Other People’s Houses (10 page)

Mrs. Levine raised one corner of her mouth. She said, “You better run up to the bathroom now. Annie! Come here and bring a cloth,” and as I was going up the stairs I heard her say to her daughter Sarah, who had come in the front door, what I did not make out at the time though my
ears retained the sounds intact, and when I was in my room that night, lying in bed, I remembered and understood that what she had said was, “I told you they don’t bring up children over there the way we do here in England,” and Sarah had said, “Oh Ma, what do you know about what they do ‘over there’—or about bringing up children, either!”

I explained it to myself. Mrs. Levine could not have
understood when I told her how I always got A’s in my report; I must tell her that I was always first in my class. I would say to her the bit about the slave market. I would write the very next day to my father and ask him how to say it in English. I lay in bed thinking up clever things to say to Mrs. Levine. I imagined sentimental situations in which to say them, calling her “Auntie Essie,” but when
I came downstairs the next morning, Mrs. Levine was sitting with her head bent over her sewing, and I found I could not say “Auntie Essie”; it sounded silly in daylight and face to face. But neither could I call her “Mrs. Levine,” because she had told me to say “Auntie Essie.” I watched and waited for her to raise her head from her work before I addressed her, and poor Mrs. Levine, happening to
look up, meaning to poke the fire, was startled to find herself under this close scrutiny. “What are you staring at me for, for goodness’ sake!” she cried out. Immediately she recollected herself, though flustered still. “Why don’t you read a book or go for a walk? Take her for a run in the park,” she said to Annie, who had a way of appearing on the scene whenever there was anything going on. “Come
on, now,” she said rather desperately to me. “You don’t want to cry—I didn’t mean to shout at you. Now, come on, will you?”

It occurred to me to say, “In Vienna, Jews aren’t allowed to go in the park.”

The effect was instantaneous and marvelous. Mrs. Levine bent down and took me in her arms, but not before I had seen her face flush and her eyes fill with tears, and I knew they were for me. I
was immensely impressed. I held myself very stiff against her unfamiliar and solid bosom; I felt restless in that embrace and began politely to extricate myself. I said I had to go and write a letter to ask my father something.

But all day I was grieved because Mrs. Levine had taken me in her arms and I had not liked it. I kept trying to think up ways in English to avoid the direct address, so
that I could have conversation with her, but I never could think of one when I needed it. And now I didn’t dare look at her in case I caught her eye and she might think I was staring. My nervousness around her increased, until by evening whenever Mrs. Levine came into a room I must get up and walk out of it. I am sure that I wounded her deeply. “All right,” she said, “you’d better go up to bed now,”
and just then I wet myself again.

I used to pray to God not to let it happen any more. I remember, I made deals with fate. I said, “If I walk all the way upstairs as far as my door without opening my eyes, I won’t wet myself again,” but as the days passed, it kept happening more and more often.

Meanwhile, Saturday morning, I had my first letter from my parents. It had been addressed to Dovercourt
camp, readdressed to the other camp and came to me via the Liverpool Refugee Committee.

When Helene came in the afternoon I could hardly wait to take her into the dining room and shut the door. I said, “I know a game. Let’s get under the table.”

Helene said, “No.”

“All right. We can play it out here. It’s a guessing game. You have to guess in how many days you will get a letter from your parents.
First you guess and then I guess my letter, and the one who guesses too early has lost. Go on. You guess.”

Helene looked straight before her. “Go on,” I said, “guess how many days.”

Helene said, “Three.”

“All right,” I said, “you guess three days. Now it’s my turn, I have to figure.” I figured that the letter I had taken to the corner post box in the morning would take two or three days to
reach Vienna, say four to be on the safe side, and they would answer the next day or the day after, say another four days, that makes eight, and then four days back, twelve, add two more days to make sure, that’s fourteen. “I guess fourteen days. Now let’s get under the table.” But Helene would not, and cried, and Mrs. Levine ran in to scold me and Annie brought our tea, and after that Mrs. Rosen
took Helene home.

But on the following Monday the twenty refugee children who had been distributed among the families of Liverpool were taken to the Hebrew day school, and after that I saw Helene every day.

