I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  The destination of this journey is home. Upon arrival, we will find, as we might have expected, that home is no longer there.

  Number 33 Chester Street.

  All this lore I know now. All this lore because of what Gila Konig told me before she died.

  6

  Immigrants, Part 2

  NEW YORK, 1982

  Gila watched the leaves in the Park rattle on the trees or billow into the shapes of clouds when the wind shifted—elms and alders and planes. European trees, American trees. There had been whole forests of such trees outside Foehrenwald, even outside Bergen-Belsen, not that she remembered them as anything more distinct than an idea. The years of her earliest childhood had become a cubist blur of trees, leaves, frost. All that time living inside her own head—once you started that, it was difficult to stop. Budapest, Belsen, Foehrenwald, Tel Aviv. Now it was 1982. Her first week in New York, almost two years ago now, she had walked down Seventh Avenue and seen the garment district—mannequins in tiny plexiglass displays, steam rising from the manholes, hand trucks and aluminum racks crammed with parkas. She’d looked at the crowd and could imagine no way in.

  Some students still lingered in the dim hallway when she came back inside. They were boys in expensive sports clothes with awkward wavy hair, the first fringes of mustache on some of their lips, aware, she guessed, of what had just happened in class. She greeted them—Mah ha’inyanim—and they looked at her and gave their rote answer, then went back to jeering about subjects she knew nothing about, from TV. She went into the bathroom and washed her face, preparing for what was next, then dried off with paper towels and glimpsed herself in the mirror—pale skin, no makeup, black hair pulled back, a few strands trailing into green eyes. She was forty-three, a Hebrew teacher. The bathroom walls behind her were the grayish pink of old hospitals. The temple had once been a movie theater, Rabbi Lehman had told her. Plastic dispensers leaked thin yellow soap onto the stainless-steel counter.

  She walked down the hall to Lehman’s office. What she guessed from the solemn look on his face was that he was going to draw this out into a mournful discussion in which her only possible role could be that of noble survivor. She stood there behind the empty chair and Lehman rubbed the corner of his tired eye with a fully extended index finger. He had taken off the jacket of his three-piece suit but the vest was still on. He nodded slowly, his head turned, his hand lightly caressing his beard.

  “You know what it’s like by now,” he said, still not looking at her. “The ignorance. Whatever you want to call it. This country. Our shame. Our schande.”

  “I lost my temper,” she said. “It was not a big deal.”

  “Robby Karsh will apologize. You’ll apologize to Robby Karsh.” He put his hand dyspeptically over his ribs, wincing a little. “As a gesture. As a start.”

  “He doesn’t have to apologize.”

  “He’s an obnoxious kid. But he’s also just a twelve-year-old.”

  The textbook sat on Lehman’s desk. On its cover was a blue cartoon dragon that spoke Hebrew. It had been defaced by Robby Karsh, who had drawn a swastika on the creature’s forehead. Before that, the dragon had been a figure grubby and feisty enough for the students to have embraced without question or doubt. For the past two weeks, they had all been learning Hebrew in relative calm.

  “You shouldn’t have slapped him,” Lehman said. “That of course is what changes it into Max Stone teaching your classes next week.”

  She turned, then consciously readjusted her hands on her thigh. She looked back down at him. “He can keep the classes,” she said.

  “Gila.”

  “He can keep the Nazis too. The Shoah. The holiness of it. He likes to talk about it more than I do.”

  Lehman drew in a beseeching breath, as if his sympathy for her anger was fraught with risk. “Can’t we have this talk later?”

  “I think we’ve already had it.”

