Too Many Men (35 page)

“I think it will be very interesting,” Ruth said.

“If you say so,” said Edek.

“Maybe we’ll do the cemetery today,” Ruth said.

“Is the train tickets expensive?” Edek said.

“No, they’re very cheap,” she said. “Train travel in Poland is extremely cheap. We can go and change the tickets after breakfast.”

“We have to go by train?” Edek said.

“I thought it would be better than flying,” Ruth said. “We’ll be able to see the countryside.”

“We did see the country, already,” Edek said. “When we was in the Mercedes.”

“Would you rather fly?” Ruth said.

“I will go whichever way you do choose,” Edek said.

“What would you prefer?” she said.

“It is all the same to me,” he said.

T O O M A N Y M E N

[
2 1 9
]

Ruth knew that there was something behind Edek’s query about the price of the train tickets but she couldn’t figure out what. She decided to ask him about it later.

“Do you still want some bread and jam?” she said.

“I will have just a little piece,” Edek said.

“I’ll get it,” Ruth said. She got up and walked to the buffet.

“Apricot and plum,” Edek called out to her. She got some jam for Edek and some fruit compote for herself.

She watched her father eat his bread and jam. He clearly loved it. He spooned large spoonfuls of jam onto each bite of bread. It cheered her up to see his hearty appetite.

“It’s good jam, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very good,” he said. Her father really was in very good shape for an eighty-one-year-old, she thought. She should be really grateful for that.

“You look great, Dad,” Ruth said. “You look years younger than you are.”

“I know,” said Edek. “Everybody does say this.”

“You shouldn’t be on your own,” Ruth said. “You should be with somebody.”

“I am with somebody,” Edek said. “I am with you.”

“You know what I mean,” Ruth said. “A partner, company, somebody to go out with.”

“Do not start with this, please,” Edek said.

Ruth suddenly thought of Martina Schmidt’s widowed mother. Martina’s mother, if she was half as gorgeous as her daughter, would probably appeal to Edek. Edek loved a blonde. So did most Jews. Most elderly Jewish women ended up blonde regardless of what color they had started out as.

“I heard about a woman who seemed very nice,” Ruth said to Edek.

“I told you, please, do not start again with this,” Edek said.

Ruth remembered, with a start, the drawback to Martina Schmidt’s mother. Even if Edek were interested in meeting a woman, Martina’s mother was German. And possibly, despite her efforts at seeking out Jews, might not want to go out with one. What was she doing thinking about Martina Schmidt’s mother? She had only met her daughter once, and

[
2 2 0
]

L I L Y B R E T T

would probably never see her again. Martina Schmidt was a stranger to her.

It was strange that the connection they had had been so intense.

Ruth could still feel Martina’s presence this morning. Meetings with most people rarely lingered for more than a minute after they were over.

She could still feel Martina’s gaze on her. She had wanted to touch Martina last night. To hug her. As though they were more than strangers. As though they were something much more than strangers to each other. She had looked around the lobby this morning half hoping that Martina would be there. Of course, she wasn’t.

Ruth missed her. It was absurd to miss someone you didn’t know, she thought. She was sure that she and Martina could have become really good friends. But who knows? Ruth thought. People often seemed promising before you really got to know them. Then, all of their ordinariness appeared. Why was she so averse to ordinariness? she thought. There was so much about Ruth herself that was so ordinary. She wondered whether Martina would ever get back together with her husband Gerhard. Gerhard still seemed to have a pretty strong hold on Martina. Even though he had told her she was too German and the wrong number. The wrong number!

How ridiculous.

Ruth suddenly felt cold. She noticed that her legs were trembling. She steadied her legs.

“Are you cold?” she said to Edek.

“No,” he said. “I am hot.”

“That’s probably because you’ve just eaten,” she said.

“I am hot because they got the heating up pretty high in this place,”

Edek said. Ruth put both of her feet firmly on the carpet. The trembling began to settle.

“Would you go out with a German woman?” she asked her father.

“Are you crazy?” Edek said.

“I thought you wouldn’t,” Ruth said.

“It is not the German I am not going to do anything with,” said Edek.

“It is the woman.”

