George Pelecanos (8 page)

Down
at the end of the alley a car clocked past on Kalmia Road, its headlights
sweeping the misted gloom. He looked back into the glow spreading from inside
his store, thinking that it would soon be 1968. He had been in America for
twenty-two years, the owner of this liquor store for sixteen of them. One day
to another and he was still here, surviving. He stood a moment longer in the
chill before he went inside to close out for the day.

Liebmann
was married once. His wife died.
Cancer, in 1962.
There was nothing anyone could do. He met her at the Shepherd Park public
library on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Geranium Street. She caught his eye
and he knew immediately that she was a survivor like himself. They talked for a
few minutes in English and then he went to German and she smiled broadly. After
a moment of shy quiet there on the steps of the library, she spoke the single
word, Mauthausen.
A camp in Austria.
He understood
that it was where she had been taken during the war.

He
was standing a step below her and looked up and said: Auschwitz.
Und danach Flossenburg.

They
were married less than four months later, and lived together in the walk-up
apartment. She brought a woman's touch. She cooked German, and made Liebmann
buy a radio. They figured out the game of baseball and were regulars at Senators
home games, sitting in their favorite spot above the third base line. She got
him started with the long neighborhood walks around Shepherd Park.

He
was not swept away by her, not at first, did not fall in love the way lovers do
who
meet and capsize together into the heat and
surprise and mystery of discovering each other. But it was a mystery
nonetheless, his love building for her like slowly painting a picture of
something he had never seen and could never have imagined. All they needed to
know was where they had been and that they had found their way to this place
and to each other. They were companions. Affection anchored them. They worked
the store together. They saved to buy a house. His wife wanted to live on
Morningside Drive--she took him walking there and admired the big four-square
homes with their precise lawns and the satisfying geometry of their flower beds
and careful flagstone walks.

They
imagined together what it would be like when they could afford to move.

When
she was sick and it was clear her time was short, Liebmann sometimes could not
sleep and got up at night o sit beside the bedroom window in the apartment,
looking down on Georgia Avenue. He touched the tattoo on his left forearm.

There
was nothing anyone could do.

He
was transferred from Auschwitz to the camp at Flossenburg to work in the
granite quarry there. The Nazis had killed off most of the older prisoners with
overwork and starvation and random executions by that point in the war.
Liebmann was young and still able to stand on his feet and swing a pick. When
the Americans liberated Flossenburg, he was among the few left alive. In the
holding settlement where he was clothed and fed and gained twenty pounds in as
many days, Liebmann made it clear that he wanted to come to
America,
that
he never wanted to see Germany again. Refugees were assigned to
cities when they arrived in America, and Liebmann was given Washington, D.C., a
part of town called Shepherd Park. An apartment was held in his name, where he
lived rent-free for a year, after which time he was expected to support
himself
and pay his own way.

Twenty-two
years later and Liebmann was still there, a four-room walk-up at 7701 Georgia
Avenue. It met his needs.

Shepherd
Park cornered into the northern edge of the District of Columbia and up against
the Maryland town of Silver Spring. A few blocks to the west of Liebmann's
apartment building was a sylvan grid of tranquil streets with redbrick
colonials and
tudors
and substantial brownstone
duplexes, the part of the neighborhood where his wife wanted to move. Further
west, along 16th Street, there were pillared mansions on half-acre lots arching
down to Rock Creek Park. But where Liebmann lived, at the corner of Georgia and
Juniper Street, the area was failing. He had watched his six or seven blocks
ebb and drift in a long collapse, falling faster and harder in the last few
years. Stores and cafes and the bakery and the pharmacy and the
neighborhood dry cleaner had all closed or moved to the suburbs. There was an
open-air shopping mall out in Wheaton, a new invention of commerce drawing
shoppers like nothing before, and merchants were moving north to Maryland and
the money.

Liebmann
was robbed once as the neighborhood faltered, held up by a frenzied black man
with one clouded eye. The thief yelled and waved a gun around. Liebmann emptied
the contents of the register into a paper sack and the man took it and bolted.
Four mortified customers left quickly without purchasing anything. Liebmann
filed a police report; one of the young officers who answered the call
suggested he buy a handgun, for protection. In case this happens again. And the
way things're going around here, it will.

A
few of Liebmann's friends urged him to sell and move. They would stop in for a
couple bottles of Mogan David or Manischewitz and talk to him as they paid.
Jacob, they'd say, it's time to go. Rent a place in Wheaton. Your business
won't miss a beat. But Liebmann didn't see it. Liquor sold everywhere and on
any day. His wife was gone. He had no children. There was nobody he cared about
who needed a different kind of life. He saw no reason to make any change at
all. He took the policeman's advice and bought a .22 caliber pistol, a little
revolver with white plastic grips that cost fifty dollars used. He got a quick
tutorial on the pistol's operation from the gun store owner. Took the gun back
to the store, loaded it and spun the cylinder and set the safety, and locked it
in the lower left drawer of his desk in the office cubicle.

The
war had left him appalled by firearms. He abruptly realized he could not
imagine using this one.

He
was forty-one years old and felt twice that age most of the time.

He
did not own a car, had never thought to buy one, although he could easily
afford anything on the road. He walked where he needed to go, or took the
streetcar and later the bus. He ate most of his meals next door at Jimmy's
Cafe or sometimes at Crisfield's, just over the District line in Silver
Spring. And after the nights when images of his sister and parents came back
too plainly in his dreams, he would take the longer walk to the synagogue on
16th Street and sit in the back and try to locate comfort in the rituals of his
people.

