The Fugu Plan Page 4

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  IN THE EARLY AUTUMN of I939, shortly after the start of World War II, Jewish refugees from Poland began streaming into the Baltic state of Lithuania - a state still free of German occupation. Within days, the international Jewish self-help organization known as the Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, established relief kitchens in all the major towns of the country to serve the refugees who within six months numbered close to ten thousand. One of the kitchens in Vilna, the capital, was known by its refugee patrons as the Club. It was to the Club that Avram Chesno had to turn his steps every morning. Avram Chesno hated the Club. For the four months he had been in Vilna he had hated the very existence of it, the reasons for its being there. He hated the stale smell of tobacco smoke that never left because the stale, smelly smokers never left. The Club, originally nothing more than a section of the ground floor in a small office building, was more than a relief kitchen: it was the coffee house, discussion room, meeting hall and social center for the entire lower economic echelon of Vilna's refugee community. Here was where you came when you had nowhere else to turn and nothing else to do. That was precisely what Avram Chesno hated most of all about the Club - it was evidence that he had no other place to go, that circumstances had locked him into such a helpless situation.

  Avram poured himself a breakfast of weak coffee and moved toward one of the long, stained and sticky tables. Around the room were clumps of gaunt men dressed in clothes that had been chosen by necessity rather than fashion or preference; men whose lined faces and overgrowth of hair and beard made them look older than their years. There were few who were outside the age limits for military service, younger than eighteen or older than fifty. Avram mentally compared their faces with the reflection he had seen as he glanced into a shop window the day before. He had always maintained a private conviction that he was a good-looking man. Tall, well proportioned and solidly built, he had enjoyed an active life of hiking and swimming even soccer until a badly broken shoulder took him permanently out of the game. His wavy red-brown hair still plentiful at forty-one, though he supposed that wouldn't last much longer - had set off the ruddy skin of his clean-shaven face. Not like your typical Polish Jew at all, he had thought in honest moments of vanity. Not that Avram would have allowed anyone to call him an anti-Semite. It was only that he was extremely glad not to have the grossly hooked nose that so many Polish Jews seemed cursed with.

  Luckily, he had never had such a thing attached to his face, and it had not spontaneously generated as a result of the past nine months' experience. But, catching sight of his reflection in that shop window, he realized that his anxious eyes, his sunken cheeks and a full growth of grey beard gave him more in common than he liked with the other refugees at the Club.

  Relegating his physical appearance to the back of his mind, Avram slumped into his chair, tired already, though it was not yet 9:00 A.M., and asked himself the same question he had asked himself every morning for the past four months, one week and two days: "What am I doing here? Alone, uncomfortable, inexpressibly bored and here, in such a place. What, in the name of God, am I doing here?"

  It had begun on September 7, a Thursday. An order was broadcast by the Warsaw Military Command that all males of military age must leave the city immediately, before the German seige, already seven days old, had fulfilled its purpose. Avram was fortyone; he had no choice. What he remembered most strongly of that tumultuous day was kissing his wife Ruth goodbye standing in the dark-paneled entrance hall of his house, brushing her light brown hair away from her face, taking in her beauty and the love in her eyes. He remembered reassuring her for the fiftieth time that he would be away for only a couple of weeks, thirty days at the most, because everyone knew that the British even then were preparing to come to rescue Poland. He would be back soon, to her and to her parents. Back to the comfortable middle-class professional routine of a high-school science teacher in the suburbs of Warsaw.

