Displaced Persons (6 page)

The nurse slid instruments in and out of a metal case, talking, motioning. It seemed she was explaining: Sima had met the requirements, and her father too. Sima’s mother, resting on the cot, had been left for last, almost invisible as the nurse spoke in her incomprehensible patter.

Finally the nurse pulled the metal necklace onto her ears again, placed one shining end on Sima’s mother’s pale, blue-veined chest.

The nurse frowned. She took out the glass tube and pushed it between Sima’s mother’s lips, waited, then shook it out. She motioned for Sima and her father to wait outside the curtained area: this time they stepped out without protest. She called out something in English—a name, it seemed, for a man with his own metal necklace appeared, and together they began to speak in a low murmur behind the curtain while Sima and her father waited outside. Sima touched her hand to her chest. Her skin still felt cool from the touch of the metal.

At last they poked their heads out. Then they stepped out fully and drew the curtain behind them, Sima’s mother still inside.

“Quarantine,” said the man.

“Quarantine,” agreed the nurse. Sima’s father looked at them, puzzled, shaking his head gently. They repeated it again and again, motioning with their hands, other words blurring into the main one until it became a singsong. “Quarantine, quarantine.”

The man jerked open the curtain. Sima’s mother was lying down, her face smooth and glistening. The man stomped over to the wooden table where he had the glass tube. He pointed at a number on the tube to Sima’s father. He made harsh, exaggerated gasps, then pointed to Sima’s mother, who smiled encouragingly at her daughter.

“Kann ist gutt,
” he said. No good. German words spoken by someone new to the tongue. They came out thick, halting. Then he went
back to the other word. “Quarantine,” he said. “Quarantine,
mutter,
quarantine.”

“Karutina,” Sima’s father tried to repeat after the soldiers. He said it slowly, breaking the word up into small parts. Ka. Ruh. Ti. Na.

He said it again. And then Sima felt her father’s hand grip hers tightly and suddenly loosen. “Ah,” he said, almost pleased, Sima thought, with the clarity that suddenly presented itself. But then he pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead and neck. He looked at Sima’s mother, who struggled to sit up, still not understanding.

“Kwarantanna,
” he announced. They want to keep you here. Not for long, he continued, though beyond the one word that had miraculously translated itself into Polish, Sima knew he had no sense of what they were saying. Not for long.

Quarantine, thought Sima. My mother has quarantine.

She knew quarantine. There had been quarantine in Russia, in Siberia, the first place to which they had been deported. Typhoid. The deportees had spread it among themselves in the work camps, in the fields, in the factories. Sima’s father had worked as a night watchman in the hospital, and after his arrest for theft Sima’s mother had taken his place. There was a quarantine ward for the people who did not die first in their huts, who were kept in a spacious, rotting hallway of the hospital, where even the local doctor was afraid to stay for long. Quarantine was like prison: no one watching, just the hard labor of staying alive. You were left to die or to escape. From prison, Sima’s father had escaped. Sima’s mother had too, later, when it had been her turn to be arrested.

Now, with the nurse chattering on to her father, Sima looked at her mother, waiting for her to explain her way out, charm the man with the white coat, or fall to the floor begging, or show them they had made a mistake, she had no fever at all. But her mother said nothing.

Sima’s father spoke. Dvora, do not worry. Simale will be in school
tomorrow. When you get out, she’ll already be teaching you, you’ll see.

Sima moved her hand from side to side. A wave. No words, no sounds. Quiet, stay quiet. It would upset her mother to see her cry. You could not let them see you afraid.

B
EREL
M
AKOWER WRAPPED HIS
hand around his daughter’s as they walked into daylight. He was tired. The sheet he had hung to protect his and Sima’s corner had not blocked out the noise and mutterings of the others, who dreamed loudly and shook the wooden bed frames in their sleep. It was mostly a barracks for families, though it appeared there were some women alone as well, their hair painfully neat, freshly combed even at night, their faces smooth but gray.

