She searches Feter’s downtown haunts. Not only the café where they’d met the previous day but also the coffeehouses and cafeterias, the delicatessens and dairy restaurants along Delancey, and that place on Essex Street that serves everything pickled. She searches any and all of the corners below Houston where her uncle has been known to perch, but all to no avail. She finds the old snowy owl, Mr. Smushkevich, the chess maven, contemplating his board alone, trying to crack the code of some obscure gambit from les jours de tsar as he nurses his tepid tea. He shows her the ancient smile as he offers his regrets. “Ikh hob nisht leygn an aoyg aoyf im, liebling.” Haven’t laid an eye on him.
At the counter of the I.G.K.P. she finds Mr. Katzenelson and Mr. Pollak, two former theater critics in exile, still arguing over the premiere of
Nor are there any clues forthcoming from the place on Broome Street that serves milk from a ladle and has the sink installed outside the toilet for Hasidic customers. Mr. Rubinstein is a Zionist who’s never put a foot in the Promised Land but who keeps a white-and-blue tin for donations to Israel on the table with his black coffee. Also no help. “Sorry to disappoint, Kallehniu,” he tells her and gives the tin a tap, so that costs her a dime for the Promised Land.
She walks. It’s only a block away, but she saves it for last, because really why would she want to go back to such a place if she doesn’t have to? She has managed for five years not to take a step back inside. Now, against her own desire, she confronts a sooty, terra-cotta brick tenement house on Orchard Street. One among many around Seward Park, where shabby canyons of flat-faced brick and wooden rental barracks stand. Jews have lived here for decades, filling up the cramped apartments and spilling out onto the stoops and into the streets and markets. More since the war’s end, but not from the shtetlakh this time. Instead of all those little villages dotting Eastern Europe, this time the deluge has come from the displaced persons camps.
Rachel stands on the sidewalk facing the building’s wood-frame entrance with its peeling varnish. Above, a latticed ironwork of fire escapes zigzags down the facade. A couple of teenaged girls burst from the door and come clattering down the steps in saddle shoes, gabbling in a language from the old country. A Baltic dialect maybe. They ignore Rachel. Ascending into the tenement’s upper floors, where the light of the stairwell thickens to soup, she hears a radio blaring Yiddish from somewhere and the yap of a dog. Mounting the stairs, she notes that the tattered step runners she remembers have been replaced by rubberized treads. The ancient smells linger, however. They’re in the woodwork, the sweat and cook pots of generations of poor immigrant Jews, boiling kraut and pickling beets, breaking their backs for a few American coins to jangle in their pockets.
On the third floor, she stops in front of the door of a flat. She wonders… If she presses an ear against it, would she hear the echo of her own voice, that skinny D.P. girl who once lived there? She had spent her days then waiting on her uncle like a servant. Preparing the food as best she could, washing clothes, sweeping the floor. She thought it was her duty to tend to her elder, and he did not disabuse her of that idea. He could still pretend that he was the master of the house.
She didn’t care. What else was there for her to do? She had no friends and no desire for them. She was content with her ghosts, who understood her pain. Understood her guilt. At night, while Feter snored to high heaven, she would lie on a lumpy mattress plopped on the floor and try to sleep—though night was when the muscularity of her fear and shame threatened to strangle her. This was her life back then, until she met Aaron. Barely a life at all.