Black Market, 1949
My mother and I stood at the kitchen sink, gorging ourselves on bread and cheese.
“Come on, Lilly, eat faster,” she said. “Your father will be home soon and I don’t want him to see us eating.” She kept glancing out the window to see whether he was coming up the flagstone path.
“Can’t he have some, too?” I kept my voice as low as possible.
“No!” Irritated, she chewed faster. “He won’t eat food bought on the black market even if he were starving! Let him eat what we get on coupons!”
“Why do we need coupons, Mutti?” I was twelve but some things were still a mystery to me.
My mother hesitated for a moment.
“There isn’t enough food for all the people who are coming into this brand-new country now. The coupons make us share, whether we like it or not.”
“Is there more food in Tel Aviv, where Abba sells your cakes?”
“Maybe a little more.”
I could feel her bitterness in my mouth too.
“I think we should move to Tel Aviv. It’s only ten kilometers from here. I’ll ask Abba.”
“No, sweet child, everything there is expensive. We have to stay in Holon.”
“I like it here, Mutti, but I don’t like coupons!”
“Do you think I like them?” She was getting angry. I saw it in her eyes. “It’s time for dinner. Set the table.”
While my mother wrapped up the bread we had been eating and hid it behind a dripping block of ice in the ice-box, I opened a drawer in the kitchen cabinet, counted out five straw placemats, and pulled them out by their fringes. Then I set the table on the terrace where we ate our meals when the weather was fine.
Mr. Winkler, our boarder, sat at the corner of the terrace where he spent most of the day, except when he strolled out to meet the mailman. He always waited for mail which, sadly, never came. Now he waved at me, his white eyebrows lifting when he smiled.
“What’s on the menu tonight?” he asked, brushing unseen lint off the yellowing lapels of his white jacket.
“We have vegetable soup and . . . I have to ask my mother.”
There was nothing else.
Being first and foremost Viennese, Mr. Winkler always hummed Strauss waltzes as if he could take those glorious old times with him wherever he went.
“Did I ever tell you the plot of Der Rosenkavalier?” His face lit up at the prospect of telling me the story again. I would have listened but my mother called me from the kitchen. She wanted me to look for Daniela, the nine-year-old girl who was also staying with us for reasons I couldn’t fathom. Trying to understand why her mother had left her with us had turned me into a spy and an eavesdropper. As I went out to the garden, I heard footsteps scurrying in the direction of the shed that my father had built at the end of our lot. It housed his garden tools as well as an old cabinet for the pots, pans, and china my mother had brought from Germany. I found her crouching behind the shed, her hands covering her eyes.
“You have to come in for dinner, Daniela,” I said.
“I don’t want to. Your mother is mean. She hates me!” she said, her lower lip pushed forward.
“That’s not true.”
“It is! She is fat and ugly. I hate her, too.”
“And what about your mother with her lipstick and painted eyebrows—where is she?”
We stared at each other until, finally, she bent her head and followed me into the house.
My father had just returned home from work.
“Who didn’t deliver a kiss today?” He offered his cheek to me, his wire-framed glasses slipping down his nose so I could see his funny left eye. I could also see a bit of white skin under his short sleeves: it was pale in comparison to the tanned skin on his hands and forearms. It was the same with me and everybody else during summer, but I only realized it now looking at him. I hugged and kissed him, but felt bad for Daniela, who sat looking down at her lap.
My mother served everyone a bowl of soup and two slices of bread. In the middle of the table she placed a large plate with cut-up tomatoes and a jug of water.
“Is this all there is?” my father asked.
“That’s it,” my mother answered, her voice forbidding further questions. “The rations we get supply two meat meals a week. No one ever died from eating vegetarian food.”
“I was only asking.”
“Don’t ask.” She slammed the words at him.
My father gulped his soup and held out his empty bowl for more.
“That’s all there is,” my mother said.
My father shoved his chair back and shook his head.
The rest of us chewed our food in silence. Darkness slowly took over but no one got up to turn on the light. I thought I could guess what Mr. Winkler was thinking: just the day before he had told me that whenever he found himself in an embarrassing situation he would simply go away—leave for an imaginary after-opera party in his beautiful Vienna. I could not join him in that escape, but I yearned for it just the same.