Near the main office swollen refugees bustled to and fro. After one night, Berel knew the bustling ones were like him, recently returned, only beginning to understand that the rumors they had heard in Russia, the propaganda, had been true. It was the men and women inside the barracks, who slept or stared in the day and who hardly spoke, so listless they could not even be angry, waiting, waiting for nothing. After months in the DP camp, their bodies had recovered from the torments they had lived through. They were the reverse of spirits, Berel thought, just bodies, clothed, more or less clean, not so hungry, but empty.

He would have to keep the atmosphere from invading him. Register for school, register for work, register for visas. There were lists for all kinds of things here: for food, for clothing, for a better dwelling, for orchestra tickets. Orchestra tickets! Someone had told him in the barracks at night—the Jews had built a theater for plays and concerts, for music to keep the grief out—no, not the grief, but the heaviness, the dark blanket that kept even healthy ones in bed, at windows, alone on benches watching the slow entry of new arrivals.

Berel had a momentum, one that started on the train from Poland to Germany, that moved even when the tracks stopped, that kept going inside him. Himself, his wife, and his daughter, all traveling—by choice! what a joke—to the country of the enemy, now transformed into a sanctuary from Poland, where Jews who returned to their hometowns were being murdered by their old neighbors. He had a momentum, one that had sprung up after the rainy week they had spent in Przemysl, venturing into the tiny storefront that served now as the Jewish center, a center that was only temporary, a committee that existed only to tell the repatriated to leave again. For safety, the small, clean-shaven man at the center had urged. For family. He himself was getting ready to flee. There was no use in staying to look. And trying to take back family property or business now occupied by Poles was to invite an assault. In Germany, the man at the center said, they might still find someone. They might still find.

Berel had a momentum. He had a wife and a daughter to care for and protect. He had an obligation to make good on a promise—put Sima in school!—to Dvora, who, for all those years in Russian exile, had kept the three of them alive with her rage and efficiency, her insistence on sweeping the dirt floors of the huts they had slept in, her desperate and frequently victorious battle against her own hunger and fear. She could steal as if she were the eldest daughter of a skilled criminal, not a modest store owner.

His own record as a thief was unaccomplished. It was a joke to his wife and daughter, his fear. He would come back to their hut from a day in the mill in Osh and take off his shoes, empty them into a metal cup, slowly, so as not to lose a grain in the cloud puffing up from the table. It would take a week of stealing to make even a small loaf. Sometimes his fear made him laugh too.

But there would be no more theft. Or less theft—already he had heard that a black market thrived here too, just outside the confines of the camp, where starving German towns people traded their family china, elegant clothing, for a pound of the refugees’ Red Cross coffee.
But Berel was not ready to start with the trading. He needed work, real work, in order to give his daughter the sense that she lived with a father, a man, that all three of them were full, flesh-and-blood bodies, not just shadows who stole and traded and lied for their food.

In the main office Berel showed the identity cards he and Sima had been issued on their entry to the camp. There was a blank square for photographs of himself and his daughter, photographs that had been taken the day before and were ready to be glued in today, their first day as displaced persons.

Now it’s official, Berel said, looking at his daughter. We have nowhere to go.

But you do, said the man stamping their papers, mounting the cards into a dark holder. You have the kitchen—he pointed—and employment. You must have work. Even when you first arrive. Believe me, I didn’t rest from the moment I came, and it helps, you see? I have a good position. You can’t let yourself rest here, if you rest, you think. You’ll find a job easily, you will, my friend. There’s plenty. You must have work.

And school. Sima’s voice broke through the sound of men, a bird sound.

The man looked at her as if he hadn’t seen her before, as if he had not been busy slipping her photograph onto a white page that held her name, Sima Makower, as if her voice was what made her real. His eyes, Berel saw, were suddenly glassy. A young lady speaking Yiddish, the man said. What a pleasure. Berel thought he heard a shake in the voice, a small tremble.

But the man went on. You must have been east, yes?

Yes, said Berel. From Poland to Bialystok, of course just at the beginning, and Siberia, and then Uz—

Yes, yes, said the man. It’s only the people from the East who came back with children. And not so many of them, and of those, not so young, like this little one. Yes,
maidele
?