On
Sundays, the only day he closed the store, Liebmann rode the bus without any
particular destination, his excursions a way past the dismay that could still
run under his thoughts at any given moment, memory rivering through and
working, down beneath the ordinary rhythms of his shopkeeper life.

On
this Sunday in the middle of November, he crossed the street to catch the
downtown bus, stepped up and greeted the driver and dropped the fare, and found
his seat midway back. He preferred sitting on the right side of the bus
although he could not explain the preference. Washington's decline slid past
the smeared window, the boarded store-fronts of Petworth and the catastrophe of
Shaw, the choked streets around Howard University gone to every manner of
destitution and loss.

The
bus wheezed into downtown and hit the turnaround at Federal Triangle and gave
up the last two passengers. Liebmann kept his seat. The driver scouted back
down the aisle, picking up trash and the crumpled transfers left on seats or
tossed on the floor. He stopped and sat in the seat across from Liebmann.

"Mr.
Liebmann," he said. He sighed heavily as he lowered himself against the red
vinyl. He was a big man, overweight from the hours passed behind the wheel.

"How
are you today, my friend?" Liebmann asked.

"Not
too bad," the driver said. He was perhaps fifty years old and had the practiced
mix of resentment and acceptance that Liebmann noticed in many of the black men
who lived in the neighborhood.
"You out for your weekly
pleasure trip?"

Liebmann
said yes.

"Well,"
the driver said, "that's good. 'Course, for me it's the same as ever. No
pleasure about it. The job I do. I'm just happy the damn rain's let up."

The
Nazis came when Liebmann was seventeen. His family lived in Berlin, in a
yellowing apartment building filled with other Jewish families. Later, after
his family was lost, he would wonder that his and so many other families
continued to live together, in the same neighborhoods, the same buildings,
huddling on the same streets, long after they understood what the Nazis were
doing, after so many others had been taken.

He
had not understood then what little his father or any of the fathers could have
done--Germany's borders closed and the jobs gone and the food gone and the
possibility of hiding or shelter or refuge little more than fragrant wishes and
the net pulling tighter day by day. The SS finally came in 1943, at dawn,
stomping up the stairwells of the building, pounding on doors and shouting, and
the staccato barking of the leashed shepherds in the hallways.

Liebmann
roused his sleeping sister, gesturing that she hurry, get up and dress. For
some reason he was afraid to speak, as if talking would give them away to the
soldiers already in their building and moving room to room. He struggled
quickly into his clothes, his half-top boots left untied when he heard the
front door of the apartment give way and his father objecting and a louder
voice ordering them out, downstairs, into the street. He heard something
break--a dish or glass--and the door of his bedroom swung wide. The SS trooper standing
there seemed massive but he was not much older than Liebmann. He was holding
some sort of machine gun across his chest. The gun was black and gleamed with
oil. The soldier stood easily, calm, expressionless, looking first at Liebmann
and then his sister, still in her nightgown, only eleven years old.

The
soldier may as well have been evaluating the fate of two barnyard animals.
After a moment he simply waved them forward with the barrel of his gun and
stood aside in the doorway as they walked out.

* *
*

Liebmann
stayed aboard the bus past his stop on the return trip. He thought he might get
off at the National Guard Armory in Silver Spring and go across the street for
a cup of coffee at the diner before he walked back up Georgia, into the
District and home to his apartment. Three teenaged boys got on at the Kalmia
Road stop, shoving and jockeying past the driver and down the aisle.

Liebmann
recognized one of them immediately.
An episode at the store a
month or so back.
Today the kid had a couple of buddies along.
Blue-collar kids, but with the open pink faces that marked them as suburban,
maybe in from the white-flight neighborhoods out in Glenmont or Aspen Hill, in
the city and drunk on the jolt of getaway freedom that came with crossing the
District line and wandering loose where nobody cared who they were or where
they were going.

The
driver called them back for the fare and the tallest of the boys, the kid that
Liebmann had thrown out of his store, swaggered to the front of the bus.

"Seventy-five
cents," the driver said, pointing at the coin box. The kid stretched it out,
gazing at the side of the driver's head. He leaned against the coin box,
scratched his genitals,
looked
back to his friends for
the designated response. They were piled into a seat across the aisle from
Liebmann and snickered on cue.

"I
thought it was a quarter to ride." The kid had a blond crewcut, wore a white
round-neck T-shirt under a black leather motorcycle jacket.

The
driver brought the bus to a stop at a red light. "
There's
three of you," he said. "Twenty-five times three. Or is that too hard for you
to figure?"

The
kid looked away from his appreciative audience, back to the driver. "You got a
smart mouth on you, don't you?" he said.

The
driver said nothing. Reached across to the lever on his right and pulled it to
open the door behind the kid.

"Off,"
he said.

"I'm
not gettin off," the kid said. "This ain't my stop."

It
had been a Saturday night when one of Liebmann's clerks spotted the same kid
slipping a pint of vodka under the same leather jacket. The kid was eighteen--or
had a driver's license that said he was--old enough to buy in the District. But
he was trying to steal a bottle.

The
traffic light went to green.

The
driver looked at the kid, waiting, and the kid said, "I told you. I ain't
getting off. I'll get off when it's my stop."

A
car behind the bus honked.

When
Liebmann had asked for the bottle under his jacket, the kid said something
about how he had to steal because of the "Jew prices" in the place. But he had
given up the bottle and left, ambling out, making an elaborate show of being in
no particular hurry, meeting the gaze of the store's patrons with slack-jawed
hostility.

The
driver put the bus in neutral and set the brake and put on the safety flashers.
The kid said, "You can't put me off the bus, man. It's against the goddamn
law."