Gone to Soldiers (127 page)

“I didn't know you at first. You look so different! It is you?” Rysia was dragging on her arm, staring at her. “Let's find someplace dry and eat the cabbage.”

“I have a house. We'll go there. You can eat with us.”

“I've looked and looked for you! All I knew was that you were in Frankfurt working for the Americans. They told me that at the hospital. I've looked for you in all the camps, everyplace! I've been here for weeks and weeks looking for you! I thought they lied and you were dead.”

Only after Rysia had gobbled a whole pan of soup and a loaf of bread could she settle herself to talk. She propped her hands on the packing crate table, water heating on the camp stove for a little real coffee Jacqueline got from her American bosses, and stared at Jacqueline.

“I went with you, but they let me go in a week. You weren't conscious and I was afraid to stay in Germany. Slowly I made my way home to my village Ceppany, near the Rába River. When I got there, the war was over. In the village, other people, Gentiles, were living in my parents' inn and running the mill. They didn't welcome me. They claimed they'd bought it and it was theirs. There were no Jews left! An old teacher of mine told me to go to the Soviet soldiers and demand the mill back. She said they would do justice.”

“Did you go?”

“I thought, what do I know about running a mill, and I was frightened of the people. I heard of another Jew who had come back in the next village and then just disappeared. I didn't want to be the only Jew in Ceppany. I hung around, but nobody wanted me there. Some Russian soldiers gave me food and tried to make me go to bed with them, but I told them I was only eleven. I think everybody was mad they didn't rape me, because they had raped others. Finally I decided I couldn't stay, so I started back to look for you. It was hard. Everything now is cut into zones with border police. The Russian commandant had given me papers, but I discovered that if I showed them at the entrance to the American zone, the Russians wouldn't let me out or else the Americans wouldn't let me in. I kept trying for two weeks along the border. Finally I threw away all my papers and went through in a load of potatoes.”

“You know what tomorrow is? It's Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rysia. L'shanah tovah tikatayvou. May we be inscribed for a good year.” She put her arm around Rysia. “Don't worry, we'll organize what we need. Now, come meet my housemates. They've all been in the camps, you're safe here.”

When they went to bed that night, Rysia lay in her arms clutching her, shuddering with fear and fatigue. “I was so afraid you had died in hospital, died like everyone else. Then I was afraid I'd never find you, that you'd gone back to France. I looked for you for so long, in every street. Every day I looked for you. I gave up hope but I had nothing else to do. I'm afraid I'll be arrested. Jacqueline, I have no papers.”

“We'll fix that. Daniela was the best counterfeiter, but I'm not useless myself. I know every little racket going here. Once we get you papers, I'm going to take you to Toulouse, where Daniela and I were in the Resistance. We have friends there. I have to get a temporary visa from the Americans to go find my sister Naomi in the U.S.”

“When you get your real sister back, you won't want me.”

“I have lost my other sister, my mother, my father, my best friend, my lover. How can only one sister make all that up?”

“I'll go where you say, but don't leave me there alone. I can't stand being alone.”

“We'll make a family. We know who each other really is. Only you and I are alive to tell what we've been through and the mountains of the dead behind us.”

“Do you think I'll ever grow up? Ever be a woman like other women?”

“You'll be a better woman than other women. We've been each other's mother, we've been each other's baby, we've shared the last scrap of bread.”

“And that apple, remember that apple,” Rysia said. “A whole orchard inside it.”

Beside her Rysia fell asleep, still holding tight. She could not extract herself to find a more comfortable position, but she did not mind lying awake. It would be the New Year. Rysia and she would go to the river and perform tashlich, throwing the crumbs in and throwing the sins away. Her sin had been quietude and despair. Her sin had been emptiness. L'chaim, life, was the toast they would drink tomorrow. She knew the worth of her friends, how strong they were, how utterly to be trusted with death and with life and rebirth. She would follow them into the war they were entering. She had no other family, no other land or loyalty, no other home.

