A sense of the complete unreality of what was happening freed her from normal human anxieties. However the future worked out, it was bound to be better than the past: behind her everything was cursed.
With these happy thoughts she boarded the bus. For some reason nobody took her money. She wondered if this was what the “land of the free” meant and was glad she didn’t have to pay; she had fifty dollars on her, and she would have to hold on to them if she was to track down her errant husband.
The sun was setting when after several small adventures and large impressions she got out at Tarrytown. She breathed in the evening air and sat down on a yellow bench at the bus station. She hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours, everything was moving about in front of her eyes and her head was spinning from a sense of weightlessness and uncertainty.
After sitting there for ten minutes she picked up her case, walked out into a little square lined with parked cars, and asked a young man fiddling with the lock of his vehicle how to find the street she wanted. Without saying a word, he flung open the passenger door and drove her up a hill to a pretty two-storey house surrounded by well-tended shrubs. The light was fading. She stopped in front of a pair of white slatted gates.
Rachel, Mickey’s mother, had been bothered all morning by a wonderful dream she had had before waking. In it she had come upon a white wooden summer-house which didn’t exist in their garden, where a sweet, plump little girl had talked to her about something very important and pleasant, even though she was only tiny and in real life small children don’t talk like that. What she had said, however, Rachel couldn’t remember.
During the day she had lain down for a nap and tried to summon back the airy summer-house and the plump child, so that she could finish the important matter she had been talking about. But the little girl didn’t reappear, and there was no point expecting her to, since Rachel never dreamed during the day.
Now she waddled to the gates, a simple-faced Jewish woman with round eyes ringed by years of insomnia, and she saw a girl standing outside with a checked cloth suitcase. She let her in.
“Good evening, may I speak to Mickey?” the girl asked.
“Mickey?” Rachel was surprised. “He doesn’t live here, he lives in Manhattan. He left for California yesterday anyway.”
Valentina put her case on the ground. “How strange, he said he would meet me.”
“Ah, that’s Mickey!” Rachel waved an arm. “Where are you from?”
“From Moscow.”
As Valentina stood against the white gates, Rachel suddenly realized that the summer-house in her dream must be these gates, and that the plump child was this plump girl. “My God, my parents were from Warsaw!” she exclaimed happily, as though Warsaw and Moscow were adjacent streets. “Come on in!”
A few minutes later Valentina was sitting at a low table in the living-room, looking out at a sloping garden whose trees bent their heads in the gathering darkness towards the brightly lit window. On the table stood two delicate unglazed cups as thin as paper, and a rough terracotta teapot; there were biscuits that resembled seaweed, and pink triangular nuts with a fine shell. Rachel put her hands on her stomach in the same peasant pose as Valentina’s mother, tilted her head in its green silk turban to one side, and looked at her with kindly interest. It turned out that the Russian woman knew Polish, so they talked in Polish together, which gave Rachel great satisfaction.
“You’ve come here on holiday or to work?” she finally put the all-important question.
“I’ve come for good. Mickey promised to meet me and help me find work,” Valentina sighed.
“You met him in Moscow?” Rachel asked, tipping her head to the other shoulder: she had this funny habit of tilting her head from side to side.
Valentina thought hard for a moment; she was so tired that having a worldly conversation in Polish, let alone embellishing it a little, suddenly seemed beyond her strength. “The truth is, we got married.”
The blood rushed to Rachel’s face. Jumping up, she ran out of the room. “David, David! Come quick!” her voice rang through the house.
David, her husband, tall and thin like Mickey, stood at the top of the stairs in a red shirt and black skullcap, holding a thick fountain-pen in his hand, peering at her with a questioning look but saying nothing.
They were a fine pair, Mickey’s parents. Each discovered in the other what they lacked in themselves, and they rejoiced at the discovery. Several years ago, having reached the limits of human closeness, they were approaching their sixties and looking forward to a long and happy old age, when they learned to their horror that their only son had turned away from the laws of his sex and had deviated into such heathen wickedness that Rachel couldn’t even find a name for it.
“We were happy, too happy,” she muttered through the sleepless nights in the huge marriage bed in which they hadn’t touched each other since their terrible discovery. “Lord, make him a normal person again!”
The popular psychology books explained to her in clear and simple words that there was nothing unusual about her son, everything was fine, and a humane society must grant him his sacred and inalienable right to his own predilections. But this was no comfort to Rachel’s old-fashioned soul. A Jewish girl, saved from the fire and gas by the nuns, who for almost three years during the occupation had hidden her in their convent, she reached the point of turning to the mother of that God in whom she mustn’t believe, but did believe nonetheless, and praying to her in Polish: “Holy Mother, do this for him, make him …”
As her husband came down the stairs to her now and saw her happy face, he guessed the happiness that had befallen her.
But this happiness was fictitious: Valentina was sitting in the living-room struggling to keep her tired eyes open. This was how her life in America began.
Alik stirred slightly.
Valentina started up. “What is it, Alik?”
“Drink.”
She brought the cup to his lips. He sipped and coughed. She lifted him up and tapped his back; he was as light as the puppet Anka Kron had given him. “There now, let’s get your tube.”
He took more water into his mouth and coughed again. This had been happening a lot recently. Valentina moved him again and tapped his back. She gave him the tube, and again he coughed, longer this time, and couldn’t clear his throat. She wet a flannel and put it in his mouth. His lips were dry and slightly cracked.
“Shall I rub something on your lips?” she asked.
“On no account, I hate grease. Give me your finger instead.”
She put her finger between his dry lips and he moved his tongue over it. It was the only touch left to him now; it looked as though this would be the last night they made love. They both thought about it.
“I shall die an adulterer,” he said quietly.
Valentina’s life had been exceptionally difficult in those early years. She generally went straight from work to her classes. But one day she had had to go home early after her landlady called asking her to bring the keys because something was wrong with the front door, Valentina didn’t understand exactly what. She gave the landlady her key, but this didn’t work either. Leaving the landlady with the broken lock, she decided to get something to eat at Katz’s, the Jewish delicatessen on the corner, before she went on to her class. The prices at Katz’s were reasonable, and the corned beef and turkey sandwiches were superb. The burly staff, who looked as if they could handle concrete slabs, sliced the fragrant meat artistically with their large knives and chatted in their local dialect. The place was rather full, and there was a queue at the counter. The man standing in front of Valentina with his back to her spoke affably to the salesman: “Listen, Misha, ten years I’ve been coming here. You and Aron, you’re twice as fat and the sandwiches are half as thick. Why is that?”