Other People's Lives (16 page)

“Sometimes that's what I wish for you most, Miriam,” my mother tells me in the late afternoon when she sits drinking tea and her narrow, nervous face gets dreamy from the steam, and her worn-out, angry voice gets swallowed away with the heat and sweetness in the cup. “I wish you could grow up to be a cow.”

But it's too late for that by now and I know it; Donna Schoenbaum, in my class in public school, is one already—and if not yet exactly a cow, then definitely a calf. Her flat, moony face tilts in the light when she raises her hand for the pass, the slow, sleepy look stays on her even in city-wide reading tests. In her father's dry-goods store, woolen underpants creep through the shelves and flannel pajamas hibernate in the window. Once, coming back from an errand for Miss Devlin, just to waste more time, I took all the barrettes and bobby pins out of my hair and stood with it just like that in the fifth-floor girls' bathroom. All of a sudden, behind me in the mirror was Donna Schoenbaum, her dirty blond hair in two fat rubber-band curls on her shoulders, her face like two wide, white, empty clouds that stand still, her eyes tiny and tight and, without her glasses, even dumber.

“Ooh, Miriam, you look just like a witch,” she said with her high, naggy, baby-cow voice. “I never saw you before with your hair down and that's what you look like. All your long, black, messy hair with your long, thin face and your
nose.
You look like a witch, I swear it.”

In camp once I learned a Yiddish song about a cow, a calf really, and this the chorus of it:
donna-donna-donna-donna,
instead of
la-la-la.
So, into her face in the mirror I said, “Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna.” A calf, all tied up, is being led off to slaughter in a wagon. Right up above it, following along in the sky, is a bird, a swallow, who flies back and forth, up and down, anywhere he wants while the cow with her dumb eyes just lies staring. The wind, seeing all this, starts laughing, keeps it up day and night, till finally the farmer driving the wagon takes pity, looks around at that stupid-eyed, tied-up calf, and says: Who told you to be a cow?
Donna-donna-donna-donna.
Donna's father's store is right next door to the kosher butcher where the huge, split bodies of killed kosher cows, hanging on deliverymen's shoulders, wobble between the entrances of the two stores. Sometimes the bodies stain the sidewalk.

“You even have yellow skin like a witch,” Donna said. Because I am named Miriam, my skin should be different: dark and lit up as a crayon color, polished and sunny—olive skin like Gracie D'Onofrio's, who has a private house with white statues and vegetables in the front and her father's exterminating business in the basement. Gracie is the prettiest girl in my class and, except for Marty Weintraub, the person Miss Devlin hates most. Gracie talks all the time: on line after the bell, in the lunchroom after the whistle, in the auditorium even in front of the principal, and in the room when she isn't whispering, she's sending notes. “If you don't know how to stop that tongue, I'll call your father and have him exterminate it,” is what Miss Devlin's always threatening her. But worst of all, in Miss Devlin's opinion, is that Gracie no longer goes to Released Time, playing hooky from her Catholic lessons. Once on line in the Girls' Yard, in one of her after-the-bell talkings, Gracie said, “They're all mean, and I have to get stuck with Sister Mary Joseph, who's the meanest. All you have to do is talk once, and she takes you downstairs and beats you.”

“It's a terrible thing that your religious education can't manage to do any more for you,” Miss Devlin screams at Marty Weintraub, a person who calls out and throws spit-balls. “You're a rude young man, Mr. Martin Weintraub, and the Sisters would surely know what to do with a rude young man like you.”

If I were in school now, the morning nearly over, where I would be, probably, is walking slowly up the back stairs on an errand for Miss Devlin. On these stairs there is a window at every half-landing, and on the higher floors the windows, through the gratings, skip the fat yellow brick of the Annex next door and fly straight to the Reservoir—the round blue beginnings of a strange little country far away from the Bronx. In the fall this little country is a colonial village settled by the Dutch: a bright, curvy shore full of tiny-roofed private houses in shapes and colors as jumbled and leaping as the changing trees, and higher than all of them, one white-topped church, sunny and placid. But in the winter, when the snow sticks to the little houses beyond the Reservoir, sealing them in long after it's become slushy in all the neighborhood streets, the little country, pale, poor, and half buried, seems even farther away—Russia. A Cossack horseman rides these backstairs windows: Anton, the custodian's helper, belted to the ledge with a pail, sits astride the sill, his stallion, and washes the windows. Pressed against the glass, his forehead is wide and empty like a Russian steppe and his cheeks are as red as my mother's were when she was a girl in Poland. From squinting in the wind, Anton's eyes get a tight, slanty, Tartar-tribesman look, and when he's working hard, his mouth curves down around a matchstick between his lips—a thin, sneering curve, practically Chmelnitski…