She had no choice, finally. Rysia was stateless, but so was she. She had delayed returning to France, in part because she would never forget the way she had lost her country and her citizenship under Vichy as under the Germans. No, she was as stateless as Rysia. She belonged to no one but the friends who had survived and who were going, as Jews, to make a place where Jews could never be stateless. Into her head came no images beyond Daniela's fantasy of the apricot trees in bloom. It did not matter. Europe stank of blood. She knew she was not so much going toward as going away from, but she was going in the only company she cherished. The war had taken from her everyone she loved, but it had given her Rysia back for the New Year, it had preserved Lev and Vera alive. It had cast up Ari, whoever he would be to them.

But first, she must find her only living sister—who perhaps no longer spoke French. Who perhaps would resent her, remembering only childish antagonisms. Who perhaps liked living with a rich American family and would resent any effort to haul her off into danger and poverty. She did not know, but she had to go face-to-face and find out. At the least, she would recover her journal, which had so much of her old life stored in it. Memory had become a religious function to Jacqueline, and she studied how to keep it intact and powerful.

The love she found in herself was not the love that Ari sought but deeper and more primitive, tribal, familial, sisterly, motherly. That she could give. That she would give. She would give her strength, her love, her knowledge, her history, herself. They would cobble a family together out of refuse and rubble; they would scavenge their debris into a life.

ABRA 11

The View from Tokyo

They had married in haste and informed the two families at their leisure, which, as the letters arrived whose anguished shrieks distance comfortably diminished, seemed wiser and wiser to Daniel and to her. They were installed in the Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, middle-level members of the bombing survey, civilians again. The hotel had stood through the bombing as well as the earthquakes it had been designed to survive. Tokyo was a ruined city. Whole residential areas consisted of squatters' huts of refuse patched together. Charred safes that had held valuables still stood with no house remaining above them.

Daniel's family back in the Bronx was sitting shivah on him. Abra's mother wrote that her father had almost had a heart attack and that she was disinherited. She also heard from Ready, who had married Karen Sue and was not inclined to indignation, and Roger, who was. “You will find to your rue,” he wrote in his flourishy script, “that doors will be closed to you that formerly swung wide, that hearths that welcomed you in will turn you cold away. Formerly your name on a card could admit you to the best clubs and secure you courteous attention. What kind of attention can you expect with a name such as Balaban?”

Daniel's uncle in Shanghai sent a present of exquisite silks and a sweet letter, along with a photograph of his family. It seemed that during the war years, Daniel's aunt had died and his uncle had married a Chinese woman. In addition to the stalwart older Balaban children, he posed with a new set of toddler offspring. He was not about to lecture Daniel on his marriage. “The Balabans have always been adventurous,” Daniel said. “I suspect we took in some Tartars on the way. Do you mind being disinherited?”

That made her laugh. “I'm not my father's heir, and we're not the wealthy side of the family. I have a trust fund from Grandfather Scott, and one from Grandmother Woolrich. I came into that this year. It's invested in blue-chip stocks and produces a steady eight thousand a year. It won't make us rich, but it gives us a base we don't have to worry about.”

“Every day I learn new things about my wife. Do you have any other hidden assets?”

“Lots,” she said, “but they're not generally regarded as negotiable.”

Daniel and she did not suffer as much as many people would have, she felt, from the disapproval and rejection of their families. They believed that time would bring the parents round. Both had left home early and definitively. She felt they were already far more important to each other than their families had been to either of them since puberty. Both of them had had the sense for years that their families did not really like them as they were, and that the less about their lives that was known in the old home, the better it was for domestic tranquillity.

They had just spent two days in Kyoto, which had never been bombed and was just as beautiful as Daniel had anticipated. Traveling with him was perfect. He spoke the language, he understood, he rapidly picked up the proper forms of behavior. He was interested in seeing everything, but what interested him most was their mutual experience. It was not the pool, the garden, the rock, the temple, but that he and she were seeing and knowing together with exchanged comments the pool, the garden, the rock, the temple.