It was my turn to clear the table. I brought the dishes in from the terrace and volunteered to wash them, too; my mother looked especially tired. Daniela disappeared to the bathroom where she played with her doll—probably the only place where she could be on her own without me around. Mr. Winkler put on his hat and left for a walk. I watched him. I needed to know where everybody was at all times, although my mother had told me it was not polite to watch people all day long.
My parents stayed on the terrace, arguing in low tones. I wondered if my mother had mentioned my idea of moving to Tel Aviv to my father and hoped he would agree. The window over the sink was open; a nearly full moon shone in. I thought I could hear jackals howling at it in the darkness. The sand dunes that bordered our small town seemed to be full of them at night. I wondered where they all disappeared during the day. The sound felt lonely and full of longing; I liked it.
I grew bored washing the dishes, so, like Mr. Winkler, I imagined myself with my father in the little yard in front of our house. We called it our “garden,” even though there was nothing there but sand.
“One day we’ll have a real garden with flowers and a hedge to separate us from the street. There is a special plant with large red flowers that is used for hedges, called hibiscus,” he’d told me. “You see, little one, I too had to learn many things when I first came to this new country. It was right before you were born, so you and Israel are almost exactly the same age. I had to learn how to be a father and a gardener at the same time!” He’d looked happy when he said that, which made me happy, too.
I was still in front of the sink when I heard someone say, “Nice moon!” Mr. Winkler stood right behind me. I hadn’t heard him walk in because of the running water. He had been shy when he first joined our family, but with time, he had begun to seek me out and, I thought, he and my father “adopted” each other, perhaps to compensate for someone who had been lost in the war. Or maybe they just liked each other without a sad reason.
“I never set foot in the kitchen back in Vienna. There, the maids did the work. All I did was eat and give orders.” He laughed as if it were the biggest joke and started drying the plates, carefully setting them on top of each other. Unlike Mr. Winkler, my parents never talked about their lives back in Germany, not even the good times.
I thanked him for his help and started to move a large blue pot in order to fit the plates into the cabinet, but behind the pot I discovered two full egg cartons and a tin of canned apricots. I desperately hoped Mr. Winkler hadn’t noticed them, but when I turned around he was gone.
* * *
Because the next day was Saturday my father did not have to bring my mother’s cakes to Tel Aviv. I went outside early with my new rake and a red hat my mother had pushed onto my head. My father was already squatting in the yard, running his hands over the ground.
“We have a problem here, you know. Nothing grows in the sand except these thorny plants. Even if it rains, the water seeps through and disappears.”
“Where is it going, Abba?”
“To the depths of the earth, I suppose. I just requested a truckload of rich red soil from the Sharon Valley. Hopefully it will arrive here soon, so we can grow our own food.”
“What will we grow?”
“Carrots, lettuce—maybe even flowers. I would really like flowers.” We looked at each other and started laughing, remembering the story of how when he first came to Israel he had planted crocus bulbs upside down. He’d waited and waited, but the flowers never showed up.
We worked together, tilling the sand with our rakes to make it even and ready for the “rich red soil.” Although we worked in silence, I felt that my father liked my company; he smiled whenever our eyes met. There were things I wanted to talk about, like my problems with my mother, but I didn’t dare spoil the moment.
* * *
That night, my mother came into my room as she always did. She covered Daniela, who shifted in her narrow bed next to mine. Then she took my face in both her hands and kissed me. “Sleep well. Thank you for always being such a help.”
I kissed my mother back, holding her face between my hands. I saw her wipe a tear from her cheek as she tiptoed out of the room and closed the door behind her. As it clicked shut, a movement shook Daniela’s bed. I heard strange muffled sounds in the dark and realized she was crying.
“Why are you crying, Daniela?”
At first she didn’t answer. After a while she whispered, “I want to be with my mother too!”
“Why isn’t she with you? Why aren’t you with her?” My questions only made her cry harder. I swung my legs over the side of my bed and sat facing her.
“Leave me alone,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry, Daniela. I want to be your friend but you won’t let me.”
“I can’t,” she wailed and turned away from me. Then there was quiet except for the soft shrieks of the frogs and crickets outside.
* * *
On Sunday I joined my mother on her weekly trip to the butcher. It was summer vacation and I enjoyed having nothing to do other than watching for flowers or tomatoes to emerge in our garden. The day was bright and hot; my sandals stuck to the melting tar on the streets and made a puking noise every time I lifted a foot. We passed rows of low whitewashed houses surrounded by small gardens, some of which already had red earth around them with flowers as well as other plants I now knew, like tomatoes, carrots, and curvy purple eggplants.
