Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“May I try that?”

Señor Rey helplessly nodded. She handed him her kit bag. She hiked up her skirt and straddled the bike. The low heels of her shoes hooked over the foot pieces.

But this was not flying. The machine strained uphill, held by one of the two ruts they called a road. On the hump between the ruts grass grew and even flowers — little red ones. She picked up speed slightly and left the village behind. She passed poor farms and thick growths of vegetation. The road rose and fell. From a rise she got a glimpse of a brown lake. Her buttocks smarted.

When she stopped at last and got off the bike, her skirt ripped with a snort. She leaned the disappointing machine against a scrub pine and walked into the woods, headed toward the lake. Mist encircled some trees. Thick roots snagged her shoes. But ahead was a clearing, just past tendrils hanging from branches. A good place for a smoke. She parted the vines and entered, and saw a woman.

A girl, really. She was eighteen at most. She was sitting on a carpet of needles and leaning against a harsh tree. But her lowered face was as untroubled as if she had been resting on a silken pouf. The nursing infant was wrapped in coarse striped cloth. Its little hand rested against her brown breast. Mother and child were outwardly motionless, yet Señora Perera felt a steady pulsing beneath her soles, as if the earth itself were a giant teat.

She did not make much of a sound, only her old woman’s wheeze. But the girl looked up as if in answer, presenting a bony, pockmarked face. If the blood of the conquistadors had run in her ancestors’ veins, it had by now been conquered; she was utterly Indian. Her flat brown eyes were fearless.

“Don’t get up, don’t trouble yourself …” But the girl bent her right leg and raised herself to a standing position without disturbing the child.

She walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Señora Perera, her glance caught the diamonds. She looked at them with mild interest and returned her gaze to the stranger.

They faced each other across a low dry bush. With a clinician’s calm Señora Perera saw herself through the Indian girl’s eyes. Not a grandmother, for grandmothers did not have red hair. Not a soldier, for soldiers did not wear skirts. Not a smuggler, for smugglers had ingratiating manners. Not a priest, for priests wore combat fatigues and gave out cigarettes; and not a journalist, for journalists piously nodded. She could not be a deity; deities radiated light. She must, then, be a witch.

Witches have authority. “Good that you nurse the child,” Señora Perera said.

“Yes. Until his teeth come.”

“After his teeth come, chica. He can learn not to bite.” She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and placed her forefinger on its tip. “See? Teach him to cover his teeth with his tongue.”

The girl slowly nodded. Señora Perera mirrored her nod. Jew and Indian: Queen Isabella’s favorite victims. Five centuries later, Jews were a great nation, getting richer. Indians were multiplying, getting poorer. It would be a moment’s work to unfasten the pin and pass it across the bush. But how would the girl fence the diamonds? Señor Rey would insist on the lion’s share; and what would a peasant do with money, anyway — move to the raddled capital? Señora Perera extended an empty hand toward the infant and caressed its oblivious head. The mother revealed a white smile.

“He will be a great man,” the señora promised.

The girl’s sparse lashes lifted. Witch had become prophetess. The incident needed only a bit of holy nonsense for prophetess to become lady. “He will be a great man,” Señora Perera repeated, in Polish, stalling for time. And then, in Spanish again, with the hoarseness that inevitably accompanied her quotable pronouncements, “Suckle!” she commanded. She unhooked the pin. With a flourishing gesture right out of one of Olivia’s operettas, conveying tenderness and impetuousness and authority too, she pressed the diamonds into the girl’s free hand. “Keep them until he’s grown,” she hissed, and she turned on her heel and strode along the path, hoping to disappear abruptly into the floating mist as if she had been assumed. Penniless exile crawls into Jerusalem , she thought, furious with herself.

When she reached the motorbike, she lit the postponed cigarette and grew calm again. After all, she could always give Spanish lessons.

SEÑOR REY WAS WAITING in front of his shed. He clucked at her ripped skirt. And Luis was waiting near the helicopter, talking to the pilot. He gave the unadorned lapel a hard stare. The Dutch nurse would stay until next Saturday, when the mail Jeep would arrive. So it was just the three of them, Luis said. She wondered if he would arrest her in the chopper, or upon their arrival at the airstrip, or in the little plane, or when they landed at the capitol, or not until they got to her apartment. It didn’t matter; her busybody’s career had been honorably completed with the imperative uttered in the clearing. Suckle. Let that word get around — it would sour all the milk in the country, every damned little jar of it.

And now — deportation? Call it retirement. She wondered if the goons had in mind some nastier punishment. That didn’t matter, either; she’d been living on God’s time since the cow.

THERE WERE FIVE APARTMENTS in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.

Nobody liked to be seen there — not the middle-aged widower, not the Moroccan family, not the three old ladies.

The widower got too few letters.

The Moroccans got too many, all bills.

The soprano got some, enough, too much, too little; what did quantity matter. Every concert series in Jerusalem had her name on its list. Do-good societies would not leave her in peace. But the one letter she craved rarely appeared, and when it did come it was only a thin blue square, as if it had been first ironed and then frozen. She extended her palm, the missive floating on it. Decades ago she had indicated with the same gracious gesture, after sufficient applause, that her accompanist might now take a bow. The letter weighed less than a peseta; inside would be perhaps four uninformative sentences in a jumble of Polish and Spanish. She might as well burn it unopened. Chin high, eyes dry, she climbed the stairs.

Tamar, who lived with her grandmother across the hall from the soprano, picked up their mail on her way home from school. Unlike the others, she didn’t care who saw her correspondence. She was seventeen. Her parents, in the United States on an extended sabbatical, wrote once a week. A great number of elderly Viennese who had fetched up on other shores wrote to her grandmother. But her grandmother didn’t like to go to the mailboxes, or anywhere else for that matter. When Tamar’s grandmother did go out — to exhibits, to lectures, to the market — she did so because as a woman of cultivation she was obliged to transcend her dislike of society, though not to conceal it.

Mrs. Goldfanger, on the ground floor, loved society. But she crept from her apartment to the mailboxes like a thief. She wanted to be alone when puzzling out the Hebrew on the envelopes, making sure that everything in her box was truly addressed to Mr. Goldfanger or Mrs. Goldfanger or Mr. and Mrs. Goldfanger or the Goldfanger family; and not to the Gilboas, who ten years ago had sold their apartment to the Goldfangers, newly arrived from Cape Town. The Gilboas still received advertisements from tanning salons, which Mrs. Goldfanger felt justified in throwing away. But some morning a legacy might await them in the Goldfanger box. Such things had been known to happen. And then what? She would have to run after the mailman, hoping that he was still crisscrossing Deronda Street like the laces on a corset. If he had completed his route she would have to go to the post office with the misdirected letter, and join the line that backed all the way to the delicatessen; and she would have to explain in her untrustworthy Hebrew that Gilboa, who had just received this letter from a bank in Paris, was away, gone, exiled, and had left no forwarding address.