Too Many Men (16 page)

She knew how to say I’m tired, my head hurts, I’ve got a stomachache, and my children are killing me. Not a very useful set of phrases and sentences.

“He understands English,” Edek repeated in Yiddish.

Edek sat in the front of the Mercedes with the driver. They were half an hour out of Warsaw. He had been quiet for most of the trip. Ruth was relieved when he started to chat to the driver. The driver seemed happy, too. He switched off the radio as soon as Edek began to talk. Ruth tried not to listen to the conversation. She checked her bag to make sure she had taken everything out of the Bristol’s safety deposit box. Her passport and Edek’s passport were still in the manila envelope she had packed them in.

Her wallet was there. Her travelers’ checks, and both sets of airline tickets were there. She was relieved.

Edek and the driver were now talking flat out. The talk was of highways and expressways. Ruth couldn’t understand most of it. She heard Edek say

“Long Island Expressway.” Why, Ruth wondered, would Edek be talking about the Long Island Expressway to the driver? Edek was animated. One sentence poured out after another. He sounded as if he was having the time of his life.

They drove past several small farms. Polish people were very neat farmers. Everything was meticulously laid out. Perfectly square fields of potaT O O M A N Y M E N

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toes. Parallel rows of cauliflower and rows and rows of beans. Rows of green cabbage, next to rows of red cabbage. The spaces in between the rows were scrupulously clean. Ruth couldn’t see a stray twig or weed in farm after farm. The animals looked just as tidy. The black and white cows had shiny pelts. Even the pigs looked spick and groomed.

There must be something soothing about growing your own food, Ruth thought. Her life was so far removed from the planting and gathering of essential sustenance. What did she do? She provided expensive letters for people who could no longer form their own words. She felt very flat.

She was jolted by the sudden, raucous laughter coming from the front seat. Edek and the driver had been chuckling quietly, but now they were laughing out loud. Edek roared with laughter. He turned around to Ruth.

“He told me a not so nice joke,” he said. “Should I tell you?” “No thanks,”

she said.

They were on the outskirts of a small town. Ruth could see the town ahead of them. They passed a large industrial building. On the side of the building someone had drawn a penis. A Star of David was drawn across the testicles and the initials LKS were written along the length of the penis.

Ruth had seen anti-Semitic graffiti in Poland before. It had shocked her each time. They had removed the Jews from Poland but anti-Semitic graffiti had stayed and thrived.

She tapped Edek on the shoulder and pointed to the graffiti. “Ask him what that is.” she said to Edek. Both men looked out of the window. The driver offered Edek an explanation.

“He says it is a joke,” Edek said to Ruth.

“Does he think it’s funny?” Ruth said.

“Of course not,” said Edek. The driver added something else. “He says they didn’t mean anything bad by it,” Edek said.

“LKS is the local soccer team, and they’re losing,” Ruth said. “So, the locals put Jude, Jew, or a Star of David on references to the team.” Edek didn’t say anything. “Do you understand, Dad?” she said. “They’re using the Star of David to signify the weak ones, the losers.”

“I understand,” Edek said. They drove in silence for several miles.

“Would you like to stop at the house of Chopin?” the driver said loudly to Ruth.

“No thanks,” she said.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“Zelazowa Wola, Chopin’s home, is very interesting,” the driver said.

“No thank you,” Ruth said.

“Why not?” said Edek.

“Because we’ll never get to Lódz,” said Ruth. “Come on, we’ll stop for five minutes,” Edek said.

“I’ll stay in the car, then,” she said. “I’ve seen Chopin’s home. I’ve seen Chopin’s piano, Chopin’s mother’s piano, Chopin’s bedroom, Chopin’s mother’s bedroom, Chopin’s bathroom, and Chopin’s garden.” Edek ignored her.

At Zelazowa Wola, Ruth stayed in the car and read. The two men returned from their tour of Chopin’s house in good spirits. The driver was humming
La Polonaise
. Edek asked Ruth if she would take a photograph of him and the driver in Chopin’s garden. She got out of the car and took the photograph. “Take one more photograph in front of the Mercedes,” Edek said. She photographed both men in front of the Mercedes. They looked so happy together. They looked like brothers.