As we moved away from the center of town there were fewer, smaller houses with large stretches of sand separating them. The town melted into the sand dunes the way milk melted into my mother’s coffee. She drank a lot of it, letting me “sip a taste” as I sat on her lap. She loved to have me on her lap even though I was now too old for that. We walked in silence, I in my blue shorts and sleeveless shirt and my mother in a flower-printed dress that seemed to burst across her stomach with each step she made. Daniela was right about her being big and fat, but she was not ugly. That was unfair—my mother looked elegant in spite of her weight. The straw hat she wore, with its short brim, accentuated her large brown eyes and straight nose. Her stride was confident in spite of her weight. She seemed as happy as I was to be out of the house.
“Mutti, why doesn’t Daniela live with her mother in Tel Aviv?” Now that we were alone, I could talk without fear of others listening, which would make her angry.
“Sarah can’t take care of her right now,” my mother said, shifting her handbag from one arm to the other.
“Why does she wear so much make-up? Why is she always so dressed up?”
My mother hesitated but I went on: “Daniela always hides when she comes.”
“Sarah is a very unhappy woman, Lilly. Her husband is no longer with her. She needs a friend to ease her loneliness. That’s how it is with adults.” Her voice faltered at the end of the sentence.
“Why won’t her husband help her?
“Let me tell you something, my dear Lilly. Your father is as irresponsible as Daniela’s. He is an incapable idealist who can’t support his family. If I didn’t bake cakes and take in boarders, I might have to give you away too!”
She was almost shouting; passersby stared at us. Sweaty strands of hair stuck to her forehead, making them look like the scorpions I’d seen in the sand. What she said scared me but I refused to believe she would ever give me away. After a moment she pulled herself together and we resumed our walk in silence, but a few minutes later she continued with her wrath.
“It’s all his fault. I never wanted to come here but he insisted. It was his dream. I told him he couldn’t make a living in this desert as a lawyer—who needs a German lawyer in the Middle East anyway?”
* * *
At the butcher’s shop, we joined a line of waiting women. Egon stood behind the counter passing meat through a grinder. His short, thick fingers moved quickly as he handled the chunks of meat. From time to time he wiped his hands on the wet rag with which he swept splintered bone and gristle into a garbage pail.
My mother bought some chopped meat and hot dogs. Then she asked Egon whether he had any eggs and sugar “under the table.”
“I am going to have company on Shabbat and I have to make a cake,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can help you,” he muttered. I knew he was playing hard to get. It was always the same with him. Then came, “How many eggs do you want?” He spoke in a different accent than I or my parents did. I could often tell what country a person came from. Egon, I could tell, was from Hungary.
“If you have a dozen, I’ll take a dozen,” she quickly replied.
He threw his head back and laughed. His protruding tobacco-brown teeth showed like short nails. “A dozen? Out of the question! I can give you six eggs. No more,” he said, scratching his earlobe.
“How much?” my mother asked, clutching her purse with both hands.
“Seven pounds!”
Not only my mother let out a gasp of alarm: the other women in the line joined her like a chorus. “Seven pounds! Highway robbery, what have we come to?”
Egon glared at the women and they grew quiet.
“Six-fifty, and that is my last word.” He flung his rag at a black horsefly that kept coming back to the bloody wooden counter in front of him.
“Five pounds. That’s my last word!” my mother said.
There was silence.
“Look, Mrs. Peled,” Egon said. “We’ve known each other for a long time. I’ll come towards you. Five and a half pounds and you have your eggs.”
“I’ll take it,” my mother said, and the deal was done.
Egon started wrapping up my mother’s purchases. “I’ll give you a bag of ice chips, too, otherwise in this heat, you’ll have hard-boiled eggs and cooked meat by the time you get home.”
The whole chorus of women behind my mother burst out laughing. “Then she won’t have to cook tonight,” someone hooted. I was amazed how a single joke made everybody friends again.
My mother looked pale and tired as we left the shop. I took her bag to lighten her burden.
“I am so hot and thirsty,” she said. “Let’s stop at Inge’s, in the transit camp; it’s very close to here. Knowing her, she’ll have some lemonade and cookies.”