Heavy, endless snows were falling, and throughout the bitter winter the land became a lonely, frozen waste. At night wolves howled in the dark forests and icy winds cried out through the trees. Through these trees, too, flew terrible stories: of unwary souls who ventured forth in crude wagons and were frozen to death in the deep while landowners in fur-rugged sleighs galloped by, their sleighbells jingling. In the snowbound countryside the peasants (poor farmers) could carry no wares to fairground or marketplace. And in the villages within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, families sat in their bleak, chilled houses, huddling closer together around the steaming samovar. Artisans and tradesmen, rabbis and scholars lived in these villages, and not often could they voyage abroad. For as bitter as were the Russian winters, more bitter still were the cruel and unjust restrictions placed upon them by the harsh rule of the Russian Tsar. As long as they had lived with poverty and hunger, so long had these pious, simple folk lived with fear. “O Lord,” they pleaded, praying to the Almighty One with fervor and devotion, “Thou Who hast vanquished our ancient oppressors, how long must we suffer under this terrible yoke?” Thus they prayed in synagogue and study house.

In such a study house, in just such a
shtetl
(for so these villages were called), a tailor, Mottel, and his five sons sat poring over the Holy Writ as the afternoon deepened into evening. Suddenly, amidst the dull hum of men's voices chanting the Scriptures and disputing over the commentaries, a great clatter was heard at the door, soon followed by an icy blast of chill air. It was the red-bearded beadle, a lantern swaying on his arm, as he cried in a terror-filled voice, “Brothers! Brothers! Bestir yourselves! Hide! Run! Save yourselves and your sons!”

“What is it, Beadle?” asked the tailor. “A pogrom?”

“Not that,” the beadle replied, his voice still shaking. “Oh, hurry, brothers, hurry! It's the Snatchers, the Tsar's kidnapers, and with them ride an army of Cossack soldiers.”

“The Snatchers!” the cry went up in alarm as all hurried to their homes, for these Snatchers were the crudest, most heartless measure the Tsar had ever devised. Eager to rid his lands of Jewish subjects, the Tsar, pretending benevolence, had offered first-class citizenship to all those Jews who would convert to Christianity. But the Jewish people remained steadfast, and the Tsar, even further angered by these “ignorant, stubborn wretches,” sent out bands of kidnapers to those areas of his empire where he permitted Jews to live. The evil purpose of these kidnapers was to snatch little Jewish lads, not more than seven or eight years of age, tear them from their mothers and their homes, and send them to peasant Christian families in distant reaches of the Tsar's vast realm, where in hapless servitude they would daily be forced to go against the teachings of their faith. For twenty-five long years such captivity was theirs to endure, the latter part to be spent as unwilling conscripts in the Tsar's brutal army. By that time, gloated the ruthless Tsar, all ties with their heritage and origin would be forgotten.

As the tailor and his sons hurried through the darkened streets, fierce Cossack soldiers already crowded the pathways. Troops of burly, red-cheeked young men sat astride sturdy stallions, and the mouths of these sleek beasts foamed and steamed in the frost. A wail went up throughout the village, and from one end to the other could be heard the voice of the cobbler's widow, Teibel, crying, “Please, sirs, please! I implore you! Take pity on me! What am I but a poor, lone widow? And what is he but my one, only son and barely an infant?” But the widow's pleas were of no avail and the screaming, woebegone youth was dragged off amidst his mother's weeping.

