Displaced Persons Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hebrew. A little Passover song.
    He went on. Two, two, who knows two? Two, two. I know two.
    She opened her lips. That is not Greek, she murmured in Polish.
    No? The young man had smiled. How strange, he said. Because I have a Greek passport. He took it out of his pocket and showed it to her. You see? Greek.
    A passport could get her into the western zones, where the British and American soldiers would protect them from the locals. A woman alone was not safe in the Russian zone, with the Red Army soldiers going after any woman they saw. Accompanied by a boy in a uniform, she was perhaps more protected. I have a ring, she said. As she said it, she touched the small blue stone in its tight setting. The one possession she had kept, but to give it up now seemed easy.
    Ah, no, said the boy—she could see, suddenly, that he was a boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen, disguised in his uniform—no. Keep it until we board the truck. That ring can pay for both of us.
    Was it generosity that he did not take it from her? He could have taken the ring and abandoned her to cross into Germany alone, but he had not. They rode with several others, Romanians, four men and a woman, whose dark clothes and mouths emitted a muddy odor. They murmured small greetings in Yiddish, nothing more. If they were to communicate it was to be in Hebrew, which sounded like Greek, the boy said. Fela knew very little Hebrew. Only the boys had religious lessons in her family, modern though her father had tried tobe. Chaim—he had given only his first name—had some difficulty himself. His hometown was not so far from her own, Mlawa, but if he had had a religious education at all, it must have stopped with the war. But he had the phrases, could rearrange words from prayers to make a sentence. He could make a sentence in any language, he said, with a seriousness that made her decide not to call him a braggart, not to joke with him. Even sitting in the back of the truck he was careful and alert. He stretched and brushed the dust off his uniform every hour until they crossed into the British zone in Germany. She grew fond of him on their journey, as she would a brother with whom she had lived all her life but only just now started to know.
     
    Y ES, SHE WOULD WAIT to bathe until Chaim awoke to keep watch. She moved into the kitchen. The widow had kept the sink clean, but dust from the bombings had gathered on all the shelves, a thick layer of white and gray. She would have to clean the house from top to bottom. There was little furniture—two beds, one sofa, one chest of drawers—and only a bit of crockery. Yet the rooms were wide and the wallpaper in good condition. Perhaps the possessions had been sold.
    Chaim came in as the coffee boiled, dressed in a shirt left for him by Pavel and the pair of trousers he had worn to sleep, his feet in a pair of torn socks.
    He sat in a chair as she put a plate before him. Has he gone for more food?
    She nodded. The coffee burned her tongue a little. She put the cup down again and blew at the steam. Chaim had a slow way of speaking, rolling his words around his tongue. He spoke slowly, but he ate fast. In the smugglers’ truck he had murmured words to himself, Polish and German and Russian, talking himself to sleep. Meat, soup, spoon, fork, knife. Once she had looked at him directly as hemoved his lips, and he had seen her, but he had not stopped. Milk. Chicken. Chocolate. Porridge. Potato. Still a child.
    Careful with the bread, Fela said. You lose crumbs when you rush.
    Her own place at the table was clean, and she smoothed out the paper she had found in the widow’s drawer and looked down at her letter. Bluma , it said. Dearest Bluma .
    What do you write there? His mouth was full with bread and coffee.
    I write to my sister. I know she—I think she—but the others. Fela looked at the neat Polish letters on the page. I am alive .
    That was all she had written. She wanted to think out her words before she scratched