Other People’s Houses (32 page)

“Do you remember,” my grandmother said, “once your parents were on a holiday and you stayed with us. You badgered me to let you sell something, so I showed you where the shoelaces were kept and said you could wait on the next person who asked for shoelaces, and the
next person who came in asked for shoelaces and you laughed so much you had to run to the bathroom?”

A customer came into the grocery, and Paul and my mother and my grandfather all rose. Each said, “You sit. I’ll go.”

“Franzi will go,” said my grandmother. “Sit down, Joszi.”

My mother returned and reported, “That was Mercedes. Five cents’ worth of butter for Señora Molinas’ boy friend.”

“Hey,”
I said, “do you think you would have recognized me if you had seen me in the street?”

Paul said he would not, but my grandmother said that I had a certain look of Ibolya, her eldest sister. “Around the eyes. Your Great-aunt Sari had light eyes like that; the boys all had dark eyes like me.”

“Take off your glasses, Omama,” I said. “You didn’t always wear glasses, did you? You have real black
eyes.”

“I remember once in the Kaffee Norstadt, in Vienna,” said my grandmother, “I was waiting for Joszi and I looked up and in the door stood Miklos Gottlieb, staring at me. He came over and said, ‘Frau Rosa, you haven’t changed. Your eyes are as black as ever.’ That was years after I had married Joszi.”

“Your Omama always had beautiful eyes—black eyes, like a gypsy,” said my grandfather.

“Eat up, Joszi,” my grandmother said, “and go upstairs and get ready for the doctor.”

“
Ja so
, the doctor,” said my grandfather.

“I’ll do the dishes. You sit, Muttilein,” my mother said, but my grandmother said, “You stay in the shop with Paul. I don’t like him to be alone.”

“Why can’t Paul be alone in the shop?” I asked as I helped my grandmother carry the dishes into the kitchen. “There are
no customers now.”

“You never know who will come in. This is not Europe. These people go around with knives.”

“All of them? Every single one of them, Omama?” I asked, and my grandmother and I would have had our first argument there and then if my mother had not called me from the living room. “Come, Lorle, here are some friends to meet you. This is my Lore. Herr and Frau Freiberg have come to
say hello and good-by. They’re going back to Vienna the day after tomorrow. Please sit down. I will get coffee.”

“
Aber bitte
, don’t make yourself any work for us. We did not come to eat.”

The Freibergs were a middle-aged couple and completely uninteresting, I thought. “Are you going back for good?” I asked Frau Freiberg.

“You know how it is here—this heat,” said Frau Freiberg. “No good for
our people.” She turned down the corners of her mouth at the Dominican Republic. “Look at your Uncle Paul. Herr Paul, you’re not looking well. You should come back to Vienna and finish your medical studies.”

Paul said, “Vienna threw me out of the university. I prefer to broil in a Santiago grocery.”

“I have a sister there,” said Frau Freiberg, “and her boy Edi, who was like my own. I haven’t
seen him since he was three—imagine; now he’s fourteen. You should see the letters he writes. Sigi, you have Edi’s last letter? They were hiding out in Holland all through the war. Terrible! I lost my brother in Poland, but Elli and the boy are back in their own flat on the Ringstrasse.”

“Ah, Vienna! ‘
Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein,
’” sang Herr Freiberg. “The music, the food, the women—eh, Paul?”

His wife said, “
Ja, ja
, I’d like to know what you think you can do about the women!”

“What are you going to do professionally?” I asked.

They both turned down the corners of their mouths and shrugged their shoulders.

“Sigi has connections. Have you got the letter here, Sigi, from Karl Haber—that’s a friend of Sigi’s from his old glee club, the Wiener Gesangverein. Aha, Frau Steiner!” They both
rose and shook hands with my grandmother, who had come in from the kitchen. “How is poor Herr Steiner? And how is it to have your big granddaughter?”

My grandmother nodded her head sidewise with a strange smile and sat down a little back and sidewise, and when the Freibergs had gone she said to my mother, “How is it that when people come you don’t call me? Lore you call, but not me.”

“I called
you,” said my mother, dumfounded.

“I heard you clearly. You said, ‘Lore, here are friends to see you.’ Not a word about me.”

“
Aber
Mutti,” my mother began, just as Paul came to the door, saying, “Lorle, this is Herr and Frau Grüner, Rudi Grüner. My niece Lore.”

My grandmother got up and went back to the kitchen.

