Too Many Men (36 page)

“It’s nice enough,” Ruth said.

Chapter Ten

O
n the corner of Pilsudskiego Street and Kopcinskiego Street, Edek asked an elderly woman for directions to the Jewish Center.

“It is on Zachodnia Street,” Edek said to her, in Polish. Ruth stood and waited. The woman was the fourth person they had asked. Ruth knew, from the map, that they must be close to Zachodnia Street. She had made a note of the exact address because she hadn’t expected many locals to know where the Jewish Center was. She didn’t think Poles would be making pil-grimages to the Jewish Center. But this woman knew. Ruth heard the woman refer to “People of Moses’ faith.” Why didn’t she say Jewish? Ruth thought. Why did she keep repeating “People of Moses’ faith”?

Ruth had called the Jewish Center that morning. A youngish-sounding man had agreed to give her ten minutes. He was the director of the center, he said. “Be here at 11:10 A.M.,” he said—11:10 A.M., she thought. This man must have a hectic schedule. “I’ll be there at 11:10 A.M.,” she had said to him. She had told him that she wanted a guide to take her through the Jewish Cemetery. “I need more notice to organize a guide,” he had said. “I need several days.”

“Not many people’s plans include a month in Lódz,” she had said to him. “I need a guide in the next day or two.”

“I don’t think I can do anything,” he said.

“I’ll come to the center anyway,” Ruth had said. She was puzzled at his T O O M A N Y M E N

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lack of helpfulness. Maybe he was overrun by Jews wanting to visit the Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery was locked. Even people who didn’t want a guide had to go to the center to pick up the key. Maybe being keeper of the keys was proving to be too much.

“Okay, okay, I know where the Zachodnia Street is,” Edek said. “Follow me,” he said, and ran off. Ruth was too tired to run after him. Why did he have to run? No one else in the streets of Lódz was running. Ruth sped up. She had lost sight of Edek. She was agitated. Where was he? Why couldn’t he do anything at a normal pace? She looked in each direction at every intersection she passed. There was no sign of Edek. How could he have gotten so far ahead of her in such a short time? She continued walking. It was 10:40 A.M. They had half an hour. She didn’t want to be late.

She was just reaching a main street, which she hoped was Al. Kosciuszki, when Edek came around the corner and almost knocked her over.

“What are you doing?” she said to him, when she regained her footing.

“You’re lucky it was me you bumped into, and not some Pole.”

“What are you talking about?” Edek said. “I knew it was you.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Ruth said. “You can’t see around corners.”

“Did we come to Lódz to argue about such stupid things?” Edek said.

“No,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I did smell your perfume,” he said. “You wear always the same perfume. I could smell the perfume from Kosciuszki Street.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t,” Ruth said.

“Forget about it,” said Edek. “We are very near to the Lódz-Fabryczna, the railway station.”

“Oh, good,” said Ruth. “That station is not far from Zachodnia Street.”

“I know this,” Edek said. “That is why I am telling you. Zachodnia Street is off a street what the station is on.”

“Dad,” she called out to him, as he ran off. She gave up. She had wanted to ask him if they could walk together. But he was gone. She relaxed a bit. At least they wouldn’t be late. She checked the note in her pocket. The Jewish Center was at number 78 Zachodnia Street.

Before she could put the piece of paper back in her pocket Edek had returned.

“The Lódz-Fabryczna is not there,” he said.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“It’s still in the guidebooks,” Ruth said. “It’s the main station in Lódz.

They can’t have got rid of it.”

“Of course they still got the station,” Edek said. “But it is not there.”

“Maybe you’re not looking in the right place,” Ruth said.

“I been there many times as a boy,” Edek said. “I know where it is.”

“That was a while ago, Dad,” she said.

“You do not forget where a station is,” Edek said.

“Maybe they moved the station?” Ruth said.

“Maybe,” he said. “I try one more place.” He was gone before she could object.

Ruth felt old. What was wrong with her? It was pathetic not to be able to catch up with an eighty-one-year-old. But then Edek was not your average eighty-one-year-old, she thought. Maybe pitched against a more normal eighty-one-year-old, she might be able to hold her own. In the distance, she saw Edek waving to her. She ran up to him.

“I did find the Lódz-Fabryczna,” he was shouting. “I told you I did know where it was. I will show you, now, where Zachodnia is. The woman in the street did explain it to me pretty good.”

