Other People’s Houses (31 page)

The next day Paul stopped off at the hospital. Dr. Marchfeld said, “Paul,
you’re looking green.”

“You, too! Ilse keeps feeling sorry for me. I’m just tired. Have you ever tried to corral six calves that would rather stay with their mothers? I thought I was going to get used to the heat, but I’m minding it even more this year. Also, we didn’t sleep last night. That’s what I’ve come to ask you about. Erich, why is Ilse bleeding?”

“All right, old colleague. What does
bleeding in the last month of pregnancy suggest to you?”

“
Placenta previa,
” Paul said, with the tiny satisfaction of someone producing his credentials in good order; at the same time, a slow terror started hot between his shoulder blades. “Do you think it would be better to get her to the hospital in Puerto Plata?”

“Certainly, it would be better, but under the circumstances I’m not going to
risk her starting labor on that infernal road. We’ll keep our eye on her here.”

In their room, Paul found Ilse whimpering in panic. He ran for the doctor, but by the time they arrived back at the barracks Ilse’s blood was gushing in fantastic quantities, and the baby, deprived of the oxygen that the ruptured placenta had carried away, had suffocated. “Poor Pauli,” Ilse said.

“Poor nobody,” the
doctor said. “Paul, sit on that chair, and Use, put your head down.” He spoke so briskly that Paul looked up with a wild leap of hope, but the doctor’s face was a dark red. Beads of sweat stood along his hairline.

All night Paul sat by Ilse’s head. He massaged her hand. Her face was a blotchy dough color, with great bruised eyes. She said, “I wish, Pauli, you could lie down for a bit.”

“I wish
you would stop worrying about me, because that’s more tiring than anything!”

She looked startled, but she was quiet after that, and he must have closed his eyes, because he awoke to see Dr. Marchfeld folding up a towel.

The doctor said, “She is dead, Paul. You go and get cleaned up.”

Paul said, “I shouted at her. I just wanted to speak with her once more.”

The doctor said, “I’ll have her taken
over to the hospital. Get yourself a clean shirt. Come.”

“I just wanted to speak with her,” Paul said.

Dr. Marchfeld pointed him toward the washroom.

In the shower, Paul came totally awake. His head was very clear. He even felt the pleasantness of the clean cotton shirt on his freshly dried skin, and already he saw how he would live in the future—perfectly normal in his actions and perceptions,
and perfectly unfeeling within.

Paul was putting things away in the suitcase when Otto came in. “That goddam quack doctor!” Otto said, and began to cry.

Paul took a piece of paper and drew a line on an imaginary graph. “It’s more complicated than a wrong diagnosis, or wrong treatment,” Paul said. “I know. I was a medical student. I’ve heard doctors say, ‘If only this happens’” (Paul crossed
his time line), “‘before this happens’” (he crossed it farther along), “‘in this five minutes I can save a life.’”

“Don’t
defend
him!” Otto said. “I’ve brought you some coffee.”

“No, thank you,” Paul said.

“Just have a little coffee,” Otto said, and looked so desperate that Paul said, “We’ll both have some. There are two tooth glasses on the washstand.”

Otto stayed with Paul for a week, going
about his business by day and returning at night full of Sosua news. Frau Halsmann had left her husband and moved to the Batey. Among the new group from Luxembourg was a woman called Sarah Hankel, who had almost been left behind because where the emigration form said “Profession,” she had written “prostitute,” and the emigration officer had made her tear it up and start over. Two of the men were
escapees from concentration camps, and Otto told Paul the stories they were telling, which were still new in those days. The next morning Paul went to see Sommerfeld about visas for his parents, not hesitating to use the blackmail of his recent tragedy.

The news of the death of Paul’s young wife came to us in England. It struck home at my unsatisfied youth, my dream of love. I was in such awe
of this Paul who had had love and lost it that it was years before I dared write to him.

Paul answered with an extraordinary letter in which he wrote—still as if he were speaking of some third persons—about “two people spun in their cocoon of passion and pioneer dreams, in a world in explosion, too fantastic to be believed while it had lasted. When that chapter of tenderness was over, Paul was
left numb and sober. He knew he must not die, because his parents were still in Vienna and would be lost if he did not help them, and that meant incessant begging and badgering at the DORSA office, perhaps for a long time. He knew this with a clear head and a dead heart.”

