Read Displaced Persons for Free Online Page B

DOWN TO Fela’s dark bread and soup of boiled meat. He would not look at Pavel. He would eat slowly, in silence. Still his body began to feel heat, as if it knew a discomfort and pain were coming. Why should Chaim obey? He bent to his soup, taking each sip like a medicine. He felt a needle begin to move inside, ready to become a knife, thrusting inside him, carving names into his guts. He would not look at Pavel, but when he glanced at Fela he saw her eyes turndown to her plate, afraid to meet his gaze. A twinge of shame pushed through him, then an ugly gratitude that made him angry. Who were these people to him, making a false family, false home? Who were they? He had a sudden image of the raincoat that Pavel had brought home for Chaim, a proud trade he had made, and Chaim wanted to leap up from the table and slash the coat into tiny pieces, until nothing remained but a pile of collar, pocket, useless squares of cloth. There was only so long he could contain his fury.
    The soup trickled into his stomach. He took an English class each week, but it was not enough to give him a purpose or an escape. Perhaps a routine would help him leave the house, make his own life. He had inquired, without real interest, into work or training, among the aid workers. Perhaps that was his way out.
     
    A FTER A MONTH IN the camp print shop Chaim accustomed himself to the operation of the large and ancient ink machine that rolled out the camp newsletter, little stories reviewed by the soldiers to ensure they carried no news of riots, protests, arrests. Death notices of the refugees were permitted. Also lists of names of the living, announcements of departures. Bundles of young people had already been let out to temporary homes in Britain and France, to be rehabilitated until—but until what no one yet knew.
    His hands turned a dark blue-black every evening as he read through the lists before the ink on the pages was dry, the names rubbing off on his clothing and skin. Each week young men and an occasional young woman or two gathered in the early evenings outside the shop to pick up the new pages, skipping over the drawings on the front page, the poems on the second page, fingers running up and down the lists, eyes squinting, hands folding the short pages and then reopening, rereading. He watched them searching for a last name thatmeant something to them, a town in which someone had a cousin, a patronymic that sounded like a past neighbor’s, borrowing pens from one another as they circled clues.
    He continued to attend his English class in the children’s school barracks, and Chaim left his post early on Tuesdays to make sure he found a seat close to the front of the room. One evening a man from the print shop came trotting after him as Chaim crossed the threshold. A young woman named Rayzl Traum had submitted an advertisement to the camp paper. The printman had written the advertisement and stopped at the last name, questioned her. She had a young cousin Chaim before the war.
    The children were finishing their lessons, the teacher outside the room, waiting as they wrote the last sums of the day. From the doorway Chaim saw the small ones copying the scrawls from the blackboard into their slim notebooks. Then he turned his face to the printman’s feet, his heavy brown shoes.
    I had a cousin Rayzl before the war, Chaim answered.
     
    H E REMEMBERED HER . R AYZELE. Now she was plump, filled with a rageful kind of cheer, another one who wanted to blot out the past, march forward. Their fathers were brothers. She held him close to her chest and breathed into his hair when she saw him.
    They sat on a bench near the print shop, and he waited for her to tell him what she knew. But she did not say a word, instead looked at him directly in the eyes, as if to send out her message without speaking. Perhaps she waited for him to ask. But he did not want to know. Perhaps it was a family trait, to know and not to say, to write quietly in notebooks, as his