The Grüners were younger but no less vulgar, I thought, than the Freibergs. They
had brought me a piece of the jewelry that they manufactured and sold—a dreadful tortoise-shell brooch stuck with imitation pearls. Their great white fat son Rudi sat down in the rocking chair and said not a word.

I chatted with Mrs. Grüner. “You and your mother must come over and have tea with us Sundays,” she said. “We just love your mother, and we wish we could see more of her.”

Paul came
in with a dapper little man in a white suit, carrying a boater. “This is Doctor Perez, Opapa’s doctor.”

Dr. Perez had a pleasant, mobile face that frowned and wrinkled to illustrate what he was saying. He shook my hand with both of his, saying, “You are very—how you say?
Muy linda
—very beau-ti-ful,” and he leered at me in the friendliest way, as if he liked me a lot. He said, “We are—
cómo se
dice?
Neighbors. You know it?”

“Doctor Perez has a very lovely daughter. Juanita is eighteen, isn’t she?” my mother asked, looking unhappy all the while, because she had inadvertently hurt my grandmother’s feelings.

“Maybe you tich English?” Dr. Perez suggested.

“First, I better learn Spanish,” I said, and before Herr and Frau Grüner left, they forced Rudi into offering to come and give me
Spanish lessons.

Afterward, my mother went to fetch my grandmother out of the kitchen, but my grandmother said, “I heard Frau Grüner ask you and Lore to visit, but I notice she didn’t ask me.”

“Mutti,” said my mother, “it’s just because Lorle and I were in the room and you were not. I know she wants you to come.”

But my grandmother could not forgive my mother. She said, “Ibolya and Sari were
going to a
Kranzerlball
once, the year I turned sixteen—so Ibolya must have been nineteen, and Sari eighteen—and there were a lot of young people. I remember Miklos Gottlieb was there, and my mother said, ‘Why don’t you take Rosa along?’ but then, of course, I wouldn’t go.” And it was clear my grandmother had not forgiven her sisters in a lifetime.

Upstairs, the three areas—where my grandmother
and grandfather slept, where Paul slept, and where my mother and I slept—were separated from one another only by swinging gates like the barroom doors in Western movies. When I awoke next morning, my watch said eight. Everyone was already downstairs, and the room was bright as noon. A
merengue
was blasting from a radio across the street. I leaned out of the window. The street was a walking market,
with peddlers in straw hats calling out their vegetables and girls in shredded rags of dresses carrying baskets classically on their heads. A donkey loaded down with sacks of pineapple had come to a standstill at the corner. On its bare back a woman sat sidewise, smoking a cigar, suckling a baby, and curling her toes to keep hold of her flopping slippers while she kicked the animal in the stomach
and beat it with a cactus across the ears. A man wrapped in a feather coat stopped under my window and I saw that the coat was made up of a couple of dozen chickens strung together by the legs and hanging from the pole he carried across his shoulders; more chickens were draped around his neck and tied to his belt. I thought the birds were dead, until my grandmother appeared on the
galería
and
poked them under the feathers so that they flapped their wings and squawked as if she were tickling them.

“
Cuánto?
” asked my grandmother in the irate voice of someone expecting to be cheated. “
Cómo?
Forty centavos? You think you can take advantage of me, because I don’t speak Spanish!” she said very loudly in German. “You think I don’t know you charge Señora Molinas only twenty-five centavos!
I’ll give you twenty-five centavos. No?
Adiós,
” and she turned away.

“Señora!
Qué venga!
Thirty centavos,” the chicken man called. My grandmother came back and counted the pennies one by one into the cup of his huge dusty black hand. The chicken man raised his face to my window, showing the gap where his front teeth should have been, and started a loud Spanish wailing, which I took to be a justified
indictment of my grandmother.

When I came downstairs, she was quarreling with Pastora, the maid. Pastora was a little hideous black woman who gave the impression of being misshapen. Over her petticoat she wore a piece of black gauze torn along the bottom and sewed together down the back with large loose stitches. I could tell that Pastora was dressed up, but my grandmother was taking off her
own ankle-length calico apron, saying, “Wrap yourself in this. Tell her, Paul.”

My grandmother’s great eyes were popping, her nose an angry beak. Her hairline was hidden by the elastic of the net under which her hair was flattened—not unlike the
schaitel
, or wig, that separates Orthodox Jewish wives from freewheeling womanhood. “No shame!” my grandmother was saying. “Coming out like that on the
galería
in front of the chicken man. Go upstairs. Go! Make the beds. And no shoes. Disgusting. You can see her toes. Children, breakfast! Lore! Joszi! Pauli!” called my grandmother, not mentioning my mother.

