The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, Page 27

  “Of course. A guy pulls a knife on you—”

  “Yes, but he was too slow, too timid.” Bernard picked up the knife and began to demonstrate. “Empty the till!” he shouted. “Empty the till!”

  “No, that’s too much,” said the clerk. “People don’t really do it that way.”

  “Really?”

  “No, no, the kid is right. Armed robbers always give away something, some sign that shows they’re scared.”

  “You’ve been robbed here?”

  “Oh yeah. A few times.”

  “That’s terrible. Do you like the theatre?”

  “I do, but I usually see movies ’cause they’re cheaper and you can fast-forward the bits you don’t like.”

  “That’s so true. Well, look, I’m terribly sorry for the mixup. But you were scared, a bit? You’re not just saying it because . . . we have to know . . . we’ve got to get it right.”

  “A little bit scared.”

  “That’s great. You were good playing along with the whole golf club thing. Have you ever acted? Let me get these Cokes, ’cause we’re actually running a bit late. What was your name?” Bernard asked, giving the clerk his money.

  “Paul.”

  “Paul what?”

  “Paul Chandler.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Paul. I’ll write that down. Bernard Leibowitz,” he said as they shook hands. “I’ll send you two tickets when we open. Should be in about three weeks.”

  “Great.”

  “Come on you two, let’s go. We’re late. See you, Paul. Again, we’re really sorry.”

  “Hey,” the clerk called out as the three of us walked out, “what happens in the end?”

  “We’re workshopping it. You take care of yourself,” Bernard called.

  Bernard started the car. I sat in the back with Pavel and started yelling at him until Bernard told me to stop.

  “He’s stoned, Rose.”

  “Who’s he?” Pavel asked.

  “His name is Bernard. He’s your guardian angel.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “I’m a private investigator,” Bernard called from the front seat.

  We drove to the edge of a park where I could interrogate Pavel without disturbing anybody. Everything Yvonne had told us was true. Bernard let me ask the questions, mostly in Russian, although it seemed that Pavel’s English had improved. He had developed a crack habit he couldn’t sustain. He had first bought a few vials from the tough guys at the station. They were the ones who taught him about pipes and then sent him on to Ziggy’s when he needed more. The pipe Bernard had found in his unit was the first he had ever tried. It was too big, an inefficient use of the rock, so he left it behind. If Pavel had got it right the first time, we would never have found him. Unable to pay for the quantity he was soon using, he agreed to sell crack for the dealer from Ziggy’s in order to support his own habit. He had taken delivery of three thousand dollars’ worth to sell on the streets but he was robbed by someone whom Pavel suspected knew the dealer at Ziggy’s. It had to be a setup. He was jumped on his way home from Ziggy’s. All of it was taken. Now he was a crack addict, three thousand dollars in debt to his supplier, strung out and in hiding. The dealer at Ziggy’s had warned him that he would be “just so much raw meat” if the stuff was used or sold without being paid for. Pavel had been a probationary dealer, a learner dealer, and had failed.

  “If it wasn’t for Yvonne, I might be dead already,” Pavel stuttered between sobs.

  “I don’t think they’d kill you for three thousand dollars,” Bernard sought to assure him.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “’Cause when someone is as desperate as you are, they’ll do nearly anything, and a person who’ll do nearly anything is worth more than three thousand dollars to the people you’re afraid of.”

  I felt numb. I vacillated between anger, sadness and fear for him. I was angry because it was all so unnecessary. He had brought it on himself in some pathetic adolescent assertion of his independence. How could he have done it? How could he have brought this on us? I was not as open-minded as I thought. It had seemed to me throughout my life that every uncertainty, every obstacle, every disaster that we had ever faced had been due to an authoritarian regime that the whole world knew about. Everybody knew about Stalin. Everybody knew about Brezhnev. But crack—who would understand this? Why should someone feel sorry for him? He had brought it upon himself. His problem was beneath us. I was angry.

  Yet, looking at him in the backseat of Bernard’s car, his body swimming in his shirt, his face pale and wet with tears, I managed at the same time to feel sorry for him. He was a sad little boy, my brother, an average boy of stifled adequacy, unblessed, whose normalcy was stolen from him by circumstances not only beyond his control, not only beyond his parents’ control, but beyond his understanding. He did not even know how far back in time he would have to go to explain this almighty European river of hatred for a group he found himself born into, a group whose existence was for so long marginal, as marginal as his existence within it. Pavel was a prisoner of his foreignness, a little boy impersonating a man permanently in exile. The exile who succeeds through hard work and talent gains everybody’s acceptance and even acclaim. But no one gets any acclaim for just getting out of bed day after day, for having a talent only for attracting derision, with his clothes, his looks, with the spittled noise that he tries to pass off as English. This was a boy who was never good at anything. At school he sat at the back and learned only to be himself. No one chose him to be in the team, in the play, in the club, in the band, to kiss behind the bike sheds. His clothes never fitted him. They smelled of Russia, of close living in small apartments. He was either invisible or else ridiculous. This was a scared and lonely young man who had never felt confident about anything and, on the basis of everything he had experienced, had no reason to expect that he ever would. With just a little bit of crack he could forget the way he always felt, forget his parents’ shouting, their house-proud impoverishment. With just a little bit of crack he could feel the way he had heard a man is supposed to feel. He could speak better. He could be not afraid. He could be capable. He could go on to achieve something. Why would he ever want to be without it?