“I’m not asking you to do something with anyone,” Ruth said. “I’m just asking if you’d go out with someone German.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that I am finished with all that stuff,” Edek said. “I am happy on my own. I can eat whatever I want to. I T O O M A N Y M E N

[
2 2 1
]

can have a piece of chocolate. I can read a book. I can watch television. No one tells me what to do. I am happy.”

“You’ll be happier with someone to share your life,” Ruth said.

“That is what you said when you said I should get married to Henia,”

said Edek.

“Henia and her boys had their own agenda,” Ruth said. “And we couldn’t have guessed how that would turn out.”

“You did say the marriage was a good idea,” said Edek.

“I was wrong,” said Ruth.

“You were wrong with the other women what you introduced me to, too,” said Edek. “Didn’t you learn from that that I am not interested?”

“What I learned from that,” said Ruth, “was that one of them was too fat, one was too ugly, one had a terrible face. What I learned was that they were not good-looking enough for you.”

“You have to have something to look at, that is for sure,” Edek said.

“What about the women?” Ruth said. “Do they have to have something to look at, too? Maybe you weren’t exactly their cup of tea.”

“This is a stupid saying,” Edek said. “To say someone is a cup of tea.”

“It’s probably not any more stupid than a lot of Polish sayings,” Ruth said.

“It is more stupid,” Edek said.

Ruth looked at her watch. They should leave if they wanted to go to Orbis. Orbis was the Polish Government Travel Agency. It was not renowned for its speed or efficiency.

“It is not so important for a woman what the man looks like,” Edek said. “For a woman it is more important what wages a man does earn.”

“That’s a sad reflection on women,” Ruth said.

“Why should they not enjoy the money, just like I enjoy to look at a nice-looking woman,” Edek said. Ruth knew that there was an answer but it eluded her.

“Remember that shocking woman you did want me to meet?” Edek said. He started to laugh.

“What shocking woman?” Ruth said.

“The one which did look like she did get her dress from a rubbish bin,” Edek said. “You remember it was at that party with all the permanent people?”

[
2 2 2
]

L I L Y B R E T T

“The permanent people?” Ruth said. “None of us is permanent.”

“Nearly everybody there was permanent,” Edek said.

“Everybody?” Ruth said.

“Everybody,” Edek said. “Everybody was posh, posh. Very rich.”

Ruth started laughing.

“You remember her dress?” Edek said.

“They were not permanent people,” Ruth said. “They were prominent.”

“Prominent, permanent, what is the difference?” Edek said. “Do you remember the dress? It looked like a bunch of
shmattes
!”

“The bunch of
shmattes
was a dress that probably cost over a thousand dollars,” Ruth said.

“It did look shocking,” Edek said, and he roared with laughter at the memory. “One side of the hem went down to here, one side up here. The top was crooked. A tailor in Lódz would be out of a job if he did make a dress like that.”

A man at another table nodded to Edek. Edek waved to him. “He is on the same floor what we are on,” he said to Ruth. The man got up and came over to them.

“Your father told me how honored he is that you want to be in Poland with him,” the man said to Ruth.

“Really?” Ruth said.

“I said most children are not so interested to see where a parent does come from,” Edek said to Ruth. “My daughter is the cream of the crap,”

Edek said to the man. The man looked bewildered.

“You mean the cream of the crop,” Ruth said to Edek.

“That is what I said,” said Edek. “The cream of the crap.”

“Crop not crap,” Ruth said.

“That is what I am saying,” Edek said.

Ruth decided to forgo the elocution lesson.

“We’re having a wonderful trip,” she said to the man. Edek nodded his agreement.

“It sounds fascinating from what your father told me,” the man said.

What had her father said? Ruth wondered. He hadn’t said all that much to her.

“What did you say about our trip?” Ruth said to Edek.

T O O M A N Y M E N

[
2 2 3
]

“I did tell this gentleman that we did go to Kamedulska Street, that sort of stuff,” Edek said.

“You didn’t talk to me about it,” Ruth said.

“You was there,” Edek said.

“I would have loved to have heard what you were thinking and feeling,”

Ruth said.

The man shuffled his feet. Ruth looked at him. He looked ill at ease. He obviously did not want to be included in this family squabble. “It is a fascinating trip,” Ruth said to the man.

