Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

There had been only seven grandchildren when she left; otherwise she could have written the obituary herself.

That night she wept for him. Of course she had been wise not to join her destiny to his. She was not meant for the settled life — not she, not Sonya, not this human leaf that had appeared unexpectedly in an overheated notions store and gotten popped, as it were, into a jelly glass by the proud but bewildered storekeepers. Oh, they had loved her, Mama and Papa; and she had loved them; and she had loved her husband for a while, and some others after him; and she had loved the tenor, too. But her love was airy, not earthbound, and so she could be scooped up like a handful of chickweed by Roland Rosenberg and flung onto the stones of London, there to send out shallow creepers into this borough, that block of flats, the derelict basement over by the river. The children. Sleeplessly she counted them. Some were in the city now. There were two small boys living with a mother who had become deranged when the oldest son was shot dead at the border; those tykes took care of her. There was a family with a dim-witted daughter who herself had borne a dimwitted daughter. “That shouldn’t happen; offspring regress toward the average!” Sonya objected, as if laws of heredity would acknowledge the error and revise the little girl’s intelligence. Mrs. Levinger ignored her outburst. There were teenage girls from Munich working as waitresses who refused to confide in Sonya, though they allowed her to buy them dinner. And …

The scratching at the door could have been a small animal. Had it been preceded by footsteps? Sonya was out of bed immediately, her left hand on the bolt, her right on the knob. Was that the smell of cigarettes? She opened the door.

Lotte stepped across the threshold. Her eyes swiveled from corner to corner. She saw the round table and laid her violin carefully under it. Then she turned and fell into Sonya’s arms.

THEY FEASTED ON BACON in the morning. Lotte had carried it from the farm. Sonya fried it along with a hoarded tomato, and toasted her last two pieces of bread. They dipped the toast into the grease.

“Now we have to talk,” Sonya said, when they had wiped their fingers on her only napkin. Lotte’s fingers were more deliberate than delicate — rather like Eugene’s at the piano.

“The family,” Lotte began. “They were kind. The church organist befriended me. There was a boy at school, too: an English boy, I mean,” and Sonya knew what she meant — the local boy’s attention supplemented but didn’t supplant the calf love of the immigrant boys already attached to her. Such an enchanting sweep of lash.

“The family,” Sonya prompted.

“I left a letter. Don’t send me back. Let me stay here with you.”

It was against the organization’s rules. But the organization’s rules often got ignored. South of the river five teenage boys from Bucharest lived in one room, supporting themselves who knew how, though pickpocketing was suspected. Sometimes Mrs. Levinger hauled them in. “It’s not good for the Jews, what you’re doing.” The boys looked at their feet.

“They endanger our enterprise,” Mrs. Levinger said later to Sonya.

“A couple of them actually work as plasterers.”

“Well, we do need plasterers,” said Mrs. Levinger, deflected. “Rumor has it that they steal only from rich drunks.”

“Rumor! Rumor has it that Winston is planning an invasion. I’ll believe that when it happens. We’re probably going to be invaded.” Sonya imagined Mrs. Levinger picking up the fireplace shovel and banging the heads of Germans foolish enough to enter her office.

Meanwhile the young Romanians lifted wallets in Mayfair. And an unlicensed pair of Polish doctors kept an unlicensed clinic in Clapham Common. Belgians who had arrived with diamonds in their hems sold those diamonds on the black market and decamped for South America, bestowing not one shilling on the agency that had brought them to London, a different agency, but still. “Not against the rules,” Mrs. Levinger mentioned. “Not comme il faut , however.” Sonya thought of Eugene’s mother’s little stone.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Lotte was saying now. “I’ll get a job. I’ll pay my share. You’ll see.”

“WHAT’S THIS ABOUT A FRENCH GIRL?” Mrs. Levinger said a few days later. “I had a letter from a family …”

“She’s with me.”

They exchanged a steady look. “We can manage a small allowance,” said Mrs. Levinger.

“If that becomes necessary,” Sonya said — in a rather cold voice, since she was almost in tears—“I will let you know.”

It did not become necessary. On Saturday Lotte asked Sonya for a few shillings; also, could Sonya borrow a screwdriver from someone in the building? Well, she’d try. Mr. Smith was at his kiosk. The twittering old lady had gone to live with her daughter. The yellow-eyed man was out. Eugene was of course not in, either. Sonya finally knocked on the secretaries’ door, expecting no luck. But the secretaries owned an entire tool chest; they’d built a hutch for their window. They were raising generations of rabbits. “How … sweet,” said Sonya.

“Cash,” explained one of the young women. “The nobs still love their lapin.”

Sonya came downstairs with the screwdriver to find Lotte returning from the High Street with a brass lock and two keys. Within an hour she had affixed it to the door of the armoire. Then she stowed her violin next to the cognac. She locked the closet. For a moment she sank into the chair. “Safe,” she said, and sighed. Sonya forbore to mention the bombings; perhaps they wouldn’t start again.

Returning the screwdriver, Sonya ran into the landlady. “I have a … guest.”

“I noticed, dearie. I’ll have to charge a bit more.”

Every day Lotte went out looking for work. She came back disappointed. At night they went to concerts. It was like having Eugene back. “At St. Aidan’s — there’s a choir singing tonight,” Lotte would say; or “A basso over at Marylebone — just got here from there.” Scattered musicians formed makeshift ensembles.

“How did you hear about this?” Sonya asked as they drifted home from a trio.

“I went to a music store looking for a job … met some other string players …”

Lotte began to play on street corners. Sonya warned her to watch for policemen. At first she played in outer London. But though small bands of admirers collected (she reported matter-of-factly to Sonya), too few coins fell into the open case at her feet. She moved toward the center of town. She played in Picadilly; in the Strand; near Whitehall. “I saw Churchill,” she exclaimed. Everyone knew that Churchill was directing the war from underground offices, but there were rumors of look-alike doubles, hundreds of them, deployed to fool the enemy and maybe the populace.

In Lotte’s new sites she collected enough money to meet the landlady’s rise in rent, to buy cheese and smoked fish and peaches, to insist that Sonya always take the greater share. “You are my patron, my benefactor, my angel.”

“I repudiate those roles. This peach is heavenly.”

“My mother, then … no, no, you are too young.”

“Hardly too young.”

“Big sister!”

Sonya was still on loan to Mrs. Levinger from the Joint, but Mrs. Levinger’s mandate had altered. Few refugees managed to get in now, but there was plenty to do for the ones already here. Families were starving. Sonya made rounds with ration books, with money, sometimes with piecework from factories — she might have been a foreman sweating workers. Lotte fiddled for coins.

One spring evening Sonya decided to cross the river before going home. No raids for a long time now, just a few planes every so often, scared off by the ack-ack guns. On the embankment she saw a clown … no, it wasn’t a clown, it was a girl. Yes, it was a clown: Lotte.