“Dad, can you wait for me?” she said.

“Hurry up,” he said, as he streaked ahead of her.

One minute later, she could no longer see him. Edek’s darting and dashing and rushing was demented, she decided. It was unnatural. Human beings were not meant to speed and careen from one place to the next.

There was no need. There was no urgency, no emergency, no crisis, no race. Finding the right street was not a matter of life and death. She looked around her. She couldn’t see Edek anywhere. She thought it would be a miracle if she and Edek managed to arrive at Zachodnia Street together.

Suddenly, Edek reappeared. He was out of breath.

“Something is wrong,” he said. Ruth felt alarmed. She knew that a man his age shouldn’t be running around like that.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked, trying to sound unworried.

“The streets are not where they should be,” Edek said. Ruth was relieved that geography and location were still what was wrong.

“Maybe it’s us who are not where we should be,” she said. But Edek T O O M A N Y M E N

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didn’t want to listen. He was gone. She didn’t care. She slowed down. It was she and Edek who were in the wrong place. What were they doing here? She should be in New York. In her office, where compared to this nothing seemed crazy.

Even the most unruly occurrences in the offices of Rothwax Correspondence seemed tame and subdued next to this. The indexing and cross-indexing of letters and files and folders seemed easy. The puzzling requests from clients seemed moderate and manageable next to this. This was madness. New York, with its erratic inhabitants, its crowded streets, its deviant traffic, and aberrant pedestrians, seemed like the Sea of Tranquillity to Ruth. An oasis of order and clarity. What was the Sea of Tranquillity? she wondered. Was it a geographical location or a poetic phrase? She thought it might be a heavenly body, or something celestial. Anything to do with tranquillity was clearly not her area of specialty. She looked at her watch. It was almost eleven. She was so tired.

Edek reemerged. “I cannot find the Zachodnia Street,” he said. “I do not know what is wrong with me.”

Ruth didn’t answer. She thought he was only questioning his sense of direction. “The Zachodnia Street was a street what I was on many times,”

Edek said.

“Maybe we should go back to the hotel?” she said to Edek. “We’re not going to make our appointment anyway. The man from the center was specific about the time we had to be there.”

“Beggar him,” Edek said.

Ruth was surprised. Edek rarely swore. This was his version of swearing.

“Beggar him” was something Edek had condensed from the word “beggar”

and the Australian expression “bugger him.” A phrase that originated, Ruth thought, from the verb “to bugger.” “Beggar him” was one of Edek’s worst obscenities. Edek didn’t know that he had distorted and blended two different words. He didn’t notice the lack of potency the phrase possessed.

Ruth had once tried to explain it to him, but he had dismissed her. He thought she was being pedantic. Ruth thought that maybe he just didn’t want to know what “to bugger” meant. She decided it didn’t matter. People got the general gist of what Edek was expressing. “Beggar him,” Edek said again.

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L I L Y B R E T T

They walked along whatever street it was that they were walking on.

Suddenly Edek turned and shouted. Ruth got a terrible fright. She had been thinking about herself and Edek, and the mess they seemed to be in, in the middle of Lódz.

“Taxi, taxi, taxi,” Edek was shouting. He was in the middle of the street now, and waving his arms. The taxi he had spotted stopped.

“You gave me a terrible shock,” Ruth said when she got to him.

“I did get a taxi for you,” Edek said. “A Mercedes.”

They got into the cab. Edek gave the cab driver the address. “We need to be there in a big hurry, sir,” he said to the driver. Edek had assumed his excessively obsequious manner again. “We’re paying him,” Ruth said to Edek. “We don’t need to lick his ass.”

“What sort of person speaks like this?” Edek said. “ ‘Lick his ass.’ It is lucky for us that he doesn’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t care,” Ruth said.

“Sir,” Edek said. “If you can make it quick, there will be a big tip for you.” Ruth grimaced and sank back into the seat. Edek would have paid out the equivalent of a year’s income in tips and bonuses before he left Poland.

Edek was counting his zlotys. “Give me a few more zlotys,” he said to Ruth.

“So you can distribute them among the Poles?” Ruth said.

“For what are you in such a bad mood?” Edek said.

