Ghita Schwarz - Displaced Persons

No one knew but a mother.

And a mother had to keep quiet, had to stop herself from screaming in fear at every moment. This Fela was good at. When Larry was born in the DP camp hospital Fela herself had kept her words inside her, had kept her groans incomprehensible and controlled, for she had heard the stories, of other women in childbirth crying out, screaming, even three years after the liberation, even four, in the delirium of pain, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby.

Fela closed her eyes.

When Pavel learned of this he would want them to go to synagogue for weeks. No. She would stand firm. It was too hot in the summer for prayer. Job’s wife had screamed at her husband, Curse your god and die! And the wife was right. What kind of husband accepted this pain, the damage coming and coming, until the end of the stupid tale when God presented the mourners with the false new family, the lie of peace after all the suffering, the lie that the new family itself would not suffer its own wounds? No one was exempt, no matter how much one had suffered before or how much one prayed now. It was the opposite, yes, the opposite.

Her son was speaking to her. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault.”

“Larry,” she answered.

“It’s my fault,” he repeated. Then he looked up at her. “I’m the worst person in the world.”

“Larry,” she said again, watched him put his face in his hands. She should touch him, comfort him, but he was using his own words for comfort. It’s my fault, I’m the worst person in the world. Did not this make one feel safer than the random truth, that a mother turning away caused blood to flow, that an inch more forward and Helen would have emerged from the pool laughing, blowing out air, spitting water at her brother?

She should touch his anguished face, but instead her voice was loud again, crying at him in Yiddish: Why? Why? Why did you not listen to me? Why did you disobey me? Do you think you are another mother, another father? You are a child, you obey!

“I’m sorry,” said Larry in English, crying. “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, choked on a word, then gurgled out: “I’m the worst person in the world.”

“Yes,” she answered him. “You are. The worst person in the world.” The words sounded good, hard, powerful, precise. She said it again, this time in Yiddish, with deliberation, the power of her voice startling her, relieving her.

He stopped crying and looked at her, his face wet and small, astonished. The worst in the world: her son. Fela’s brother, her youngest brother Lieb after whom her son was named, had been like Larry, so sensitive, so soft. There had been a time in her own youth when the children had run the lives of their parents, smuggling and trading, maneuvering for news and plans. But no more. Inside her swelled a sudden pity, pity for her son, her sweetheart, as they said in English, her little king. They thought they commanded everything. When she was a child she almost did not have permission to speak to an unaccompanied young man in her father’s store. But what had all the strictness accomplished? It had driven out her older sister to a kibbutz in Palestine, long before the war, and it had driven Fela herself out to the arms of a young man, her first love, when the Germans crossed into eastern Poland. But she had not done what she did to punish her father, or to make politics. She had left the home and fled to Russia for love. Her beloved had been arrested and disappeared, and their infant had died, but she had lived. Perhaps love had saved her life, as politics had saved her only surviving sister’s, taking them out of the town that was destroyed, every person, every baby.

And now, with her errands, with her impatience, with her need for silence and privacy, she had turned away from them and risked everything, stupid, stupid, as if she knew as little as her children about all the blood and torn flesh through which they had passed to enter this world. But she did know. Her son did not. Little man. Always trying to be good, and yet suffering the world’s punishments and random accidents, just like his parents.

Her pity made her speak again. She would cover over her cruelty, she would wash it away. Don’t worry, she said in Yiddish, don’t worry, my child. Helcha is all right.

She caressed her son’s head without looking.

O N THE TABLE BETWEEN them lay a bolt of silk the color of dark wheat. Pavel’s old friend Fishl Czarny had delivered the material straight to Pavel, a remnant from a manufacturer going out of business. For the first time in several weeks, perhaps longer, Pavel felt calm, his bad leg stretched out to the side, his hand caressing the cloth, taking in the fineness of the weave. The silk could make a lining for a dozen suit jackets, and with an important contract for a small retailer due in two weeks, the order would be completed with a touch of elegance.

His brother-in-law was speaking to him. “I go down to get a soup,” Kuba said. “Should I bring you a coffee?”

Why the pretense of English when they were alone? Pavel thought. It was a battle they fought silently every day, each trying to last as long as possible in the language of his choosing, as if Kuba were afraid of his mother tongue, as if Pavel would be able to teach him otherwise. But Pavel was in a good mood today, and his brother-in-law would not spoil it. He could be generous for a moment, he thought, and reply to Kuba in English. “Beautiful, no?”

Kuba’s round face was a mask. He said, “What have we given away for it?”

Pavel sighed. He was not angry, but he might become angry, and it was stupid to enter an argument without full command of one’s words. He answered in Yiddish. I don’t give away. I make business. Shouldn’t he have a suit from us, for all he does?

So he deals in fabric now? Kuba relented halfway, spoke in Polish.

He has a friend, yes, who has occasion to supply-take a look! What it will add to the Steiner order! Pavel spread the silk across his palm and wrist, stretched out his arm toward Kuba.

It’s the bartering that I don’t like. Like peddlers in a village. We can’t account well for it.

What is to account? There is no man I trust more.

Ah. Kuba looked at him, half-cold, half-hurt. Of course.

But Pavel didn’t regret his words. Of course! Of course! He was with me in-

Yes, yes, I know, Kuba interrupted.

He’s a religious man! More, he is a loyal-he and I-

“I have not yet eaten,” Kuba said. “Do you want I should bring you a coffee?”

No, said Pavel. No-I-He was standing, he suddenly realized. “No, thank you,” he said, slowly, to make himself calm. “No.”

He stood another moment after Kuba had left. Another argument was coming, this time about the space for the shop. Pavel wanted to lease from the landlord the space next door when they expanded. Kuba hated their location, a few blocks north of the garment district, on crowded Forty-sixth Street near the electronic shops and jewelry dealers. But Pavel loved it. He liked being outside the center, apart and distinctive. And in the seven years he had been in New York, seven lean years after the hell of waiting four years after his accident for new visas, he had made for himself a skill not just in cutting but in handling cloth, and had built for the family a network of connections with his friends in the nearby businesses. So what if they were outside the main pole? They made for themselves another small pole, catering to people who made their money on other things, who introduced Pavel to luxuries at a discount, a slim chain for his wife, a good wallet for himself, and the watch for his nephew, his sister’s firstborn. Could Kuba have forgotten the watch? Even if Pavel had to push himself up the narrow staircase to his shop and office, grasping the railing with one hand and his cane with the other, even if on occasion the accountant next door complained of the noise made by the steamer and sewing machines, the location was ideal.