the yellow walls, though. He was painted in green, painted in black tar, drawn in pencil, cut from brown paper. There were several Hamans in relief, made from a sturdy papier-mâché. “What is this stuff?” Sonya asked the history teacher. “The
Stars and Stripes,
pulped,” he told her. Many Hamans were rendered feet up, head down. Each wore a little black mustache.