  She came back to find the girl, Hannah, waiting for her alone in the classroom. The desks were disarranged on the gray floor and there were still fragments of Hebrew letters on the blackboard, yellow flecks missed by the eraser. Gila retrieved her purse from behind the desk and the girl looked up from her Walkman, which she was tinkering with rather than listening to. Her dark hair hung in loose curls and she wore one of her father’s old dress shirts, far too large, frayed at the collar and cuffs. She appeared to be still upset—not shocked, but offended—by Gila’s outburst. It must have seemed unprovoked, slightly deranged, aimed not just at Robby Karsh but at the class in general. It must have seemed that way because that was how it had felt to Gila herself. But it had been Hannah’s fault.

  “Are you ready?” Gila asked.

  Hannah shrugged.

  “Where’s your bag?”

  “It’s in the coatroom,” Hannah said. “Where it always is. No one’s going to steal it.”

  “You could have picked it up.”

  “I’ll get it on the way out.”

  Gila looked at the floor. “You told my story to Robby Karsh,” she said. “You must have told it to him at some point.”

  Hannah’s eyes went a little narrow, a kind of thoughtful squint that often masked her actual thoughtlessness. She had the naïve brown eyes of a dog, a narrow face like something carved out of sandalwood.

  “I guess Robby Karsh thought it was funny,” Gila said. “I thought you understood why I told you that story.”

  The girl kept meeting her gaze with that odd thoughtful poise. Gila could see now that Hannah didn’t know why she’d repeated the story to Robby Karsh. All she knew—or sensed, gradually—was that she’d done something a little obscene, which, to Gila, seemed the inevitable result of telling such stories.

  What they’d subsisted on in Bergen-Belsen, she’d told Hannah, was a watery broth made of boiled nettles—nettles, she’d explained, were a kind of weed whose leaves were said to taste somewhat like artichokes. She’d never been able to eat an artichoke, she’d told Hannah. She and her mother had had one bowl of the nettle soup to split between them each day. It was at the very end of the war, a season of typhus, overcrowding, a near total breakdown of logistics (there were no tattoos, she’d explained, not all the camps did that anyway). Her mother didn’t share the soup with the dozens of other starving women and children in their barracks, with the thousands of other starving women and children outside the barracks. To share would have been to jeopardize their own lives. Of course there was more to the story, such as how her mother had gotten the bowl of soup in the first place. Where her mother had gone when Gila waited in the little room outside the vestibule of the infirmary. What her mother had done to keep them alive. That part of the story she had not shared with Hannah.

  They walked up 79th Street, not talking, Hannah listening to the tape player now, her duffel bag over her shoulder. Gila carried a small suitcase for their trip to the country with Hannah’s father. His store filled two high stories of a white-brick building, its windows bordered in gold, each window shaded by a monogrammed green canopy embossed with a gold letter G. Inside, pale carpets caught the light from outside and made the shop half drawing room, half museum—a Chinese horse of brown and green enamel, across the room a marble statue of Apollo. Upstairs, among the English and French furniture, a few gowns hung before tall mirrors and within the opened doors of armoires.

  He was a large white-haired man in an olive-colored suit. He breathed in, as if annoyed, then said hello and Hannah turned off her Walkman.

  “I need a different coat,” she said. “Everyone wears these coats now.”

  “We’ll buy you a new wardrobe.”

  “I don’t want a new wardrobe, I want a different coat.”

  “Fiorucci. Maybe you’d like that.”

  It was impossible to know if he was joking or serious. Gila stood there with her suitcase on the floor beside her, not so much as spectator but as attendant. They were fighting—this was the way they fought. Her presence here was the opposite of the Hebre
w lessons, where every kind of gaze assailed her from every angle at all times. It should have been easy enough to adjust from one role to the other—visible there, not here—but the basic trick still eluded her.

  They walked down to the dim garage with its office and punch clock, prices in black on the huge white sign. Groff waited for them to get into the car. The Lincoln had power locks and a leather strap you used to pull the heavy door shut. They drove down York Avenue to Sutton Place, then took 57th Street to the turnoff onto the Queensboro Bridge, Gila in back, Hannah up front beside her father, Groff staring stoically at the traffic, Gila looking into Hannah’s side mirror at the reflected skyline.

