Displaced Persons (22 page)

When she was a child her mother would become angry if Sima did not finish her food. Her father would help her when her mother wasn’t looking, would take what was left on her plate—it was a secret partnership, Berel helping her look like she obeyed, Sima giving him a little more to help him feel satisfied. She and her mother had small, slim-boned bodies, but her father’s had been broad, expandable, always ready for more, a hunger they had joked about in Russia.

She thought of her father’s lips lapping at the piece of halvah she had cut him that day in the hospital. His head leaned against the hospital wall, and he looked calmer, his eyes less red from the tears a few moments before.

You know, Sima had ventured, your attitude is part of the problem.

He glared at her. I think it is your attitude that is the problem.

She said nothing. Anger, that was good, she thought. Or not so bad. It cut her, it always had, but it was better than his crying. Much better. He had been angry and sharp since she was a child, she remembered it well, his quiet rage at her. There had been one night in Osh, she must already have been five, or six, maybe younger, they had both left her for work and she had wandered outside—how old was she then? She felt that they must have left Russia and gone to Germany soon after, but perhaps—

Where had they been after Osh? She wanted to ask, suddenly—why did she not know where she had been?

No, she could not ask.

But she felt her lips moving, the words slipping out of her mouth.
Tatteh
, where were we after Osh?

He looked at her, a little satisfied smile. She knew what he was thinking—at last, she’s admitting it, with a deathbed question.

Hmph, he said, eyes small and alert.

Oh, don’t answer it, if you can’t remember either.

Of course I remember. Osh was the last place before Uzbekistan, and then from there we went back.

How did we hear to go back to Germany?

We didn’t hear anything. We were told to register to get on a train, and we did it. It was the rumors on the train, so many rumors that we knew it was true.

I don’t remember the train out of there, she said. Only the train to Russia.

It didn’t feel like a train, he said, it didn’t feel like a train because it was so slow. They had to keep stopping and hooking and unhooking the cars. And the tracks! Destroyed. It must have taken us more than a month to get to Germany.

I wish I remembered it better.

No you don’t, said her father. Her father leaned back into his pillow. His eyes glittered, triumphant.

Forget about it, said Sima.

No, no, I am delighted you ask.

She leaned toward his ear and continued. There is no reason for you to be angry with me. No reason!

He did not answer.

She continued. What is it with you? Acting like a little child who did not get his way. What do you want, to prove to me you can die?

I wish it were a little easier to prove.

Terrible! You have a nerve!

Oh, I see, I have a nerve. I do. His voice came out in a whisper. What a daughter I have!

She stopped, sat in the large chair near the head of the bed, looked away from him. How ridiculous he was. Always so dramatic. He wanted to make her burst into tears! Well, she would not. It was a bad habit she had gotten into with him in the last few years, matching his moods, shout for shout. She never would have dared with
her mother. No, her mother had been a mother, scolding her, hitting her—even when she was twenty already, smacking her with a towel when Sima did not come home one night, she was out with a boy from the army again—a real mother, who had died when Sima had only just become a mother herself. But her father—her father had lived long enough to become her friend.

T
HE PASSENGERS APPLAUDED AS
the plane rolled down the runway. The national anthem began playing through the speakers. Lola would be waking up, struggling with her father, begging him in her raspy sleep voice to let her have five more minutes, just five more minutes, then dressing lightly, stealing one of Fela’s cookies from the upper cabinet before Chaim saw, ignoring Chaim’s shout to go get her galoshes, now, right now, forgetting to grab her wool hat. She smiled at the thought of it, relieved at being here at last, of arriving on time, in time. Her neighbor in the aisle seat smiled back at her. Sima had new photographs to show her father, in a little envelope in her purse, and she touched them as she stood up to exit.

A
BOVE THE CUSTOMS HALL
she could see the second floor of the terminal, families peering through the glass walls for the arriving passengers below. She looked up absently, out of habit, from when her father used to come and wait for her and Lola to arrive, then shook her head. She saw a face that looked like her aunt Zosia’s. Her heart began to pound. Why would Zosia be here? She had told her not to pick her up. But Zosia had not listened to her, of course she had not listened to her, she had not wanted Sima to come alone to the hospital, she was worried that Sima would be tired after her flight, her
aunt was like a mother to her. Sima had told her not to, but of course Zosia had come to the airport to pick her up. She looked up again and squinted. Yes, that was Ze’ev with her, no doubt reluctant to let Zosia drive alone. Sima’s hands began to sweat. Are you all right? said the customs agent.

Of course, said Sima.