“Franzi,” Paul said when everybody was sitting down, “I wish you wouldn’t come down at six every morning. Let me have half an hour by myself to do my exercises.”

“If Franzi doesn’t want
to come down, I will,” said my grandmother, without looking at my mother. “I don’t want you to be alone in the shop, Pauli.”

“I want to get up, Muttilein,” said my mother, stroking her hand over my grandmother’s arm. “You don’t have to come down.”

“I don’t open the shop till half past six,” Paul said. “I’m physically in bad shape these days. By lunchtime I’m good for nothing, and I find that
if I do half an hour of exercises every morning, in the nude, I feel better all day.”

“But you, Vater,” my mother said to my grandfather, “you needn’t come down so early. The doctor wants you to take it very easy.”

“But I have always come down after I am awake,” my grandfather said. “And I have to tidy the shelves and have everything in good order before the shop opens. Mutter, you could take
an extra hour of sleep. Paul and I can get our own breakfast.”

“Typical,” Paul said to me. “Have you noticed how the members of Jewish families can’t bear to see each other work?”

(The following morning, at six o’clock, my mother heard Paul downstairs and leaped out of bed to go and help him. After that, Paul tried being down by five-thirty, but my mother always heard him.)

When breakfast was
over, I carried the dishes into the kitchen and found my grandmother already at the sink, whipping on her toes like a tennis player waiting for service, plucking the chicken.

“Omama, why are you starting lunch at half past eight?” I asked.

“The soup,” my grandmother said. “I’m already late. Thirty cents for this skinny bird. This will never make a soup like our Fischamend hens—and look at these
miserable carrots.”

“Would you like me to clean them for you?”

“If you like. Not with that knife—with this, and beautifully. Don’t peel. Scrape.”

“What difference does it make so long as they are clean?”

“All the difference if you work beautifully or not.”

“Omama, how come you don’t use some of those wonderful local vegetables they were selling in the street?”

“They’re no good for us,” said
my grandmother, and as my mother appeared in the doorway she said, “Franzi, you do the carrots. Use this knife, and scrape.” Which was the first time my grandmother had addressed my mother directly since my mother had forgotten to call her when the Freibergs had come to see me last night. My mother’s face broke in relief, and she went and embraced my grandmother and kissed her.

I walked away.
For the rest of the morning I hung around the shop. The shop was called
Productos de Sosua
, because it sold the specialty cheeses and sausages made in the settlement, but its main business was a brisk traffic of our poor neighbors coming all morning for infinitesimal quantities of staples.

At twelve o’clock, we sat down around a table covered with the same kind of ugly, shiny oilcloth my grandmother
had had on the table in Fischamend. My grandmother stood lightly on her toes, ladling out the beautiful burnished soup. She filled each plate only two-thirds full, and the smallness of the amount was in direct proportion to the undiluted strength of its taste; it was the nature of my grandmother’s soup that it was all gone before the surprise of its delicate, strong essences, as varied on
the tongue as wine.

“A wonderful soup, Mutter,” said my grandfather from under his mustache. “As long as I have been married to your grandmother, every meal was a surprise and a pleasure,” he said.

“Eat, don’t talk,” said my grandmother. “Eat, Paul. Eat, Lore.”

After lunch, my grandparents went to rest upstairs, just as they had always done in Fischamend. I said I was going to stay with Paul.

“Paul will want to rest, too,” my mother warned me on her way to her room.

Paul said, “Well, my grown-up niece Lore!” He sat down on the rocking chair. From there he could watch the shop. “Not that anybody comes during the siesta hour.”

The street was silent. The noon brightness seemed trapped inside the room despite closed shutters; the heat was intense. Paul had laid out his account books,
but his head began to drop, nod by nod, until it hit his chest and he snapped awake, setting the rocker in motion as he leaped to the door of the shop, which stood empty except for an excess of light. He came back and sat down, saying, “This rocking chair is a mistake. Tomorrow is Thursday. The Sosua truck will be here and I don’t have my order ready.” He drew the account books determinedly toward
him and fell asleep. Where his head came to rest upon his shoulder, a pool of sweat formed on his shirt. Little by little, he lost that hold with which sleepers in public places still keep themselves erect, slipping forward on the hard wooden seat until his legs buckled at the knees.