On Thursday I came in glory. I said that I had had a letter, which made it five days, and I had guessed fourteen days, so I had won by nine.

Next day at break, in the schoolyard, Helene
said that she had won too and she had had a letter. “You didn’t win,” I said. “I won. Because you said three days and your letter took six so you lost by three days, see?” Helene did not see. She looked straight before her. “Let’s do it again,” I said. “I sent a letter today and I have to figure.” This time I figured so well that I made it twenty-one days. “Twenty-one days,” I said happily. “Now it’s
your turn. You guess.”

“Two days,” said Helene. In all the weeks we played, she never did catch on.

A delightful thing had meanwhile developed. I had written my parents about my friend Helene Rubichek and how her parents were coming to England. My parents knew Anton Rubichek by name as a journalist and got in touch with him and arranged to send me a present, a box of sweets perhaps, a surprise.
More wonderful yet, my parents were going to visit Helene’s parents on Saturday at the very time Helene would be visiting me. This intrigued me: I wanted Helene to describe to me the room in which they would be having their coffee, to give me an idea how the furniture was arranged, so that I could the better think of them sitting there, but Helene wasn’t at all good at giving anybody any ideas
and I made up my own picture. The next letter from home destroyed this picture: It seemed my parents had never sat in that room at all. It was explained in an enclosed note, sealed and addressed to Mrs. Levine, who read it to her daughters. They were very excited, and then Mrs. Levine called Mrs. Rosen on the telephone and they talked a long time. I got a new picture of my parents standing outside
Helene’s parents’ apartment door, which had been locked and taped and sealed off with an official seal. The neighbors said the Rubicheks had been taken away that morning.

This troubled me deeply: I practiced imagining what my parents were doing, and where, at the very instant that I was thinking of them and then trying to imagine that they were really doing something entirely different in quite
another place. It made me giddy, and I went to Mrs. Levine and told her my stomach felt sick. She gave me some medicine and I vomited, and then I felt better. I sat down and wrote a letter home.

I posted it the next morning on my way to school. During break I found Helene and said, “This time I guess thirty days.”

Helene said, “I’m not playing any more.”

“Yes you are,” I said, appalled because
I could not face the weeks ahead unless they were divided into periods of which I could see the end, with a letter to wait for, like the piece of chocolate that my mother had always put in the middle of the plate, underneath so many spoonfuls of rice pudding. “Don’t you like to play?” I said quickly, for Helene was laying her cheek on her shoulder. “I’ll show you how to win. Guess twenty days
and then you won’t expect a letter and suddenly it will come as a surprise, you see?”

But Helene said, “I won’t get any more letters.”

“Yes, you might,” I said, but I knew that Helene had turned obstinate past recall.

At the house after school, I had begun to write my autobiography, to let the English know, as I had promised my father, what had happened to us under Hitler. But when I came to
write it down, I felt a certain flatness. The events needed to be picked up, deepened, darkened. I described with gusto the “horror-night” of Schuschnigg’s abdication—not mentioning how unsolemnly rude my mother had been to Tante Trude. I wrote how, the next morning, “the red flags waved like evil ghosts in the wind and I stood still and held my hands in horror before my eyes, having already an
inkling of the charm of the darling Germans.” (“
Die lieblichen Deutschen
” were the words I had heard my mother use.) I wrote, “The sun shone in the cloudless blue. Was it for us it shone or for our enemies? Or was it only for the happy people in distant lands who would surely come to our aid?” I showed it to Sarah.

Sarah must have been fifteen years old at the time. By far the most intelligent,
spirited, and imaginative of her family, she was the Elizabeth Bennet of the Levines. She was constantly irritated with everyone, trying to bully her father into asserting himself, her mother into being better informed, her five sisters into greater awareness and elegance. To me, she was the touchstone of everything English. My book became our common project. She encouraged me to finish it, and
she was going to help me translate it and publish it. Together, we would expose Adolf Hitler to the world.

