Other People’s Houses (7 page)

“All right, everybody!” said the counselor.
“Let’s go, then.”

I told her I didn’t feel very well and did not want any supper. I would stay in the cottage and go to bed. As soon as the others were gone, I fetched the brown paper bag out of my rucksack and looked the cottage over for some place, some corner where a sausage could be hidden so as not to smell. I kept thinking that I would presently find such a special niche for it. Meanwhile
it was cold in the unheated cottage. I took off my shoes and got under the blanket. I laid my head back against the chilly little pillow. I got up again. I thought of starting a letter to ask someone to be a sponsor for my parents, but instead I went and knelt at the bottom of the bed with my elbows on the window sill and looked out. In the direction of the assembly hall the sky glowed with light.
I wished I had gone along with the others. I was thinking of putting my shoes back on and going to look for my roommates, when I heard them coming along the path and I remembered my sausage. Now it seemed that what I needed was a long stretch of time to take care of it—and here were feet already on the veranda steps. The door opened. I was lying between the sheets, breathing hard, having just
in time skidded the
Knackwurst
into the corner under my bed.

The children did not let me forget it. The counselor, who slept next to me, said “Someone must have made in her bed!” I hummed a song to show I did not feel myself meant in the least, and one of the little girls asked me if I had a stomach-ache, to be making such a horrible noise. The counselor giggled. Finally, they went to sleep.

During the night the temperature dropped; the memorable, bitter winter of 1938 had set in on England’s east coast. By morning, the water in the sink in our cottage was a solid block of ice. The tap merely sputtered. We could not wash our faces, and we set out guiltlessly for breakfast with unbrushed teeth and our mothers not even betrayed.

Outside, the vicious cold wind from the ocean knocked
the breath out of us. We bucked it with lowered heads. The hall had been constructed for summer use. At our first breakfast, we watched the snow that had seeped between the glass squares of the roof and the iron framework fall in delicate drifts through the indoor air. It sugared our hair and shoulders and settled briefly on the hot porridge, salt kippers, and other wrong, strange foods. It was rumored
that one of the girls had had her toes frozen off. We were fascinated. It seemed right that the weather should be as unnatural as our circumstances. (As long as we stayed in that camp, we slept in our stockings and mittens and we wore our coats and caps all day.)

My mind during that first breakfast was on my sausage. I had to do away with the sausage without doing away with it. It was difficult
to focus on the problem; I kept forgetting to think about it, yet, all the time, the place where the sausage lay on the floor against the wall, under the bed, remained the center of my guilt, a sore spot in my mind.

I ate in nervous haste. I meant to get to the cottage before the others came back, but when the meal was done we all had to sit and listen to the camp leader make announcements through
his megaphone. He told us the camp regulations—that the ocean front was out of bounds, that we were to write letters to our parents, that we must stay in hall because some English ladies from the Committee were coming to choose children to go and live with families in different parts of England. We were going to learn to dance the
hora
, he said, for the ladies.

The trestle tables had been cleared
away. There was some ragged singing going on. “Dance!” said the camp leader to a small circle of children he had collected in the center of the hall. He bobbed at the knees encouragingly. His eye roved the hall. He went trotting from one group of children to another. “Come on, everybody! Let’s show the English people how we can dance!” No one moved. The camp leader wiped his brow. He took off
his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. His arms were covered with a perfect sleeve of hair. I was rooting for him. I would have gone myself, but I didn’t know how the dance went and I wasn’t sure if he meant me when he said “everybody.”

I went and stood with some children watching workmen install two extra stoves. They were big black stoves with fat black L-shaped chimneys that carried
the smoke out through the roof. When the stoves were lit, they created rings of intense heat in which we stood all morning jostling for places, for the warmth made no inroad on the general chill.

The camp leader had found some of the older children who knew how to do the
hora
. They danced in a ring, their arms around each other’s shoulders. I looked for the camp leader and saw him standing with
a group of ladies in fur coats. He had put his jacket back on. He was bowing and bobbing his head to the ladies. He walked them all around the hall. They stopped and talked to some of the children. I stalked the party with my eyes. I would ask them about getting a sponsor for my parents and the twins. They were moving toward me. I felt flushed; it came to me that I did not know the words to say
to them. A cloud of confusion blocked the ladies from my sight, though I knew when they were in front of me and when they had passed. I saw them going out to inspect the kitchens. The camp leader held the door for them.