But the agent eyed her carefully and again ran through the list of questions she had just answered, just to make sure. Time was wasting, but Sima answered politely, calm. It was only noon. Nothing could have happened yet. Not even a day had passed. She walked out of the baggage check and looked for her aunt and uncle. There they were, her aunt in a blue cotton shirt and gray skirt, sunglasses on her head, her face straight, expressionless, her unshaven husband grasping her hand, her eyes—that look, thought Sima in a panicked flash, that look, something terrible has—

What has happened? said Sima. What has happened? My God, what has happened?

Your father—her aunt began.

But Sima could not let her finish. “
Oy, Gott,”
she cried, again and again. God,
Oy Gott
, her words and grief were pulsing from her bones, through her skin, in all the languages she knew.

H
E HAD BEEN ALONE.
She had come here to be his companion, and he had died in his narrow bed alone.

You were with him, said Chaim. It is a blessing.

Her husband’s voice, clear, strangely near despite the telephone, was breaking; he was crying. She could hear Fela’s voice, faint garbles of concern in the background, and she felt a wave of hate for her husband. Here she was, all alone, abandoning her daughter to her husband’s secondhand telling. She was alone here, her daughter was
alone there, or almost alone, and her father had died alone, alone, alone.

Sima’s shame was great. Yes, she lied, dry-voiced. Yes. I was with him, and he fought it. He fought with me near him. He was not alone.

A blessing, wept Chaim. A blessing. He got his wish.

April 1973

S
OMEONE AT WORK HAD
tickets to a concert. A commentator whose companion was sick. Would Chaim like to come instead?

Yes, he thought. He would. Normally the reporters and announcers did not mix with the technical people—it was a nice gesture, he should not refuse it lightly.

He called Sima at home. She answered on the second ring, her voice compressed, more flat than sad, as if she was lying down.

Go, she said. Go. Don’t worry about me.

H
E DECIDED TO STAY
a bit late at his desk, grab a bite with the commentator. Bob. They sat at a coffee shop two blocks from Avery Fisher Hall, Chaim nibbling on unbuttered toast, Bob swallowing a hamburger.

It was a concert at a small orchestra society, with a soloist whose face, when he opened the program, he thought familiar. And the name—Basia Lara—Basia. He read her biography in the program twice. Yes, it must be her.

Basia Lehrman, now called Lara, Basia Lara. She too had gone from Germany after the war to Israel, but he had not seen her since—since when, perhaps since Europe, when a teacher in the DP camp had taken the musically gifted children to a concert in Hamburg. How old had he been, that concert? No more than fourteen, still living in the house in Celle with Pavel and Fela. He had not seen her since, but he believed he had heard something of her, a picture some years ago in a Tel Aviv newspaper, accounts of a large international prize she had won, the first for an Israeli, let alone a refugee.

Basia had become professional, successful. She lived in Baltimore with her conductor-husband, who taught at the conservatory. But that was all he read of her before she appeared, large and dark haired, skin pale against a gleaming dress, on the stage. She began to sing, love songs in German and Italian, to the accompaniment of a piano. Lieder from Schubert, music he had not heard before and did not melt into, then an aria in Italian that flowed into him, her voice falling in minor notes like dripping water, slow but detached.
Mio ben ricordati
, it began, please remember, remember, my beloved, the awkward English translation almost unnecessary, the small vocabulary he had absorbed in youth budding up inside him, words he could recognize once he heard them but not call up before they came out of her mouth.
Mio ben ricordati
, how my heart loved you, and if ashes can love, from the grave I still will love you. When the song ended, there was a long pause. Chaim saw the singer’s face register surprise at the silence, then a broad smile as the clapping began.

He told Bob he would take a walk before going home, but instead waited in the receiving room adjacent to the recital hall. She entered
from a door Chaim had not noticed until she walked through it, her pianist at her side. Even at a distance he could see a silver swath of makeup extending from her eyelids, reflecting against her white skin and rouged cheekbones.

Chaim waited until the number of concertgoers flanking her had dwindled to four. He thought he saw her looking at him with some concentration as he approached. As he came near he put on a slight smile, then murmured, “I was with you when you attended your first concert, more than twenty-five years ago.”

She took in a breath, let it out in a laugh. Of course she remembered him, her fellow refugee, along with every detail of the concert hall, what their teachers wore, the exact music played. That night was one of the most beautiful nights of her life. The others around her moved away.

Do you like my dress? she said, in Yiddish. It was floor length, the color of lilac, entirely sequined. The neck scooped down, leaving the plump white skin around her collarbones bare.

Yes, said Chaim.

You’ll never believe how I got it. One of my first recitals here, I sang in a church. Through the music school. I had nothing! I wore something I thought was very elegant, borrowed from a teacher who had worn it years before. A man came to see me afterward, backstage.

Chaim shifted.

An elderly man. He said—Basia moved into English, “Miss Lara, you sing beautifully, you dress terribly. I want to buy you a gown.” Basia laughed.

Chaim said, He was Jewish.

