Displaced Persons (16 page)

Hmm? said Pavel.

The hot water. You said you wanted me to—

Yes, yes, we should talk to Weisenfeld.

She said the people below us have always had the same thing. It’s the boiler for our whole line.

Larry interrupted. “May I please be excused?”

Fela looked at his plate. “You didn’t finished.”

“I almost finished. Look.”

Pavel leaned over his son’s plate, scooped off the potato skin and chicken bone and put it onto his plate. Helen passed her plate too.

“Helen! You haven’t eaten nothing!”

“Ma, I’m full. Please. Can I go too?”

“Ask right.”

“May I please be excused?”

The children grabbed their plates and forks, and from behind him Pavel heard a clanging in the sink.

Not everything from Hinda do I like, said Fela. But I like the phrases she teaches them. I forgot to tell you. Last week the mother of Henry, Larry’s friend, told us what a good boy we had. Polite.

Yes, said Pavel.

Fela was silent a moment. So, what happened today?

Nothing, nothing.

Something happened.

What should have happened?

I just ask you, that’s all.

Business, said Pavel. It’s not so good.

H
E AWOKE IN THE
night, cold but not remembering his dream. Fela stirred only a bit as he sat up. He stepped out of bed, holding the night table for balance as he pushed his feet into his slippers, then limped through the hallway to the kitchen, his hand touching the walls as he went.

His lighter was in his jacket pocket in the bedroom, but he still had a few cigarettes in the pack he kept in the bill drawer. Sometimes they smelled more delicious than food. He drew one out, placed it unlit in his mouth. Just the taste of the paper made him feel better. He took a large wooden match, what Fela used for the candles on Fridays, and struck it against the wide red strip on the box. The flame gave a light to the kitchen, dark in the hours before sunrise.

Hinda would be sleeping now, resting from the agitation of the afternoon. She rested in daylight also, lying in bed for hours at a time, sometimes crying, perhaps sometimes just thinking, too tired to cry. Once in a while Fela went there to help and to cook, and when they were a little younger Pavel would take the boys out to the park with his own children. Lately Hinda’s resting had become more frequent. She went to a psychiatrist. No doubt today’s telephone call had not helped.

What a family they were, Pavel awake at night, Hinda in bed during the day. Everything in reverse. What a thing to pass down to the children. It was true what they said, some people could not recover. Even here, in the golden city spoken of in his youth, where everything
was to be made new, where even before the catastrophe people had come in to build and to earn. Even here. But Pavel was strong. He did not let it come over him the way Hinda let it. He did not let the questions sicken him the way they sickened Hinda. Why did he survive? Why he and not another? He did not let the questions sicken him. He was strong. And his children were strong and good. His nephews also were good, if a little wild, the elder already smoking cigarettes, the younger disappearing with the car before he had a license, scaring Hinda and Kuba into calling the police. But Pavel’s children were not wild. They studied. They earned praise. Hinda doted on Helen like she was her own daughter, presenting her with tiny dolls dressed in the costumes of nationalities all around the world, the names of which Helen rolled around her tongue like an expert importer. Cambodia, Dahomey, Brazil.

His children were good. They would not be affected, he thought, because he and Fela tried, they kept things private, they did not let the children hear of anything they worried about. Hinda too tried. She did not speak of any past, even to Pavel. Perhaps she spoke with Kuba, but Pavel thought not. Kuba cared for her like she was a wounded soldier. He was a good husband—he let her stay quiet. When Pavel decided to go to the first commemoration of the Belsener displaced persons, Pavel asked them to go, and without even looking at each other both gave him the same look of doubt, even disdain. It upset Hinda to think about anything at all, and in Kuba she had an ally.

But sometimes she could not escape. Some things were too public, blared in the news, not just in the Yiddish weeklies she refused to read but also in the American papers and magazines, the capture of a war criminal in Argentina, the beginning of a trial in Israel. She had gone to bed this last time just after the High Holidays, when the trial was already under way some months. Pavel had almost not noticed her disappearance. Instead he had been calling Fishl twice a day, once after reading the morning papers and once after reading the eve
ning papers. The numbers, the statistical testimony, consumed him but also gave him some relief. It was true, it was true, it was true. And if the American papers printed terrible photographs, images he had to skip over, at least the text of the articles gave counts and countries, cold figures. Everyone saw it was true.

