Displaced Persons (14 page)

Or in most things anymore. Now that Pavel and Fela got on by themselves Larry watched over his sister. He watched over Helen; he obeyed his mother. It was all right.

F
ELA PAUSED BY THE
window of a real estate office on Seventy-fourth Street, squinted at the little pink and green papers with black handwriting advertising apartments in Jackson Heights, houses in Corona. She and Pavel were always among the last ones. They had come after the others, stuck in Germany without visas while the others had started their new lives, learning the language of work, taxes, and now real estate after everyone else. She checked the storefront office every week, and every week someone looked up at her through the window. But she did not go in.

Pavel thought they should move. Pavel’s cousin was still in an apartment in Brooklyn, but Pavel’s sister and brother-in-law had a house in Long Island already. It was true, it would be good to have something larger. But it was difficult to find a home that would be suitable for Pavel’s limp. A house with stairs was out of the question, even if they could afford it.

She looked at a drawing of a house two blocks from Queens Boulevard, not too far from the courthouses. Reasonable, but still too much. Kew Gardens, she thought, squinting again at the advertisements in the window. Pavel liked the name Rego Park. It sounds like Riga, he said. It’s Jewish. And the Budniks live there.

She stepped away from the window. Perhaps she would stop an extra minute, buy a little sweet thing, some fruit, for the house.

That would be good for them. They shouldn’t learn to love so much her baking; it was bad for later. Larry was growing now, of course, and he could eat more steadily even than his father, but they taught him how to eat slow. It was a challenge, with a ten-year-old boy, to teach him to slow down! Fruit was good for eating slow. Pavel was careful about his eating, no matter how trim he was. And she too. They taught their children well. Finish what you eat, but eat slow. It was better for the digestion. Also one didn’t gain so much. Not that
she prepared so many heavy foods. Cookies and cakes were the only exceptions.

Fela did not love to cook. She loved to bake. Pavel had a nostalgia for stuffed derma, but she could perform only a poor imitation of her mother’s recipes, and besides, too much meat limited her baking to cakes without dairy in order to keep the home kosher. She would bring the dairyless cookies with her for holiday dinners at the home of Pavel’s sister Hinda, and Hinda would scold her sons for eating too many. Fela and Hinda did not feel a warmth toward each other, even from the first, when Hinda was still a bitter girl without a mother or a sister or even a friend to guide her through womanhood and marriage. Hinda had married before Fela and Pavel, and no doubt Hinda had disapproved of the morals in the house near the DP camp, Fela and Pavel sharing a bed before signing a marriage contract. But that was not all of it. Hinda took herself away from everyone but her husband—to that neighborhood in Long Island, not a single acquaintance from Europe. Hinda did not like reminders, not even of the time in Germany after the war.

Fela was different. She had drawn an internal line and kept herself calmly on the side of the new life. Her mouth and face and hands no longer felt strange to her. For all Hinda’s clucking at the cakes, Fela still looked all right, although she felt she could lose two or three kilos. They had come upon her in the last year, without her noticing until summer, when she pulled the slim beige strap of her open-toed mules over her pedicured feet and felt herself teetering at the knees, the extra weight pushing down on her ankles.

As for Pavel, he noticed his own appearance more than hers. Every morning since they came to the United States she would watch him from their bed getting dressed. It fascinated her, the unwrapping of the phylacteries from his arms and forehead, his daily choice of shirt, his struggle to put on his specially made shoes, one stacked higher than the other to balance the limp. She would lie curled, breathing
steadily, feigning sleep as he knotted his necktie in the mirror, pulled his jacket onto his narrow chest, and then stopped to stare at himself. Sometimes he would stare thirty seconds, sometimes almost five minutes. She knew what he saw. Scarred body, dented face, worn skin hanging below his thinning black hair. But his clothing was fresh, the shirt pressed but soft, the tie subtly patterned to complement the suit. He drove the children crazy on the way out the door, smacking their winter coats with a lint brush, refusing to acknowledge that once outside for five minutes they would accumulate far more debris than he could scrape off in the few moments before the rush out of the apartment to school.