In bed at night, I dreamed about Sarah, but in the daytime I sought out the comfortable sanctuary of Annie’s kitchen. I liked to watch her trip busily about, like the good sister in the fairy tale my father had taken me to see in the children’s theater. She looked so tidy in her linen dress
and long apron. Her eyes were lowered demurely, but her little round nostrils stared outrageously. There was a game I played: I would stalk her around the kitchen, trying to maneuver myself into positions from which I could get a good look into the inside of Annie’s nose.

Annie never made me finish up my cups of nauseating tea with milk, or told me to cheer up and
do
something, like Mrs. Levine;
she never corrected my Viennese table manners or pulled me up when I used a German word instead of the English one I didn’t know, like Sarah. Mostly, Annie was not particularly listening to me, and this gave me a certain freedom in talking with her.

I would say, “Annie, do you like Mrs. Levine?”

And Annie would say, “Yes. Mrs. Levine is a very nice lady.”

I said, “I like her. I didn’t like
her in the beginning, but now I do.” And I would discuss with Annie my impressions of the daughters of the house and ask Annie which one she thought was the prettiest. I said I thought Sarah was beautiful. I liked her the best—the others continued to confuse me. I knew that there were six. It took me weeks to figure out which of them lived in which of the rooms on the second floor, and which of them
were married and only came to visit. I did not dare to talk to any of them, because their names and faces were interchangeable. Then I would say, “And Uncle Reuben, he is nice,” surprised to come across him in my mind, just as I was always surprised to come into a room and find him in it. This house full of women was inclined to forget Uncle Reuben except at mealtimes, to feed, or at times when
his eyes were bad, to fuss over. But whenever I did recall his existence, I liked him. “He is kind,” I said. “He gives me sixpence every Sunday. I like him very much.”

Annie said yes, Mr. Levine was a very nice man. I liked talking things over with Annie. And if Annie winked her eye and made me laugh and I wet myself, I would say brazenly, almost carelessly, “Annie, look what that silly Barry
did.” Annie would say, “That dog, he’s getting just terrible,” and she would get a cloth and wipe up the pool.

One day the dog must have had a cold in his insides, because he really did make a pool. I watched him do it, and I was so pleased that I cried, “Hey, Annie, guess what? The dog made a pool. Look, behind the settee in the sitting room.”

Annie said, “Miss Sarah, there goes that dog again.
You see what I told you, he’s getting worse and worse.”

Sarah said, “Barry, come here at once.” She took hold of his collar and said, “Lore, was it Barry who made that pool?” and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Right behind the settee; nobody could even have got in there except Barry,” I said, with all my heart because it was the truth.

“Well, then,” Sarah said, “don’t you think he should
be taught not to do it? He’s been living in our house long enough, don’t you think, Lore? Maybe he needs to be punished. Hand me his lead.”

I stood and watched her spank the dog—not very hard or very long, but he laid down his front legs and raised his head, gave three high-pitched howls, and fled into the kitchen.

Later I heard the visitors in the sitting room. I didn’t know if I was supposed
to go in. Barry was alone in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to go in there, so I went up the stairs looking for Annie.

There was no one on the green-carpeted landing. All the doors were shut and blind. I stood listening, and I wondered about those five maids in their caps and aprons. I never had seen any of them again or ever stopped expecting to. (It must have occurred to me at some point that
there never had been any maid but my own Annie, but mystification had become a habit of mind. Only now, with this writing down, is it obvious how Annie’s curiosity had taken five separate peeks at the little refugee that first night; only now does Auntie Essie finally merge with the ugly old woman in fur; now I understand the word “taimtarais,” which Annie said every morning when she came to wake
me and which my father never did find in any dictionary.)

Annie’s dustpan and broom leaned outside my room on the top floor. Annie was inside, but she wasn’t cleaning. She was standing at my dressing table eating my chocolate. I heard the small rustle of her finger poking choosily into the box of sweets my mother had hidden in my suitcase for me—saw with my own eyes how Annie lifted one out and
put it into her mouth. I dared not breathe in case Annie should turn around and know that I had seen her. With a beating heart, I backed away, wondering how I should ever face her again, or what I would say to her when we met. I crept down the stairs.