Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“I don’t, you know,” Sonya told him. “I have enough biblical Hebrew to teach classes Aleph and Beth.”

“If you are sent to Palestine your Hebrew will improve,” he said. And, glancing down at her dossier: “You speak French.”

“I studied French in high school, that’s what it says. Once, in Quebec, I ordered a glass of wine. And Yiddish — I haven’t used it in decades.”

Their eyes met. “The situation in Europe is desperate,” he said. “Thousands of Polish-German Jews have been expelled by Germany and refused by Poland and are starving and freezing and dying of dysentery in a no-man’s-land between the two countries. Many are children. Several organizations are working together to help — and working together is not, I see you studied Latin as well, our normal modus operandi. Two Jews, three opinions, I’m sure you understand.” He checked his verbal flow with a visible effort. His mouth opened and closed several times but he managed not to speak.

“I’ll do any job,” she said in this interval. “I just don’t want you to count on languages.”

“Do you sing? We find people who sing are comfortable in our work.”

“I am moderately musical.” Very moderately. She thought of the tenor. She could still say yes. But she did not want to become a caretaker.

The fat man’s gaze loosened at last. He looked out the window. “All agencies are working together to get these people from into England. For this, for all our efforts, we need staff members who are efficient and unsentimental. Languages are of secondary importance. The Joint trusts my judgment.”

She signed a sort of contract. Then she said, “You should know, I am occasionally sentimental.”

A smile, or something like it, landed on his large face and immediately scurried off. She suspected that, like many fat men, he danced well.

Sonya took the train back to Providence. After several months she learned that she would be sent to London and there loaned to another organization, one helping refugee children. She put the books of her clients into order. After several more months, there came a steamer ticket. She stored her furniture, and gave herself a farewell party in the emptied apartment. She took the train again and in New York boarded a ship bound for Southampton. The fat man — his name was Roland, she remembered — showed up to say good-bye, carrying a spray of carnations.

“How kind,” she said.

“It is not the usual procedure,” he admitted.

By the time she arrived in England the displaced Polish-Germans were already rescued or lost. War had been declared. She was sent to Hull for a year, to help settle as domestics German-Jewish women who had already arrived. Then she was reassigned to London.

There the Joint found her a bed-sitter in Camden Town. The landlady and her family lived on the ground floor; otherwise the place was home to unattached people. Each room had a gas fire and a stove. It took Sonya a while to get used to the smells. She had to get used to footsteps, too — there was no carpet, and everyone on the upper floors traveled past Sonya’s room. There was an old lady with twittering feet. “My dear,” she said whenever she saw Sonya. A large man looked at her with yellow-eyed interest. His slow footsteps sounded like pancakes dropped from a height. An elderly man lightly marched. With his impressive bearing and his white mustache he resembled an ambassador, but he was the proprietor of the neighborhood newsstand. Two secretaries tripped out together every morning after curling their hair with tongs. (The first time Sonya smelled singed hair she thought the house was on fire.)

And there was a lame man of about forty, their only foreigner. Sonya didn’t count herself as foreign; she was an American cousin. But the lame man — he had a German accent. He had dark skin and bad teeth. Eyebrows sheltered glowing brown eyes — eyes that seemed to be reflecting a fire even when they were merely glancing at envelopes on the hall table. His legs were of differing lengths — that accounted for the limp. Sonya recognized his limping progress whenever he came up or down the staircase: one pause Two, one pause Two; and whenever he passed her door: ONE TWO, ONE TWO, ONE TWO.

THE CHILDREN CAME, wave after wave of them. Polish children, Austrian children, Hungarian children, German children. Some came like parcels bought from the governments that withheld passports from their parents. These children wore coats, and each carried a satchel. Some came in unruly bands, having lived like squirrels in the mountains or like rats by the rivers. Some came escorted by social workers who couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Few understood English. Some knew only Yiddish. Some had infectious diseases. Some seemed feebleminded, but it turned out that they had been only temporarily enfeebled by hardship.

They slept for a night or two in a seedy hotel near Waterloo station. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger, who directed the agency, stayed in the hotel, too, intending to sleep — they were always tired, for the bombing had begun. But the women failed to sleep, for the children — not crying; they rarely cried — wandered through the halls, or hid in closets, smoking cigarettes, or went up and down the lift. The next day, or the next day but one, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger escorted them to their quarters in the countryside, and deposited them with stout farm families, these Viennese who had never seen a cow; or left them in hastily assembled orphanages staffed with elderly schoolteachers, these Berliners who had known only the tender hands of nursemaids; or stashed them in a bishop’s palace, these Polish children for whom Christians were the devil. The Viennese kids might have found the palace suitable; the Hungarians would have formed a vigorous troupe within the orphanage; the little Poles, familiar with chickens, might have become comfortable on the farms. But the billets rarely matched the children. The organization took what it could get. After the children were settled, however uneasily, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger rode the train back to London, Mrs. Levinger returning to her husband and Sonya to solitude.

FOR MONTHS SHE NODDED at the dark man and he at her.

They said “Good evening.”

One day they left the house at the same time, and walked together to the underground.

He lived two floors above her, he said. She already knew that from her attention to footsteps.

His room contained an upright piano left behind by a previous tenant. He managed to keep it in tune. “A piano is so rare in furnished … digs,” he said, seeming to relish the British word.

He was on his way to give piano lessons. His pupils were London children whose parents thus far refused to have them evacuated. She was on her way to her office. He left the Tube first. “I hope we meet again, Miss …”

“Sofrankovitch,” she said. She didn’t tell him that the honorific was properly “Mrs.” Her childless marriage had ended long ago.

After that, as if the clock previously governing their lives had been exchanged for a different timepiece, they ran into each other often. They met on the narrow winding High Street. They bought newspapers at the kiosk manned by their distinguished-looking housemate. They queued at the greengrocer’s, each leaving with a few damaged apples. They found themselves together at the fishmonger’s. Both were partial to smoked fish, willing to exchange extra ration coupons for the luxury.

Often, at night, after he came home from work, after she came home, they sat by her gas fire.

“Providence,” he mused. “And the place of the hurricane?”

“Narragansett.”

“Naghaghansett,” he rolled out, his vowels aristocratically long, his consonants irreparably guttural.