Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

THE BARRAGE CONTINUED for months. Only storms kept the planes away. Sonya prayed for a hurricane. Churchill conceded that London was under attack. The flying bombs did not cease until three weeks before victory.

But earlier still — five weeks before victory — Lotte and Eugene left for Manchester. The director of the new civic orchestra there had heard Lotte playing with the quartet, had offered her a job. There would be pupils for Eugene.

Lotte had been sharing Eugene’s bed since the day the doodle-bug struck the church. But the night before leaving, she scratched on Sonya’s door. She put on the old clothes — the hat, the plaid trousers. She played “Someday I’ll Find You” and “I’ll See You Again.”

In the morning all three walked to the Tube and rode to the station. Even next to Eugene and Lotte, Sonya saw them as if from a distance — two gifted émigrés, ragged, paired. Father and daughter? Step-siblings? Nobody’s business. As soon as they boarded the train they found a window and stared through it, their loved faces stony with love of her. She wondered how long Lotte would flourish under Eugene’s brooding protection, how soon she would turn elsewhere. She was French, wasn’t she, and Frenchwomen were faithless … His mother’s diamond! She lifted her left hand in its disreputable glove and pointed toward the place of a ring with her right index finger.

On the other side of the window Eugene shook his head. Yours, he mouthed.

So Sonya sold the ring. It fetched less than she’d hoped — the stone was flawed. She bought a voluminous raincoat made out of parachute material. She bought new gloves and some dramatic trousers. She stashed the rest of the money.

IV.

“IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME,” Sonya said, once Mrs. Levinger had left them alone.

“Oh, I wanted to visit,” Roland said. “When I was in Lisbon, in Amsterdam … But each time, something sent me elsewhere.” He shifted in his ill-fitting jacket. He had lost more weight. Mrs. Levinger had hinted that he was some kind of hero.

They left the office and walked into wind and rain. Sonya’s new coat swirled this way and that; it got drenched though it was supposed to be water-repellent; it dragged her backward. Finally she lifted its skirts, so as to be more easily blown to wherever he was taking her.

A pub. They sat down. Sonya knew he would not mention the nature of the work he had done, and he didn’t — not during the first beer, not during the second. So: “Where now?” she asked, resting her worn-out hands on the worn-out table.

He told her about the Displaced Persons camps. He was going to the one at Oberammergau. “I hope you will join us. Your persistence, your intelligence, your accommodating nature …” She waved away his words with her right hand and he caught it midair. “I will stop this talk, though it is not flattery. I invite you to Oberammergau.”

“I speak no German.”

“But you are musical,” he reminded her. He caught her other hand, though it couldn’t be said to be in flight, was just lying there on the table. “Sonya Sofrankovitch. Will you come?”

She was silent for several moments. His odd smile — would she ever get used to it, to him? — told her how much he wanted to hear yes .

“Yes,” she said.

CAMP GRUENWASSER WAS PREPARING for Purim, that merry celebration when you must drink until you cannot distinguish the king from the villain, the queen from the village tart.

“Purim?” Ludwig inquired.

He was twelve — pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin Before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat.

“Purim is a holiday,” Sonya said. She was fifty-six, also pale and thin by nature. She had spent the war in London; now that it was over she was codirector of this camp for Displaced Persons. What a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty, they were; homeless, they were; despised. “Purim celebrates the release of the Jewish people. From a wicked man.”

“Release. Released by the Allied forces?”

“No, no. This was in Shu, Shu, Shushan, long ago …” She said long ago in English. The rest of the conversation — all their conversations in the makeshift, crowded office where Ludwig often spent the afternoon — was conducted in German. Ludwig’s was the pedantic German of a precocious child, Sonya’s the execrable German of an American with no talent for languages. Her Yiddish was improving at Camp Gruenwasser, though. Yiddish was the camp’s lingua franca, cigarettes its stable currency.

“Shu, Shu, Shushan,” Ludwig repeated. “A place of four syllables?”

Sonya briefly closed her eyes. “I was repeating an old song, a line from an old song.” She opened them again and met his reddish-brown gaze. “Haman was the name of the wicked man. The heroine was a queen, Esther. Speaking of queens …”

“We were not.”

“We were not what?”

“We were not speaking of queens.”

“Even so,” Sonya said. “A set of chessmen came in with the allotments yesterday. It is lacking only a pawn. A stone — can you employ a stone?”

“Yes. Also my uncle keeps his corns in a box for just such purposes.”

Sonya dragged a rickety chair to the wall underneath a shelf, and climbed up on it, and retrieved the box of chessmen. She gave it to Ludwig.

He was scurrying off when Ida said, “Wait.” Ida was the secretary, a Person who had been a milliner Before. “I will tell about Purim, you should know, a Jewish boy like you.”

He paused mid-flight, back against the wall, eyes wide as if under a searchlight. “In Shu, Shu, Shushan long ago,” Ida said in English, with a nod to Sonya, then continued in German, “there was a king, Ahasuerus; and a general, Haman; and Mordecai, a wise Jew who spent his time by the gates of the palace. King Ahasuerus’s queen offended him so he called for a new queen. Mordecai …” and she used an unfamiliar word.

Sonya ruffled through her German-English dictionary. “Procured ? I’m not sure …”

“… procured his niece, Esther,” Ida said, her dark eyes insistent. “Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman arranged to murder the Jews. Esther, the new queen now, urged Ahasuerus to stop the murder. The Jews were saved.”

“Procured …” Sonya still objected, and Ludwig, still pinned to the wall, said, “It was a miracle, then.”

“A miracle,” Ida said, and nodded.

“I do not believe in miracles, especially miracles accomplished by the fuck .” The word wedged its Anglo-Saxon bluntness into the German polysyllables. The vocabulary of children had been augmented by American servicemen. But the GIs were not responsible for the hasty and brutal lovemaking Ludwig had witnessed in forest huts, in barns by the side of the road, in damp Marseille basements.

“A girl with good looks and a beautiful hat can work miracles,” Ida said. “Withholding the fuck. And that word, Ludwig, it is improper.” She returned to her typewriter. Ludwig ran away.

Sonya, who had more to do today than three people could accomplish in a week, strolled to the narrow window. It was February, mid-afternoon. Shadows were deepening in the courtyard formed by the long wooden barracks so hastily abandoned by the Wehr-macht that Persons continued to find gun parts, buttons, medals, and fragments of letters (“ Heinz, Leibling, Der Kinder …”). There was still a triangle of sunlight in the courtyard, though, and ragged children were playing within it, and Ludwig should be among them, would have been among them if he weren’t a peculiar child who preferred the company of adults.