Edek and the driver started talking as soon as they got back into the car.

The driver was telling Edek something about Chopin’s mother. Edek was also discussing Chopin. Ruth didn’t know he knew anything about Chopin.

The two men talked and talked.

Ruth was puzzled. Edek was never as garrulous as this in Australia. And then it dawned on her. Of course, in Australia he was forced to speak English. A halting, faulty English. Here he could speak Polish. Perfect Polish.

Polish, the language of his childhood, the language of his mother and father. No wonder he was at home here. He was at home. It was a sobering thought.

“Is it nice for you to be able to speak as much Polish as you want to?”

she said to her father.

“It is all right,” he said. “I can speak Polish, I can speak English, I can speak German.” He paused. “Do you know what they called the path to the gas chambers?
Himmel Weg
. The road to heaven.”

“What made you think of that?” Ruth said.

“What, are you stupid or something?” he said. “What else am I thinking of? You think I am not thinking about things. This morning it was a big trauma for me.”

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“What was?” said Ruth.

“What do you think I am talking about?” Edek said exasperatedly.

“The ghetto wall, of course.”

“Why didn’t you tell me at the time?” Ruth said.

“Why should I tell you every little thing?” he said.

“That wasn’t so little,” said Ruth.

“It is enough of this stuff,” Edek said. He turned back to the driver.

They were almost on the outskirts of Lódz, now. “We’re getting close to Lódz,” Ruth said to Edek. “I do not recognize it yet,” he said. His voice sounded frighteningly flat.

“We’re going to be all right, Dad,” she said.

“Of course,” he said.

She wished that the driver would start chatting to Edek. As though he had read her mind, the driver said something to Edek. Edek answered him.

Soon another conversation was under way. It seemed to be about cars and mileage. And Mercedeses. Edek started to sound like himself, again.

“Jesus, look, more graffiti,” Ruth said. They had passed a wall with several Stars of David crisscrossed with the LKS initials of the losing Polish soccer team. As soon as she had spoken, she had regretted interrupting Edek and the driver. “I do not think you should say Jesus,” Edek said.

“Children do this. It is just children,” the driver said, looking back at the graffiti.

They were in Lódz proper now. Ruth didn’t want to cause another disturbance by announcing that they had arrived. Edek seemed unmoved. He had opened the glovebox of the Mercedes and was admiring the smooth way it opened and shut. Edek and the driver were agreeing that the precision of German engineering was hard to beat.

Lódz looked as bleak and as grim as Ruth remembered it. They were in the center of the city. In the streets people had pallid faces and blank expressions. Lódz, an industrial city built on the textile industry, was often called the Manchester of Poland. Lódz, Ruth thought, made Manchester look like Monte Carlo.

They pulled up outside the Grand Victoria Hotel. The doorman rushed up to open the car doors. He collided with the driver, who was also in a hurry to open the car doors. The doorman opened Ruth’s door with a flour-

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ish. He peered inside. “Please let me help you with anything that you need,” he said to her. He was revolting. She hunched her shoulders so that she would be as far from him as possible while she got out of the car. He hovered around the car door. “It is a pleasure to be of help to such a beautiful woman,” he said as Ruth was halfway out.

He really was repulsive, she thought. He had a very thick neck on top of a very thick body. Several thick gold chains hung around his thick neck, and revolting wads of hair were growing out of his ears and nostrils. Ruth flinched. How could men like this not realize how unattractive they were?

Maybe it took a lot to make a man feel unattractive.

“I shall come to your room, personally, to make sure that everything is in order for you,” he said to Ruth. “No, thank you,” she said loudly. He really was disgusting. Awful enough to make anyone change his mind about the value of genocide. Someone should have shot him, years ago. She smiled to herself at the outrageousness of that thought.

Ruth looked at her father. He was handing over what looked like volu-minous amounts of zlotys to the driver and shaking his hand. He said his final good-bye to the driver and followed Ruth into the hotel. Edek smiled at the doorman and introduced himself. “Dad, I’ve just got rid of him,”

Ruth hissed into Edek’s ear. “He’s revolting.” Edek glared at Ruth and moved away from her. He started talking to the porter. Ruth went to the reception desk. She requested rooms close together. She heard Edek laughing.