How lucky she was that he had been hidden away in cryptanalysis all through the war, or someone would have grabbed him. She had married him because she loved him, but what shallow love that had been she already understood. Now that they were together she was falling in love with him in a new way that made her feel as if everything before had been practicing scales, exercises to develop the hands, the eye, the mind. Partly what she loved was how much he loved her.

Daniel was affectionate and passionate; and hers. He was not sloppy or uxorious in public, but unfailingly courteous and attuned. They were a team. They did not hold hands and coo, but worked together efficiently, excitingly, enjoying their competence, their intelligent communication and complementary skills. Abra had learned a great deal about munitions and the economy of war; Daniel knew a vast amount of and about the Japanese.

But his affection was novel, a man who cared warmly, who expressed that caring readily and without forethought or rationing. At first she had silently but constantly compared him with Oscar. Indeed Karen Sue had remarked to her that she obviously had a thing for Jewish men; perhaps she did. Or perhaps what she had wanted in Oscar and never gotten was exactly what was supremely haveable in Daniel. Now she rarely thought of Oscar except in connection with London during the war. He had ceased to exist as a force in her psyche. He was superannuated.

When Oscar sent them a fine camera as a wedding present, she was pleased merely. She had no trouble writing him an honest thank-you. Daniel was briefly suspicious, but she made him understand that Oscar liked to make family of everyone.

Theirs was, she thought, a relationship of equals at last, at last, and having had this, what woman would settle for a rationed dependency? Daniel knew far more about food and art; she handled their finances and began to take a greater interest in money in general. She was astounded daily upon waking, upon reflecting during the workday, upon retiring beside him at night, to discover how actively happy she was. Not that she thought him perfect. He had no taste in clothes, no sense of how to dress himself to display his charms and to give clues to others that would inculcate respect. He broke the back of books he read. He failed to clean the basin after he shaved, and frequently left the toilet seat up so that when she rose in the night to pee, she fell in. He sang, abominably, in the bath, the shower and while brushing his shoes. These small flaws reassured her. A whole warring sector of life had come to peace and was planted over in roses and wheat. Mine, she thought frankly, when she looked at his handsome head, his slender remarkable hands, his crisp hair. Mine. Me. Us. She would take on any enemy with him and for him, she was sure of that.

An air letter came from New York:

My dear nephew Daniel
,

I hope you don't be angry that I write you. I know how it is with you and your parents but I am so grateful for your help in coming to this great and beautiful and safe country I want you should know how I feel. You should keep in the mind too that I am here and seeing your parents and can let you know how they are and let them know how you are because you shouldn't forget they care about you in spite of present quarrels and troubles
.

I got a job as bookkeeper in the diamond district and I am studying English in the night school to become citizen and speak and write better. I thank you a hundred times for your help and I will be a good friend to your parents. When you have grandchildren for them, then they will soften. In the meantime mazel tov to you and your lovely bride. Your sister just had a baby boy they named Sherman. I never heard of such a name except for a tank. Be well and come back well
.

I wish I could send you a wedding present, but I am saving to bring over other people who need help. But when you come back to this country, I will celebrate with you and give you a present then
.

Your loving and grateful aunt
,

Esther Balaban

“We should send
her
a present,” she suggested. “What would she like?”

“I never met her.” Daniel stuck his lip out. “I didn't exactly move heaven and earth to bring her over. I'm feeling mildly guilty. My parents did the whole thing. We'll send her a kimono. They fit anybody.”

The next day they were scheduled again for Hiroshima. It had been set up three times before, and each time canceled. They couldn't figure out what the fuss was about. After all, Abra had been looking at bomb ruins for years, first unofficially and then in an official capacity. But this time finally the cars arrived and off they went, with the rest of their party of eight. It was a crisp clean November day when Mount Fuji was clearly visible with fresh snow farther down each week and the leaves displaying fine ancient-looking washed-out tints on the ground, the last chrysanthemums still raising golden and bronze withered manes.