Hotel Cuba, page 2
Glad for a break from all their company, Pearl sat on the bed, staring at the water-stained wallpaper peeling in the corners. She’d never see this room again. People who crossed the ocean rarely returned. Good, Pearl decided. That’s why I’m going, to leave this life behind.
Back in the front room, Mrs. Feldsteyn and Frieda were gone, and Father was sitting sullenly at the table, his eyes red and anxious. “Where’s Frieda?” asked Pearl, gathering the ends of the tablecloth.
“She walked Mrs. Feldsteyn home. Avram went with them.” He reached for her arm to interrupt her cleaning and said, “I hear in America, even the water isn’t kosher.”
“Nonsense,” she said, recognizing Father’s flair for the dramatic.
“When children are young, parents talk about how smart their children are. When parents are old, children talk about how stupid their parents are,” he said. “In America, I suppose you girls will start smoking and stop going to shul. You’ll cut your hair, change your names, go with strange men, become modern women. I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Pearl dropped the tablecloth and sat down to think of a response. You can’t go back on your word, she thought. Even if you do, I’m going. I won’t spend another winter starving, hiding, freezing because we don’t dare light a fire to catch the notice of soldiers. I won’t dig myself a grave in this dying town. I need to make a different life.
“If you don’t know, then why did you let Basha go before us?” Pearl asked, her voice rising. “Why let us go now?”
“Of course you must go. Here, there’s nothing for you.” Father picked at his chapped lips. “God takes away everything that’s mine that I love. I should be used to it.”
Pearl often heard him say this, but tonight his sadness both touched and irritated her. I know you’ll be lonely for us, she thought, but I’m not a thing, and I’m not yours.
“Promise me you won’t work in a factory,” Father said. “They lock the girls inside and burn them to death.”
“That’s an old story,” Pearl said in a harsher tone than she meant. “Before the war even.” Daddy, she thought, it’s our last night. Let us be gentle with each other. She searched his eyes, hoping for a kind look. He flinched.
“And promise me you won’t let Frieda marry that peacock Mendel,” he said.
“I don’t like him either, but does it matter if we like him or not? In America, she’ll be free to make her choice.” Pearl didn’t see why Frieda, still in her teens, should marry at all. In America, some girls waited until well in their twenties to settle down. The Yiddish papers said so, and Basha confirmed it. Not that Pearl believed everything Basha said, but on this point, she accepted her sister’s word.
“Mendel’s the type who looks in the mirror every five seconds to visit with his best friend.” Father gripped Pearl’s arm again, this time hard enough to hurt. “He isn’t worthy of her. With him, she’ll have a miserable life. Now promise me.”
He had this awful look on his face, and his grip tightened even more. Pearl imagined herself a girl, being caught with her fingers in the honey pot. If she refused his demand, he could change his mind again about America, hold back the money he’d promised. A possibility, but not likely. Far more likely, she realized with a painful sense of sadness, was that this could be the last thing he’d ever ask of her face-to-face. When she left Turya tomorrow, she would probably never see him again.
“Yes, I promise,” she said. After all, what did it cost her? He let go of her arm, and his face took on a more peaceful aspect. Then as she picked up the tablecloth again to shake out the crumbs, another thought came to mind: Why don’t you care who I marry?
Maybe he didn’t think she would.
As a child, Pearl used to watch on summer evenings as boys and girls strolled up Greyble Street. A few daring couples held hands openly. Pearl admired the girls in their summer dresses yet dreaded the prospect of holding some oily-faced boy’s hand, making promises as a child to another child before knowing the man he’d become. And then the war and Revolution swept away the young men her age, not to mention several of the girls she’d played with in school, who were now in their graves. If she wanted to find a husband in Turya, all that were left were toothless old men, young wet-ears, or the few who returned from the war alive but with broken bodies, broken minds.
That was how she made it to twenty-seven unmarried.
* * *
A LITTLE AFTER dawn, Pearl and Frieda, dressed in gray like old women to ward off strange men’s eyes, climbed aboard a horse cart crowded with fourteen passengers, all heading west across the scarred countryside. It hardly seemed real. No tearful partings. Even Frieda was unusually solemn. Just a wave to her father and brother, and then the jingling of a harness and the soft plop of horses’ feet sinking into mud.
