Survivor’s Sidewalks
Walking home in a different way
Whenever she’s out of earshot, my father complains to me that my mother glares at him every evening as he’s emptying out his pockets onto our kitchen table. “You’d think I had committed some sort of a crime — like a theft or maybe even worse just to look at her face!” He’s a short muscular man but probably average height for men of his generation from Poland. He was one of the lucky ones who survived Auschwitz, one of the lucky ones who found his way to America, who learned English and became financially stable.
He’s talking about his “finds” — the things he picks up from the sidewalks when he walks home from his tailoring shop in town. Mom remains silent until he’s totally finished. He signals this by pulling his pockets inside out, stretching his arms out and then turning his palms face up as though about to perform a magic trick. He further explains to me that Mom always becomes so angry with him over his finds. “This I just can’t understand. Her reaction? It’s completely mishugah. For me this is making no sense.”
My mother begs him to stop picking things up from the ground. Her initial approach is to reason with him. “They’re dirty, Meyer!” She explains. “And even if they aren’t, who knows where they’ve been or who touched them.”
I listen to their frequent arguments about his finds. Mostly they’re clothing — gloves, hats, scarves, and sometimes sweaters. His face assumes an intense seriousness as he lays things out. His bushy eyebrows scrunch together with concentration.
There’s a method to Dad’s habit. He’s learned, after many years of looking on the ground and successful “finding”, that there actually are “finding” seasons; spring is the best one, for instance, because the snowmelt is greatest. It’s when items that have been hidden under the snows of winter reveal themselves. Occasionally, my father brings home a book or a pen for my mother. Once in a while, there might be a piece of jewelry — even a wallet once.
“You know, it was one thing when we collected clothes from the ground in the camps,” She reminds him, ”but that time was when all of us were starving and always cold. That was then but it’s no more! Her voice rises, her anger increased as she realizes her explanations have no impact on Dad’s behavior. “I want to forget those times and you need to forget this craziness of yours now!” She shouts.
She wants nothing to do with anything that evokes even the slightest memories of the camps — the unimaginable brutality, her loss of family, and personal dignity, and her belief in god or humanity. “We’re living a new life in America now. Why don’t you understand we must work to forget?” She reminds him daily with different words. Dad turns to me after her lectures. He has a personal mission: to gain my sympathy and support.
“She’s always angry with me, always is telling me I’m reminding her of our past suffering and hardship when I bring home things. But they’re good things, you know this, yes?” What my father understands to a total certainty is that one glove may not be as good as two but it’s definitely better than no glove.
“So imagine that you have only one glove, a glove you found, but only one.” He instructs me. “And the weather, it is freezing! Below freezing even and you found this one glove. So you are able to put into this one glove you found the one hand but remember that always you can put inside a pocket the other one. There it could stay nice and warm also, yes?”
He admits to me that the hat he found on the street next to the traffic light just that afternoon is dirty but one thing he knows for sure: it won’t have lice like the things they found in the camps always did. “Besides, why can’t she just wash it?” He asks me.
They weren’t my parents when they were engaged in their daily life-saving “finding.” They weren’t married to one another either nor did they know each other. There was no likelihood their paths would ever have crossed since they’d grown up and lived in different countries. They’d also been taken away to different camps.
“You’ll remember,” my father reminds me, “we were more dead than alive when we were trying to find anything that maybe could help us to be warmer Just this alone would give us a better chance to stay alive.”
He married her, my mother. The was a woman with a damaged body and a traumatized mind. And she married him — a man with a damaged body and a traumatized mind. Could they have married anyone but one another? Of course not. What other kind of person could possibly ever understand? Yet they both understood that in a different kind of life with a different kind of past, they would have chosen differently.
