“I wish,” Sonya began. “I cannot,” she tried again. “There is no arrangement in London for refugee children,” she finally said. “Only in the villages.”
“I am no child. I am seventeen.”
Sonya shook her head.
The lids dropped. “Sixteen. Truly, madame.”
“Call me Sonya.”
“Merci. Madame Sonya, I am sixteen next month, if I had my papers I could prove it, but my papers were lost, everything was lost, even the photographs of my father, only the violin …” Lotte swallowed. “I will be sixteen in three weeks. Please believe me.”
“I do.” Mrs. Levinger was glancing at them; other children needed attention. “You must go to the Cotswolds now,” Sonya said. “I’ll try to make some better arrangement.”
Lotte said, “Empty words,” and turned away.
“No!” Was she always to be denied sentiment, must she be only efficient forever? — she who was moderately musical. “I love gypsy tunes. Look, this is my address,” she said, scribbling on some brown paper. “I will try to find you a café, or maybe a …”
Lotte took the paper. Sonya’s last sight of her was on the train, a different train from the one Sonya herself was taking. Lotte stood in the aisle, clasping the violin to her thin chest.
“I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU A RING,” Eugene said.
“Oh!”
“I may be interned.”
“It won’t happen,” she said, fervently. But it was happening every day. Aliens suspected of being spies — Jews among them — were shut up in yellow prisons.
Eugene said, “My other suit, my piano scores — they can fend for themselves. But my mother’s ring — I owe it respect. It eluded German customs, it eluded also my own conscience.”
She glanced at him. In the light of the gas fire his skin looked as dark as the geranium.
“I should have sold it to repay my rescuers,” he explained. “But it is only a little diamond. And it meant much to my mother.”
“Ah … your father gave it to her.”
“Her lover gave it to her. My mother was born in Lyon; in Berlin she retained her French attitude toward marriage. And then, of course, my father was so much older.”
“Older?” A dozen years separated Sonya and Eugene — she had recently turned fifty-two without mentioning it.
“Twenty years older.” Eugene fished in his pocket. Something twinkled. He put it into her palm.
Two weeks afterward he was taken away.
II.
BY THE BEGINNING of Sonya’s second year in London she had acquired women friends and men friends and a favorite tearoom and two favorite pubs and several favorite walks. She had adopted the style of the women around her — cotton dresses, low-heeled shoes — but she spurned the brave little hats. She swept her gray hair back from her brow and pinned barrettes behind her ears. Her hair curved like annoyed feathers below the barrettes.
She knew where to get necessaries on the black market. Occasionally, for her small clients, she used that knowledge. Sometimes she used it for herself — a bottle of contraband cognac was stashed at the bottom of her armoire waiting for Eugene’s return.
She went to lectures in drafty halls. She went to briefings with people who had recently returned from Vichy and Salonika and Haifa. She went to patched-together concert operas and to stunning theatricals — once, in a theater, she heard Laurence Olivier’s voice rise above the sound of bombs.
She attended exhibitions of new watercolors. A few times, during the summer, she bathed at Brighton. “You must play!” Mrs. Levinger ordered. She received letters from friends in Rhode Island and her aunt in Chicago and the fat man in New York and the tenor and Eugene. She kept track of that first tubercular boy, visited him in his seaside sanatorium. The Yiddish of her childhood stirred, necessarily, during the early visits, but after a few months she discovered that the new words he was learning stuck to him like burrs. Soon they spoke only English. Together they watched the slate-colored sea. Sitting next to his little chaise, his translucent hand in hers, she told him about the hurricane that had sliced her own life in two. “A tall wave smashed onto our cove.”
“A hill of water,” he experimented. “Yes, yes! A mountain.”
She kept in touch with the sister, too, in her berth in a cottage. A year after the boy was taken away, Sonya and Mrs. Levinger presided over the reunion of the children, the girl rosy, the boy pale but free of disease. The foster mother agreed to take him, too. “For she pines, she does,” said that kindly soul.
“OF COURSE YOU REMEMBER Roland Rosenberg,” Mrs. Levinger said.
“Of course.” They shook hands. He was a little less fat, but it would be tactless to say so. They spoke of work in an unnecessary way — it was as if she knew by heart the papers in his shapeless briefcase, as if he could trace each line on her face back to the situation that had drawn it there. But they did talk, some, in a gloomy restaurant. His table manners were terrible. His handkerchief was a disgrace. That peculiar smile recurred now and again — upturned lips, a look of wonder. Mark Twain, he told her, was a passion with him. Someday he wanted to follow Twain’s journey around the world.
“And the composers you like?” she idly asked.
“Franz Lehár is my favorite.”
Lehár: beloved by Hitler. “Oh dear,” Sonya said.
“Shameful, isn’t it. The Joint should fire me.”
There was no cab. When was there ever a cab? He walked her home. “I will be back someday,” he said.
“Good.” Good? What were they doing to Eugene?
“THE NEW YORK TIMES, please,” she said one evening, and took the paper from the distinguished gentleman. Standing at the kiosk, she looked at the front page. The war occupied most of it, though there were city scandals, too. The Dakotas were suffering a drought. She folded the paper under her arm — she would read it by lamplight, at home; there were no air raids nowadays.
From his recess he rumbled: “How are you, Miss Sofrankovitch?”
She turned back. “… Okay, thanks.”
“I have newspapers from Belgrade today, a rare event.”
“Ah, I don’t read Yugoslavian.”
“No? You read French, perhaps. I have—”
“Not really. And not German, either,” she anticipated. “I can read elementary Hebrew, Mr…. ”
“Smith.”
“Smith.” She peered at him, and at the darkness behind him.
“My own parents sold newspapers,” she confided.
“Indeed.”
“Yes, in a store. They sold cigarettes also. Candies, notions. Notions — an Americanism — perhaps you are not familiar with it.”
“Haven’t a notion!” He turned his attention to the next customer. Business first, of course; but how urgently Sonya now wanted to describe to him that small round couple, her parents, that pair of innocents to whom she had been born long after they had given up the idea of family. By then the store itself was their issue — a close, warm cave. In it she grew into a tall girl; graduated from high school, from normal school; from it she married a handsome and untrustworthy boy. She kept the marriage going, and the store too, until both parents were safely dead.
Mr. Smith disposed of his customer. Sonya leaned across the shelf of newspapers. The interior, big enough for two if the two were disposed to be friendly, was adorned with magazines clipped to bare boards, and advertisements for beer. The place was redolent of tobacco, the fragrance of her childhood. She remembered Eugene’s bad teeth, made browner still by his cigarette habit. She inhaled. “I sold the place during the Depression,” she told Mr. Smith. He leaned against a poster: loose lips lose lives. She withdrew her upper body from the booth and again stood erect, continuing her history. “I sold the living quarters, too. I rented an apartment and also bought a … house, a house on the shore. It was destroyed by the hurricane, but perhaps here you didn’t know of the hurricane.”