They passed the large black cross marking the edge of town, and the main road turned into a dirt track barely visible in the scarred, empty fields of sandy soil stretching out in all directions. All wasteland. Pearl felt like Moses crossing the desert. What the Germans didn’t manage to bomb during the Great War, the Russians burned. Villages were flattened, replaced by snarls of barbed wire, piles of broken brick, and burnt trees skinny and black as whips. The few remaining buildings were sprayed with bullet holes, their windows cracked, their roofs fallen in, their doors stolen for fuel. On the side of the road stood rows of wooden crosses, some marked in charcoal, others carved neatly with the names, ranks, and ages of young men, or simply, “Here lie 3 German soldiers.”
“Where are the people?” Frieda whispered. The man next to her overheard and pointed them out, poking their heads out of homes dug from the earth, mounds of sod, scrap metal, and stove bricks covered in green thatch. Peasant children nestled together for warmth, their cheeks and bare feet red as cow’s blood. Frieda shut her eyes, but Pearl forced herself to look, to witness, and to guard herself from wanting to come back.
That night, they reached a half-destroyed train station where the Polish border used to be. Pearl and Frieda stretched out on the cold tile floor, staring at the stars through boards laid across the blackened walls for a ceiling. Men occupied the benches, while women sat on the floor with blank-faced children and babies in puddles of urine.
It’s just for tonight, thought Pearl. Tomorrow the train comes to take me to America. She took off her coat to cover her sister, then removed her shoes and rubbed her feet. “I wouldn’t do that,” warned a woman next to her. “Look.” She gestured to the other passengers’ feet, clad in strips of rags or shoes made of birch bark tied with cords.
“Oh, I see,” said Pearl, putting her shoes back on. “Thank you.”
“You wouldn’t have an extra bit of food to spare?”
Pearl tore off a hunk of her dark bread, and the woman pressed it into her mouth.
In the morning, Pearl’s back was sore and her cheeks were chapped with cold. She and Frieda lined up to fill glasses with hot tea from a large brass samovar. A man tossed a cigarette butt on the ground, and two others rushed to grab it and suck a few puffs.
The ticket office, a shack made of whitewashed pine boards, remained closed until just after their train arrived. While Frieda watched the one suitcase they shared, Pearl joined the crowd pressing against the window to buy their tickets, bodies against bodies. “No, let me through! The train can’t leave without me,” she begged, but the crowd kept pushing. Finally, she pressed her lips into a tight line and pushed right back, rammed her shoulder into a stranger’s arm.
When it was her turn, she learned that overnight the fares had risen; the Polish zloty had lost a tenth of its value. Luckily, Pearl’s American dollars were still good.
As she rushed to rejoin Frieda, a man bumped into her roughly, nearly knocking her over. “Lousy she-Jew, watch where you’re going!” he said and vanished into the crowd, taking with him her sense of triumph at getting the tickets. Then she checked her pockets and her heart seized. The change she’d received at the ticket window was gone.
She and Frieda passed the five-day journey to Warsaw in a third-class carriage without seats, just a wooden floor packed with passengers and stinking of garlic sausage, sweat, and dirty skin. They arrived hungry, exhausted, and nearly broke, only to discover the laws in America had changed. Previously a sibling in America could sponsor a visa, and for that they had their sister Basha in New York. Now immigrants from Eastern Europe needed a child or parent as a sponsor. Siblings like Basha were useless.
The line of would-be immigrants eager to plead their case at the American consulate extended for blocks. Smugglers, touts for travel agents, and peddlers roamed the line, plying their trade in bored singsong voices. Each day, Pearl went earlier, at six, five, then four in the morning. No use sleeping there all night; the police chased people away. One man who managed to get inside had his application refused, so he jumped out of a second-floor window. After that, the windows were locked and guarded.
In the afternoons, Pearl found work cleaning rooms at a hotel. Most of the guests were men or small families, though once, she saw a pair of elegantly dressed women coming out of a room together, their elbows just touching. One of the women, eyeing Pearl, whispered something into the ear of her companion, and Pearl longed to know what it was. She’d never had close friends, aside from her sisters. What might it be like to share such closeness with a girl who wasn’t a blood relation?