Before I knew what I had decided, I was walking out of the hall into the freezing air, going around the outside of the building toward the kitchens. It had stopped snowing. A
door opened and a man in a long white apron came out with a steaming bucket, which he emptied into a trash can. He was whistling the tune of the
hora
. He waved to me and went back in and shut the door. The trash can went on steaming.

For a moment there, I saw what to do with my sausage. The idea of throwing into the trash can what my mother had gone especially to buy me, because I had lied that
I wanted it, brought on such a fierce pain in my chest where I had always understood my heart to be that I stood still in surprise. I was shocked that I could be hurting so. I started walking toward the cottage, weeping with pain and outrage at the pain. I had a clear notion of myself crying, in my thickly padded coat and mittens that were attached to one another by a ribbon threaded through the
sleeves and across the back. And my hair was light brown and obstinately curled. No wonder the photographers had not taken my picture. I noticed that I had stopped hurting. I suspected that I was somehow not crying properly, was perhaps only pretending, and I stopped, except for the sobbing, which went on for a while.

When I came to the cottage, I walked around to the back, having decided that
I would bury the sausage. I found a piece of wood and scraped away the top layer of snow, but, underneath, the earth was frozen and unyielding. I scraped and hacked at it with my heel. Tufts of muddy iced grass came loose. I stood looking around me. The wind had dropped and the air froze silently. And then I saw something; I saw where, in the middle of a semicircle of snow that must in summer have
been a flower bed in a grassplot behind the cottage, there grew a tall, meager rosebush with a single bright-red rosebud wearing a clump of freshly fallen snow, like a cap askew. This struck me profoundly. I was a symbolist in those days, and roses and the like were just my speed. It excited me. I would write it in a letter to Onkel Hans and Tante Trude in London, saying that the Jews in Austria
were like roses left over in the winter of the Nazi Occupation. I would write that they were dying of the cold. How beautifully it all fell into place! How true and sad! They would say, “And she is only ten years old!” I ran around the cottage and up the veranda steps. I emptied my rucksack onto the blanket, looking for pen, paper, and my father’s list of addresses with a rapidity that matched the
rate at which my metaphor was growing and branching. I wanted to be writing. I was going to say, “If good people like you don’t pluck the roses quickly, the Nazis will come and cut them down.” I hopped onto the edge of the bed, and, hampered by coat and gloves, with freezing ears, plunged with a kind of greedy glee into my writing.

The counselor’s thin face appeared behind the cold glass of the
window. She opened the door and came in. Everyone was sitting down to lunch, she said, and they had sent her to look for me. I recognized the authentic voice of the exasperated grownup. I wanted to get her to like me. I kept chatting. I walked to the dining hall beside her, telling how I was writing to some people in London who were going to get a visa for my parents. I watched out of the corner
of my eye to see if she was impressed. Her face was blue and her eyes little and wind-reddened. Her mouth was set in a grin; I could not tell if it was against the cold or if she was laughing at me. I wouldn’t talk to her ever again.

To my surprise, she began to talk to me. She said people were saying that there were new persecutions going on in Vienna, that all food shops were closed to Jews,
that Jews weren’t allowed to go into the streets day or night and were being fetched out of their apartments and taken away in cartloads. She said she was frightened because of her mother. I told her not to worry; there were so many Jews, they probably wouldn’t even get to her mother.

After lunch, the camp leader addressed us through the megaphone. He said he had heard the rumors about new pogroms
in Vienna, that he had no official word and we were not to believe them or worry ourselves. Now we would observe one minute’s silence and pray for our dear ones left behind. There was a shuffling, a scraping of five hundred chairs as we got to our feet, followed by such a thunderous silence that a little dog belonging to one of the kitchen staff could not bear it and set up a long, terrified
howl. The faces of the children opposite me struggled to retain a decent solemnity, but laughter spread through the hall. I felt my face smiling and laughter coming from my own throat, and was horrified because I knew that the sin of my gaiety would be visited on my parents in the very disaster that I should have been this instant praying away.