  In spite of the reassurance he had hoped he was conveying to her, he was worried. There was no denying the violence of the German attack or the incredible speed of it. Hitler's madness had not sprung up overnight so that it could be expected to wither in the light of day. In Warsaw, Avram had been aware of the growing nationalism of the country next door and Hitler had had his effect on Poland. Even Avram's Christian colleagues at the school - intelligent, well-educated men with a solid grasp of history - had been swayed. Nothing obvious, of course. As the Warsaw government, during the thirties, increased its own harangues against the Jews and began imposing petty, and not-so-petty, restrictions on them, Avram's Polish Christian friends expressed their regret to him for all this. They were embarrassed by their own government, they said. It was regrettable that the Polish peasant mentality was still so strong, they said. We do not share this nonsense, they said. But as time passed, Avram was gradually isolated. His class schedule was changed without his being consulted. Meetings were held without his being notified. More and more the other teachers seemed to be avoiding him; less and less did either his opinion or his feelings seem to matter.

  On particularly humiliating days, especially when the autumn rain or winter sleet made life even more depressing, Avram Chesno found himself dreaming almost uncontrollably of the land across the Atlantic. Not New York - which so many European Jews were struggling night and day to reach but California. California, where cities had room to spread out in an exhilaration of space. California, where the air was clean and dry and the scenery unbelievable. When Warsaw was drowned in rain, California would be bathed in sunlight. When Warsaw was frozen, California would radiate warmth. America as a whole offered a freedom, an openness, a whole range of material and professional possibilities that Avram knew he could never find in Europe. But to Avram of all America only California - and particularly Southern California offered enough to induce him to break his ties to his homeland in order to seize it.

  But he hadn't. The California dream had been interrupted, in 1932, by the reality of a girl whose beauty, warmth and wit he had found irresistible. He had married "his Ruthie" in a synagogue - the first time he had been in a synagogue since he had left his parents' home at the age of twenty and the last time, excepting a brief visit each year on the High Holy Days. Ruth would cheerfully have gone with him to California then, in 1932, when a well-educated teacher from Poland could have aquired an American visa even if he was a Jew. But Ruth felt responsible for her parents and they, with all the stubbornness of old age, flatly refused to leave Warsaw. They had been born in Europe; everything and everyone they knew was in Europe; they would die in Europe.

  In moments of honesty with himself, Avram Chesno realized that much as he loved his in-laws, he was waiting for them to die. This was not an aspect of his self awareness that he was proud of, nor one which he wished to share with his wife. So emigrating to California simply ceased to be a topic of household discussion and remained only a dream.

  Then on September 1 the German invasion put an end even to the dream. The Nazis were showering up to thirty thousand shells a day on Warsaw and that the capital could hold out against them even till the seventh was incredible. The order for men to evacuate, though terrifying in its implications for those remaining behind, was not completely unexpected.

  "I didn't tell you before," Avram had said over breakfast the morning following the order, the last meal they had together, "but I have withdrawn almost all our money from the bank."

  To his surprise, Ruth merely nodded.

  "I know. I went to the bank a week ago, thinking to do the same. They told me you had beaten me to it."

  Avram looked at her across the breakfast china. After seven years of marriage, her calm common sense and competence still amazed him.

  "I don't know where you put it," she confessed, trying to smile.

  "In the small wooden trunk on the top left shelf of the bedroom closet," he said. "Ruth, there is something else in the trunk. I bought a gun, a small revolver, and a box of bullets. I really don't think you wil
l ever have to use it. The Nazis want the land and they want political control, but they have no reason to make war on women and their elderly parents."

  In spite of his anxiety, Avram tried to lighten what he was saying. Ruth turned her face aside and closed her eyes.

  "Just come back, Avram. Just let it all be over soon and you come back to me, to us. How long will you have to be away? How will I know where you are? How can I get in touch with you? And suppose something happens to us here - how will you know where to find us?"

  He didn't have the answers. All he could do was repeat what he had said the night before. "I will try to get to Bialystok. One of my former classmates from university is there and I am sure I can stay with him. You have his address? I gave it to you last night."

  She nodded. She had the address, but what she wanted was reassurance. All he was giving was reality.

  "Ruthie, I don't know what conditions will be like. Try to keep in touch with the school. If I can't reach you directly, I'll try to reach you that way. Ruth, it's only a question of weeks," he said, as she began to cry. "I'll be back with you, you know I'll be back. . . ."