Frieda also earned a few pennies, selling flowers outside a Russian Orthodox Church that was slated for destruction. For safety reasons, the government said, though Pearl knew the real reason: hatred. They hated Russians here, as well as Germans, Gypsies, and Jews. The Poles were a people of hatred, and she hated them right back. Their language, their hulking churches where priests preached Jew hatred to ugly men with tight, smirking faces that made her want to run away.
Pearl was beginning to despair of ever leaving Poland, when a Jewish couple in line at the consulate told her about Cuba.
Ever literal minded, Frieda opposed the idea. Their goal was America, not Cuba. “If we keep waiting at the consulate, someone’s bound to hear us,” she said as they ate gritty day-old bread in their rented room. They shared a single bed and woke up in the middle of the night scratching from bedbugs. “Your way of talking to people, it’s so . . . direct. Try flattering a little. Or let me try.”
“Doesn’t matter, no one there will ever listen,” Pearl argued.
“But why do the laws apply so specifically to Eastern Europe?” Frieda asked.
“Look who’s lining up outside the consulate for visas,” said Pearl, but Frieda shrugged. “Enough Jews to make a minyan a hundred times over.” Frieda still didn’t understand, so Pearl laid it out plainly. “Americans don’t want Jews.”
“Where in the world do they want Jews? I say let’s wait to go to America. What’s in Cuba? Who do we know in Cuba?”
“Cuba is next to America. You stay there a year, then you can go to America without a sponsor or affidavit or anything. That’s what the travel agents say, and a Jewish couple I met told me the same.”
And one more thing, Pearl thought. At least Cuba’s not Poland.
She’d asked the travel agent to show her Cuba on the map, to prove he wasn’t playing some Turkish trick. The claw-shaped island really did seem close to Florida, as if she could jump across the water from one coast to another. He showed her pictures of palm trees by the water and a lighthouse. So they did have proper buildings, thought Pearl. Cuba wasn’t just a wilderness, like Sinai or Midian in the Torah.
“We should wait, to try for America,” Frieda said. “What’s the hurry?”
“We can’t get stuck here. What if there’s another war?” said Pearl, panic rising in her chest. “You’re barely eighteen. How do you know what you want?”
“I just know,” Frieda said. “Without Mendel, my life will be a desert. Please.”
Frieda often talked that way, in the language of fairy tales and Bible legends that Pearl used to read to her when she was a child, as if they lived in the time of Moses instead of 1922. As if she’s the heroine of a story, ennobled by suffering for love. A dreamer. Perhaps America might cure her sister of her silliest dreams.
While Frieda lived in dreams, Pearl handled money and documents. She paid ticket agents who counted money to the last kopek. She bribed their Polish landlady with knitted socks and earnest promises to pay the balance for their room. She kept strict accounts of their meager budget, refusing to indulge her sister’s whims for penny candy or pretty stockings. And then Frieda accused her of having no heart.
“Promise me that Cuba is only temporary,” said Frieda. “Just a stop, not the end. Our goal remains America.”
“Of course,” said Pearl, annoyed by all these promises she was being asked to make, first by Father, now Frieda. “Who wants to stay in Cuba? What’s in Cuba?”
* * *
ON THE SS HUDSON, nights are the worst. As the boat rises and falls on the waves, Frieda lies in her berth, clutches one of Pearl’s clean handkerchiefs over her face, and recites childhood prayers. In her berth above, Pearl listens to the others’ crying, coughing, and retching. Periodically the ship’s doctor tours their quarters, checking for measles or tuberculosis. The passengers beg for medicine for seasickness, but he has none to give. He suggests they rub their temples.
She sleeps in her clothes, as they did in Russia, in case they needed to jump out of bed and escape to the woods from whomever their enemies were—Cossacks, Poles, Reds—depending on the day. Her good wool dress with the lace collar, the one she’d worked on for weeks to make a good impression in America, is now hopelessly wrinkled.
