He walked quickly toward the village and up the dirt path toward the small house with the familiar cast-iron door handle in the shape of a tail Karel had given him with a wink the day before his wedding. He’d had such trouble attaching it. Finally Karel had simply soldered it on. He touched the melted part of the metal where the soldering iron had done its work. The door handle had survived. Even the plants (Genya’s roses, her potato patch) bloomed, no worse for the years between in which the whole world had reveled in an orgy of red, bloody slaughter… The door handle was fine. The earth, unvaryingly fertile.
He knocked on the door. An unfamiliar woman answered, opening it slowly. When he told her who he was, she let the door go and threw her apron over her head with a sob, running out the back door.
The living room was filled with strange bare wooden pieces he did not recognize. Except for the hand-stitched pillow on the couch and a few vases and pictures, he recognized nothing as belonging to him. He picked up the pillow and traced the fine, small stitches in red and green thread in the pattern of a single rose. He remembered the small, childish white hands holding the tiny needle, the way the hands would fall on the full, pregnant belly to rest, the belly that had held his first-born son, Benjamin.
Strangers crowded around the door, and the woman in the apron returned with her husband and others. Their suspicious, frightened eyes darted toward the pillow in his hands. Only one of them he recognized: Vladek Kushner, whose family had always lived down the street and whose younger brother had been one grade below him at the gymnasium.
“Aaron!” Vladek said, extending his hand sorrowfully.
Had he been one of those who had stood at their doors laughing and clapping as the Germans rounded up Genya, Benjamin, and little Rivka? His wife and his children? Oh, yes, that is what they did, those friends and neighbors. Stood by their doors and laughed. Enough people had survived to remember and to tell. He looked at Vladek’s hand, wondering. But then, he’d taken it. It was not in his nature to refuse friendship.
“Tell them it is my house, Vladek.”
There was silence. “These are cousins from Slovania. They mean no harm.”
“They are living in my house, the home of my wife and children…”
“The house was empty!” the woman protested. “We found nothing here. It was filthy, neglected. We took care of it.” Her voice rose.
And who emptied it? he thought, but did not say, because he did not want to hear excuses and see the faces turn hard. Because he felt a sudden deep hatred of which he was not particularly proud. So instead he said in his soft, gentle way, “You needn’t worry. I have not come back to live here. I simply want my things.”
“We found nothing… The house was empty of everything when we came. I swear!” the woman screamed and pleaded.
Aaron walked through the house, filling his arms with his belongings and then walked out the front door and dumped them on the ground in a great pile. And each time he went back, a few more people had gathered around to watch.
“You see that house down there, that’s Malek’s house. He took your bedroom set,” an older woman told him with malicious pleasure. “What are you going to do about it?”
“And the Husaks took the china closet and the wardrobe,” someone else called out to him. And all of a sudden everyone was surrounding him, telling him the details of the pillaging, the carrion eating.
“Does anyone have a wagon? Just for the afternoon, to load all my things? I will give you a good price,” Aaron suddenly asked.
“I will bring you one,” offered a man he didn’t recognize.
They arranged to meet in the evening in front of the tavern.
Like a general with orders, he went mechanically and methodically from house to house, loading the tables and chairs, the cabinets and hope chests, the mirrors and silver candlesticks, ignoring the protests of the outraged housewives who had come to think of these things as their own, staring coldly into the averted and guilty eyes of the men, some of whom he knew.
They had been his friends and neighbors.
By the time he climbed up into the wagon, it was early evening. He sat behind the reins for a long time, uncertain about what to do next, until lengthening shadows flung themselves greedily over the wagon, distorting all his familiar belongings into strange, sinister shapes.
He sat there a long time, watching the moon rise over the village of his boyhood, the same moon he had seen on his way home from the cinema, the same moon that had cast its lovely, silver glow over him and a young woman as they’d held hands beneath the old, fragrant trees.
But it was not the same.