Of course! But I couldn’t understand. And when he wrote me the check—it seemed a shameful thing to do. I said, No, no. Finally he started to speak in German, and I answered. My German, perhaps you remember my German—but it has improved with the schooling.
I can sing it, if not speak it. So! He was here tonight, I wore the dress he helped me buy, one dozen years ago. Let me tell you, it was hard to get in it. I hope I get out.

Chaim laughed a little, stole a glance at the waistline of the dress. It did seem a bit tight. It turned out he knew the man too, an acquaintance of an acquaintance, a professor who had come from Germany in the 1930s, before the war.

I am so glad we saw each other, Chaim. It was fate, wasn’t it, to meet again at a concert?

Maybe fate, said Chaim. Maybe luck.

I perform again tomorrow, and I go out of town in a few weeks. Why don’t we have lunch before I go?

Wonderful, said Chaim. He took down her number.

I
MET SOMEONE FROM
Germany tonight, said Chaim, his hands calm on the kitchen table.

Yes? said Sima, half-smiling.

Basia Lehrman—a classmate from Belsen. She was the soloist—

Basia. Basia Lara? I know her.

You know her? How? The words came out louder, more shocked than he anticipated.

Not from camp. She’s much older than me, you know.

What, a year, two?

Maybe four. Sima’s lips went straight. Maybe five. She lies about her age, of course. I was in the army with her. She’d subtracted some years to postpone service. No birth certificate, no documents, impossible to prove. But still, hard to do, given that figure. She was developed like a thirty-year-old when she was eighteen, at least, when she said she was eighteen. Men always after her.

She was singing.

Ah, you heard her. She was in the acting troupe of the army. I heard her a few times. Beautiful voice.

Yes, Chaim agreed. She had a pretty voice.

Sima’s careful hands were cutting a pear; the juice spilled onto her polished pink fingernails. It was night. Lola was asleep. Chaim felt his hand push itself across the round table to cover his wife’s. She didn’t stop cutting.

Do you want a piece? she said. It’s so good.

No, said Chaim, withdrawing his hand. No.

Sima had started for Lola one collection after another, the most extravagant and least successful being an intricate dollhouse. Lola was not delicate; she broke things, and miniatures made her nervous. She was quite tall for her age, lithe and loud. The dollhouse was kept in Lola’s room, but Lola rarely touched it. Sima dusted the insides, bought tiny furniture, small rugs, even little dishes. Sima had not had a girlhood, Chaim thought. She had not had a girlhood and so still was a girl. She had been poor and deprived but sheltered in youth, protected and watched. Now, suddenly learning to be without parents, she was learning what it was not to be young.

Basia was old.

S
IMA GOT UP AND
washed her plate. Chaim stayed in the kitchen, then went to the living room, turned on the hi-fi. He put on Rachmaninoff’s Third, a new Lazar Berman recording he had brought home from the station. He played it low and sat on the sofa, waiting for Sima to come out from the bedroom and ask him to join her.

They had lied to Lola until Sima had come back. He had lied, because Sima had wanted him to. She wanted to tell her daughter about Berel’s death in person. He would sit in the living room with the record player on, waiting for the telephone to ring while Fela made
dinner for him and his daughter in the kitchen, Lola convincing her to put chocolate in her apple cake, Pavel smiling wider than Chaim remembered ever seeing, Lola looking happy and ignorant.

Every night the same thing. Chaim would tell a funny story about Lola. But Sima’s laughs would come out unnatural and short, barked over the international phone lines.

Chaim, she said. How will I tell her?

I can tell her, he offered again.

I want to. Please, let it wait.

But it made him nervous to wait, to watch his daughter’s mouth opening like a bird’s: “How is Sabah? What does he say? When is he coming out of the hospital?”

He would turn away and say, “Not good, not good.” Then, as if to make himself feel more truthful: “Very bad.”

He thought their daughter was stronger than Sima believed. Lola was healthy and exuberant, more trouble than her school could handle: good trouble, the trouble of a strong child. She was mischievous. She laughed uncontrollably at jokes made by schoolmates, whispered during emergency drills when the rule was silence. Chaim went to the meetings with Sima, nodded solemnly over their daughter’s failings, flirted gently with the teachers. Lola would burst into tears afterward and quickly recover. She knew that people died; if he told her the truth she would not collapse. Grief was grief, it did not matter who bore the message or in what form the message was given. It was not good to give their daughter the luxury of believing that when death came, it came gently, accompanied by a mother’s comfort.

H
E COULD NOT REMEMBER
what he had felt when he had learned of his father’s death, when he had seen his brother—and even if he could remember he preferred to blot it out. Chaim remembered only
flashes of shock and horror—the sadness had come later, when the world he once knew seemed a forgotten story, something in films, grief forming in a fog, surrounding him, but refusing to fill him the way he saw that his wife was filled.