  His wife had been in a restaurant nine months ago when she’d gone into a seizure and fallen out of her chair. That was how all this had started—the babysitting for someone who didn’t really need a babysitter, the twelve-year-old girl whose mother was in and out of the hospital until one night she wasn’t. On one of those nights when Gila was alone with the terrified girl, the TV lights flashing on the walls of her bedroom, Hannah curled on the floor with a quilted blanket, not crying but frustrated, angry, Gila had told her the story of the camps and the nettle soup. You had to be strong in the face of enormous sadness. That was the simple point of the story. But perhaps the point was simply overwhelming. She had never had children of her own. Perhaps it was no wonder if she did all the wrong things with Hannah.

  The house was on a large pond north of the village, a mile from the bay, two and a half miles from the ocean. It had sat empty all that spring and all that summer, even when there was no longer any reason to remain away, even after Groff’s wife, Mona, had died. The headlights shone on the front windows where the roses had sprawled in thin, mad tentacles. When Groff switched on the porch lights, the moths came fluttering around. He’d asked Gila to come along on this first trip because he couldn’t face it, he said. He said he’d talked to Hannah about it and Hannah wanted her to come too. He was frequently candid in this way, in short bursts. It wasn’t that he spoke the language of charm, it was that he somehow embodied charm in all its subtle confusion. His ugliness was charming. His silence was charming. His apparent repudiation of all things charming was part of his charm.

  Hannah went up to her bedroom and Groff went back to town to get some dinner, so Gila set the table. The kitchen smelled intoxicatingly of mold. Wood everywhere—varnished floors and exposed beams on the ceiling and the wood of the staircase, the dark frames of the windows. She saw his wife’s taste in dishes—festive bright plates, yellow or orange. Dingy, cheap silverware, amber-colored glasses. The moldy scent and the scent of lemon floor wax gave Gila a feeling not unlike déjà vu, only there were no memories attached to it. Dried flowers in a vase. A kind of potent nostalgia for a place she’d never been, a home she’d never had.

  There was an old poster on the wall of Hannah’s bedroom—she’d forgotten it until she went in, planning to call her friend, but when she saw it she put on her Walkman and sat on the bed, hunched there in her salvaged clothes, her father’s baggy dress shirt. There was the small black-and-white TV, the Woody Woodpecker doll, the pink-and-blue desk with its matching chair. There was her mother’s eager, ironic smile looking down on it all, all those toys and games she had bought for Hannah, both laughing at them and with them, as if she’d had a hand in inventing them herself. The poster on the wall showed a disco group in an exuberant Broadway tableau above a set of piano keys that matched the starry midnight sky behind them. The word “camp” had more than one meaning, Hannah’s mother had explained once, one of those meanings being “playful”—the poster and the disco group it portrayed were very “camp,” her mother had said. Hannah listened to the song on her Walkman and saw a blue-and-green swirl like the ocean viewed from a distant height. A new kind of song, mechanistic and cold, the drum machine’s synthetic hand claps coming with such concussive force that they seemed to assert a kind of meaning, like code from some other, more allusive world.

  Mr. Stone, the older Hebrew teacher, was always giving his condolences about her mother, and he would sometimes ask her about Gila too. He was a sullen man with an old-fashioned Bronx accent and synthetic dress slacks, age spots on his hands. He knew the whole story—the babysitting last spring during the hospital stays, then her mother’s death. It’s not that bad, Hannah had wanted to say. But of course that isn’t what she’d said. Her contempt for Stone was not pure, it was laced with awkwardness. What she’d said was: Did Gila ever tell you about the camps?

  You told my story to Robby Karsh. I thought you understood why I told you that story.