  I was scared for him. I knew nothing about addiction, nothing about what it took to tear yourself away from the only thing that ever made you feel worthwhile, nothing about how long that took or what you had to go through to come out on the other side. Bernard knew. He knew from Adam.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked him.

  “He has to detox. We have to take him somewhere where he can detox.”

  “I can’t go back to my unit. They’ll kill me,” Pavel whimpered.

  “He can’t be left alone,” Bernard said.

  “How long will it take him to detox?”

  “Anywhere from two to five days. And they won’t be fun days.”

  “I can’t take him home to our parents like this. I don’t know what it will do to them. I don’t know what my father will do to him.”

  “Do you know anyone who could watch him for two to five days?”

  “I’ll watch him. That’s not the problem. The problem is where to watch him. Where would I tell my parents I was staying. What do we do afterwards?”

  “First things first: he has to detox,” Bernard said.

  “I can’t go back to my place, they’ll kill me. I owe them three thousand dollars.”

  “We’ll take him back to my place,” Bernard said.

  “Really?”

  “Why not. It’s safe for him.”

  “What about your father?”

  “It will test his religious convictions. It’s a mitzvah,” Bernard said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A good deed.”

  “Bernard, it’s not fair on your father.”

  “Rose, it’s an emergency. Do you have any better ideas?”

  Bernard’s father lived in the middle of a narrow stre
et of weatherboard houses guarded by trees planted by the early European settlers to drain the swamp they were building on. The street was crowded with old cars. Bernard parked in their driveway. The house was dark. The refrigerator hummed. The clock in the hall ticked. Bernard let us in while I tried to keep Pavel quiet. We went to the front room, where Bernard switched on a lamp on a side table. There were black-and-white photographs in frames. It was too dark to make them out.

  “You can stay in my brother’s old room,” Bernard said to Pavel. Then to me: “You’re going to have to tell your parents something, Rose.”

  “I know,” I said, looking beyond the light of the lamp and into the darkness. “I’ll tell my mother something. Whatever I tell, I’ll tell her first. What about your father?”

  “I’m going to wake him now.”

  “Now?” I whispered in alarm.

  “Rose, I have to. Pavel’s not going to go to sleep and—”

  “No, I will, I will,” Pavel interrupted.

  “Can’t you wait till morning?” I begged him.

  “Pavel may not let me. Detox is . . . well, it’s not pleasant. I don’t want my father waking to some strange sound in the middle of the night. He’ll think he’s back in the camps unless he realizes it’s fifty years on and the noise is coming from the other room. Either way, I have to wake him.”

  I remained with Pavel in Adam’s old room while Bernard went to wake his father. I heard him knock on his father’s door and my heart sank. I could hear their muffled voices. A little while later Bernard called me into the kitchen and there was his father, sitting at the table in his summer pajamas, with the light off. I don’t know why I was so unnerved by him. His arms, resting on the table, were illuminated by the light from the window. Beneath the hair on his left forearm I saw the number. I had never seen one before. I had heard about them, of course, read about them, but had never seen one. Bernard grew up seeing it at breakfast. His parents had been branded like cattle and he saw their numbers every day before school. One day, without warning, he saw his mother’s number for the last time.

  “You are Rose?” his father said in a quiet, accented voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Bernard tells me you need help.”

  “Yes, Mr. Leibowitz, my brother is unwell.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  “No.”

  “Do they know where you are?”

  “No. When my mother hadn’t heard from my brother for a number of days, she sent me to my brother’s place to check up on him. I came back and told her he was fine, but the truth was he was missing. He’d moved out of his unit and I was worried something might have happened to him. I didn’t know what to do. Bernard—Bernard helped me find him. When we found him he was . . . he’d started taking . . . it’s called crack. . . . Nothing with needles.”

  “You are Bernard’s friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do your parents think you are now?”

  “Out with friends. I’m not sure where they think I am.”

  “Your family, you are Russian Jews?”

  “Yes.”

  My eyes had filled. A tear spilled out onto my cheek. I did not want him to see it. I didn’t know why I was crying. It annoyed me. I hadn’t known I was even close to tears. He stood up, a shrunken man, too small to be the father of a bear. He got up from the table and put his hand to my face. It was warm. The skin on his palm was wrinkled and I cried even more.

  “Rose,” he whispered, “I want to help you. I will turn the light on and make us a cup of tea. You will tell me how I can help you.” He turned the light on and went to the sink to fill the kettle.

  “Your parents have two, yes? You and your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more?”

  “No.”

  “Well, a boy and a girl. That’s it, isn’t it? There are no other kinds. I have two boys.”

  “Yes, I know. Adam is your other son.”

  “You know Adam?” His eyes lit up.

  “No, Bernard has told me about him. He’s in Israel now?”

  “Yes . . . he’s there and I am here.”