Quickly the tailor bade all his family hide so that when the louts arrived, they would think they had happened on an empty house. But the baby, cradled in its mother's arms under the bed, began to whimper in fright when he heard the heavy, crunching footsteps stalk through the door. Frantically stuffing a cloth a bit further into the infant's mouth, the tailor's wife suddenly gasped in horror. For her sons, hiding in the yard, began to let out terrible, piteous cries: they had fallen into the hands of the snatchers. Hurriedly crawling out of her hiding place, the anguished mother clutched her youngest son to her breast and saw that the infant in her arms had gone limp and lifeless, suffocated by the tiny cloth. Late that night, peasants of the neighborhood, emboldened by drink and encouraged by the Cossack forays, swept through the miserable village, pillaging and plundering as they went.

Just as the drunken peasants are finishing off, a noise starts to come from the kitchen like a hundred toilets flushing. Ppshh, wuschsh, swishchh, it comes and goes: my mother is speaking Polish with Eva the Refugee. In Poland, my mother said, it rained constantly from Rosh Hashanah straight to Simchas Torah and rained again from Purim all the way to Pesach, and that's why when people speak Polish it sounds like a rainstorm. Not that Eva the Refugee thinks so. She comes up to see my mother when she gets the feeling that she has to speak Polish. As far as I'm concerned, if she opened up an umbrella and used a little imagination it would be just as good. But there's no one else around she can speak Polish to, not even her husband, Fritz, who's so German-looking—with his glasses that have no frames and his strange smile—that he lived underground in Germany for the whole war without anyone finding him out. What happened to Eva, though, wasn't so lucky; every time she wears a short-sleeved dress, the whole building has to see the blue number on her arm and think of the terrible life she had. When she first moved in, it was this blue number that made all the other women in the building, the cows especially, keep away from her completely, but when they found out how talented she was in gossiping, all her worries were over.

In her tiny ground-floor apartment where she lives with her husband and her fat little son, Eva sits at her window which looks out on the front court and watches everything, from early in the morning when I leave for school till very late at night when all the Mah-Jongg games are over. And these are the things she knows: what person's daughter who goes to art school and is engaged for the second time had a big fight with her boyfriend in the lobby at one in the morning, and refused to give back the ring till he tried to pull it off her finger; what very skinny woman with no children went running down to someplace in the South and came back with a baby girl that she says isn't adopted but when you take a good look into the carriage what you see is the face of a Southern
shiksa;
what boy's mother got so furious when he didn't make the SP that she went to school and tried to force the principal into telling her her son's IQ, and when he wouldn't, how this person's mother carried on so much that the principal was ready to call the police; what person's children have to go running all over the building looking for televisions to watch even though there is one in their own living room, but all it gets is snow and ghosts because this person's husband is so cheap that he won't give Rappaport a two-dollar-a-month increase for a roof antenna. There are smaller things she watches too. To my mother she says, “I didn't know your daughter was starting a new fashion with high socks—one up and one falling down all over her ankle.” And to Stuie Greenzweig's mother, “In case you never thought about it, it's possible for a boy to walk out of the house every day at three-thirty with Hebrew books in his hand and where his feet take him doesn't have to be Hebrew School.” So there are people who would be happier if Eva would move, just to a different apartment.

Even Dora Rappaport, the landlord's wife, begs Eva to go into a bigger apartment: every time she sits in her beautiful house in Long Beach and thinks of Eva with the number on her arm in that tiny apartment, it makes her nauseous. But Eva isn't interested. To Rappaport and anyone else who asks, she says that she and her husband are saving up for a house on the Island. But the truth is that if Eva ever had to give up her ground-floor front-courtyard window, she would have no place to put her talents.

Anyway, what Eva really wants has nothing to do with apartments or houses, it doesn't even have anything to do with watching people from windows. What Eva really wants is a baby daughter, and what it has to do with is the blue number on her arm. Once, a long time ago in Europe before the Nazis came, Eva was married to someone else, not Fritz, and had two little daughters. When the Nazis came around and started taking people away, they told everyone that they just needed people to do work, and that they would put all the children in special nurseries so that the mothers, who were working, wouldn't have to be bothered. But when they got to Eva's older sister Anzhia, who was beautiful, with long red hair, and played the flute like a bird, she refused to be separated from her children, and what happened to Anzhia was that she and her three children were shot with a gun right then and there. When Eva saw this, what she should have done is hide—quick, one, two, three—with her two little daughters under the bed, and then be very careful about how she stuffed cloths. But what she did do was let her children be taken separately, and because she never saw them again, what she would like to have now is a daughter.