“You are behaving like a baby,” Edek said to Ruth. “Let us go.” He got up. “Nice to meet you,” he said to the man.

Ruth and Edek had been waiting in the Orbis office for twenty minutes before anyone took any notice of them. Ten or twelve Orbis employees were sitting in a row behind a glass partition. Like bank tellers in a bank.

None of them appeared particularly busy. Two of them were eating, one was on the phone, and one was leafing through a magazine. Not one of them looked up at Edek or Ruth. There were no other customers. Finally, Ruth had knocked on the glass. “One minute,” the woman said. She finished her cup of coffee and beckoned Ruth over.

Ruth explained that they wanted to change the date of their train tickets from Lódz to Kraków. They would like to leave on Wednesday instead of Thursday. The woman pulled out an enormous book and started looking through it. The book had very thin pages. There must be five thousand pages of train timetables in that book, Ruth thought. She took a closer look. The timetables were in very fine print. There were thousands of them.

“I think we’re going to be here for a long time,” she said to Edek.

Thirty minutes later, Ruth and Edek were still standing there at the Orbis counter. Ruth was furious.

“It can’t be that complicated,” she said to the woman. Ruth had been glaring at the woman from time to time, but the woman hadn’t appeared to notice.

“It is not easy,” the woman said, and kept turning the pages.

“Maybe we’ll change these at the station?” Ruth said to Edek. “Or maybe I should just buy new tickets, and throw these away.”

“Calm down,” Edek said.

[
2 2 4
]

L I L Y B R E T T

“I am calm,” she said, gritting her teeth.

“Maybe I will call Stefan and ask him to drive us to Kraków?” Edek said.

“Who is Stefan?” said Ruth.

“Stefan is the driver what took us from Warsaw to Lódz,” Edek said.

“He was a very good driver.”

“You want a driver to come from Warsaw to Lódz to pick us up and then drive us to Kraków?” Ruth said.

“Yes,” said Edek. “I think it is a good idea.”

“It’s a crazy idea,” Ruth said. “Warsaw is eighty-eight miles from Lódz, and Lódz is a hundred and eighty miles from Kraków.”

“How do you know such exact miles?” Edek said.

“I just know,” said Ruth.

“That is not so far,” said Edek. “In Australia people drive for sometimes one thousand miles.”

“On highways,” Ruth said. “And not in icy winter conditions.”

“It is not so icy,” Edek said.

“You want him to come to Lódz to pick us up, drive us to Kraków and then drive himself back to Warsaw?” she said. “That’s nearly four hundred miles. Anyway, I don’t want to drive a hundred and eighty miles with someone who’s got up at four A.M. to drive to us.”

“We could book him into a cheap hotel in Lódz,” said Edek. “Then he could come the night before and he will be like new for us in the morning.”

Ruth felt exhausted. She glared at the Orbis woman again.

“It would be very expensive,” she said to Edek.

“We can afford it,” he said. “We can afford what we like,” he said, in a very loud voice.

“You really want to drive to Kraków with Stefan?” Ruth said.

“It was a very comfortable Mercedes, wasn’t it?” Edek said. “You said yourself how comfortable this Mercedes was.”

“Okay,” said Ruth. “But we haven’t got Stefan’s number.”

“I got his number,” Edek said.

Edek ran toward his parka, which he had left on a chair. He came back holding a business card. “See,” he said. “I got his number.” He looked so happy. Why shouldn’t they get Stefan to drive them to Kraków? Ruth thought. She would ask Stefan to drive them to the moon, if it made Edek T O O M A N Y M E N

[
2 2 5
]

this happy. Edek looked overjoyed. She would ask Stefan to move in with them, if it would keep her father feeling so joyful.

“Ring Stefan up and see if he’ll do it.” Ruth said.

“He will do it,” Edek said. “He will be very happy to do it.”

“How do you know?” said Ruth.

“I did already suggest it to him when we was driving to Lódz,” Edek said. “ ‘It would be a pleasure,’ Stefan did say.” Ruth started laughing.

Edek looked pleased with himself.

“We’ll go by car,” Ruth said. She turned to the Orbis operator. “Fuck your timetables,” she said.

“That is not such a nice thing to say,” Edek said to Ruth.