Tonight is one of those stormy evenings when clothes, books, and tin cups go flying. Passengers roll out of their bunks, tumble onto the floor, cry, scream, or pray, terrified their boat will sink.
When the mood grabs her, Frieda kneels on the floor and prays, her lips moving dramatically, her face a pretty picture of solemnity. Pearl also wants to pray or, more accurately, wants to want to pray, but she can’t make herself believe that saying a few words can force God to serve her will. She prayed plenty during the war and then again during the Revolution, and look what happened. Nothing.
In her berth, she lies awake, trying to shut out the noises, particularly the low yet distinctly savage sounds of men pushing into their women, who cry out, making horrifying sounds. Like they’re being stabbed.
Even before what happened to her in Turya, Pearl disliked those funny-looking Poles, with their thin lips and eyelids, but there was nothing humorous about the anger they carried with them always. It wasn’t only women they wanted. They liked boys too, to serve as personal valets, and other gruesome uses Pearl overheard Father mention to their neighbor. Pearl hated their clean-shaven Polish faces and their ugly nasal Polish language, those long, knife-straight noses, and those mocking blue eyes.
Since the Revolution, it wasn’t safe for a chicken, a cow, or a woman to linger outside. The only animals in the streets were wolves, who’d lost their fear of humans and walked through the town single file, in daylight. Pearl and her sisters did the laundry and hung it to dry in the house. Rather than visit the public baths, they cleaned each other with damp rags. No more trips to the outhouse. They relieved themselves in a pot.
All during those days of fighting, she yearned for a proper bath. As a girl, Pearl used to go with her mother and sisters to the bathhouse in winter, or the women’s bathing area in the river. She’d hold Mama’s hand and splash beside the riverbank, while her sisters went in up to their necks, their nightdresses billowing under the water. Some girls swam naked, and Pearl admired their white limbs swaying like reeds in the river. Every man in town knew this was a private area for women and avoided it, yet once a stranger from another town appeared, stripped off his clothes, and dove in the water. The other women quickly chased him away, yelling and throwing rocks at his back, but Pearl got a good look at the firm, flat lines of his bare chest, in such contrast to the swelling breasts of the women. She felt marvelous and warm in the presence of so much beauty, in both kinds of bodies.
Staying cooped up at home for so long, Pearl felt as if she’d swallowed a nest of crickets. So she’d sneak over to the root cellar to satisfy her cravings for both privacy and food. She’d steal licks of apricot jam, chew a leathery ring of dried apple, crunch the meat of a walnut. She made a sugar cube between her teeth last for ten minutes, letting each grain of sugar melt on her tongue. Her palate was simple yet intense.
Coming out of the cellar one afternoon, Pearl saw a Polish soldier urinating on the side of her house.
He carried a long gun and wore mismatched pieces of different uniforms: the gray army jacket of a German, the peaked cap of a Pole with a dirty red rim, and the black leather boots of a well-to-do Russian peasant. Maybe he wasn’t a soldier, just an opportunist. His face was shaved, so she knew he wasn’t Jewish.
For years after she’d remember how she was too startled to speak or scream.
He could have taken her into the trees, or behind a shed, but he did it in the open.
One minute she was sucking raspberry jam from her fingers in the safety of their damp cellar, and the next, she was pinned to the ground by this man’s body, heavy and smelly, like the underside of a horse. With one hand, he pressed his cold mud-stained fingers over her lips, and with the other he opened his pants. At the initial burst of pain—like a barbed spike ripping through her insides—her mind jumped to another place, like fainting but awake. It’s not real, she told herself, like those horror stories grandma used to tell to scare us children so we’d stay out of the woods. Imagine it’s already over. She shut her eyes and thought of the female animals squawking and bleating in the yard during mating season.
She’s glad now for what she cannot remember. Pearl heard him buckle his belt but didn’t see him run off. She lay there with her eyes shut, the cold earth chilling her back, the dirt clogging the tips of her fingernails. Her hair hurt. So did the insides of her thighs. She still felt his weight pressing her down. She smelled him. Words came to her lips, a jumble of different prayers. “God, why?” she pleaded under her breath. “If I’m guilty, tell me how I’ve sinned. From the well of my distress, I call on you.”
