“The kind of person,” Rosa said, “is what you see. Thirty-nine years ago I was somebody else.”
“Thirty-nine years ago I wasn’t so bad myself. I lost my teeth without a single cavity,” he bragged. “Everything perfect. Periodontal disease.”
“I was a chemist almost. A physicist,” Rosa said. “You think I wouldn’t have been a scientist?” The thieves who took her life! All at once the landscape behind her eyes fell out of control: a bright field flashed; then a certain shadowy corridor leading to the laboratory supplies closet. The closet opened in her dreams also. Always she was hurtling down a veiled passage toward the closet. Retorts and microscopes were ranged on the shelves. Once, walking there, she was conscious of the coursing of her own ecstasy—her new brown shoes, laced and sober, her white coat, her hair cut short in bangs: a serious person of seventeen, ambitious, responsible, a future Marie Curie! One of her teachers in the high school praised her for what he said was a “literary style”—oh, lost and kidnapped Polish!—and now she wrote and spoke English as helplessly as this old immigrant. From Warsaw! Born 1906! She imagined what bitter ancient alley, dense with stalls, cheap clothes strung on outdoor racks, signs in jargoned Yiddish. Anyhow they called her refugee. The Americans couldn’t tell her apart from this fellow with his false teeth and his dewlaps and his rakehell reddish toupee bought God knows when or where–Delancey Street, the Lower East Side. A dandy. Warsaw! What did he know? In school she had read Tuwim: such delicacy, such loftiness, such Polishness. The Warsaw of her girlhood: a great light: she switched it on, shewanted to live inside her eyes. The curve of the legs of her mother’s bureau. The strict leather smell of her father’s desk. The white tile tract of the kitchen floor, the big pots breathing, a narrow tower stair next to the attic…the house of her girlhood laden with a thousand books. Polish, German, French; her father’s Latin books; the shelf of shy literary periodicals her mother’s poetry now and then wandered through, in short lines like heated telegrams. Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. Her father, like her mother, mocked at Yiddish; there was not a particle of ghetto left in him, not a grain of rot. Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.
“Your name?” her companion said.
“Lublin, Rosa.”
“A pleasure,” he said. “Only why backwards? I’m an application form? Very good. You apply, I accept.” He took command of her shopping cart. “Wherever is your home is my direction that I’m going anyhow.”
“You forgot to take your laundry,” Rosa said.
“Mine I did day before yesterday.”
“So why did you come here?”
“I’m devoted to Nature. I like the sound of a waterfall. Wherever it’s cool it’s a pleasure to sit and read my paper.”
“What a story!” Rosa snorted.
“All right, so I go to have a visit with the ladies. Tell me, you like concerts?”
“I like my own room, that’s all.”
“A lady what wants to be a hermit!”
“I got my own troubles,” Rosa said.
“Unload on me.”
In the street she plodded beside him dumbly; a led animal. Her shoes were not nice, she should have put on the other ones. The sunlight was smothering—cooked honey dumped on their heads: one lick was good, too much could drown you. She was glad to have someone to pull the cart.
“You got internal warnings about talking to a stranger? If I say my name, no more a stranger. Simon Persky. A third cousin to Shimon Peres, the Israeli politician. I have different famous relatives, plenty of family pride. You ever heard of Betty Bacall, who Humphrey Bogart the movie star was married to, a Jewish girl? Also a distant cousin. I could tell you the whole story of my life experience, beginning with Warsaw. Actually it wasn’t Warsaw, it was a little place a few miles out of town. In Warsaw I had uncles.”
Rosa said again, “Your Warsaw isn’t my Warsaw.”
He stopped the cart. “What is this? A song with one stanza? You think I don’t know the difference between generations? I’m seventy-one, and you, you’re only a girl.”
“Fifty-eight.” Though in the papers, when they told how she smashed up her store, it came out fifty-nine. Stella’s fault, Stella’s black will, the Angel of Death’s arithmetic.
“You see? I told you! A girl!”
“I’m from an educated family.”
“Your English ain’t better than what any other refugee talks.”
“Why should I learn English? I didn’t ask for it, I got nothing to do with it.”
“You can’t live in the past,” he advised. Again the wheels of the cart were squealing. Like a calf, Rosa followed. They were approaching a self-service cafeteria. The smells of eggplant, fried potatoes, mushrooms, blew out as if pumped. Rosa read the sign:
KOLLINS KOSHER KAMEO:
EVERYTHING ON YOUR PLATE AS PRETTY AS A PICTURE:
REMEMBRANCES OF NEW YORK AND THE PARADISE OF YOUR MATERNAL KITCHEN:
DELICIOUS DISHES OF AMBROSIA AND NOSTALGIA:
AIR CONDITIONED THRU-OUT
“I know the owner,” Persky said. “He’s a big reader. You want tea?”
“Tea?”
“Not iced. The hotter the better. This is physiology. Come in, you’ll cool off. You got some red face, believe me.”
Rosa looked in the window. Her bun was loose, strings dangling on either side of her neck. The reflection of a ragged old bird with worn feathers. Skinny, a stork. Her dress was missing a button, but maybe the belt buckle covered this shame. What did she care? She thought of her room, her bed, her radio. She hated conversation.
“I got to get back,” she said.
“An appointment?”
“No.”
“Then have an appointment with Persky. So come, first tea. If you take with an ice cube, you’re involved