  In the two days following the order to evacuate Warsaw, over a hundred thousand men between the ages of eighteen and fifty went out from the city. Almost all of them - Jews and non-Jews alike-headed east to the relatively safe sector of Poland which Hitler had awarded to Russia in return for her compliance in Germany's takeover of the rest.

  Avram at first tried to take the train heading toward the border. But the train was stopped and all passengers off-loaded at Lochow. It was there, in Lochow, that he began to realize that, superficial as it might have been, the facade of acceptance he had been living with in Warsaw was not a part of the provincial scene. He was well dressed and had a pocketful of money, but he was spat upon, shoved, denied service in restaurants, even forced out of the line waiting for the country bus - all in the moment of realization or suspicion that he was a Jew. Avram was incensed! As a child he had sometimes encountered things like this. But as an adult, as an educated comfortably well-off professional, he had escaped these indignities.

  The closer he came to the border, the happier he was to be going to Bialystok - not that he had any love for the Russians. But at least Bialystok was a city - not like the one-horse peasant towns he'd been passing through for over a week. His classmate was a part of the sizable Jewish community there. Bialystok, he thought, ought to be a good place to stay for a while.

  It hadn't turned out quite that way. Bialystok was only another stage in the thickening nightmare of disruption, separation and fear. A steady torrent of refugees poured in from the Nazi-held west, crowding the Jewish quarters beyond capacity and driving already inflated food and housing prices almost beyond reach. Avram was greeted and accepted into the family of his former classmate; but he quickly understood that his contributions to the household budget were considerably more important than his sparkling wit or recall of the good old days.

  With their seizure of Bialystok Province the Russians had begun rebuilding the society according to Stalin's blueprints. Judaism, while officially protected as a culture, was suspected as an "exclusivist" and counter-revolutionary religion. A successful Jew, like Avram's classmate, was doubly damned for being a "bloodsucker on the body of the working class."

  At first Avram went almost daily to the telegraph office, sending off cable after cable telling Ruth how he was doing and asking after her. For weeks, there was no response. Avram was beside himself with anxiety. Finally, an answer came - but so brief, almost inconsequential, as if she had been afraid that anything more would be blocked by the censors. She missed him. She was well, and her parents were well. Life was more difficult than before, but not impossible. That was all! Heedless of the censor, Avram wrote back voluminously. From her meager replies, he realized very little of it got through.

  With the approach of the year's end, Avram could no longer pretend to himself that the British could or would rescue Poland from the Nazis. What was now would be in the future: Germany held Warsaw like a piece of sponge in an iron vise. Ruth was there; he was here. There was a distinct possibility they would not see each other again for a long, long time. Avram spent the bitter cold December days trudging the streets of Bialystok, seeing nothing of the city, the people, the shops and markets, only seeing in his mind Ruth's fair skin, laughing eyes and lithe body. He would spend half a morning thinking just of her hands - their smoothness, their warmth, how they looked nestled in her lap while she was listening to one of his stories, how they felt when she first came into the house on a cold winter day and put them against his cheeks. It was inconceivable that he would never see her again, never hold her again. Avram went home late and left early. He never laughed.

  In early March, he hit bottom. Standing near the eighteenth-century Podlasie Versailles Palace, permitting the weak winter sun to burn off at least a little of his depression, he recognized a face from his own block in Warsaw. Avram started walking quickly toward his neighbor, asking questions before he reached him.

  "Hello! Have you any news? I haven't heard from my wife in a long time . . ."

  Recognizing Avram, the man began to respond with pleasure at finding a familiar face so far from home. But as Avram's questions continued, the neighbor's smile faded. "Do you know how our wives are doing?" Avram kept on asking questions. "Our families? I have been trying . . ."

  He stopped and began again more quietly. "What's happened? To my wife, to my home? Tell me. Please."