  “With Bernard.”

  “Yes. It’s a hard life for him in Israel.”

  “It’s a hard life everywhere,” I offered, regretting it immediately. This man knew about hard lives. He didn’t need any wisdom from me. He put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

  “Well, Rose, if you are Russian you will know something about hard lives, even one as young as you.”

  I smiled weakly, not knowing what to say. My brother was high on crack in the other room and this man’s son was watching over him. My parents were at home, my father probably in his chair watching late-night television, not understanding it all, my mother probably in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering where her children were. I was being made a cup of tea by a man who had seen, who had experienced, the worst the species had to offer. My eyes kept resting on the number. I tried not to let him see.

  “You are a good sister to take care of your brother like this.” I didn’t know how to answer this, either. I couldn’t say anything that didn’t sound trivial to this man with the number on his arm and the sad sunken eyes. Those eyes had seen it all. They had seen the dead piled high on top of each other. They had watered when ashes blew into them, the ashes of the Jews of Europe.

  “You are looking at my arm, at the number.” He had noticed.

  “No, I was—”

  “It’s all right, Rose. I have had it a long time now. I was fifteen when it was given to me,” he said bringing over the tea. “I was fifteen. I had already seen my father, my mother and two younger sisters lined up against the wall and shot. I saw it through a gap in a neighbor’s fence. By the time I was on the train to Auschwitz I was long an orphan. There was time to think on the trains. I thought of my family, just gone. I hallucinated. All those people crammed together, no air, no water. I kept mistaking shapes in the dark at the other end of the cattle car for my father, my sisters, my mother. By the time we got there I had seen men and women die standing up. I had seen children smothered under the weight of people struggling to be near a crack in the wooden doors for air, for moisture. The train slowed. We could hear the dogs in the distance. When they opened the doors the light was blinding. We shielded our eyes. The dogs were straining on their leashes to get at us; they were deafening. The SS were shouting at us to hurry off the trains. They beat us into a formation for the first Selektion to see who would go straight to the gas. Most were to be gassed within twenty-four hours. You cannot imagine the scene. No one could invent this nightmare.

  “People had brought suitcases with them on the train. They carried them into line until they were ordered to drop them. We saw skeletons in striped uniforms, their eyes bulging out of their faces. They came to pick up the belongings people had dropped. I had nothing but a coat. An SS guard ordered me to drop it. One of the skeletons came to take my coat. He came very near to me. All the while the dogs were barking and the people from the train were being beaten, crying, screaming, into a line. He came to me, this skeleton. I don’t know why he chose me, but without looking at me he muttered underneath his breath, ‘I am eighteen and I have a trade. I am eighteen and I have a trade. You must say it or you will not see the morning.’

  “I have said it every day since, like a prayer. I am eighteen and I have a trade. I am eighteen and I have a trade.” He sipped his tea. He lifted his eyes from his teacup and spoke as if confessing, “I have said it every day. It’s worked so far.”

  It was agreed that I should go home. I wanted to walk. It was only a couple of kilometers and I didn’t want to leave Mr. Leibowitz alone with Pavel. But it was unthinkable to both Bernard and his father that I should walk home alone in the dark. Bernard’s father had suddenly become a member of the cast. Mr. Leibowitz told me that Pavel could stay with them for the period of his detoxification on one condition:
that I told my parents where he was and why. I tried to bargain with him. I told him I would tell them where he was, but not why. This was unacceptable to him. We settled on one of my parents and why, and it had to be tomorrow. I did better than that. I was forced to.

  Bernard drove me home and when I got there my father was asleep but my mother was up, sitting in the dark. She didn’t know whether to hug me or shout at me. Where had I been? Who had I been with? How had I got home? Had I seen Pavel? I sat beside her in the dark and told her everything: about Pavel’s empty flat, Bernard’s listing in the telephone directory, the crack pipe Bernard found in Pavel’s flat and how he used it on the tough kids at the station, about Ziggy’s, the dealer and about Yvonne. I told her about Pavel’s attempt to rob the 7-Eleven and Bernard’s impromptu theatre workshop and, of course, about Mr. Leibowitz.

  At first she wanted to go to the Leibowitzes’ immediately but I managed to talk her out of it. She asked why Pavel was there with them and not recovering at home. I told her that I didn’t think Pavel and my father should see each other until Pavel had gone through the detoxification period.

  “But I’ll have to tell him. He’s his son, too, and if I tell him he’ll want to see him.”

  “It won’t do either of them any good, Mum,” I explained. She thought about this and I took her silence as tacit agreement. It was two o’clock in the morning. The only way I could get her to go to bed was to promise to take her to Pavel in the morning.

  She called Kuznetsov at home first thing the next morning to tell him she would not be coming in that day. Why? Was she sick? What was wrong? Kuznetsov would not rest. He wanted to know everything. My mother was whispering. She didn’t want my father to hear.

  “It’s my son, Pavel. He’s in trouble.”

  She hung up in a hurry when she heard my father getting up from the kitchen. He would have seen her putting the phone down. She tried to preempt any questioning from him about the phone call.

  “Oh, you’re showered and dressed already,” she said to him.