Nothing
. . . The word stuck in his mind, refusing to be part of a sentence. Nothing, he thought, a great wave of exhaustion, disgust and despair draining him of all his life forces. So tired. Could you be so tired and still be alive? He knew you could, because he had walked to Siberia with rags on his feet, sleeping as he walked. He had lived through that. He was suddenly sorry he had not simply lain down in the snow like so many others. He had lived for one thought: Genya, the children. To see them again.
But now… nothing.
But because he’d promised to return the wagon and the
man was waiting for it, he slapped the reins and got the horses moving. The man was standing outside.
“Where do you want to unload?” he asked, but before he could answer, a voice called out his name. He turned.
At first, he didn’t see anything familiar about the old man, but then he suddenly recognized him.
“Manik?”
“Yes.”
He was the barber. How many times had he sat on that old chair smelling of peppermint and cigar smoke, those large, kind hands turning his head this way and that? Once, when he was a little boy, he remembered crying and being given a large piece of rock candy.
And suddenly everything fell into place. “Here, Manik. Take everything.” He hugged him and handed him the reins, then he turned his back and walked toward the train station, taking only the small bag he’d come with.
He went into the transit station and took a piece of bread and a bowl of soup. She was sitting nearby, the young woman with the thick auburn hair and the modest blouse.
“You look tired,” she said hesitantly, like a woman who is not accustomed to speaking to strangers.
“You are not from here. Why did you get off the train?” he asked her.
“I…” She blushed. “I had some stomach trouble and needed to be near a bathroom.”
The blush, the idea that such delicacy had survived, made him want to weep.
She ran her fingers nervously over the collar of her blouse. He could see that it had been scrubbed and bleached and starched and ironed. She had taken time to do it. It had been important to her. If she could do that, after all she’d been through… If she could still care about that…
It was at that moment he fell in love with her and decided to live. To build a new home that would be filled with lovely new things: closets full of beautiful, new clothes; new furniture, and new children.
They were married ten months later with two other couples in one of those quick, mass weddings so common among grieving survivors after the war. The ceremony had taken place in some Czechoslovakian town along the train route neither one had ever heard of. They began again, a new apartment, a small factory making buttons. Rivkie’s birth. A small new life to fill the emptiness in those closed chambers of his heart he couldn’t bear to open.
Then the communists had taken over, grabbing him one day on his way to work, forcing him to help build a new munitions factory. The very same night, he wrote to relatives in Brooklyn to sponsor them for American immigration quotas. They’d put their names on the list, and two years later their number had come up.
He gave the key of his thriving little business to one of his workers and walked away, never looking back. Another start. A new language. A new country. A new struggle to earn a living.
Aaron Gottlieb opened his eyes. Newrose Avenue. His stop. He felt the cool outdoor air touch his wet face, drying his sweat-filled clothes as he stepped onto the outdoor platform. He shifted his briefcase from arm to arm. It was suddenly so heavy, he wasn’t sure he could carry it all the way home. He suddenly felt he had no strength left.
Dinner was on the table when he walked in.
“Go, darling. Take a shower. We’ll wait for you,” Ruth urged him, taking his jacket and briefcase.
He held her briefly around the waist, feeling the familiar, pliant give of her flesh beneath his hand. She smelled so clean. He suddenly didn’t want to touch her, as if his unhappiness were something unclean and contaminating.
The shower revived his body but not his spirit, which lay upon him like a heavy winter blanket on a hot summer night.
After dinner Rivkie disappeared. When she came back, she was wearing a beautiful new suit.
“
Tateh
,” she said hesitantly with a big smile, “what do you think?”
He looked up from his paper at his pretty teenage daughter in the rose-colored suit. She looked lovely. And the suit looked very expensive.
“You went shopping?” He looked at Ruth, who bit her lower lip.
“I didn’t mean to.” Rivkie smiled. “I was just in the city and found myself in Abraham and Straus, and they had this reduced rack… Oh,
Tateh
, it’s pure wool, a real Pendleton, and it’s three-piece—two skirts and a jacket, so it’s really like two outfits for the price of one…”
“How much did it cost,
maideleh?
” he asked calmly, his heart sinking.
“Now, Aaron,” Ruth placated him, “she needs clothes, and she has been good about not shopping so much lately…”
“How much?” Aaron Gottlieb asked patiently, closing his eyes.