T
HERE WAS A COMMOTION
at the pool. Fela could see a small group of adults in a half-circle and two boys chasing each other, trying to steal a glimpse of the scandal within. She walked faster, her paper bag of oranges and apples tapping her thighs in an assuring rhythm. Nothing has happened, nothing has happened, she thought to herself, the words coming into her brain slowly, then accelerating. Nothing has happened, nothing has happened, God willing, nothing has happened.

“Mrs. Mandl! Here she is!”

The phrases in Fela’s head stopped even as her legs began to run, the inner soles of her mules slapping against the bottoms of her feet, the edges of her toes scraping against the gravel, then the concrete, then the tiles surrounding the pool. She pushed at the women in their half-circle, at the small damp girls crowded by the lounge chairs, she pushed, she didn’t know what or where she pushed, but she heard again, this time softer, the American woman’s voice that had called her name:

“Now don’t worry, Mrs. Mandl, really, don’t worry. She’s okay.”

Blood trailed down Helen’s temples.

“
Oy, Gott!”
Fela whispered, her breath cold against her teeth. “
Oy, Gott!”

Her hair—her child’s hair! was dark and matted, thick with blood, more blood.

“
Mein kind!”
she cried.
“Oy, Gott!”

“Mrs. Mandl!” Another voice, from the direction of Helen. Fela saw suddenly, even as she reached out to grab her daughter’s hand, to touch her daughter’s pink and swollen skin, that Helen sat in the lap of a large woman whose round face bubbled out from behind large brown sunglasses. Fela looked at the woman with confusion. A man stood over the two of them, wiping the back of Helen’s head with a bright white bandage quickly soaking with red, a wave of blood spreading as if through a snowdrift on a narrow cobbled street, but no, there was no snow, there was no snow, Fela turned her head to look past the plump legs of the women to the pool, it was summer, it was New York, there was no snow, but the pool was suddenly filled with dark red water, blood, no, it was blue, it was a pool, the municipal pool of Jackson Heights where she took her children each Saturday in summer, it was summer, and she was looking at the face of her five-year-old daughter, who had stopped her crying and was talking to her in English.

“Don’t worry, Ma, don’t worry.”

“Heads always bleed a lot! Nothing bleeds like a head!” It was the man speaking, his hand lifting and twisting Helen’s hair, rubbing his dark bandage on the child’s scalp. “She won’t even need stitches!”

“Stitches!” cried Fela.

“Mrs. Mandl!” repeated the woman, holding Helen by the waist. “Don’t get hysterical. It will only upset her.”

But what is it? What happened? My God, dear God, what happened?

The man smiled at her. “No speak English?” he asked. “Doctor.” He pointed to his bag, then clapped a hand to his chest. “Doctor.”

What has happened? What has happened?

“Does anyone around here speak Jewish?” called the large woman in the sunglasses. “Even a few words?”

“There’s no one here today,” said someone in the crowd. “It’s Saturday.”

She looked up for the body attached to the voice, then saw her son was before her, hair damp, shorts dripping, face wet with pool water and tears. She saw her son, and his father’s crumpled face in his, and her chest grew hot, her voice was wailing out, she could feel the wail coming out of her, though when it came out she heard it only in a whisper, What did you do? What did you do?

“She just wants to know what happened.” Larry’s thin voice. “She understands.”

A child started talking, a woman cut him off, then another woman interrupted. Diving, the children had been diving, running and diving, the somersaults the little ones liked to compete over, and Helen had made an acrobatic leap and knocked into the wall of the pool, emerging from the water with a line of blood streaming after her. Larry said not a word, and when Fela found it in herself to look at his face, to accuse him, he was looking down at his feet, at Helen’s feet, at the cement walk on which the crowd stood.

“Kids get hurt,” said the woman holding Helen. “It happens. Now, sit in that chair. Go, sit.”

The doctor nodded. “Let Dr. Velasco play hairdresser with your daughter another minute.”

Helen giggled.

Fela moved over to a lounge chair, Larry following. The women and children had dispersed, only one woman standing by, a soft smile on her face. Fela smiled back.

