Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwarz Read Free Book Online

father had done in his job as a translator—was that his job?—yes, of course, he had tutored Chaim in the Yiddish letters before Chaim could understand the words he read, of course that was his work, was Chaim forgetting these things already?
    After a moment, he said, Where do you sleep?
    Not here, she said. I live on a Zionist kibbutz, a new one they started a few kilometers south, on good farmland. So we don’t have to depend on ration cards, like little prisoners again. We prepare for these British—her mouth turned fierce—to let us out of here, to let us into our homeland. Come with me there. You can smuggle yourself out of the camp. It’s an hour’s drive from here.
    I—said Chaim—I have a place, not in the camp—I thought you could stay with us—
    But she hesitated. They expect me back this evening, she said. And you—already you have missed convoys they let into Palestine. You are young enough to be an orphan—why did you not go on the list?
    I don’t know, he said. I am here, I live with—I have a warm place in a home until—I take English lessons—
    English! cried Rayzl. To be a stranger in a strange land again! A Bundist, just like your father, refusing Palestine for class politics? Look how it helped him! And since when do the English let you into their country, or the Americans either? English!
     
    C HAIM CAME TO THE house in Celle and lay down on the sofa. He bent his arm over his eyes to block out the remaining afternoon light, and he saw an image of his mother, her own elbow bent at her brow to cover her eyes, yes, once he had seen his own mother lie down like this, perhaps after the first action or perhaps at a different time, at some terrible news or another, he did not remember, saw only her thin body outstretched on the cot in the ghetto apartment, no, it must have been after, long after his brother had been taken—and the image itself made Chaim tear his own arm from his forehead, curl his body into a ball, sob.
    After some time he opened his eyes and stared at the wall, covered with floral paper. He did not want to touch it, the false decoration of a home in which he lived as a strange guest. Sometimes he brought one of the young men he had met from outside the print shop to stay in the house, just to feel himself not so alone. But Lazar had not liked to sleep there more than one night at a time, even with the use of a clean sink and the promise of Fela’s pastries. And suddenly Chaim too wanted to escape the little house, the little town, the questions that would surely come tearing at him in the evening as Fela laid out the food on the garden table. He did not want to see them. He wanted to escape every familiar face he saw, every reminder of something he knew. He wanted to be a stranger, completely alone, a newborn, learning new images and new faces.
    He pushed his legs out of the house and took Fela’s bicycle toward the camp. On the main road he saw a group of British driving to the Bremen zone, a small island of American soldiers.
    “Work,” he said, smiling, flashing his identity card. “I have work in the harbor.” They let him into their truck.
    The rubble still covered wide areas near the port, but a few businesses and houses had been rebuilt, and in a small café near one of the piers he sat alone and watched the Americans in civilian clothes flirt and drink with the German women. Two black soldiers walked past him, talking in soft voices too low for him to hear. They were always together, in groups, and it was understood they had their own brigades, separate from the others. He followed their faces as they walked, stared openly at them. They did not seem to notice. In the American zone in Austria he and Fela had passed a camp, but their driver, a Jew, had warned them not to enter, for the Americans forced the Jews to live and work with the Ukrainians and Poles and Latvians. Americans do not separate, the truck driver had said. They say that was what Hitler did! The