My grandparents did not, in fact, get to Sosua until September of the following year. My grandmother, at the time a sick woman,
was brought off the boat on a stretcher. Paul procured a three-cornered pillow from the DORSA office so my grandmother could sit upright through her sleepless nights. He massaged her feet and brought her three meals a day from the communal kitchen, which my grandmother, herself a beautiful and fastidious cook, was unable to eat. She was convinced that Paul’s recent stomach upsets had been caused
by the oil used in the kitchen. Paul saw the necessity of getting a house of their own, and, rousing himself out of the lethargy in which he had lived the last year, reorganized the defunct Steiner Group. After the marriage of Renate and Otto, Michel had withdrawn, but Michel’s older brother, Robert, wanted to get out of the large “Swiss” group, and came in with them.

My grandmother was dead
against the idea. “What kind of a farmer is Paul going to be? He was never any good with his hands. Besides, look at him—he isn’t strong enough.”

“It’s my nature to look starved, Muttilein. I’m feeling much better.”

“We should move to town and open a little shop like our shop in Fischamend,” said my grandmother.

“No,” said Paul. “No, no, no. No little shop.”

The group returned hopelessly from
their talk with Sommerfeld. Building in Sosua had virtually stopped since America’s entry into the war. There was a shortage of money and building materials of every kind. Paul and my grandfather went to work in the DORSA storeroom. My grandmother, who had recovered her health, quarreled with Renate and refused to speak with Frau Halsmann, who was having an affair with one of the boys from the
bachelor barracks, eleven years her junior. It was not till the spring of 1944 that the homestead at Ferrocarril was completed and offered to the Steiner Group.

During the middle years of the war, Sosua’s economy became integrated into that of the rest of the country. Its harvests were considerable, and Sosua cattle—the offspring of Mr. Langley’s prize bull—brought good prices in a market already
driven high by the wartime shortage. There was a boom in tortoise-shell Mogen Davids after Farber had stocked the general store (of which he was now the manager) and given his new Dominican wife one to wear around her neck when she visited home. His onetime partner in the tortoise-shell business was left with an oversupply of crosses, which he had intended for the native market; for a while,
the two men did not speak to one another. The experimental dairy co-operative was showing profits for everyone except my grandmother, who had been forbidden to sell the butter and cottage cheese she made in her own kitchen, and when she went to Bockmann’s café—which now served hot Viennese dinners and had a one-lane bowling alley—she sat at a corner table and would not speak to
anyone
.

In the
midst of the general prosperity, the new Steiner homestead was having its first hard years. Paul’s eggplant harvest had failed, each fruit rotting at the point of contact with the earth. “It may be just my two left hands,” Paul said, “but next time I’m going to try planting a month earlier and harvesting before the rain sets in—with one corner planted the same as this year, for a control. That should
eliminate the wet-ground factor, unless the rains start a month early or half a dozen unknown factors get in the way. Oi! I’ll do it on my own time.”

“On your own time, you should sit a little,” my grandmother said.

“I’m afraid to sit. I may not want to get up again,” Paul joked.

But his strength was seeping out of him. He felt the heat as a persecution that never let up. Every job he did seemed
to him inadequately done and needing to be done over more carefully, and he forced himself to do it again.

The second harvest was not as bad a failure as the first, but the homestead needed a substantial additional loan from DORSA, and Paul’s health had broken. My grandmother nursed him and cooked for him and talked to him about starting a shop in town.

The war was over. Hitler was dead. Renate
persuaded Otto to move back to the Batey and take over the Sosua trucking concession to carry the produce of the dairy co-operative and the new privately owned sausage factory to the town markets. Robert Brauner, wanting to have the entire homestead under his control, bought out Paul’s share, and Paul opened the little shop in Santiago.