“It’s okay, everything okay,” Fela said. Perhaps the neighbor would turn away. But she stayed. Fela feigned a look of concentration as she watched the doctor’s hands, the slim bottle of ointment he twisted open and poured on yet another bandage, then moved her eyes down to his wide feet in brown sandals, to Helen’s own feet and legs, her
little waist wrapped in damp nylon, the pink and yellow flowers of her bathing suit.

They had no idea, these children. No idea what it took to bring them into the world. If they knew, they could not risk everything in this way, diving against a mother’s wishes, running, screaming, hitting, scratching—almost, God forbid, choking each other!—they knew nothing of what it took. If they knew even a half, even a quarter, even a tenth, they would not dare.

No one knew but a mother.

And a mother had to keep quiet, had to stop herself from screaming in fear at every moment. This Fela was good at. When Larry was born in the DP camp hospital Fela herself had kept her words inside her, had kept her groans incomprehensible and controlled, for she had heard the stories, of other women in childbirth crying out, screaming, even three years after the liberation, even four, in the delirium of pain, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby.

Fela closed her eyes.

When Pavel learned of this he would want them to go to synagogue for weeks. No. She would stand firm. It was too hot in the summer for prayer. Job’s wife had screamed at her husband, Curse your god and die! And the wife was right. What kind of husband accepted this pain, the damage coming and coming, until the end of the stupid tale when God presented the mourners with the false new family, the lie of peace after all the suffering, the lie that the new family itself would not suffer its own wounds? No one was exempt, no matter how much one had suffered before or how much one prayed now. It was the opposite, yes, the opposite.

Her son was speaking to her. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault.”

“Larry,” she answered.

“It’s my fault,” he repeated. Then he looked up at her. “I’m the worst person in the world.”

“Larry,” she said again, watched him put his face in his hands.
She should touch him, comfort him, but he was using his own words for comfort. It’s my fault, I’m the worst person in the world. Did not this make one feel safer than the random truth, that a mother turning away caused blood to flow, that an inch more forward and Helen would have emerged from the pool laughing, blowing out air, spitting water at her brother?

She should touch his anguished face, but instead her voice was loud again, crying at him in Yiddish: Why? Why? Why did you not listen to me? Why did you disobey me? Do you think you are another mother, another father? You are a child, you obey!

“I’m sorry,” said Larry in English, crying. “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, choked on a word, then gurgled out: “I’m the worst person in the world.”

“Yes,” she answered him. “You are. The worst person in the world.” The words sounded good, hard, powerful, precise. She said it again, this time in Yiddish, with deliberation, the power of her voice startling her, relieving her.

He stopped crying and looked at her, his face wet and small, astonished. The worst in the world: her son. Fela’s brother, her youngest brother Lieb after whom her son was named, had been like Larry, so sensitive, so soft. There had been a time in her own youth when the children had run the lives of their parents, smuggling and trading, maneuvering for news and plans. But no more. Inside her swelled a sudden pity, pity for her son, her sweetheart, as they said in English, her little king. They thought they commanded everything. When she was a child she almost did not have permission to speak to an unaccompanied young man in her father’s store. But what had all the strictness accomplished? It had driven out her older sister to a kibbutz in Palestine, long before the war, and it had driven Fela herself out to the arms of a young man, her first love, when the Germans crossed into eastern Poland. But she had not done what she did to punish her father, or to make politics. She had left the home and fled to Russia
for love. Her beloved had been arrested and disappeared, and their infant had died, but she had lived. Perhaps love had saved her life, as politics had saved her only surviving sister’s, taking them out of the town that was destroyed, every person, every baby.

And now, with her errands, with her impatience, with her need for silence and privacy, she had turned away from them and risked everything, stupid, stupid, as if she knew as little as her children about all the blood and torn flesh through which they had passed to enter this world. But she did know. Her son did not. Little man. Always trying to be good, and yet suffering the world’s punishments and random accidents, just like his parents.

Her pity made her speak again. She would cover over her cruelty, she would wash it away. Don’t worry, she said in Yiddish, don’t worry, my child. Helcha is all right.