They already know it is true, said Fela. They knew it was true long ago. Just no one did anything before.

They did, said Pavel. They did. Even in Hamburg, even in Celle there were trials.

Ha, said Fela. Ha! Celle! The man had a chicken farm not a mile from Belsen, even closer to the DP camp than we were! Didn’t you read how the Americans caught him once, then let him go? They believed lies a child would not believe! He was allowed to leave Germany before we were!

Yes, they were stupid. Sometimes I myself do not believe it was true.

Maybe you did not believe, but they believed. They knew it was true before any trials, Pavele. So! Only Jews are willing to put in the time to search out and punish.

Pavel stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, lit another. What had Hinda said to him once? If you came out of camp, you came out punished. Kuba had told something like this to her. But Pavel did not want to have come out punished. He did not think he had. Punished! She was using it as an excuse for Marek, that thief, no words were enough to describe him, every time Pavel heard the man’s name evidence of another crime came out, attempted murder, thievery, now blackmail. Could one be punished before one had committed crimes instead of after? Did Marek commit his crimes to justify the earlier punishment and suffering? Was that what Hinda was trying to say?

But why have compassion for Marek and not for her own brother? When Hinda looked at Pavel he knew she saw a broken face and a crippled body. He wanted to laugh at her—could she not see how
strong he still was, how his children thought he could lift a building? But something in her face when she looked at him—he did not like it. And yet here she was, full of pity for Marek, the man who had made Pavel this way.

Stealing from one’s own people—was that not a bigger crime, well, perhaps not bigger, not as big, but still, it was enormous, it was unexplainable—and for Marek to do this next thing to Kuba, the lying, like stealing from a brother! Almost worse than the original injury to Pavel. Imagine Fishl doing this, or Yidl Sheinbaum, who had sent them their largest customer not too long ago. It was impossible. One did not have to cripple another to walk straight oneself. That was American business. One got ahead, yes, but by stealing from others? By blackmail? A young man had gone to see his aunt in the Russian zone, had kissed the last remaining evidence of his mother’s blood-line, and another man had accused this pitifully small family reunion, a reunion of two, of being a front for communism. Enough to ruin a family.

If he could make all his own personal trials, Marek Rembishevski would be one of the accused. Not the first, not the priority, that honor would belong not just to the grand leaders who made paper orders but also to the specific soldiers and guards and commandants, who had done what he still did not know to his brothers, his baby sister, his father, even his stepmother, poor woman. His cousins, his aunts, his uncles. His girlfriend—how long since he had thought of her, a curvaceous girl who liked sweets—he could make his own long list of the accused, and if Marek were not at the top of the list, he was not at the bottom either. Even Kresser, that tormentor, that shame upon his people—but Pavel did not even like to think the name. No, Marek was not at the bottom of the list. Pavel felt the smoke from his cigarette burn against his ribs. Could a person really be so confused that he could mistake theft from a fellow Jew after the liberation for the fighting for food and blankets during the war? That was the first question
Pavel would ask at Marek’s interrogation. A simple question. Could a person really be so confused? That was what a trial was for, to ask the questions and await the painful answers. Pavel wanted to know how Marek would answer. It would make him feel better to know.

Hinda did not ask questions. She did not feel better from the news of the trial in Israel. She felt sick, just as sick as some of the times before. Fela too did not seem so happy. After the children got up from dinner each evening she watched Pavel read the same news stories over and over, until he could memorize the passages in English, not leaving the room until the table and sink and counter were spotless and he picked up the telephone again to call Fishl.

