How to Fall (18 page)

“Put on The Garment,” she called after him.

But when he came out of the bedroom he was wearing one of his usual white shirts.

“Before you came here—what did you do?” Mrs. Levinger asked during Sonya's first month in London.

“Books.”

“Wrote?”

“Kept.”

“Well, then. Think of this enterprise as a balance sheet. On balance the children are better off. Don't you have a handkerchief, Sonya? Take mine.”

The sort of incident that triggered this exchange—the removal of a child from his cohort by medical personnel—would occur frequently, but Sonya had just witnessed it for the first time: the kindly faces of doctor and nurse; the impassivity of the other children, imperfectly concealing their panic. Many wore cardboard
placards, like Broadway sandwich men. LONDON, LONDRES, LOND, ENGLAND, the boards variously said.

“There is something a little wrong with your chest,” the doctor had told the child, in German.

“We will make it well,” said the nurse, in French.

The little boy spoke only Polish and Yiddish. He spoke them one after the other as he was led away. Then he screamed them, one after the other, stiffening his legs so as not to walk. “Mama!” he called as he was lifted up, though his mother was no doubt dead. “Big sister!” he cried as he was carried off, though his big sister, a girl of eight, had fallen to the floor.

“You will get used to it,” said Mrs. Levinger to Sonya. “Oh, dear.”

 

Sonya was an American in town for the War. For several summers in the recent past she had led a gypsy life on the Rhode Island coast—danced on the beach, shared a one-room house with an ageing tenor who loved her to distraction. These facts were a matter of indifference to Mrs. Levinger and the rest of beseiged London . . . or would have been a matter of indifference if Sonya had broadcast her history. But she said little about herself. When, during the previous year, friends in Providence (her home during the three seasons that weren't summer) begged to know why she was going abroad, throwing up her jobs (she taught Hebrew at Sunday School and she kept accounts for various small enterprises) . . . when people posed these questions, Sonya answered, “Because of the hurricane.”

Her beach house had four slanted walls and an uncertain roof. No electricity, no running water. The hurricane of 1938 lifted the place from its cement foundation and spun off with it. Not a stick of Sonya's belongings was ever recovered—not the woodburning
stove, the chemical toilet, the teapot, the garments hanging on hooks. In the weeks that followed the storm she sat in her hillside Providence apartment and stared at the center of town, also ravaged but gradually repairing itself. But her own life would not be repaired; she was already sliding into unrelieved respectability. Somebody would sooner or later ask her to marry him—despite middle age, despite lack of beauty, somebody sometimes did. The tenor had already proposed. She feared that, no longer buoyed by her annual summer of freedom, she would weakly say yes.

So she had offered herself instead to the American Joint Distribution Committee, affectionately called the Joint. She went to New York for an interview. The interviewer, an overweight man in shirt sleeves and a rumpled vest, said, “Good that you speak Hebrew.”

“I don't, you know,” Sonya told him. “I have enough Biblical Hebrew to teach classes Aleph and Beth.”

“If you are sent to Palestine your Hebrew will improve,” he said. And, glancing down at her dossier: “You speak French.”

“I studied French in high school, that's what it says. Once, in Quebec, I ordered a glass of wine. And Yiddish—I haven't used it in decades.”

Their eyes met. “The situation in Europe is desperate,” he said. “One thousand Polish-German Jews have been expelled by Germany and refused by Poland and are starving and freezing and dying of dysentery in a no-man's land between the two countries. Many are children. Several organizations are working together to help—and working together is not, I see you studied Latin as well, our normal
modus operandi.
Two Jews, three opinions, I'm sure you understand.” He checked his flow with a visible effort. His mouth opened and closed several times but he managed not to speak.

“I'll do any job,” she said in this interval. “I just don't want you to count on languages.”

“Do you sing? We find people who sing are comfortable in our work.”

“I am moderately musical.” Very moderately. She thought of the tenor. She could still say Yes. But she did not want to become a caretaker.

The fat man's gaze loosened at last. He looked out the window. “All agencies are working together to get these people from Zbaszyn into England. For this, for all our efforts, we need staff members who are efficient and unsentimental. Languages are of secondary importance. The Joint trusts my judgment.”

She signed a sort of contract. Then she said, “You should know, I am occasionally sentimental.”

A smile, or something like it, landed on his large face and immediately scurried off. She suspected that, like many fat men, he danced well.

Sonya took the train back to Providence. After several months she learned that she would be sent to London and there loaned to another Organization, one helping refugee children. Then came a steamer ticket. Rapidly she put the books of her clients into order, and stored her furniture, and gave herself a good-bye party in the emptied apartment. She took the train again and in New York boarded a ship bound for Southampton. The fat man showed up to say good-bye, carrying a spray of gladiolas.

“How kind,” she said, trying not to shudder at the funereal flowers.

“It is not the usual procedure,” he admitted.

By the time Sonya arrived at the London office the displaced Polish-Germans were already rescued or lost. But War had been declared. There was plenty of work to be done.

 

The Joint found her a bed-sitter in Camden Town. The landlady and her family lived on the ground floor; otherwise the place was home to unattached people. Each room had a gas fire and a cooker. It took Sonya a while to get used to the smells. She had to get used to footsteps, too—there was no carpet, and everyone on the upper floors traveled past Sonya's room. There was an old lady with twittering feet. “My dear,” she said whenever she saw Sonya. A large man looked at her with yellow-eyed interest. His slow footsteps sounded like pancakes dropped from a height. An elderly man lightly marched. With his impressive bearing and his white mustache he resembled an ambassador, but he was the proprietor of the neighborhood newsstand. Two secretaries tripped out together every morning after curling their hair with tongs. The first time Sonya smelled singed hair she thought the house was on fire. And there was a lame man of about forty, their only foreigner. Sonya didn't count herself as foreign; she was an American cousin. But the lame man—he had a German accent.

