Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

The noise increased. There was some yelling: another skit. She saw Ida waltzing with the general. Ida looked up at him from under her hat. As they turned, Sonya saw an inquiring look on her lovely face. As they turned again she saw the look change into one of admiration. As they turned again she saw the look become one of pleasure.

“She’s fucking him,” Ludwig said, in English. He had taken off his black king’s barrel. He was seated on the bench beside her. He smelled of brandy. “I am employing a metaphor,” he explained.

The general danced a two-step with Ida’s cubicle mate, the little old lady who came alive at dusk. He danced the Kozachok with a group of Ukrainians. He danced another waltz with Ida. And then, twenty minutes later, Sonya and Roland and Ludwig and Ida and a dozen others stood at the gates to wave good-bye to the jeep carrying the three officers. The general touched his cap — handsome headgear, really, with all that gold insignia, but no match for Ida’s.

SONYA PREDICTED that the camp’s rations would soon increase, but they did not. She hoped that Ida might get a private gift — silk stockings, maybe — but nothing appeared. She even thought that the new immigration act would be rushed through the United States Congress.

“It was only a dance,” Ida said.

“Two dances. And you were ravishing.”

“He’s a soldier,” Ida said, sighing. “Not a king.”

But then something did happen. The allotment of cigarettes per Person was officially increased. The augmented allotment, however, was not to be distributed (a formal letter ordered) but to remain in the disposition of the directors. And that, Sonya and the newly bearded Roland discovered, was enough to change things significantly — to get butter, milk, greens, sanitary napkins; to buy a sow, which enraged some but fed others; to pay a glazier from the village to fix broken windows; to procure gas for mendicant trips to Frankfurt, which resulted in more butter, milk, greens, and sanitary napkins; and finally, with the aid of a bundle of additional dollars contributed by Americans, to enable a sizable group of Displaced Persons, including Ida, to bribe its way overland to Brindisi, where waited a boat bound for Haifa.

One day Mendel’s wife, who had replaced Ida as the directors’ secretary, handed Sonya a letter.

We have reached Palestine , wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. We have been saved, again .

“OTHER CAPITALS,” BEGAN ROLAND, and paused for breath as he sometimes did. Sonya waited with apparent serenity. “… are in worse shape,” he concluded.

They were standing on the Pont Neuf, holding hands. All at once they embraced, as if ravaged Paris demanded it.

Roland Rosenberg was sixty and Sonya Rosenberg was fifty-eight. They had directed Camp Gruenwasser since 1945, but finally the place had been able to close, its last Displaced Persons repatriated to Romania. So the Rosenbergs, too, had left, traveling westward on first one train and then another. Each was dressed in prewar clothing, each lugged a single misshapen suitcase. They looked like Displaced Persons themselves; but their American passports gave them freedom, and their employment by the Joint Distribution Committee gave them cash.

Paris was giving them dusty cafés, a few concerts with second-rate performers, black bread, and this old bridge called New. Recovering from their embrace, they turned again toward the river. “The Old World,” Roland said, “is a corpse.”

Sonya — who had spent the war years in blistered London and the five decades previous in Rhode Island — knew the Old World only by reputation. Cafés, galleries, libraries, chamber recitals; salons de thé ; polyglots in elegant clothing conducting afternoon dalliances before returning to one of the great banking houses … A derelict barge sailed toward them, sailed under them; thin children without shoes played on its deck.

ON THEIR THIRD DAY, coming out of a brasserie near the Bastille, Roland suffered a heart attack. He spent a week in the hospital. Sonya sat by his side in a long room with metal cots and wooden floors that, like Camp Gruenwasser’s infirmary, stank of carbolic acid. She displayed an outward calm, she even felt calm — he would survive this attack, the French doctors told her, with emphasis on the this— but she could not prevent her long fingers from raking her long hair, hair that had turned from gray to white during the war and its aftermath.

When Roland was released they traveled by train to Le Havre and by ship to New York. The Joint got them a place on lower Fifth.

It was a meandering apartment with mahogany furniture and gilded mirrors and draperies in a deep red. Circus wagon, Sonya might have called that shade, but she knew that colors had acquired new names since her departure in 1939, a decade ago — names borrowed from wines and liqueurs: cassis, port, champagne, chartreuse. The apartment was rent-free — that is, the Joint paid its rent to the regular tenant, who was away in California for a year. At the end of the year Roland and Sonya would find something more to their mutual taste, whatever that turned out to be. At Camp Gruenwasser they had shared an office and then a bedroom; they had married six months ago, but they had not yet together made a home.

Right away Sonya got her hair cut. The actress Mary Martin was playing a navy nurse in a Broadway show. Mary Martin’s hair was clipped close to the scalp, like a boy’s. All over Manhattan women were trying that coiffure, most of them just once — even the prettiest face looked plain without surrounding fluff. But the cropped style suited Sonya’s long head and steady eyes. “You’re always beautiful to me,” Roland said when she came nervously home from the beauty shop. The effect of his declaration was stronger because of the flatness of its tone. “I’ll love you until the day I die,” he added, again without emotion; and she knew that to be true, too. Let the day be slow in coming, she thought, again smelling the carbolic of the hospital.

Roland’s skin was still pasty but he was less often short of breath — a new medicine was helping. The Joint kept asking him to make speeches; well, of course, who knew more about the plight of European Jews during the previous two decades; who could judge better the situation of those who were left on the continent; who could better suppose the future? He came home from speech giving with his shirt moist. Thank God the apartment building had an elevator.

The apartment’s permanent tenant was a woman, they thought — they judged partly from the four-poster’s silk spread, creamy yellow. Eggnog? There was a crumpled, lace-trimmed handkerchief in the back of one of the dresser drawers; it smelled of perfume. The tenant read German; German books were everywhere. “She is German,” concluded Sonya.

“Or Austrian or Swiss,” Roland said. “Or Lithuanian.”

“She’s no Litvak,” Sonya insisted, helplessly remembering Baltic Persons shivering in Gruenwasser’s under-heated barracks. “She’s an aristocrat.”

“There are Lithuanian aristocrats,” began the reasonable man, but Sonya was already enumerating the signs of hoch culture: millefleur paperweights, framed eighteenth-century drawings, volumes of Rilke and Novalis, a shelf of novels in French. And the family photographs on the desk: a bespectacled father, a fine-featured mother — how would she fare with a Mary Martin chop? — five blond daughters in the loose children’s dresses of the twenties. The photographs seemed unposed — perhaps a favorite uncle had taken them, Roland suggested. The girls, very young, played in a garden; mountains rose in the distance. Slightly older, they occupied a living room — three lolled on a couch, another sat at a piano, the littlest looked out the window. At the foot of a gangplank the entire family stood close together, as if bundled. They were all in coats except for the father, who carried his over his arm. Mama wore an asymmetrical hat. The girls — teenagers now — wore cloches.