“Don’t let the tea cool off. Remember what I told you this morning, the hotter the better,” Persky said; he clanged his spoon happily. “Here, let’s make more elbowroom—”
His hand, greasy from the crullers, was on Magda’s box.
“Don’t touch!”
“What’s the matter? It’s something alive in there? A bomb? A rabbit? It’s squashable? No, I got it—a lady’s hat!”
Rosa hugged the box; she was feeling foolish, trivial. Everything was frivolous here, even the deepest property of being. It seemed to her someone had cut out her life-organs and given them to her to hold. She walked the little distance to the bed—three steps—and set the box down against the pillow. When she turned around, Persky’s teeth were persisting in their independent bliss.
“The fact is,” he said, “I didn’t expect nothing from you tonight. You got to work things through, I can see that. You remind me of my son. Even to get a cup of tea from you is worth something, I could do worse. Tomorrow we’ll have a real appointment. I’m not inquiring, I’m not requesting. I’ll be the boss, what do you say?”
Rosa sat. “I’m thinking, I should get out and go back to New York to my niece—”
“Not tomorrow. Day after tomorrow you’ll change your life, and tomorrow you’ll come with me. We got six meetings to pick from.”
Rosa said doubtfully, “Meetings?”
“Speakers. Lectures for fancy people like yourself. Something higher than pinochle.”
“I don’t play,” Rosa acknowledged.
Persky looked around. “I don’t see no books neither. You want me to drive you to the library?”
A thread of gratitude pulled in her throat. He almost understood what she was: no ordinary button. “I read only Polish,” she told him. “I don’t like to read in English. For literature you need a mother tongue.”
“Literature, my my. Polish ain’t a dime a dozen. It don’t grow on trees neither. Lublin, you should adjust. Get used to it!”
She was wary: “I’m used to everything.”
“Not to being a regular person.”
“My niece Stella,” Rosa slowly gave out, “says that in America cats have nine lives, but we—we’re less than cats, so we got three. The life before, the life during, the life after.” She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, “The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.”
“And during?”
“This was Hitler.”
“Poor Lublin,” Persky said.
“You wasn’t there. From the movies you know it.” She recognized that she had shamed him; she had long ago discovered this power to shame. “After, after, that’s all Stella cares. For me there’s one time only; there’s no after.”
Persky speculated. “You want everything the way it was before.”
“No, no, no,” Rosa said. “It can’t be. I don’t believe in Stella’s cats. Before is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie.”
“But it’s over,” Persky said. “You went through it, now you owe yourself something.”
“This is how Stella talks. Stella—” Rosa halted; then she came on the word. “Stella is self-indulgent. She wants to wipe out memory.”
“Sometimes a little forgetting is necessary,” Persky said, “if you want to get something out of life.”
“Get something! Get what?”
“You ain’t in a camp. It’s finished. Long ago it’s finished. Look around, you’ll see human beings.”
“What I see,” Rosa said, “is bloodsuckers.”
Persky hesitated. “Over there, they took your family?”
Rosa held up all the fingers of her two hands. Then she said: “I’m left. Stella’s left.” She wondered if she dared to tell him more. The box on the bed. “Out of so many, three.”
Persky asked, “Three?”
“Evidence,” Rosa said briskly. “I can show you.”
She raised the box. She felt like a climber on the margin of a precipice. “Wipe your hands.”
Persky obeyed. He rubbed the last of the cruller crumbs on his shirt front.
“Unpack and look in. Go ahead, lift up what’s inside.”
She did not falter. What her own hands longed to do she was yielding to a stranger, a man with pockets; she knew why. To prove herself pure: a madonna. Supposing he had vile old man’s thoughts: let him see her with the eye of truth. A mother.
But Persky said, “How do you count three—”
“Look for yourself.”
He took the cover off and reached into the box and drew out a sheet of paper and began to skim it.
“That has to be from Stella. Throw it out, never mind. More scolding, how I’m a freak—”
“Lublin, you’re a regular member of the intelligentsia! This is quite some reading matter. It ain’t in Polish neither.” His teeth danced. “On such a sad subject, allow me a little joke. Who came to America was one, your niece Stella; Lublin, Rosa, this makes two; and Lublin’s brain—three!”
Rosa stared. “I’m a mother, Mr. Persky,” she said, “the same as your wife, no different.” She received the paper between burning palms. “Have some respect,” she commanded the bewildered glitter of his plastic grin. And read:
Dear Ms. Lublin:
I am taking the liberty of sending you, as a token of my good faith, this valuable study by Hidgeson (whom, you may recall, I mentioned in passing in my initial explanatory letter), which more or less lays the ethological groundwork for our current structures. I feel certain that—in preparation for our talks—you will want to take a look at it. A great deal of our work has been built on these phylogenetic insights. You may find some of the language a bit too technical; nevertheless I believe that simply having this volume in your possession will go far toward reassuring you concerning the professionalism of our endeavors, and of your potential contribution toward them.
Of special interest, perhaps, is Chapter Six, entitled “Defensive Group Formation: The Way of the Baboons.”
Gratefully in advance, James W. Tree, Ph.D.
Persky said, “Believe me, I could smell with only one glance it wasn’t from Stella.”
She saw that he was holding the thing he had taken out of the box. “Give me that,” she ordered.
He recited: “By A. R. Hidgeson. And listen to the