Sima’s hand was a fist in Berel’s palm. My wife insisted there is a school here, Berel intervened, almost apologizing. That’s why my daughter asks.

Ah, said the man, but there is!

Sima giggled.

Another beautiful sound, said the man. The
maidele
laughing. But listen, my friend, not yet. He gave Berel a pointed look. If you bring her with you to look for jobs—poor motherless one—they will try not to give you manual labor.

It was true. Everywhere they went—the food line, the clothing room, the newspaper office with its lists of the living—workers of the camp looked at Sima as if she were a still photograph from a movie, a movie whose name was now forgotten but whose faces were familiar, adored. There were other children, to be sure—Berel had seen one or two young teenagers doling out food packages—but the sight of a small one, attached to her father—in fact the man who had issued their identity cards was right about the manual labor. Berel had been prepared to talk about his carpentry skills, his facility with lumber, but there was no need. Sima kept herself quiet—no mention of her sick mother—and Berel was given an assignment to do bookkeeping.

Report on time! said the managing clerk. Believe me, if you are late, twelve others will be ready to relieve you.

I would like to enroll Simale in the school, said Berel. Will I have time in the morning, early?

Come here at eight in the morning, said the man. You can take a break in the afternoon, and enroll her then. You have a daughter to support, a little lamb to protect, but I simply cannot hold the job for a newcomer if you are late.

Berel walked out of the clerk’s office elated. Office work!

Let’s go tell your mama, let’s leave her a message, said Berel. She’ll be happy to hear from us. Even if all we do is tell her by note that we are all right.

She’s moving tomorrow, said a nurse at the entrance of the infirmary. You will be able to visit. You, but not the child, understand?

Berel nodded. By tomorrow he would be working at a desk, moving his pencil across dark ledgers, perhaps even feeling the need for a pair of glasses—he hoped not, of course—reporting the influx and distribution of shoes, skirts, hats, underthings. Sima herself would be at a desk, socializing with other young ones, writing in her own notebooks, making drawings, learning to sew. He would be able to tell Dvora: Today we made a start on a new life.

But tomorrow came and again they waited at the accounting office, Sima at his hip, until finally the man in charge of showing him to his place informed him the director was absent, on a trip to the American zone, something very important, Berel must understand, he would have to come back tomorrow. Yes, of course the job would be waiting, just be sure to be here in the morning, early. The managing accountant hated tardiness. And what a lovely daughter Berel had, little lamb. Berel should be sure to enroll her in the school, even if now it was perhaps too late, the children away on their afternoon games.

Berel decided they would visit Dvora after eating, so as not to look hungry when they arrived in the hospital. He wanted to appear before her with a look of energy and life.

Sima, Berel said as they entered the infirmary building, can you stay here and wait for me?

No, said Sima. I’ll come with you. How will you find her without me?

I’ll find her, said Berel. It’s not so hard.

I’ll come with you, she said.

If it was me in the hospital, you’d let your mother go, said Berel. You would know she could find me.

That’s different, said Sima.

It’s not for children, said a woman at the table for visitors. A
woman who spoke Yiddish. Believe me, there is no use in trying to convince me.

You see? Berel said to Sima. There’s nothing I can do.

He was given a mask to put over his mouth, and led by a nurse through a door and up a narrow staircase. He could see Dvora waiting for him on her cot, in a broad room surrounded by perhaps a dozen feverish women. Some of the cots were empty.

She had been much sicker when she entered the camp. But in the daylight pushing in from the window, she looked different. Her skin was bruised and spotted from malnutrition. He had seen the marks, he had seen her discolored body, but he had not noticed as he did now, when she was surrounded by other women, pale women, perhaps sicker women, but none with the same scattering of bluish stains. He himself was drawn, thin, continually hungry, he knew, his skin pale, but Dvora—had she looked so weak only two days before?

He sat by her bed, in a thin metal chair. She did not allow him to touch her.