  Slowly, miserable to be the bearer of such news, the neighbor told him. "About three weeks ago, Mr. Chesno, there was a fire on our street at your end. My nephew, who only recently escaped here from Warsaw, told me.

  "He said the police insist it was accidental. He himself believes it was done on purpose, by some young hooligans wanting, as they put it, to 'settle the score with the Jews.' Your house and - I am so sorry - your wife did not survive the fire. Also, the two other, elderly people there were killed."

  Avram lowered his eyes, releasing the man.

  "I am sorry, Mr. Chesno. If there is anything . . ."

  Avram did not hear the words or see the sympathy on his former neighbor's face. Grief clouded his vision so that he stumbled away from the sidewalk. He found privacy behind a large evergreen tree before he broke down.

  For seven days, Avram did nothing but remember Ruth. He cared nothing for himself, ate scarcely at all, neither bathed, nor shaved, nor changed his clothes. By the eighth day, the poignancy of her death had been dimmed, the sense of loss not diminished but at least familiarized. Avram awoke feeling for the first time his own physical griminess. He bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes and joined his host for morning coffee. Then he returned to his bedroom to think.

  He had no desire to go back. Without Ruth, Warsaw was nothing more than a city he didn't care for under a regime he despised. Living here in Bialystok with his friend was becoming more difficult. It would become completely impossible once his money ran out. Realistically, he had only one alternative. With the first break in the cold, Avram Chesno set out on the path followed by thousands of his fellow refugees, a path that led to Vilna. His former classmate envied Avram the refugee status that permitted him to leave the Soviet Union, but he was not sorry to see him leave.

  "Hello, again. May I join you?"

  Avram looked up from the sticky table to see a tall, heavy-set man hovering over him, trying forlornly to smile.

  "Yes, of course. Orliansky, isn't it?" The two had met three days ago at the post office - the day an excited Ephraim Orliansky had received a thick envelope from America.

  "You looked happier the last time I saw you," Avram added as the man sat down.

  "I have been to the American Embassy. In fact, since I saw you, I have been to the Japanese Consulate in Kovno as well. But I had higher hopes from the Americans."

  Orliansky sighed and lost himself in the depths of his tea glass, seeming to forget Avram entirely. But preoccu
pation with distant thoughts was one of the commonest symptoms of the diseased state of being a refugee. Avram said nothing and waited.

  "Do you know," Orliansky resumed the conversation, "what you need to have, just to apply for a visa to America? A certificate of good conduct from your local police covering the past five years. Can you imagine that? I am running for my life, carrying two babies, shepherding another and my wife through the woods, and on the way I am supposed to drop by the police station and ask the fellow who is driving me out if he would be so kind as to attest to my noncriminal status for the past five years. 'Oh, and by the way, Mr. Police Captain, I also need copies in duplicate of all public records concerning myself, my wife and our three children; birth certificates, school certificates, marriage registration. Be a nice fellow and put all that together for me, won't you?' Either they are living in a dream world or we are. And if it's us, I'd like very much to wake up!"

  Orliansky's story was nothing new to Avram. Months before, he had presented himself at the American Embassy thinking that, in spite of all he had heard, the United States might be interested in making a new citizen out of a Warsaw science teacher. She wasn't. No reason, no explanation; just "application rejected."

  "Apply again in a few months," the visa officer had said; but that was the only consolation he had had to offer.

  Avram's disappointment would have been greater if his hopes had been higher in the first place. He should have gone to California years before, dragging Ruth's parents by the neck if necessary, or simply presenting them the alternative of coming along or staying behind alone. If he had done that, he'd now be on a beautiful beach or teaching in one of the clean, flat-roofed schools that seemed to be the norm all over the state. But he hadn't. So ever since he had fled Warsaw, long before he had even reached the American Embassy in Vilna, the dream of California seemed to have less and less substance, less and less possibility of being realized.