I remember once, when Paul and I were walking in Santiago
together, we talked about Ilse. Neither of us mentioned her name. I had asked Paul if a person in the first throes of loss wants to be left alone or to be nursed along, and Paul said the person wants to be left alone but that he had been helped by Otto’s presence. “The very irritation of having him there acted as a distraction. In the moments I had to be talking to him, I could not concentrate on
the pain.” Paul said that he had recently found three lines of a poem in his head. “And I know they are about my poor wife:

“You are like the moonlight in the day,

Invisible—yet perceived

By the heedless heart no longer grieved.

It’s just like me to have the first three lines of a poem that I don’t know what to do with,” he said.

“Pauli,” I said, “what are you going to do with yourself?”

“Try and make a go of the shop until our quotas come. In America, I’ll try and get a job—perhaps in a laboratory, where my medical training might be useful.”

“I don’t mean just that,” I said. “You never go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry about me, Lorle.”

“But I do,” I said, and I felt like crying. “Omama didn’t even want you to go for a walk this evening, for goodness’ sake.”

“I’m afraid your Omama
cares more for my being home than I care for going out.”

“But you have to make a stand, Pauli.”

“No, I don’t,” Paul said. “I’m too old to make a stand on principle. If I should ever find anything I want to do enough to make a stand, I will, I promise you. But there’s nothing, Lorle, that I want.”

CHAPTER TEN

Santiago de los Caballeros: Omama and Opapa

It was in hot, late summer that I arrived in Ciudad Trujillo. My mother met me at the pier, and we took a chartered taxi, which, in the absence of a railroad, carried the better class of passengers across country.

My mother, who had not seen me in two years, sat looking at me while I looked out of the window not liking this new country
where I was going to live. The mountainous areas seemed brash and new, lacking in composition; the plains were sunburned and monotonous except for the miserable palm-leaf shacks and occasional bursts of gross, oversized vegetation. Over all stood the unrelieved, unlovely white heat of the sky. At every crossroads, we stopped at the little inspection posts. The soldiers joked with the driver and the
three chatty Dominicans in the back seat, who were putting up good-naturedly with the heat, the noisy
merengue
on the car radio, and the road rattling beneath us.

I was feeling sick and I leaned out of the window, but even the breeze raised by our motion felt secondhand and warmed-over. I thought there would be relief when we stopped for lunch in one of the small, hot, towns, but the taxi-driver
led us into a flyblown restaurant where a crippled Chinaman served us hot fried chicken, rice, and warm Coca-Cola.

When we got back into the car, which was now the temperature of a greenhouse, the driver turned the
merengue
on the radio to full volume. By midafternoon, we arrived in Santiago.

Santiago de los Caballeros is a dusty native town lying inland and low between mountains. It has narrow
streets and painted wooden houses. Across the first floor of each house runs a narrow
galería
, where people rock in rocking chairs or stand leaning on the painted, turned-wood balustrades.

“That’s ours, the yellow house,” said my mother, and there on the veranda stood my family, smiling and smiling. I could tell that they were fantastically pleased to have me there. They had last seen me when
I was ten years old, and now I was twenty. I saw that my grandmother was wearing the same kind of hairnet and striped-calico apron she had worn in Fischamend, and I remembered how bald and frail my grandfather was. But Paul, bespectacled, skinny, and hook-nosed, was different from the person I had been remembering all these years. They all escorted me along the
galería
into the front room, which
had been converted into a little grocery shop, with neat, well-stocked shelves, scales, meat slicer, and cash register. The adjoining living room had bare wooden walls and a wooden floor and strange windows that had no glass, Paul explained, so that what little air came in might circulate.

“Lorle, look! Pauli had this piano here for me the day I arrived,” my mother said.

“Would you like to sit
in my rocking chair?” my grandfather asked me in his thick Hungarian accent.

“She would like to sit at the table and have coffee and cake,” my grandmother said, aping him, as I remembered her doing in my childhood.

“
Ja so,
” said my grandfather.

I was excited. “This is all so strange and familiar!
Sacher Torte
with
Schlagobers
in San Domingo, and eating in a room next to the shop so that someone
can watch the door, the way we always did in Fischamend.”

“Do you remember, Lorle, how much we used to laugh?” my mother asked.