Ghita Schwarz - Displaced Persons

HE MET HER IN a café near her Midtown hotel at two, just after the lunch rush. Basia was waiting for him in a booth; he was surprised, expecting her to be later than him. She was dressed simply, in a caramel-colored blouse and skirt, a wedding ring her only jewelry, but still she seemed to glitter.

Chaim, she said.

Hello, he answered in Hebrew.

But she continued in Yiddish. You grew up. I meant to say it to you yesterday, but I was so shocked-so taken back in time, you know.

He nodded.

So I say it now, she continued. You grew up.

He gave a nervous laugh. Yes. As did you.

Yes, she said. I have two daughters.

I have one.

Don’t tell me her name. I’m sure she is beautiful.

Not beautiful, said Chaim. Not exactly. But a charmer. Very smart.

Of course, said Basia. How could it be otherwise?

He ordered a soup and half a sandwich, but when it came he found it hard to swallow more than a spoonful or take more than a small bite.

Such a delicate eater, said Basia. But she herself had a full salad in front of her, almost untouched.

Sometimes my digestion is unpredictable, said Chaim.

He waited for the pains to flicker inside him at the reminder, but he felt nothing. Calm.

She began to hum. “ Vedrai carino, se sei buonino, che bel rimedio ti voglio dar. ”

That is something you sang last night, yes?

Basia smiled. From Don Giovanni. She is trying to heal her lover, trying to comfort him.

What does it mean?

“ Sentilo battere, toccami qua,” Basia sang. “It means: feel it beating. And toccami qua : touch me here. Touch me here, touch me here.”

She is almost ridiculous, Chaim thought. But he did not laugh.

She repeats it, said Basia in Hebrew, until he does it. He knows he will be healed.

When she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room he called for the check, breathing slowly, blinking away the image of her chest struggling against its sequins as she sang the night before.

Do you have the afternoon? Basia said, returning. Let us walk.

He had told his supervisor Russell that he was sick, and Russell had waved him off-it occurred to Chaim that he had not taken a sick day since eight years ago, when Sima had given birth, and he felt more troubled by his deception to Russell now than by his betrayal of his wife.

Was it a betrayal? No, no, it wasn’t to do with her but with him. It wasn’t expected that he should be a man in hiding while she grieved. He had remained steady to her, in love with her, truly attached to her all the years of their marriage.

He had been with other women in Tel Aviv, of course, though not in the first two years they were married, and only on the reserve weekends. Since Lola’s birth he had been with someone else only once, a young woman he had met one morning when the church down the street had burst into flames, an electrical fire, they said, the same church in which a deaf black boy had been killed by police because he had not heard them shout at him to turn around. But this was different from the girl at the church fire, this was a real wind in him. At the lobby of Basia’s hotel, when they stopped, he did not wait for her to ask him upstairs. He clasped his arm around her full waist. She did not try to escape.

BASIA DECIDED TO STAY an extra day and made some excuse to her husband and daughters. Chaim had two days of her, one afternoon and another full day-he was sick, he told Russell, working late, he told Sima-spent in her hotel bed and walking in Central Park, and he felt himself to be in a French movie. When she left he felt a half-pleasant sensation of pull and loss, an easy loss. He carried her bags for her the morning she left, and on the train platform she gave him a modest kiss on the cheek that he imagined he could smell and feel throughout his day at work, cutting tape at the radio station for a public service announcement, adjusting the volume in the recording room for the announcers.

What was it that Basia had sung that night? He wanted to call up the tune in his head, but he couldn’t remember it completely, only a note or two, the shadow of the melody. He thought of her plump white chest in the hotel bed beside him, then in the sequined dress. Her voice the opposite of her body: thin, unembellished, pure. Her body as full of music as his own was empty.

Why had she left Israel? Her career had called her. Her husband, a Hungarian pianist, had left Hungary for the same reason.

Really?

Well, when the Communists came, it was more difficult.

He must speak Yiddish.

Of course, but now I speak a little Hungarian. I speak everything! She laughed. I am a citizen of all countries. It is crazy, but we communicate most in English now. I don’t know why. His Hebrew is all right, anyway.

But he did not want to move there.

You know what they say about us, Chaim. I felt that people looked at me like I had committed some crime, or else I would not be alive. Didn’t your friends say such things to you?

I didn’t talk to my friends, said Chaim. They did not want to hear it.

But on the subway home he thought it was not quite true. Berel had wanted to hear it, and Dvora, and even Sima. Yet Sima knew almost nothing. Her willingness to listen had softened his need to talk, had relieved him of the burden of having to say anything, as if the only reason to tell her was to make sure she would believe it. But if she already believed, he was absolved of the obligation to speak. Almost a healing silence, as if she knew with medical precision where not to cut.

On the subway he felt thinner, cleaner, a new man. But Sima did not look up when he came home. He went into their bathroom, washed his hands, rubbed them hard with his wife’s embroidered towels. While brushing his teeth he hummed to himself an American song, words he half remembered from a tape Basia had put on in her room. And I seem to find the happiness I seek . The rhymes so clean and easy. When we’re out together dancing, cheek to cheek .

AFTER DINNER HE STAYED in the kitchen, reading a Yiddish weekly that Pavel had left for him and sipping tea. He slipped a spoonful of jam into his mouth, rolled it around under his tongue.

I need some things, said Sima, her voice sharp. She had appeared at the doorway of the kitchen without his noticing her arrival, her dark robe tied loosely around her waist, her hair pulled back. On Ninety-third Street the drugstore is still open. We need Q-tips.

Chaim’s lips parted. There was a question in his mouth, but no sound came out.

And soap, Sima continued. Dial soap. The kind of soap we use is Dial.

I know what kind of soap we use, Chaim said, then regretted it instantly. He had showered at Basia’s hotel.

Sima looked at him, a kind of puzzled expression on her face. Please go, she said.

It was eleven o’clock at night. He wanted to ask, What, now? But as he thought the words he stopped them, and his face flushed with relief at having held himself back from what would have been a terrible stupidity, possibly something worse than what he had already done.

Words moved into his head, bubbled inside his chest. Please-I don’t know what you are talking about-let us think about it-you don’t know-I did not-my love, I have missed you so much, I only-it was about the music, it was something from my past-how can I-

He said: All right.

His mind turned blank as soon as he got outside, marched uphill to Broadway in the chill. Dial soap, Dial soap, he thought, the words bouncing in his head in an even rhythm, Dial soap, Q-tips, Dial soap, Q-tips. When he came back he sat in the kitchen for an hour, the pharmacy bag on the table in front of him, staring at the red and yellow lettering. He had a feeling he should be scared, but he was not. At last he got up to walk to the bedroom but stopped at his daughter’s door and pushed it open. Sima was lying in Lola’s bed, her arm thrown over their daughter’s waist.