  It was such a strange, impersonal accusation, to think Hannah would have told that story to a boy like Robby Karsh, to any of those boys. It meant that Gila didn’t know anything about her, that she understood Hannah as nothing more than another student in that lifeless, spoiled class. The accusation had surprised her so much she hadn’t even been able to deny it. But maybe she wasn’t so different from the other students after all. Why else had she told the story to Mr. Stone? Out of awkwardness. Out of embarrassment. She had told the story to Mr. Stone just to make him stop talking.

  As for Robby Karsh, he had no idea about Gila. He’d just drawn the swastika as a joke.

  Pizza in the white box, the salad already wilting in its foil tray. The room was too quiet so Groff put on the radio. The receiver glowed an efficient yellow beneath the dial, the nearby college station playing jazz.

  “I have to go out a little later,” he said.

  Hannah looked up from her plate. Groff turned his hand palm up.

  “You have a big date?” Hannah said.

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “If you’re just going to the Kleins’, why can’t I come?”

  “It’s late. It’s already late.”

  Gila was hardly listening. She was thinking things through. For example, neither Groff nor Hannah knew she had quit her job at the temple that afternoon. She thought of Hannah’s face in the classroom—that poise, older than Hannah’s age—and wondered how much Hannah suspected.

  Groff looked at her, his eyes seeing her but also denying everything about her that wasn’t relevant to this particular moment. “I won’t be long,” he said. “There’s a movie player—Hannah can show you how it works. I don’t know what there is—old tennis matches—Wimbledon. You won’t want to watch that, but there are movies. Hannah will show you.”

  He bit into the crust of his pizza, hungrily chewing. The way he ate was so unself-conscious that the room became calmer.

  A desk, a bed, a mat on the floor, a dresser with broken handles so that she left the drawers partly opened—this was how Gila lived in Manhattan now. Outside, the city withered, food wrappers and empty cans in an abandoned station wagon, the local shop displaying soap and toothpaste. Her building belonged to a congregant at the temple, that was why the rent was low. She could hear other people’s TVs in the airshaft as she tried to sleep. At first, she’d felt obliged to go to services, sitting there before the cantor’s modal gloom, the loud seconding of the organ, Rabbi Lehman circulating the undressed Torah to the nearly empty pews. They treated her like some sort of wraith, someone foreign to have opinions about.

  Not long after he’d hired her, Groff had given her a gift from his shop that hung on the wall of her apartment now, a framed poster from the 1930s, the glass cloudy, the image a hazy black and white. At the bottom was the name Elsa Schiaparelli, the designer, who was posed in profile, her hands clasped casually over the arm of a gilt chair, black hair knotted at one side, a white gown falling off one shoulder in a cowl of fabric cut like feathers. At the top, in pink letters, was the single word Shocking! She had mentioned to him once that she’d wanted to be a designer. He’d remembered.

  “It must be worth something,” she said.

  “Not really,” he answered. “Not much. These things just accumulate. Don’t take it if you don’t like it.”

  He was still holding it against his hip.
>
  “I used to make drawings,” she said. “Schiaparelli. Chanel. I used to dream about those things, even when I was a little girl. Even when I was younger than Hannah.”

  He put the poster down on the counter and looked at her. He seemed on the verge of probing for more, then she could see him decide not to.

  “Fine, good,” he said. “Then it’s yours.”

  He came back a little after ten, moving in the lamplight with a tight chest, not looking too much at anything. Mona’s things, his things—the Turkish rug, rose colored, the worn sofas, the end tables with their stacks of magazines. The sunroom lay beyond it, its windows on the pond a lustrous black. In the kitchen, he found an old bottle of rum and poured some into a glass with some ice, the Haitian kind he liked, Barbancourt. He wished he could have stayed at the Kleins’, the candles burning over the two different hearths, the women in their sweaters and jeans and high boots, food all around, the different wines. Harry Klein sold commercial real estate. He did impressions and told obscene jokes, even racist jokes, and he read Anna Karenina every year. Mona had liked to help him prune the fruit trees on the side of his property each March, standing on the ladder with her long streaked hair blowing in her eyes, her rag wool gloves.