I borrowed a pencil and sat down on a bench against
the wall and wrote a letter home. It was a letter in code, to pass the censor. I wrote, “Here are some
questions
that you must answer
immediately
. What did you have for dinner today? Did you have a nice walk this morning? Are you still living at the same address? Do you understand these
questions?
PLEASE ANSWER AT ONCE
.” I wished there were someone to show my letter to—not a child but a grownup,
who would appreciate it.

The camp leader was still on the stage, talking to some people. I went straight up to him and I said, “How long does a letter to Vienna take, please?” He said it took about two days. I said that I was writing to my parents to find out if they were all right. He said that was fine. His eyes were looking sharply over my head at a new bunch of ladies in fur coats standing
just inside the door, and though I knew very well that he was waiting for me to move on so that he could go to them, I still said, “I wrote a letter in code.” “That’s good,” he said. “Just a minute, now.” And then he turned me, not ungently, out of his path. I watched his back striding away, bowing and bobbing to the ladies. I thought, He doesn’t even know my name, and I walked away myself, but
my shoulder felt for hours the pressure of his hand.

I went back to the bench by the wall and sat. Outside, the dusk of an English winter day, which starts imperceptibly almost immediately after lunch, was settling over the camp, and it looked cold. I sat with my mittened hands inside my pockets, sinking every moment more deeply into my coat. My head kept nagging me to go and write another sponsor
letter; it might be this letter I might be writing this instant that would save my parents. The lights came on in the hall, but still I sat. I tried to frighten myself into activity by imagining that the Nazis had come to the flat to arrest my father, but I didn’t believe it. I tried to imagine my father and mother put into carts, but found I did not really care. Alarmed, I tried imagining my
mother taken away and dead; I imagined myself dead and buried in the ground, but still I couldn’t care anything about it. My body felt, for the first time in days, wonderfully warm inside my coat, while my eyes sportively attached themselves at random to a child and followed her across the hall to join the
hora
dancers, and watched their clever feet doing the steps. The music had become familiar,
and I sang it in my head.

There was a lady in a fur coat walking up to where I sat, and she spoke to me. She said, “Would you like to come and dance with the other children?” I said, “No,” because it did not seem possible that I could get up out of my coat. “Come along,” the lady said. “Come and dance.” I said, “I don’t know how,” looking straight before me into the black of her dress where her
fur coat flapped open. I thought, If she asks me a third time I will go. The lady said, “You can learn,” but still it seemed to me she had not asked me in such a way that I could get up and go, and I waited for her to ask me the right way. The lady turned and walked off. I sat all afternoon waiting for her to come back.

In the evening there was an entertainment. We sat in rows. The camp leader
got up on the stage and taught us to sing songs in English: “Ten Green Bottles,” “Rule Britannia,” and “Boomps-a-Daisy.” Then he introduced a muscle man. The muscle man threw off his cape and he had nothing on underneath except a little pair of plum-colored satin trunks. He looked bare and pink standing all by himself on the stage, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. He flexed his biceps for us.
He could flap his diaphragm left side and right side separately, and wiggle each toe in turn. His head was small and perfectly round, like a walnut. Afterward, the camp leader went up to thank him. He said the muscle man was sorry that he could not speak German but that he had come all the way from London to entertain us. The muscle man stood smiling with great sweetness, but I knew he didn’t even
know that I was there.

At the end of the entertainment, the camp leader announced that we were to remain in hall after breakfast tomorrow to welcome the Mayor, who was coming to welcome us. The ceremony would be broadcast by the B.B.C. He asked for a show of hands from the children who spoke English. They were to be introduced to the Mayor. I raised my hand, stunned by the opportunity opening
before me. I could tell the Mayor about the rose in the snow; I would ask him to be a sponsor for my parents. In bed that night, I asked the counselor how to say “growing” in English, but she didn’t know. She told us that a new transport of Jewish children from Germany was expected in camp. I understood from her that this was to be regarded as a calamity, because German Jews talked like Germans and
thought they knew everything better than everybody else and would ruin the whole camp. I was surprised. At home I had learned that it was the Polish Jews who always thought they knew everything and were noisy and pushy in public and ruined everything for the
real
, the Austrian, Jews. I asked our counselor how to say “plucking,” as in “plucking flowers,” in English, but she said how should she
know?