Displaced Persons Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m afraid. Too afraid for it. But she started again, slower than before, the bicycle leaning from side to side.
    If you go a little bit faster, said Pavel, just a little bit, it won’t shake so much.
    She stopped again, unbuttoned another button near the hem of her skirt.
    Pavel trotted behind her as she moved her pale legs. Many times he had perched girls on the frame in front of him, grasping them by the waist, cycling in the forest behind his grandfather’s town so as not to create a scandal. But here he was, so many years later, no community to scandalize, no one left to be shocked, and he was careful, more careful than he ever had been.
     
    I N THE EVENINGS THE three of them smoked in the garden, playing card games on a folding table they had found in the pantry. A few times Chaim brought home a friend he had met at his job in the camp print shop. The friend brought camp newspapers and bulletins in exchange for the food Fela made. Pavel approved. He liked that his house should welcome refugees as a camp could not. And it was good Chaim had a friend. Everyone needed a companion, Pavel thought. A young boy especially. A wheel on its own would not go anywhere, but attached to a frame and another wheel it could be a bicycle, and a bicycle could travel, move, carry, and work. God gave Moses the commandments in two stone tablets. Two was a stronger number than one.
    They played rummy, and a version of poker Fela would not reveal how she had learned. Before the war, Pavel didn’t play cards. But early on, after he had fled to a town not yet clean of Jews, he had stayed with a family he knew only slightly, and the father and daughter had taught him to play in the evenings, when no one was allowed out. They knew him only by a false name, Miloch, but he became close with them, especially the daughter and her husband, and he learned the game fast. He could make his face a mask and trick the others into thinking his prospects were bad. It was a good skill.
    The war had ended, but still he played with deep concentration, breaking his thoughts only to watch as Fela cast out a card, or mocked a mistake of Chaim’s, or laughed as she laid out her winning hand. Fela made fun of his gloomy expressions.
    So serious! she would say. We’re still alive, even if you lose the game!
    He would want to answer, Who says I will lose? But he kept quiet, instead letting out a mournful sigh as he shifted in his seat.
    He saw that Fela was the most cheerful when she played cards.The rest of the day, her chores and her cooking, her letters to Palestine and to Poland, her squinted reading of the camp newsletters, she approached with grim drive. He liked to keep her playing cards as late as possible, so he could hear her shouts of victory and affectionate jokes before he went to sleep.
     
    P AVEL AWOKE IN THE middle of the night. He got up and went to the drawer where he had placed his wallet and a little envelope of his pictures. He caressed the brown packet. He did not need to take the pictures out. If he stopped moving altogether, he thought he could hear Fela rustling in the bedroom across the corridor, Chaim’s hard breaths in the living room. They seemed at peace. In the day it was easier for him than for them—Fela afraid to go into the garden, Chaim lying on the sofa and humming—but at night they were free. Perhaps their thoughts exhausted them during the day, and their bodies had no choice after the sun went down. Meanwhile Pavel was alone, trying to explain things to himself without the help of a night companion or a fellow traveler. When Fishl had been with him there had been an understanding. He had been a guide, recognizing Pavel in the entry room of the death camp, advising him how to keep alive. The skills he and Fishl had taught each other kept him alive even now. Yet now Pavel was confused, more confused than he had been in years. He could speak more languages than a military interpreter, but still he did not know what to call