“It was reduced from seventy-five dollars!” Rivkie said with clear-eyed triumph, though her voice was still a little anxious.
“Rivkie!”
“It cost fifty dollars,” she whispered, fiddling with the buttons, averting her eyes.
“
Fifty dollars!
” Dresses cost $15.99-$20.00 was already expensive. But
fifty dollars!?
It was an enormous amount of money. Beads of perspiration sprang up like a crown of thorns around his head.
“I know it sounds like a lot of money,
Tateh
, but just feel the quality,” Rivkie said in a sweet, wheedling voice, moving
quickly and taking his hand to rub against the fine new fabric. “Aren’t you always telling us that it pays to buy good quality, that in the long run it saves money? I mean, I’ll get so much use out of this, and Tamar will have it next.”
The fact that Tamar was already two sizes larger than Rivkie did not seem to figure in these calculations. And since Aaron Gottlieb had no idea about women’s sizes, he didn’t ask.
“What did you pay with?” he asked softly.
“Well, I gave her some money for clothes I’d been saving,” Ruth answered reluctantly.
“But that was for you! To buy yourself something, wasn’t it? Weren’t you saving that for yourself? To buy yourself something new, Ruth?” He felt a lump in his throat.
“Me?” She laughed a little ruefully. “What do I need new
schmattes
for? Rivkie needs clothes. She’s a
kallah moide
.”
“She’s only sixteen, Ruth. She’s not getting married tomorrow.”
“Oh, but you know the busy tongues, you know what it is. She doesn’t dress nice, already there’s talk, there’s trouble. Already the phone doesn’t ring so fast with
shidduchim
. It’s not too early to worry, Aaron, believe me.”
He believed her. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. The salty perspiration stung his torn cuticles.
“Come,
mamaleh
, turn around, show us again how beautiful,” Ruth urged her daughter.
Rivkie obliged willingly.
That night Aaron Gottlieb had a strange dream. “Here is a letter,” Ruth told him in his dream, handing him a large white envelope. “Deliver it or the children will die. I will die.” She was wearing a tattered pair of his old army pants, an old shirt with a strangely white, starched collar. He found himself walking down a long corridor with no exits. He felt a sense of urgency that made him walk at a pace far too fast for him, so that he had a feeling
of exhaustion and resentment. He wasn’t sure where he was walking to, and suddenly he was. He was supposed to find something. He was alone, but the thing he was supposed to find, it was not for himself. Ruth was waiting for it, and the girls. He began to push himself, but the faster he walked, the longer the corridor became, with no end in sight.
Then all at once he spied a door, and a sense of relief coursed through him. If he could just reach the door, he would be able to get what it was they were waiting for, and he could rest. The door loomed closer and closer. He reached out to touch the handle, and the moment he touched it, he remembered the letter Ruth had given him. But it was not there anymore, and he didn’t know where in the corridor he had dropped it. Now they would all die, and it would be his fault.
He wept, large gulping sobs that woke his wife. She shook him gently, than harshly, with a frightened urgency.
“Aaron, what is it? A bad dream, darling? . . . Darling! What!?”
But he couldn’t stop. He wept and wept and wept.
Tamar and Rivkie came running in. They stood at the door of their parents’ bedroom, appalled.
“
Go back to sleep girls!
” Ruth screamed at them.
“
Mameh
, what’s the matter with
Tateh?
” Tamar ran to her, putting her arms around her mother’s slim shoulders. “
Mameh, Mameh
. It’s Tamar. What’s wrong?”
“A bad dream, that’s all,” Ruth murmured, her eyes stunned.
“Call a doctor,
Mameh
,” Rivkie pleaded.
“
No!
No one must see him like this! He wouldn’t want that. Please girls, if you want to help, go to sleep. I will take care of your father. Go now. Go!” she commanded them.
The sisters looked at each other, and then at their weeping father and frightened mother. They didn’t want to leave. But out
of long ingrained habit of doing their parents’ bidding even when it went against their own ideas and desires (they were good Ohel Sara girls), they did what they were told.