Too Many Men (2 page)

Ten taps were hard to disguise. Exceptionally hard in a business meeting. She had to count the taps, too, so she often lost the thread of what was being said. She had a few lesser protective mechanisms such as five rapid blinks of either eye to stop the destruction of small-scale happinesses or success. One year she had had to spit three times over her shoulder when she had felt in danger. That had proved a difficult thing to do in public, and she had been relieved when she’d felt safe enough to give that up.

Ruth tried to curtail the taps and the blinks as much as she could. She knew that if she let all of her idiosyncrasies loose, she could look like a maniac in minutes. These superstitious gestures had been part of her since she was a child. Yet she didn’t believe in the supernatural. She scoffed at star signs, tarot cards, palm readings, clairvoyants, and psychics.

This was the third trip Ruth had made to Poland. She really didn’t know why she was here. And she didn’t know why she wanted her father to join her. Her first trip to Poland was just to see that her mother and father came from somewhere. To see their past as more than an abstract stretch of horror. To see the bricks and the mortar. The second time was an attempt to be less overwhelmed than she was the first time. To try and not cry all day and night. And she had cried less on that second visit. Now, she was here to stand on this piece of earth with her father.

Edek Rothwax hadn’t wanted to come to Poland. When Ruth had first asked him, he’d said no. “What do you want to go to Poland for?” he had said. “There is nothing there. Everyone is dead. There is nothing to see.”

One day Ruth had felt a crack in Edek’s resistance. She had told him she was going to go to Poland, on her own, again.

“You still want so much to go to Poland?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I’d really like to be there with you.”

“You are crazy,” Edek said. “Where do you think we will be? Somewhere important? No. There is nothing important there. There is nothing there.”

“We could go to Monte Carlo afterward,” she had said. Edek loved a

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poker machine, and, Ruth was sure, although she’d never been there, that Monte Carlo must have poker machines.

“Pheh,” Edek said. “We got such poker machines in Melbourne, now.”

“We’ll stay in a really nice hotel,” Ruth said.

“You can afford the best hotels,” he said, “in Las Vegas, in Monte Carlo, in Poland.”

He was always telling her what she could afford. “You can afford to take it a bit easy,” he would say if she said she was tired. “You shouldn’t work so hard,” he said regularly. “You can afford for someone else to do your work for you. You can afford anything.”

He also wanted her to buy things. Cars in particular. He called constantly with suggestions of good cars to buy. They were always Lincoln Continentals, Cadillacs, or Pontiacs. He loved American cars, and he couldn’t understand Ruth’s lack of interest in them. “It costs four hundred dollars a month to garage a car in Manhattan,” she would say to him. “You can afford it,” he would say.

He called with other suggestions of what she could afford, too. These were mainly gadgets. Gadgets that chopped onions or cleared drains or converted currency. Ruth had said no to a self-retracting extension cord, an ultrasonic moth repeller, a handheld paper shredder, an indoor and outdoor thermometer, a pen that wrote underwater, a portable security motion detector, and hundreds of phones, fax machines, and photocopiers. If she had taken up all of Edek’s suggestions she wouldn’t, now, be able to afford anything.

When she first went into business on her own, Edek had been very nervous. “You have, finally, such a good job,” he had said. Edek’s dream had been for Ruth to be a lawyer. He saw the job she had writing letters and speeches at Schoedel, Firth, and Thomson, a large New York law firm, as a great disappointment. As Ruth’s salary rose, Edek’s disappointment eased.

Ruth got the job by accident. She had a master’s degree in twentieth-century literature, a degree that was not in high demand, and she had four years’ experience as a private secretary in Melbourne. She had been working as a temporary typist at Schoedel, Firth, and Thomson, and trying to decide if she should stay in New York or return to Australia. She’d been in New York for three years. She was thirty-three. One evening, just as she was about to leave the office, a senior partner asked her to type a speech for T O O M A N Y M E N

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him. It was late. Even the late-working secretaries had left. It was a terrible speech. Ruth typed it up. She also typed an alternative version. She left both speeches on the partner’s desk. Two weeks later she was on the permanent staff of Schoedel, Firth, and Thomson with four weeks’ annual vacation and a health care package.

