Was that woman Ida? Sonya had never before seen her in lipstick. She must have been hoarding it forever; lucky it hadn’t pulverized. And that brilliant red silk blouse, how come it wasn’t dust … Ida blew a kiss to Sonya and asked Mendel to dance. Mendel’s wife, vastly pregnant, smiled acquiescence. Mendel was dressed in a long black jacket whose wide belt bore a buckle covered in silver foil. Sonya guessed his puritan garb was intended as Lutheran. Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another. It was a heavy cloche with a narrow brim, and it was covered with hundreds of shining bows, or perhaps butterflies, or perhaps ecstatic transparent birds. They caught the light of the candles, transforming that light into ruby twinkles, turquoise wings, flashes of green. Were they silk, those bows butterflies birds? Were they diamonds? Were they real winged creatures? Ida whirled by. Below the iridescent helmet her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck. “We have guests,” Roland said in Sonya’s ear.
She had been ignoring the three American officers, though she had identified their rank, she had noticed their medals, she had recognized the famous grin. “Roland, I am exhausted, my charm whatever there was of it is used up, would you take care of them for a while, Roland? And tell them that your wife will be with them shortly.”
“Wife?”
“Everybody thinks we’re married, why upset that cart …”
“I wish you were my wife. I would like you to be my wife.”
“Yes,” she said, acknowledging his wish, maybe even acceding to it; and then she backed up, backed up, until she collided with the accordionist moving forward. The Persons’ orchestra was taking a break. Sonya sat down at the ruined piano.
She played “You and the Night and the Music.” The missing keys were mostly at either end; the absence of middle A and the B-flat below middle C was a nuisance, but she fudged. She played a Strauss waltz and the waltz from Faust. The smoke thickened like roux. The air in the room was clouded and warm and vital; life itself might have originated in these emanations from burning tobacco. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She played “The Merry Widow.”
The noise increased. There was some yelling: another skit. She saw Ida waltzing with the general. Ida looked up at him from under her hat. As they turned, Sonya saw an inquiring look on her lovely face. As they turned again she saw the look change into one of admiration. As they turned again she saw the look become one of pleasure.
“She’s fucking him,” Ludwig said, in English. He had taken off his black king’s barrel. He was seated on the bench beside her. He smelled of brandy. “I am employing a metaphor,” he explained.
The general danced a two-step with Ida’s cubicle mate, the little old lady who came alive at dusk. He danced the Kozachok with a group of Ukrainians. He danced another waltz with Ida. And then, twenty minutes later, Sonya and Roland and Ludwig and Ida and a dozen others stood at the gates to wave good-bye to the jeep carrying the three officers. The general touched his cap — handsome headgear, really, with all that gold insignia, but no match for Ida’s.
SONYA PREDICTED that the camp’s rations would soon increase, but they did not. She hoped that Ida might get a private gift — silk stockings, maybe — but nothing appeared. She even thought that the new immigration act would be rushed through the United States Congress.
“It was only a dance,” Ida said.
“Two dances. And you were ravishing.”
“He’s a soldier,” Ida said, sighing. “Not a king.”
But then something did happen. The allotment of cigarettes per Person was officially increased. The augmented allotment, however, was not to be distributed (a formal letter ordered) but to remain in the disposition of the directors. And that, Sonya and the newly bearded Roland discovered, was enough to change things significantly — to get butter, milk, greens, sanitary napkins; to buy a sow, which enraged some but fed others; to pay a glazier from the village to fix broken windows; to procure gas for mendicant trips to Frankfurt, which resulted in more butter, milk, greens, and sanitary napkins; and finally, with the aid of a bundle of additional dollars contributed by Americans, to enable a sizable group of Displaced Persons, including Ida, to bribe its way overland to Brindisi, where waited a boat bound for Haifa.
One day Mendel’s wife, who had replaced Ida as the directors’ secretary, handed Sonya a letter.
We have reached Palestine, wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. We have been saved, again.
THE COAT
“OTHER CAPITALS,” BEGAN ROLAND, and paused for breath as he sometimes did. Sonya waited with apparent serenity. “… are in worse shape,” he concluded.
They were standing on the Pont Neuf, holding hands. All at once they embraced, as if ravaged Paris demanded it.
Roland Rosenberg was sixty and Sonya Rosenberg was fifty-eight. They had directed Camp Gruenwasser since 1945, but finally the place had been able to close, its last Displaced Persons repatriated to Romania. So the Rosenbergs, too, had left, traveling westward on first one train and then another. Each was dressed in prewar clothing, each lugged a single misshapen suitcase. They looked like Displaced Persons themselves; but their American passports gave them freedom, and their employment by the Joint Distribution Committee gave them cash.
Paris was giving them dusty cafés, a few concerts with second-rate performers, black bread, and this old bridge called New. Recovering from their embrace, they turned again toward the river. “The Old World,” Roland said, “is a corpse.”
Sonya — who had spent the war years in blistered London and the five decades previous in Rhode Island — knew the Old World only by reputation. Cafés, galleries, libraries, chamber recitals; salons de thé; polyglots in elegant clothing conducting afternoon dalliances before returning to one of the great banking houses … A derelict barge sailed toward them, sailed under them; thin children without shoes played on its deck.
ON THEIR THIRD DAY, coming out of a brasserie near the Bastille, Roland suffered a heart attack. He spent a week in the hospital. Sonya sat by his side in a long room with metal cots and wooden floors that, like Camp Gruenwasser’s infirmary, stank of carbolic acid. She displayed an outward calm, she even felt calm — he would survive this attack, the French doctors told her, with emphasis on the this—but she could not prevent her long fingers from raking her long hair, hair that had turned from gray to white during the war and its aftermath.
When Roland was released they traveled by train to Le Havre and by ship to New York. The Joint got them a place on lower Fifth.
It was a meandering apartment with mahogany furniture and gilded mirrors and draperies in a deep red. Circus wagon, Sonya might have called that shade, but she knew that colors had acquired new names since her departure in 1939, a decade ago — names borrowed from wines and liqueurs: cassis, port, champagne, chartreuse. The apartment was rent-free — that is, the Joint paid its rent to the regular tenant, who was away in California for a year. At the end of the year Roland and Sonya would find something more to their mutual taste, whatever that turned out to be. At Camp Gruenwasser they had shared an office and then a bedroom; they had married six months ago, but they had not yet together made a home.