“Even so,” Sonya said. “A set of chessmen came in with the allotments yesterday. It is lacking only a pawn. A stone — can you employ a stone?”
“Yes. Also my uncle keeps his corns in a box for just such purposes.”
Sonya dragged a rickety chair to the wall underneath a shelf, and climbed up on it, and retrieved the box of chessmen. She gave it to Ludwig.
He was scurrying off when Ida said, “Wait.” Ida was the secretary, a Person who had been a milliner Before. “I will tell about Purim, you should know, a Jewish boy like you.”
He paused mid-flight, back against the wall, eyes wide as if under a searchlight. “In Shu, Shu, Shushan long ago,” Ida said in English, with a nod to Sonya, then continued in German, “there was a king, Ahasuerus; and a general, Haman; and Mordecai, a wise Jew who spent his time by the gates of the palace. King Ahasuerus’s queen offended him so he called for a new queen. Mordecai …” and she used an unfamiliar word.
Sonya ruffled through her German-English dictionary. “Procured? I’m not sure …”
“… procured his niece, Esther,” Ida said, her dark eyes insistent. “Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman arranged to murder the Jews. Esther, the new queen now, urged Ahasuerus to stop the murder. The Jews were saved.”
“Procured …” Sonya still objected, and Ludwig, still pinned to the wall, said, “It was a miracle, then.”
“A miracle,” Ida said, and nodded.
“I do not believe in miracles, especially miracles accomplished by the fuck.” The word wedged its Anglo-Saxon bluntness into the German polysyllables. The vocabulary of children had been augmented by American servicemen. But the GIs were not responsible for the hasty and brutal lovemaking Ludwig had witnessed in forest huts, in barns by the side of the road, in damp Marseille basements.
“A girl with good looks and a beautiful hat can work miracles,” Ida said. “Withholding the fuck. And that word, Ludwig, it is improper.” She returned to her typewriter. Ludwig ran away.
Sonya, who had more to do today than three people could accomplish in a week, strolled to the narrow window. It was February, mid-afternoon. Shadows were deepening in the courtyard formed by the long wooden barracks so hastily abandoned by the Wehr-macht that Persons continued to find gun parts, buttons, medals, and fragments of letters (“Heinz, Leibling, Der Kinder …”). There was still a triangle of sunlight in the courtyard, though, and ragged children were playing within it, and Ludwig should be among them, would have been among them if he weren’t a peculiar child who preferred the company of adults.
The year was 5707 by biblical reckoning and 1947 by the Christian calendar. The Purim party would begin after dinner. There would be pastries — hamantaschen: Haman’s hats. Without those pastries the holiday might as well be ignored; without those pastries the megillah — the tale, written on a scroll — might as well be stuffed into a cistern. Tonight’s necessary hamantaschen — they would be a joke. Men who had been chefs Before knew how to bake Sacher tortes, linzer tortes, all kinds of sweets; but where was the sugar, where the nuts? Today, using coarse flour and butter substitute and thin smears of blackberry preserves, they would bake ersatz hamantaschen, one or two per individual. Sonya did not know whether the practical bakers considered babies individuals, though babies certainly counted to the Red Cross and the American command — each infant received its own vitamin-laced chocolate bars and its own Spam and its own cigarettes. Sonya could not procure sufficient tinned milk, however … As for the meal preceding the party, it would consist of the usual dreck: watery spinach soup, potatoes, and black bread. Eisenhower had decreed that the Displaced Persons camps be awarded two thousand calories per Person per day; decent of him, but the general couldn’t keep count of newcomers, they came in so fast.
“In my atelier I served the most distinguished and cosmopolitan women,” Ida mused, her hands at rest on the typewriter keyboard. “I fashioned turbans and cloches and toques.”
“Cartwheels and mantillas,” encouraged Sonya, who had heard this reminiscence before.
“I spoke five languages. I made —”
“Sonya!” came the voice of Roland, Roland Rosenberg, Sonya’s codirector. “Sonya?” and he followed his voice into the office, his eyes flickering over the beauteous Ida and coming to rest on Sonya’s narrow visage. He still had a fat man’s grace, even a fat man’s circumference, though he was losing weight like all the staff. “Sonya, the Chasids in the north building refused to share their megillah. They boycotted the general service.”
“The Enlightenment Society also boycotted,” Ida remarked. “They held a seminar on Spinoza.”
“The blackberry jam — there’s so little of it. Goddamn!” Sonya said. She was subject to sudden ferocity these days. It was the Change, Ida told her knowingly, though Ida herself was only thirty-five.
“Poppy seeds — why couldn’t they send poppy seeds,” said Roland. “I requested poppy seeds.” Consulting a list, he left as unceremoniously as he had entered.
“Roland, it’s all right,” Sonya called after him. “The kindly German farmers — they will certainly butcher some calves for our party.” She was in the doorway now, but he had rounded the corner. “Whipped cream will roll in like surf.” She raised her voice, though he was surely out of earshot. “General Eisenhower — he will personally attend.”
“Sonya,” Ida said in a severe tone. “It is time for your walk.”
ABOUT PURIM LUDWIG HAD DISSEMBLED. Feigning ignorance was always a good idea; know-it-alls, he’d observed, tended to get beaten up or otherwise punished. In fact, he’d already heard the story of Esther, several times. First from the young man in the room next door, the one with the radiant face. Ludwig, recognizing the radiance, predicted that the young man would get caught in the next X-ray roundup. Meanwhile the feverish fellow did a lot of impromptu lecturing, even haranguing. Did he think he was the Messiah? grumbled Uncle Claud. One day last week he’d gathered a bunch of children around him and recited the Purim tale. He made a good thing of it, Ludwig thought from the periphery of the circle; he almost foamed at the mouth when reciting the finale, the hanging of Haman and his ten sons, the slaughter of the three hundred conspirators. Then the story had been taken up in the schoolroom on the second floor of the north building, where grimy windows overlooked in succession the one-storied kitchen and the grubby garden, all root vegetables — well, this was a stony patch, said Uncle Claud, his voice rumbling like a baron’s; we cannot expect the chanterelles we scraped from the rich soil in the south of France. Past the garden a road led between farms to the village of tiled roofs. Beyond the village green hills gently folded. The Judaica teacher, not looking through the window at this familiar view, had begun the Purim story by reading it in Hebrew, which maybe half a dozen kids could understand. He translated into Yiddish and also Russian. His version, a droning bore in all three languages, insisted that the Lord, not Esther, had intervened to save the Jews. The history teacher said that night that there was no justification for this interpretation in Scripture. A day later the philosophy professor referred to the story as a metaphor.
“Metaphor?” Ludwig inquired, and presently learned the meaning of the term. He loved learning. He liked to hang around the office because Roland, without making a big thing of it, let fall so many bits of knowledge, farted them out like a horse. Sonya, too, was interesting to observe, hating to argue but having to argue, hating to persuade but having to persuade. She’d rather be by herself, reading or dreaming, Ludwig could tell; she reminded him of his mother … And Ida with her deep beautiful eyes and her passionate determination to go to Palestine; if only Uncle Claud would fuck her, maybe all three would end up in the Holy Land, well, not so holy, but not a barracks, either. He’d heard that people there lived in tents with camels dozing outside. But Uncle Claud preferred men.