The Pale of Settlement Read Online Free PDF Page A

never saw nor heard from him again.
    The International Red Cross had tried to reunite the children lost in the war with their relatives, posting photographs of the foundlings in railway stations across Europe and reading their names over daily radio broadcasts. Now, more than fifty years after the war’s end, there were still thousands of unclaimed children—not children any longer, of course, but men and women well past middle age. The Red Cross was no longer receiving much of a response.
    Susan’s grandmother kept photographs of her sons as children tucked beneath the glass top of her vanity. Susan studied the pictures while her grandmother puffed powder on her cheeks, papery as crepe, and filled in her eyebrows with pencil. The photographs were posed studio portraits, black-and-white faded to tones of gray. Susan’s father and his brother had chin-length hair tied with bows, like girls. They bore no resemblance to the men Susan knew, as if they’d come from another century, another world. She wondered if her grandmother’s cousin kept photographs of her vanished child. She pictured him with protruding ears and a dimple in his chin, like a pinhole or a star. She wanted to ask her grandmother if she thought the boy could possibly still be alive, but she didn’t have the nerve.
    Susan’s grandmother never talked about the war. What she talked about, instead, was her own girlhood. She told stories about how she fought with her sister (the prettier, cleverer, unlucky one), rode in the sidecar of her boyfriend’s motorcycle, brought her dolls along on her honeymoon. Her stories had morals, like fairy tales.She told the same stories, over and over, so that after a while it no longer seemed that they were true.
    Susan’s ex-boyfriend didn’t marry his pregnant girlfriend, but he didn’t leave her, either. In the end, she had a baby girl. He sent Susan a photograph. In it he was standing next to a baby carriage. All you could see inside the carriage was a bundle of pale pink. Her ex-boyfriend was wearing a herringbone wool overcoat and a college scarf wound around his neck. He stood slightly hunched over the carriage with an anxious, impatient expression on his face, as if the baby might be crying and he wasn’t certain what to do. In the background was a broad, gray street lined with leafless trees.
    Linden trees, perhaps.
    Susan’s father went to a conference in Germany when she was in grade school, not long after the Munich Olympics. It was his first trip back since he was a boy.
    When he got home, he said, A tall man in a uniform came to meet me at the airport. He stepped forward and said, Herr Stern.
    Herr Stern
.
    It was only the driver, her father said. But it gave me a little chill.
    Susan’s ex-boyfriend was twenty-eight when they met, six years older than she: an older man. He’d traveled, held a real job, even lived with another woman for a time. He was ready, he said, to settle down. From the beginning, she felt the pull of gravity.
    The first time she went to his parents’ house, they sat on his childhood bed and he showed her his high school track trophies, his Princeton yearbook, souvenirs from trips to Nouakchott andJohannesburg, and she felt as if he were laying it all out for her, a life he could superimpose on hers, like a transparency over a photograph.
    They slept together in the guest room on a sleigh bed with scars on the footboard left by a cowboy ancestor’s spurs. Susan lay next to him in a darkness that smelled of old books and musty chenille and imagined the way their children would be. She wanted it all: the trophies, the ancestors, the sensation she got of being safe in his orbit, her feet held firmly to the ground.
    Susan’s grandparents were fond of her ex-boyfriend. Her grandmother said he was
sehr schön
. Her grandfather called him a
mensch
.
    When her grandparents came for a visit to New York, they sat around her