Upon her return Sima had become silent and inward, even with Lola. He wanted to talk to her, to tell her that he too wept for her father, the man who had given him a new family, but he felt that crying in front of her would seem intrusive, presumptuous. Berel had mocked him at their first meeting. That was how Chaim remembered it—Sima’s father’s sarcasm at his painfully new Hebrew surname: Halom. Chaim had changed it, cleverly, he had thought, to the translation of his own name, his father’s name, Traum, dream. He wanted to feel new in his new country, new and native, his names rolling off the Hebrew tongue with thoughtless ease. He fooled almost no one, of course: his accent, though mild compared with that of the other Europeans, and perhaps more his face, its telltale fatigue and suspicion, gave him away as a boy from the diaspora, a meek goat who had escaped the slaughterhouse by accident, by intervention from forces stronger than himself. But the change of name signified at least a willingness to adapt and to fight. He would use the word for
dream
as it occurred in the Bible, not as it had been handed down to him in a murderous Europe.

Your father’s name was not good enough for you? Berel had asked.

Sima’s mother had scolded. Berele! Let the boy eat.

I’m finished eating, Chaim had said. He smiled, keeping his face free of trembling. I feel I kept my father’s name. It is not as if I chose something completely different, like the others: spring or zion or song. I do not reject my father’s name. The meaning is the same.

Ah, said Berel. The meaning.

Sima protested. I had thought about it myself.

So, Simale, why did you not do it? And do not try to convince your
boyfriend that it was out of respect for your poor father and mother. We all know—perhaps Chaim knows too—that you always do as you please.

I like our name, said Sima. That is all.

Well, reasoned Chaim, the meaning would not have made a difference in Hebrew—Makow, what, a little town?

A big town! answered Berel. With no Jews now. That is why we keep it. Even if—he shot a sly look out of his eye—even if our daughter is the last to carry our name, until she marries, of course.

Sima flushed. But Chaim was relieved. The old man did not hate him—in fact perhaps liked him a bit. He continued his logic. If you can translate the name into Hebrew, you don’t lose the meaning. If it can’t be translated, it can’t be translated. So, of course, it is different to try to change Makower—he nodded at Sima’s mother—than to change Traum.

Dvora broke in. I was Zambrowska, she said. Before I was anything to do with Makower. And now, look, after I married: no more of the sisters Zambrowska. No brothers Zambrowski. Nothing.

Hmph, said Berel. You see? Are there so many
Traumen
left in the world that you felt you could make it one less? Berel chuckled a little at his own pun. One misses the sound too, not just the meaning. Some things cannot be translated. Now, where was your family from?

Chaim had let himself be drawn out. A small town, north of Warsaw. Dvora had smiled—she had had family not far from there. But Chaim did not want to dwell on his origins—the facts of his family, scholarly, somewhat secular, poor, he could mention, but the details—the sisters and brothers—he did not want to spill it. He told instead scenes from his life after the ghetto—scenes of escape with the five boys, then the three, then just Tsalek, the last friend he had lost, the traveling from small town to town, the hiding in the forest, trapped in a group of incompetent gentile partisans, then in an abandoned shed
in the city. To his surprise he had delighted Berel and Dvora with his tales—they chuckled and laughed, poured him tea, asked him for more. Adventure stories: preferable to the tale of his name.

Yet when he applied for the visas to America he had put himself and his wife down as Traum. What did
Halom
mean in English? It would mean nothing. And once he moved he did like the sound of his father’s surname, in the open American voice used by his new employers or in the lilting Yiddish of Fela’s kitchen. Pavel, overjoyed to be reunited, had introduced him to friend after friend by his full name, and the sound stirred in him relief, nostalgia, as for a tune he had heard in his childhood but had difficulty singing himself. It was easier to say the word
Traum
in English than in Hebrew—here the gaze at the Europeans was less accusatory. Here he had less to prove or to show. And for a man his age there was no army requirement in New York, and all the protests the students did over the war in Vietnam did not pain him the way he thought it should. Here he did not face his own death or the deaths of others—people he himself might harm—as he had in Israel, each time he was called for reserve duty, each time he heard of activity on the border. In Europe it had not occurred to him that a life in Palestine would mean the constant fighting and fear of fighting. Before the war even the most idealistic youths—his brothers had been among them, his cousin Rayzele and her brothers too—had thought of Palestine as a place to work and live in a peaceful collective, no neighbors to battle or expel or kill. And after the liberation, what little he had understood of the battles between Arab and Jew had not included the thought that he would join an army to move others out. He had left the house in Celle, Fela crying, Pavel, half-furious, grasping his shoulders again and again, with the idea that he would be on his way to a real home, that the fear he felt every day in Germany would dissipate and his comfort with Rayzele and her friends would grow.