Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwarz Read Free Book Online Page B

again. But the ache hadn’t left her. Now that her body could do more than subsist it began to remember other pains, not just hunger orfear. Once, cycling down the street with Pavel, she thought she saw Moshe, and as the small man with his brown curls and calm eyes had come closer, her neck had tensed, as if they were together, at night, he about to touch her. It wasn’t him, of course; she saw that a moment after the constriction in her abdomen stopped. But now the face of the man in the street, the man who was not Moshe, became something she longed for, a reminder of the face she had loved and was beginning to forget. But she didn’t see him, the false Moshe, again.
    When she gave away her ring to the smuggler who took them across the border into Germany, she gave away her last clear picture of her love, the image she had of him twirling it on her finger, round and round, as she became too thin to wear it securely. Before then, she had sold a watch stolen from her father when she and Moshe had run away, she had traded the leather finery hidden in the house by her mother, but she had not let the ring leave her body. She had kept it close to her chest, under her clothing, after the news had come from a neighbor’s wife that Moshe, kidnapped into the Russian army, had disappeared, after the baby, born prematurely with the shock of her grief, had withered from dysentery, dying from the sickness in her milk, after her flesh had vanished from a hunger so strong it crushed the grief. Now that her grief was back, the ring was no longer with her. She did not need it. It was the last thing she had from Moshe, yet when the time came she had not hesitated to rid herself of it. Some part of her thought that if she gave it up, she would find him alive. Some part of her wanted to blot out any piece of him that remained in the physical world in order to keep him to herself, inside her, whole.
    They were all in her now. She got up from her cooking twice, leaving a pot simmering as she went to her room to read Bluma’s letter again. Already she knew it by heart, and still it said the same thing, over and over again. I have heard nothing . Fela’s letter had been posted by the British soldiers, thanks to Pavel’s dealings. Bluma had received it, and she had received no other.
    That night Fela could not play cards. Chaim was away, on an outing to the mountains for the refugee boys. Fela sat silently with Pavel in the garden, tapping her coffee cup. Then she got up, went into the kitchen. In the early weeks in the house she had found a lightweight cigar box. The box held eighteen loose cigarettes, not so stale that they could not be enjoyed. She returned to the garden with the box.
    Let us try them, she said to Pavel.
    They passed the first one back and forth, touching each other lightly as their arms stretched across the little table. They were used to American cigarettes now, bought on the black market, but these had a softer taste, unfiltered but still not as strong. They lingered over the one between them, taking care not to let any tobacco fall out from the crumbling paper.
    After a few moments she let her knuckles graze his palm and then his forearm, bare but for the blue mark above the wrist. He moved his hand to her hair, as if to smooth it. But then he moved it away and instead touched her face, his fingertips at her cheekbones and lips. She felt a familiar chill inside her ribs but said nothing, looked down, then got up to clear the coffee cups from the garden table. At the door to the kitchen, saucers in hand, she turned.
    Come with me, she said.
    He followed her into the kitchen, stood away from her as she washed the cups. Then they went into his bedroom and slipped under the blankets fully clothed, undressing each other lying down, without looking.
     
    F ELA AND P AVEL WALKED arm in arm near the port. They had taken the train to the Bremen zone, where American soldiers stood on the docks to monitor shipments of coffee,