“This is no picnic,” Ruth said. “Do you think I should be cracking jokes and slapping my thighs?” She wasn’t sure that Edek understood what slapping a thigh meant. Edek understood enough to take offense.

“It is not such a picnic for me, too,” he said.

They drove in silence. Ruth could smell the driver. She could smell the smell of sweat and other body odor, and unwashed hair and unclean clothes. Why didn’t Polish men wash more often? You’d think the driver of a Mercedes would want to smell more like a Mercedes driver and less like a local vagrant, Ruth thought.

They drove past two pieces of anti-Semitic graffiti, one after the other.

Stars of David, with the losing soccer team’s emblem emblazoned across the star-shaped symbol of Judaism. Ruth pointed them out to Edek. “They got rid of their Jews,” she said to Edek. “But they couldn’t get rid of their T O O M A N Y M E N

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anti-Semitism.” She shook her head. “They got rid of almost two hundred and fifty thousand Jews from this area. Wasn’t that enough? What are they carrying on about?”

“Don’t talk about this stuff,” Edek said. “The driver, he sees what we are looking at.”

“So what?” Ruth said. “He knows he’s anti-Semitic. He doesn’t care.”

“It is only children,” the driver said. “Just children.”

“Jesus,” Ruth said. “What sort of kids are they bringing up?”

“My daughter is not really a troublemaker,” Edek said to the driver, in English.

“If you want him to understand,” Ruth said to Edek, “you’d better repeat it, in Polish.”

“
Oy
,
cholera,
” Edek said, and began a long explanation of Ruth’s bad mood to the driver. The driver nodded his head, sympathetically.

Ruth and Edek had been in the taxi for over five minutes. They were two or three miles from where the cab had picked them up. Ruth knew that she and Edek had started out quite close to Zachodnia Street. How had they become so lost? No wonder she was tired. They had walked for miles.

“The Poles did used to throw stones at me, in this area,” Edek said in a low voice to Ruth.

They arrived, finally, at 78 Zachodnia Street. Edek tipped the driver an inordinately large number of zlotys. The driver got out of the cab and bowed half a dozen times to them. Number 78 was a large vacant allotment of land. An old building was at the very back of the block. They approached the building. A smell of boiled cabbage permeated the air.

“Can you smell boiled cabbage?” Ruth said to Edek.

“Yes,” he said. “It is not very nice.” They reached the building. Ruth looked inside a dark doorway.

“I think we have to go inside and up the stairs,” she said to Edek.

“This is the Jewish Center?” Edek said. “Are you sure?”

“I think I’m sure,” Ruth said.

She and Edek walked up the dank, dark staircase. The smell of cabbage was overwhelming. The air was so damp that Ruth thought that the cabbage must still be being boiled. It was so dark it was hard to see where they were going. This was the headquarters of the Jewish community of Lódz?

The heart of Jewish life in Lódz? What a heart, Ruth thought. She suddenly

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L I L Y B R E T T

felt very depressed. This was not what she associated with being Jewish.

Where was the warmth? Nothing about this place was Jewish.

Ruth was shivering. It was very cold in the building. “Are you cold, Dad?” she said.

“No,” Edek said. “Where are we?” he said after a minute. He seemed as dazed as Ruth to find that this dark run-down damp place was the center of Jewish Lódz. Ruth knocked at a partially opened door at the top of the stairs. She looked at her watch. It was 11:13 A.M. They were only three minutes late. Inside, a man in his thirties, dressed in the black clothes of a religious Jew, sat at a desk. He was shuffling papers. He had an air of business about him. “Come in,” he said, in a perfunctory manner. He didn’t look up.

The room was not very large and was sparsely furnished. A woman was typing at a table against one wall. There was another room off to the left.

Ruth wondered if that was where the cabbage was being boiled. She and Edek stood inside the door. The woman smiled at them. “We’re here to arrange a guide for the cemetery,” Ruth said to the woman. The woman, she had decided, looked more approachable than the man. The woman shook her head. It was clear she didn’t speak English.

“Let’s go,” Edek whispered to Ruth.

Ruth looked around the room. Two rolls of fax paper were on a shelf, together with a photograph of an Orthodox Jew. Ruth didn’t know who the Orthodox Jew in the photograph was. This was the most sparse and spare Jewish Center she had ever seen. What furniture there was, was old. It looked so depressing. So bereft of life. Maybe her father was right. Maybe they should go.