“It makes me jittery,” Edek had said to her, two years later, when she told him of her plans to branch out on her own. To start her own business.

A letter-writing business. Edek had liked the wooden sign she had had made for her new office. “ROTHWAX CORRESPONDENCE. EST. 1991” it said.

“LETTERS WRITTEN ON ALL SUBJECTS FOR ALL OCCASIONS.” And his fears were mollified by the number of office items she had had to purchase in order to start the business.

Now that Rothwax Correspondence was successful, Edek was convinced that the company had been his own idea. “I did say to you,” he said to Ruth regularly, “that if those lawyers could afford to pay you so much and still make a profit, there was for sure a profit to be made in this letter-writing business.”

Ruth looked at her watch. Her father would be arriving in about thirty hours. Edek Rothwax had been forced out of his home, in Poland, when he was twenty-three. He hadn’t been back since. He was nearly eighty-two now. He was twenty-three when he, his sister, two of his brothers, and his mother and father were ordered to leave their home. Like all the other Jews of Lódz, they left everything behind. They left the furniture, the piano, the bedding, the books, the china, the cutlery, the crockery, the photographs, the clothes. They took only what they could carry.

It was February 1940. They walked, with all the other Jews, along the one street they were allowed to use for their relocation. Mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers, and grandfathers carried their possessions in sacks, sheets, suitcases, prams, and upturned tables. Bearded men carried bundles of books bound together with string. A freezing wind howled and smacked at them. It was an exceptionally cold winter. They were not allowed to use the sidewalks. Over one hundred and fifty thousand Jews walked on the side of the road. They had to step out of the way whenever a car or truck drove by. The procession took days.

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The Nazis had allocated 5.8 Jews to each room in their new homes. The Jews walked to those rooms, in the run-down slum area that had been designated for them, hanging onto their belongings and to each other. They walked out of their own lives, and, six years later, the few Jews who had survived found no trace of their former lives left.

“I don’t know why I want to be in Poland with you,” Ruth had said to her father the last time she had talked about going to Poland.

“I, for sure, don’t know why,” he had said.

“I just want to,” Ruth said, “that’s all I know.”

“You are supposed to be so clever,” Edek had said. “If you don’t know, who should know?” Ruth sensed a barrage of criticism coming her way.

She began to say good-bye. Edek interrupted her. “It is not important for me to go to Poland,” he said. “For me, it is all finished there. But, if it is so important for you, I will go to Poland with you.”

Ruth was stunned. “When do you want to go?” Edek said.

“Next month,” she had said.

“Okay,” said Edek. “You buy the tickets and pick me up on the way.”

Ruth had been so taken by surprise, she hadn’t been able to answer him. “Thanks, Dad,” was all she had said. She had had to call him back and explain that Melbourne was not on the way from New York to Warsaw. She wouldn’t be able to pick him up. She would have to meet him there.

Ruth felt a bit dizzy. She was used to running in larger spaces. She had been following the paths and promenades cutting across and around the Saxon Gardens. The park, off Pilsudskiego Place, a large square, was one of Warsaw’s most popular gardens. Two soldiers, with the freshly scrubbed faces of the young, guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, at one end of the square. They marched in brisk unison around the memorial. Their black, highly polished metal-tipped boots clicked in a sharp synchronicity that echoed around the square.

The gray, thin winter light gave the park a sparse, Spartan demeanor.

The Baroque sculptures, the fountain, and the benches didn’t seem to add any warmth. There were over a hundred species of trees in the two-hundred-year-old gardens. They all looked the same to Ruth. They had T O O M A N Y M E N

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trunks and they had branches. Maybe in summer, when they had leaves, it would be easier to differentiate between them.

Ruth didn’t know a great deal about nature. Trees were green, to her.

Grass was green. Nature was green. Too much green made her feel claus-trophobic. She was glad it was winter. Jews weren’t meant to know about trees. They weren’t meant to be able to distinguish between poplar trees and oak trees, or birch trees or maple or willow trees. In Yiddish, there was one word for tree. Tree. It covered all trees.