Perhaps Fela worried he would pass down his thoughts to his children. But even if they kept their pact to keep the children away from the suffering, it was all right for them to know something of history. A public event like a trial—he knew at least Larry talked of it in Hebrew school. If Larry would ask questions, Pavel would answer. This he and Fela had agreed they would do. His nephews asked questions, mentioned Kuba’s exploits in the war. They thought their father a hero, a soldier who had fought and resisted while living in plain sight, on Aryan papers. And Kuba had been wounded. It was not so bad to pass down an example to the children. Hinda tried in her own way. She tried to teach her sons polite words and taught Larry and Helen too. She spoke slowly to them, in careful English. Pavel’s English was also careful. Better than Fela’s, he sometimes thought. It made him proud and ashamed at the same time. It wasn’t just the grammar that he mastered better, it was the tone and inflection. His English retained a hint of German underneath the Polish accent, but Fela’s had a strong Eastern sound, the consonants exaggerated, the vowels round and mournful. He understood, from the way his American cousins spoke to him and the way they spoke to his wife, that this small difference gave him a kind of prestige. Hinda understood this too, and so her resentment of Fela only grew with time. Why couldn’t
Fela turn her words around? It seemed to Pavel that Hinda thought of Fela’s accent as a personal affront, an attempt to keep down the whole family.

And of course Pavel’s reluctance to move the business, to expand, caused more problems. There had been a period in Pavel’s life when any risk, no matter how wild, any successful effort to organize merchandise or food had given him its own reward, a kind of happiness, almost physical, the way he used to feel as an adolescent kicking a soccer ball or even as an adult, hopping off his bicycle at the house in Celle, or in the middle of the night, after lovemaking with Fela. But now he did not feel it. He did not feel anything like it.

His children were provided for now, and to take out a big loan from a bank that could make it all go bad, he could not see the purpose. Pavel’s family had a clean, bright apartment. His children wore new clothes and went to Hebrew school. Never had they felt the fear that so many did, that if they became poor, or sick, they could be deported back to Poland. Perhaps Kuba wanted to pass down a big business to his children. But Pavel would pass down something more. His son would be something big, a doctor or a lawyer, and his daughter would be elegant and educated, a teacher perhaps, with beautiful children. He would pass down something more.

P
AVEL WOKE UP AGAIN
a minute before his alarm clock buzzed, the heat knocking at the radiator. Had he slept more than three hours? He thought so. And then the two before the dream. Not so terrible.

It was still dark. In the kitchen he took a few quick puffs on his cigarette before wrapping himself in his tefillin. After praying and removing the tefillin, he cut six oranges and squeezed the halves over the juice dish. Helen did not like the pulp. He poured half the juice through a sifter into a glass for her and poured the thicker half into a
glass for Larry. Then he came back into the bedroom for his shower.

He took off his robe and turned the shower on, waited for it to grow warm. Perhaps it was time to discuss a move. A bank officer would again visit, they would show him the merchandise, explain the ideas for branching into finer textiles and handmade suits, the officer would be young and healthy, would call Kuba Jake and Pavel Paul, full of enthusiasm until they began to discuss in earnest, when the grim looks would appear and everything Pavel and Kuba had worked for would be assessed as trifles, pitiful collateral against possible financial disaster.

Pavel didn’t want it. Right now he didn’t want it. The excitement was lacking. He did not feel an urgency. Perhaps Kuba did not either, only wanted to, trying to recapture the feeling that every action had a grave importance, meant life or death. Moving the business did not mean life or death. But perhaps a move, or if not a move, at least an expansion, would mean greater savings for college for the children, a bigger apartment, perhaps it meant—he did not know what it meant.

Could Kuba really believe that Pavel owed him something? That he, Pavel, kept the whole family down? It was impossible. The steam seeped into his chest, warming his body. Yes, that was what Kuba thought, that Pavel kept the family down, that Fela kept the family down, that by having this accident and being forced to stay even longer in Europe, by doing all this—all this trading in Europe, even trading that had helped Kuba and Hinda live here when they first came, that this too seemed to make the family illegitimate. Pavel shook in the shower with the outrage of it. His fist made an involuntary movement in the air, into the water, and the shower turned cold.