The Grand Victoria Hotel had seen grander days. There was wear and tear and a general shabbiness everywhere. Even in the lobby. The porter came up to take her bags. His collar was covered with dandruff. His hair was filthy. Slicked in its own grease. Ruth grimaced and moved a foot farther away from him. It was funny, she thought, that you could tell the difference between dirty hair and hair that was designed to look dirty, with layers of gel, mousse, thickeners, relaxers, styling creams, and foaming strengtheners.

She felt her own hair. All the curls were curling the way she liked them to curl, into little ringlets. Her hair had been looking good lately. These good looks came at a price. A hundred and fifty dollars a haircut, to be precise. Geoffrey, at the John Frieda salon on Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, always did a good job on her hair. He was English, and she T O O M A N Y M E N

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liked the familiarity of his accent and his phrases. He was playful with her.

He was the youngest of ten children, and handled her hair with the confi-dence and intimacy of a man who has always been around women.

Geoffrey was always asking her if she was in love. No, she would say.

“Neither am I,” he would reply. “Here I am, in New York, in gay heaven, and I can’t get a date,” he would say. “It’s a city in which it’s impossible to meet real people,” she would say. Sometimes she went to the movies with Geoffrey. Ruth had her hair colored at the John Frieda salon, too. Bryan, her colorist, was one of the most relaxing men she had ever met. She almost went into a coma when Bryan colored her hair. She had her hair colored every three weeks. That way she need never know if she was going gray.

Hair was complicated for most women. Ruth had had her long curly hair cut by the local barber when she was twelve. Her mother had taken her to Mr. Brown, who had a barbershop across the street from them in Carlton. Mr. Brown cut and cut. Ruth emerged with a short back and sides. Mr. Brown had even clipped the back of her neck with his clippers.

With her new haircut, Ruth looked like a pinhead. She had looked in the mirror when she had got home and known that Rooshka hadn’t meant to make her ugly. Something out of her mother’s control had driven Rooshka to have Ruth’s hair cut off. Ruth knew that it must have been connected with the chopping off of her mother’s own long, thick plaits, in Auschwitz.

When they emptied Auschwitz, there were fifteen thousand pounds of human hair left behind. The Nazis were too busy in the last days of the war to ship this particular shipment of hair. The hair was packed in fifty-five-pound bags, ready to be shipped to Bavaria to the factories that processed the hair. The factories converted the hair into fabric. Lining to be used in men’s overcoats. The factories paid twenty-five pfennigs a pound for this hair, which reemerged as rolls of lining. Tailors stitched the hair into men’s suits as well. Somewhere in Germany, men had walked to work wearing her mother’s hair. The hair contained traces of hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B, the gas they used to kill the owners of the hair, but the Germans weren’t bothered by that. After all, this hair didn’t touch German skin.

It was big business, this crating and shipping of people’s bits and pieces.

Gold and platinum pulled from teeth were melted and molded into ingots.

Watches were sent to Oranienburg and spectacles were shipped to the SS

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Sanitary Office. An office that didn’t appear to have been too sanitary.

Clothes were forwarded to the Ministry of Finance. When the Germans fled Auschwitz they left behind eight hundred and thirty-six thousand, five hundred and twenty-five women’s dresses, among other things.

Ruth felt trapped and restless in her room at the Grand Victoria Hotel. She needed to get out. It was four o’clock, and almost dark. She thought that she would probably feel better, even if she only sat in the lobby. She picked up her bag and walked to the door. The door handle wouldn’t turn. It was stuck.

She called Edek’s room. “I’m stuck,” she said. “I can’t get out of my room.”

“What happened?” he said.

“The door handle won’t budge,” she said. Edek started to laugh.

“It is not such a good hotel what the Bristol is, that is for sure,” he said.

“It has seen grander days, the Grand Victoria,” she said. He laughed again.

“You was always clever with words,” he said.

“Dad, can you call the porter and explain the problem to him, in Polish?” she said.