There were quite a few people walking to work through the Saxon Gardens. On the whole, they didn’t look happy. They looked locked into some kind of misery. New Yorkers didn’t spend their days smiling, but there was a purposefulness and a vivacity to their snappiness and their lack of patience. Here in Poland, people looked oppressed. In 1983, on her first trip to Poland, Ruth had thought that they looked oppressed because of the terrible conditions that most Polish people were living under. There had been a dire shortage of food, then. Long lines of people queued for bread, for milk. There were queues for everything. Queues for soap, shampoo, toilet paper. Things were very grim for all Poles in 1983. The luxury goods stores in Warsaw displayed tubes of toothpaste and packets of laundry powder in the middle of otherwise empty shelves.

Things had certainly changed since then. Now you could buy Chanel, Armani, Guerlain, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. And food stores were stocked with sausages and cheeses, and pickled and potted meats and herring, and smoked and roasted ducks and chicken. But everyone still looked miserable. In restaurants, shops, and offices, the notion of service hadn’t been wholly absorbed. Train conductors, shop assistants, clerks, and waiters seemed to slip from sycophantic to surly with unseemly speed. Most officials could lurch from obsequious to peremptory, in any exchange, with no evidence of what caused the switch. It was hard to like Poles, really, Ruth thought. A lot of Jews disliked Poles. “They’re a suspicious and sour people, and they seem to have a monopoly on stained, brown teeth,” her friend Aaron, a lawyer she had worked with, had said when she told him she was going to Poland.

You rarely heard Jews voice similar sentiments about Germans. Jews might express anger or hostility or a fear of Germans, but they didn’t deride them in the same way that they slurred Poles. Ruth found this

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strange. Yet she was the same. She hardly ever expressed any hostility to Germans. But given half a chance, a round of aggression would fly out of her if she spoke about the Polish. “They look harsh and crushed and wrinkled and old as soon as they hit forty, as though their souls have slipped out of them and turned into skin,” she had said to someone recently. What sort of a way was that to speak about any human being? She hated herself when she said things like that.

A man’s voice startled her. “I think you can hear me,” he said. She looked around. There was no one there. She slowed down. Who could have said that? Where did the voice come from? There was definitely no one there. The nearest person was thirty or forty feet away, at the end of the path. She must have imagined it. Maybe she was missing New York. In New York there was always someone saying something to you, or to themselves. She slowed down to a walk. She was probably more tense and more jet-lagged than she realized. She decided to go back to the hotel.

A couple walked past her. Ruth recognized fragments of their conversation. Fragments that were of no use.
Ja nie moge
. I can’t.
Ja ci mówie
. I am telling you. She’d heard Polish spoken by her parents all of her life, and she understood so little of it. A van with Hebrew lettering and OUR ROOTS, in uppercase print on its side, drove by. Ruth remembered the brochure she had found in her hotel room in Warsaw on her last trip. The brochure,
Through Jewish Warsaw
, was published by Our Roots, the “Jewish Information and Tourist Bureau.” The brochure detailed six tours, and the times you could be picked up for each tour from six different hotels. The price for all the tours was in U.S. dollars.

Tour One covered the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Cemetery, the Nozyk Synagogue, the Jewish Historical Institute, and the ghetto wall. Tour Two was identical to Tour One except for the pickup times. Tour Three was stated, as Warsaw-Auschwitz/Birkenau-Warsaw. Tour Four offered Warsaw-Treblinka-Warsaw and Tours Five and Six had Majdanek as part of their package. Neither the guides nor the people in the Our Roots office seemed Jewish to Ruth.

Ahead of Ruth, at the edge of the park, a young woman, about twenty, was squatting beside a tree. As Ruth got closer she realized that the young woman was having a shit. A thick roll of brown shit hung from the woman’s bum. Ruth felt nauseated. She wished she hadn’t seen the shit in such T O O M A N Y M E N

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detail. How could a young woman do that? There were hotels with public toilets nearby. Ruth wondered why this relatively uncommon sight seemed so Polish to her. She had never seen anyone shitting in public in Poland before. Why did she see Poles as coarse and vulgar? It was very prejudiced of her. Two women walked by. They were probably her own age, Ruth thought, though they looked about sixty. They both scrutinized Ruth, then nudged each other and continued to stare at her. Ruth felt uncomfortable.