He had dark skin and bad teeth. Eyebrows sheltered glowing brown eyes—eyes that seemed to be reflecting a fire even when they were merely glancing at envelopes on the hall table. His legs were of differing lengths—that accounted for the limp. Sonya recognized his limping progress whenever he came up or down the staircase: ONE pause Two, ONE pause Two; and whenever he passed her door: ONE Two, ONE Two, ONE Two.

The children came, wave after wave of them. Polish children, Austrian children, Hungarian children, German children. Some came like parcels bought from the governments who withheld passports from their parents. These children wore coats, and each carried a satchel. Some came in unruly bands, having lived like squirrels in the mountains or like rats by the rivers. Some came escorted by social workers who couldn't wait to get rid of them. Few understood English. Some knew only Yiddish. Some had infectious diseases. Some seemed feebleminded; but it turned out that they had been only temporarily enfeebled by hardship.

They slept for a night or two in a seedy hotel near the Waterloo station. Sonya and Mrs. Levinger, who directed the Agency, stayed in the hotel too, intending to sleep—they were always tired, for the bombing had begun. But the women failed to sleep, for the children—not crying; they rarely cried—wandered through the halls, or hid in closets smoking cigarettes, or went up and down the lift. The next day, or the next day but one, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger escorted them to their quarters in the countryside, and deposited them with stout farm families, these Viennese who had never seen a cow; or left them in hastily assembled orphanages staffed with elderly schoolteachers, these Berliners who had known only the tender hands of nursemaids; or stashed them in a Bishop's Palace, these Polish children for whom Christians were the devil. The Viennese kids might have found the Palace suitable; the Hungarians would have formed a vigorous troupe within the orphanage; the little Poles, familiar with chickens, might have become comfortable on the farms. But the billets rarely matched the children. The Organization took what it could get. After the
children were settled, however uneasily, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger rode the train back to London, Mrs. Levinger returning to her husband and Sonya to solitude.

 

For months she nodded at the dark man and he nodded at her.

They said Good Evening.

One day they left the house at the same time, and walked together to the Underground.

He lived two floors above her, he said. She already knew that from her attention to footsteps.

His room contained an upright piano left behind by a previous tenant. He managed to keep it in tune. “A piano is so rare in furnished . . . digs,” he said, seeming to relish the British word.

He was on his way to give piano lessons. His pupils were London children whose parents thus far refused to evacuate them. She was on her way to her office. He left the Tube first. “I hope we meet again, Miss . . .”

“Sofrankovitch,” she said. She didn't tell him that the honorific was properly ‘Mrs.' Her childless marriage had ended long ago.

After that, as if the clock previously governing their lives had been exchanged for a different timepiece, they ran into each other often. They met on the narrow winding High Street. They bought newspapers at the kiosk manned by their distinguished looking housemate. They queued at the greengrocer's, each leaving with a few damaged apples. They found themselves together at the fishmonger's. Both were partial to smoked fish, willing to exchange ration coupons for the luxury.

Often, at night, after he came home from work, after she came home, they sat by her gas fire.

“Providence,” he mused. “And the place of the hurricane?”

“Narragansett.”

“Naghaghansett,” he rolled out, his vowels aristocratically long, his consonants irreparably guttural.

“Something like that,” she smiled into the shadows.

Eugene had never visited the United States, though as a young man he had studied piano in Paris. “Yes, I heard Boulanger.” Except for that heady time he had not left Germany until three years earlier when one of the other refugee Agencies helped him emigrate to London. Still short of forty then, his parents dead, his sister safely married in Shanghai, his ability to make a living secure—he was one of the easy repatriation cases, she supposed.

His father, he told her, had fought for the Kaiser.

She had been a young woman during that War. Yes, she knew that Germany had once been good to its Jews, its Jews faithful to their rulers.

He stretched his long, unmatched legs toward the meager blue flames. “I'm glad we met.”

One noontime—
mirabile dictu,
the New York fat man might have said—they ran into each other far from home, in Kensington Gardens.

“I am attending a concert,” Eugene said. “Come with me.”

“My lunch break . . . not much time.”

“The performers also are on lunch break. You won't be late. You won't be very late,” he corrected, with his usual slight pedantry.

They hurried along the streets leading toward the river, passing bomb craters, and passing shelters of brick, of cement, of corrugated iron. Their own shelter back in Camden Town was an
underground bunker, a crypt, safer than these. But it trembled, sometimes, and then little children cried, and women paled, and men too. Sonya soothed whichever toddler crawled into her lap, and smiled encouragement at the child's mother. It was hard to breathe. Suppose the thing should cave in—they would all suffocate. Being struck above ground, being blasted, being shattered into a thousand pieces like her beach house, that would be better than not breathing . . . There were times she did not go into the shelter at all, but stayed sitting on the floor in her blackedout room, arms around shins. Behind her on the windowsill bloomed a sturdy geranium, red in the daytime, purple in this almost blindness. And if the house should be hit, and if she should be found amidst its shattered moldings and heaps of glass and smoking bricks, her head at an odd angle, her burned hair as black as it had been in her youth . . . if she should be found in the rubble, people would think, if they thought anything at all, that she had slept through the siren. She might have taken a bit too much, the wineshop keeper would say to his wife—he no doubt guessed that his customer sometimes sacrificed food for whisky. She was working so very hard, Mrs. Levinger would remark.