Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Roland would have to shave without a mirror. Maybe he’d grow a beard. She was attempting to pick up the shards when he came in.

“Sonya, stop.” He walked down the hall and fetched the communal broom and dustpan — a large thistle on a stick, a piece of tin. She was sucking her finger when he returned. He looked at the cut. “Run it under water for a long time.” She ran it under water for a long time. When she turned around the damage was swept up, the implements had been returned, and he was lying on the lowest bed, eyes closed, as if it was this recent effort that had exhausted him, not two years of constant toil.

She closed their door. She unbuckled his worn belt. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt. What color had it been originally? It had long ago faded to the yellowish green of his eyes. She unbuttoned the cuffs, too, but did not attempt to remove the shirt — it was up to him whether or not to take it off; he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? Was he? He had all the vitality of a corpse. But when she roughly rolled down his trousers and pulled them off and rolled down his undershorts and pulled them off, she saw that he was ready for her. When had they done this last — three months ago? Six? For them, as for the Persons, one gray day got sucked into the next. Yet there were joys: letters from relatives thought dead, meat sometimes in the soup, and tonight a party … She stood and lifted her little black dress over her witch’s body. It ruffled her witch’s coiffure. She left the dress lying on the floor. She straddled Roland’s erection, brushing him back and forth, side to side, until she felt a spurt of her own moisture, and he must have felt it, too, for, alert, he gripped her upper arms and turned them both over at once as if they were a single animal, a whale in green flannel maybe. She looked up at him. “Roland, I love you,” she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders, the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. Were these not things to love? Oh, and the kindness. He thrust, thrust … “Ah,” she said. And even in her pleasure, her witch’s pleasure, she heard the stealthy opening of the door. She turned her head and met Ludwig’s rodent gaze.

BY THE TIME ROLAND AND SONYA ARRIVED at the great hall — a big room with a little stage — the thrown-together orchestra was playing: strings, one trumpet, woodwinds, an accordion, a balalaika, three guitars, one drum. Candles in tin cans were burning side by side on the rim of the stage and on a ledge around the room and at the windows. Each thick candle, Sonya noticed, was made up of a clutch of little, twisted candles, the Chanukah kind. There were also several chanukkiyahs. A broad table held a mountain of hamantaschen. Another table sagged under bowls of liquid. “Let’s hope no one got hold of the methanol,” Roland said. At another camp, mostly Polish Persons, two men had gone blind from drinking the stuff.

Roland was dressed, he claimed, as Dionysius — that is, two sprigs of juniper were pinned to his scant hair, one falling onto his forehead, the other nestling within his humble nape.

Most costumes were equally rudimentary. Where could Persons get fabric, jewels, gauzy shawls? Yet some had indeed procured such items. A wife had made a royal garment for her husband. It was a short black silk cape, formerly the lining of their only coat. They wouldn’t need a lined coat in Palestine, this loving spouse explained to Sonya. She had adorned the cape with little white fur tails which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins. Several young Mordecais wore, in front of their ears, scholarly coils: the strapping tape from Red Cross packages. One Esther had saved a beaded dress from her dead mother’s wardrobe. Another wore a dirndl skirt and a jersey shirt that said ENGLEWOOD HIGH SCHOOL. A Catholic family slipped in shyly wearing Easter finery; after years in a cardboard valise the clothing too seemed to be cardboard. Ludwig and his uncle Claud had encased their upper bodies in splintery barrels that had held potatoes. Their heads were crowned by circlets of dry leaves. SCHWARZ KÖNIG was painted on Ludwig’s barrel. Uncle Claud was the white queen.

King, queen, wise man, and the occasional hero: cigar stubs identified Churchill, a cigarette holder Roosevelt. No one came dressed as Haman. Haman adorned the yellow walls, though. He was painted in green, painted in black tar, drawn in pencil, cut from brown paper. There were several Hamans in relief, made from a sturdy papier-mâché. “What is this stuff?” Sonya asked the history teacher. “The Stars and Stripes, pulped,” he told her. Many Hamans were rendered feet up, head down. Each wore a little black mustache.

The orchestra fluted, blared, strummed. Persons danced, changed partners, danced again. The pile of hamantaschen diminished, was replenished. The two Hungarian sisters entered, hand in hand. A skit was performed in one corner. Ida entered, wearing a hat. A skit was performed on the stage. Someone sang, dreadfully. Three men dragged in the upright piano from the corridor, although the orchestra had specified that it did not require a piano, did not want a piano, certainly could not employ that piano, which was missing seventeen keys. The orchestra leader swiped at one of the three moving men with his baton, an umbrella spoke. Roland intervened. The piano, with bench but without pianist, remained, near the string section. The radiant young man from the south building entered, wrapped in a blue and white tablecloth with permanent stains; Sonya guessed that it, too, came from Englewood, New Jersey. The philosophy teacher …

Was that woman Ida? Sonya had never before seen her in lipstick. She must have been hoarding it forever; lucky it hadn’t pulverized. And that brilliant red silk blouse, how come it wasn’t dust … Ida blew a kiss to Sonya and asked Mendel to dance. Mendel’s wife, vastly pregnant, smiled acquiescence. Mendel was dressed in a long black jacket whose wide belt bore a buckle covered in silver foil. Sonya guessed his puritan garb was intended as Lutheran. Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another. It was a heavy cloche with a narrow brim, and it was covered with hundreds of shining bows, or perhaps butterflies, or perhaps ecstatic transparent birds. They caught the light of the candles, transforming that light into ruby twinkles, turquoise wings, flashes of green. Were they silk, those bows butterflies birds? Were they diamonds? Were they real winged creatures? Ida whirled by. Below the iridescent helmet her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck. “We have guests,” Roland said in Sonya’s ear.

She had been ignoring the three American officers, though she had identified their rank, she had noticed their medals, she had recognized the famous grin. “Roland, I am exhausted, my charm whatever there was of it is used up, would you take care of them for a while, Roland? And tell them that your wife will be with them shortly.”

“Wife?”

“Everybody thinks we’re married, why upset that cart …”

“I wish you were my wife. I would like you to be my wife.”

“Yes,” she said, acknowledging his wish, maybe even acceding to it; and then she backed up, backed up, until she collided with the accordionist moving forward. The Persons’ orchestra was taking a break. Sonya sat down at the ruined piano.

She played “You and the Night and the Music.” The missing keys were mostly at either end; the absence of middle A and the B-flat below middle C was a nuisance, but she fudged. She played a Strauss waltz and the waltz from Faust . The smoke thickened like roux. The air in the room was clouded and warm and vital; life itself might have originated in these emanations from burning tobacco. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She played “The Merry Widow.”