Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

Iris opened her left eye (the right side of her face and neck was layered with gauze and tape), and even that did not look like my sister’s eye. That bright, sometimes acid, leaf-green light had gone out of it. Francisco kissed Iris’s forehead, and I did the same. Carnie sat at the foot of the bed. She told Iris a few stories about hijinks at La Bella Donna. I sorted everything in the basket and made a tower of the chocolates. I peeled a tangerine. Francisco said that I was taking care of everything at home, not that it was all on my shoulders, but I was doing a great job and Iris didn’t have to worry about a thing. Iris closed her eye. Carnie went to relieve Bea and Francisco said, You need to rest. I’ll leave you girls alone. He took the tangerine and went into the hall. He didn’t come back.

I walked around the room. You know, I said, I thought it was better Danny didn’t come in and see you like this. Iris nodded and the tubes taped to her chest and the cocoons on her arms and shoulders moved slightly. I said, We probably have a month at the Torellis. They need a butler and a cook and a governess. And I don’t think Danny and I can cover those bases. Iris closed her eye.

We sat for a few moments and she opened her eye again.

She mouthed the word Reenie.

“Can I touch you here?” I said, and I rested my hand on her left leg. She nodded. “I thought someone would have told you.”

Iris held my eye, furiously.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “They did everything they could for her. She was … she wasn’t … she was not alive by the time she got to the hospital.”

She mouthed the words I know.

“You know? You mean you already knew?”

Iris nodded.

“Does it help to have me tell you?” I said.

“No,” she said.

ON THE WAY HOME, Francisco let Bea drive and he sat in the back with me, with Danny sprawled across us, half asleep. Francisco told me that when Iris’s hands were healed, he had some tricks to help her, to make her hands look pretty. In the backseat shadow, he traced designs and contouring on my hand. (You shade the tips of the fingers in pearl, he said, so they catch the light. The burned areas, if there are any, you layer with a sheer foundation and then a peach one and then you use just a little brown to slim the fingers. Plus, she has to wear nail polish, always, to make her hands look finished.)

Iris was in the special burn unit for another two weeks. The Torellis sent more fruit baskets, to her, and to me. Danny and I ate fancy pears and ginger cookies and Golden Delicious apples, and I have to say that he never asked for a decent meal. I figured that when he lay in bed, praying in his mysterious way, he asked God: What kind of people steal you from your life, however miserable, and give you a better life, however peculiar, and then take it away, just when you’ve just gotten a tiny bit comfortable?

Every morning, I fed my father poached eggs and jam from the little jars tucked into the fruit baskets and then I took Danny to school. I quit going to La Bella Donna, even though I knew that wasn’t the smart thing to do, and looked after my father, who didn’t really need anything except a milk shake and a bedpan. I didn’t have it in me to tell women what might happen to them.

I’d walk to Danny’s school and sit outside his classroom until the bell rang. We’d take the bus into town and go shopping for things we liked. I stole nail polish for me and Captain Marvel comics for him. We bought ice cream cones at Kriegel’s and walked over to Grace Avenue Park to do my nails and read. We watched the kids play. When it got a little cooler and darker the kids went home and Danny and I put our goods in my bag and we played on every piece of equipment, and perfected a standing double on the slide and then we took the bus home, for our fruit and cheese and cookie dinner.

I don’t know who visited Iris. Even though I think that I am, really, in the red cul-de-sac at the bottom of my heart, a better person than Iris, I know that if it’d been me in that hospital, she would have slept in the chair beside my bed.

Letter from Gus

Pforzheim

January 2, 1945

Heil Hitler! Just kidding. People here salute all different ways.

Fick dich and the horse you rode in on. Or, Mein Gott , when will this war be over? Or, You can have my sister if we can have your chicken. Or, What are you looking at, Hurensohn ? (SOB, to you.) Or, I’m doing my best here — don’t shoot me or steal from me or turn me in. (I’m working on that last one. I hope it will keep us alive.)

The little girls Sieg Heil! like you wouldn’t believe. If this country weren’t being strafed, shit on, and starved, we’d have to take them downtown and buy them little Bund Deutscher Mädel outfits. BDM is like the Girl Scouts — if the Girl Scouts gave badges for Jew-killing and world domination. The girls goose-step around the little square of dirt in front of the house all morning. I don’t discourage them. I’m hoping their enthusiasm makes us look good. Greta just flaps her hand up at the wrist and looks away.

Her aunt and uncle are decent people, what we think people in the old country should be. Salt of the earth. We’ve got no butter, no chickens, and no gas. The old man tinkers with this and that, sharpens knives, and does a little black market in cigarettes when he can. The aunt cleans the kitchen twice a day and makes potatoes sixteen ways. Occasionally, there’s a mashed turnip that we could use to patch tires, if we had tires. These people wish we’d never come. The old lady hisses when I come into the kitchen. We make the girls play outside until their lips are blue. But the aunt and uncle share their dinner with us every night and twice, the old man and I have hitched out to a farm so I could fix some prehistoric tractor. Most mornings, we just keep walking until someone with a few eggs needs a knife sharpened.

They lost two sons on the Russian front. They don’t know where their third boy is. I haven’t seen another man in Pforzheim with all his limbs, and under forty. There’s a young guy up the road and he gets around with a cart on four wheels, like a kid’s wagon but big enough to accommodate a grown man. He must have been six-two when he had legs. We’re friendly, and sometimes, after a few shots, Hans asks me to tell him the story of our coming to Germany. He laughs until he cries and sometimes I do too.

There’s no work for me in town. There were watchmakers and jewelers on every corner and now there’s nothing.

January 28, 1945

We got bombed for the first time last night. Greta was throwing dishwater in the yard because the drain was backed up and I was pulling the curtains. The girls stood on the porch, calling the cat. The bombs started falling and the girls looked up. I don’t think they knew what they were seeing or hearing. The alarm screamed out and we hustled down to the cellar. I carried Carolyn, Greta took Anna and the old people, and the cat hurried down behind us. The lights went out. We slept in the cellar, in the smoke. In the morning, Uncle Horst and I pulled down the back door and what was left of the kitchen. We are all fine.

Your pal, Gus

GUS AND HANS LISTENED to the radio address of Marshal Harris, from London. The marshal said, “It should be emphasized the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale … are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.”

The man was as good as his word, Gus thought.

DRESDEN HAPPENED TEN DAYS before Pforzheim. Herr Altmann’s brother drove his old truck three hundred miles from the outskirts of Dresden, where there were still some roads, to Pforzheim. Gus helped him out of the truck and he made the girls play in the yard while Greta changed the dirty bandages around the old man’s neck and ear. He talked for an hour, and Greta translated for Gus. The center of Dresden was destroyed. He’d driven past piles of rubble taller than the people who came out from the cellars. He said the rubble was brick, stone, bicycle frames, burning tires, wood framing, people’s coats and hats and shoes, and underneath and in between that, people. He said he passed dead people without a mark on them; they’d died from asphyxiation. Gus asked Greta if she was sure that’s what the man was saying. Greta said, I’m sure. His name is Klaus, Greta said, and Gus shook his hand.