Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Something like that,” she said, and smiled into the shadows.

Eugene had never visited the United States, though as a young man he had studied piano in Paris. “Yes, I heard Boulanger.” Except for that heady time he had not left Germany until three years earlier, when one of the other refugee agencies helped him emigrate to London. Still short of forty then, his parents dead, his sister safely married in Shanghai, his ability to make a living secure — he was one of the easy repatriation cases, she supposed.

His father, he told her, had fought for the kaiser.

She had been a young woman during that war. Yes, she knew that Germany had once been good to its Jews, its Jews faithful to their rulers.

He stretched his long, unmatched legs toward the meager blue flames. “I’m glad we met.”

One noontime — mirabile dictu, the New York fat man might have said — they ran into each other far from home, in Kensington Gardens.

“I am attending a concert,” Eugene said. “Come with me.”

“My lunch break … not much time.”

“The performers also are on lunch break,” he said. “You won’t be late. You won’t be very late,” he corrected, with his usual slight pedantry.

They hurried along the streets leading toward the river, passing bomb craters and shelters of brick, of cement, of corrugated iron. Their own shelter, back in Camden Town, was an underground bunker, a crypt, safer than these. But it trembled sometimes, and then little children cried and women paled, and men too. Sonya soothed whichever toddler crawled into her lap, and smiled encouragement at the child’s mother. It was hard to breathe. Suppose the thing should cave in — they would all suffocate. Being struck above ground, being blasted, being shattered into a thousand pieces like her beach house, that would be better than not breathing … There were times she did not go into the shelter at all, but stayed sitting on the floor in her blacked-out room, arms around shins. Behind her on the windowsill bloomed a sturdy geranium, red in the daytime, purple in this almost blindness. And if the house should be hit, and if she should be found amid its shattered moldings and heaps of glass and smoking bricks, her head at an odd angle, her burnt hair as black as it had been in her youth … if she should be found in the rubble, people would think, if they thought anything at all, that she had slept through the siren. She might have taken a bit too much, the wineshop keeper would say to his wife — he no doubt guessed that his customer sometimes sacrificed food for whisky. She was working so very hard, Mrs. Levinger would remark.

Eugene led her to a church. Sonya looked up at the organ loft. A few parishioners on their own lunch breaks settled into the empty pews. One slowly lowered his forehead onto the back of the pew in front of him, then lifted it, then lowered it again.

Downstairs, in a small chapel, a dozen people waited on chairs and two performers waited on a platform. The standing young man held a viola by its neck. The young woman sat at a piano, head bowed as if awaiting execution. A note on the mimeographed program mentioned that these twenty-year-old twins had recently arrived from Czechoslovakia. The performance began. The sister played with precision. Eugene’s fingers played along, on his thighs. The brother made love to his instrument. In the intervals between selections the attentive audience was entertained by faint sounds of organ practice from above. The concert lasted less than an hour. When the twins and their guests filed upstairs, Sonya looked for the parishioner who had banged his forehead against the pew back, but he was gone.

As Eugene had promised, Sonya was not very late getting back to work. Still, Mrs. Levinger had already returned from lunch. She was on the telephone. She gave Sonya a distracted nod and hung up.

“The next batch is here,” she said. “The French ones.”

THE USUAL SETUP: at one end of a large room, volunteers stood at bridge tables; at the other end, a trestle table holding loaves of bread, and biscuits, and plates of sausages, and jugs of milk.

Forty children who had been fending for themselves for six months now huddled in the middle of the room as if, were they to approach the food, they would be shot.

One girl’s hair was the color of lamplight.

Mrs. Levinger hoisted herself onto a folding chair and grasped its back for a moment while her rump threatened to topple her. Then she stood up. Once standing she did not falter or shake.

Sonya made note of various details — it was part of her job. There was a small pale fellow who looked sick, but the doctors hadn’t detained him. Hunger and fatigue, probably. Two little girls gripped each other’s hands. Many children carried smaller children.

The fair-haired girl carried an instrument case.

Mrs. Levinger welcomed them in French. They were being sent to villages in the Cotswolds, she said. Hills, she elaborated. They could keep their belongings. Siblings would not be separated. The host families would not be Jewish. But they would be sympathetic.

“I am not Jewish, either,” said a dark boy.

“Ah, Pierre,” reproved a bigger boy. “It’s all right, in this place.”

The children made their slow silent way to the trestle table.

Soon all were eating — all except the tall blond girl with the instrument. She seemed about to approach Mrs. Levinger. But it was a feint. She swerved toward Sonya. “Madame …”

“Oui,” Sonya said. “Voulez vous—”

“I speak English.” Her eyes were gray. She had a straight nose, a curly mouth, a small chin. “I do not wish to go into the countryside.”

“What is your name?”

“Lotte,” she said with a shrug, as if any name would do. “I am from Paris. I wish to stay in London.”

“Your instrument …”

“A violin,” Lotte said. “I tried to sell it when we ran out of food in Marseilles, but no one wanted to buy it. I am skilled, madame. I can play in an orchestra. Or in a café—gypsy music.”

“I wish,” Sonya began. “I cannot,” she tried again. “There is no arrangement in London for refugee children,” she finally said. “Only in the villages.”

“I am no child. I am seventeen.”

Sonya shook her head.

The lids dropped. “Sixteen. Truly, madame.”

“Call me Sonya.”

“Merci. Madame Sonya, I am sixteen next month, if I had my papers I could prove it, but my papers were lost, everything was lost, even the photographs of my father, only the violin …” Lotte swallowed. “I will be sixteen in three weeks. Please believe me.”

“I do.” Mrs. Levinger was glancing at them; other children needed attention. “You must go to the Cotswolds now,” Sonya said. “I’ll try to make some better arrangement.”

Lotte said, “Empty words,” and turned away.

“No!” Was she always to be denied sentiment, must she be only efficient forever? — she who was moderately musical. “I love gypsy tunes. Look, this is my address,” she said, scribbling on some brown paper. “I will try to find you a café, or maybe a …”

Lotte took the paper. Sonya’s last sight of her was on the train, a different train from the one Sonya herself was taking. Lotte stood in the aisle, clasping the violin to her thin chest.

“I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU A RING,” Eugene said.

“Oh!”

“I may be interned.”

“It won’t happen,” she said, fervently. But it was happening every day. Aliens suspected of being spies — Jews among them — were shut up in yellow prisons.

Eugene said, “My other suit, my piano scores — they can fend for themselves. But my mother’s ring — I owe it respect. It eluded German customs, it eluded also my own conscience.”