I agreed to go; I never said “no” to my mother. I was sorry for her hard life but also feared her. She could turn on anyone very quickly and we all knew it.
The light yellow sand was hot and blinding. It got into my sandals and burnt my toes. I had to pick up each leg and shake out the sand before putting it down again. Hopping didn’t help.
“You look like you are walking on eggs.” My mother laughed, wiping drops of perspiration off her forehead: one drop was left, glistening at the end of her nose. She seemed happier now but I wasn’t. I couldn’t forget the harsh things she had said before about me and Daniela. I walked ahead of her without looking back.
My mother had met Inge on one of her volunteer visits to the transit camp. Those who had made it to Israel earlier helped the new waves of refugees by visiting and talking to them, assuring them that new houses were in the process of being built and would soon become available. I never understood why my mother liked Inge, who, even now, months after coming to Israel, claimed she was an “Austrian citizen.” When she said that, she raised her chin and her nose as though she were on a stage, her green eyes flashing with a strange inner light. I had come to the conclusion that my mother was fascinated by Inge’s ravishing smile and her long hair, which she wore in two braids. When she wrapped the braids around her head like a crown, it made her look like a queen, even in her poor corrugated metal shack.
We found Inge standing in the middle of the room, holding a lizard by the tail. The creature’s head and legs were moving wildly. I grasped my mother’s arm in terror.
“Can you believe that?” Inge yelled without a word of greeting. “On my bed! I can’t live in this country! If I don’t manage to live somewhere else—anywhere—I’ll either die or go crazy.” She went to the open window and flung the creature out.
“Come on, Inge, it’s not so bad,” my mother comforted her. “Soon you’ll be out of here. The shacks are only temporary!”
It took a moment for Inge to relax. She motioned to us to sit down. There were three chairs and a low coffee table in a multi-purpose living space. A tiny corner was used as a kitchen. Next to the entrance door hung a cracked mirror to which Inge pointed, saying she had just rescued it from someone’s garbage. She served us lemonade, proudly telling us she had squeezed the lemons with her own hands. The cookies came out of a small red tin—“a gift from a friend,” she said.
When we finished our refreshments, Inge cleared the table and went into her bedroom to fetch the “stuff” that her relatives had sent her. While we waited for her to return, I examined a small china vase displayed on a window sill. I guessed it had somehow survived the escape from Austria and the refugee camp in Cyprus where Inge had lived waiting for the smuggled entry into Israel.
Inge returned with an enormous stack of clothes in her arms; it reached up to her nose. All we could see were her green eyes and the thick crown of auburn braids.
“There!” she said as she dumped the pile on the table, her eyes full of joy and mischief. “Look at this brocade gown! It’s embroidered with gold!” She looked delighted in her role as magician, conjuring forbidden luxuries in the middle of the desert.
“This here is pure English wool for a concert or a cocktail party. Swiss lace for a garden party!” She pulled out one fancy garment after the other with wide swinging motions. I watched her as she fingered each item. She looked so foreign and different from anyone I had ever seen.
“I have more silks,” she said, “but I won’t unpack any more. I am ready to leave this country, Della.”
Her mood had changed. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think I am still in Vienna, that the Nazis, the communists, the fleeing didn’t really happen. That it was all a bad dream—then I look around and find a lizard gaping at me. God Almighty!”
“Inge, you have to be patient!”
“No! As soon as I have enough money,” she said, “I’ll be gone like the wind.” Then her glance fell on me and she pulled herself together.
My mother marveled over the clothes. She pressed a black lace dress to her breast and looked at herself in the entrance hall mirror. Her hands shook. Her eyes focused far away with an expression of longing and pain. That, I thought, was what she, Inge, and Mr. Winkler had in common. They had all been plucked out of their former lives and the loss was still numbing.
“You look beautiful, Mutti,” I said and moved toward her. She turned around and hugged me.
“My Mamaleh, my darling! This dress is too small for me—I’ll buy it for you! Hopefully you’ll marry a rich man and be elegant and glamorous—” She pulled me closer. “But remember, Lilly, not a word to your father; he’ll be furious if he finds out.”
As soon as we came home I ran to my room and buried the forbidden dress in the depths of my closet behind my folded school clothes.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon guests showed up at the door. Sarah looked happier than I had ever seen her, She wore a summer dress with a print of red roses that looked so real you could almost smell them.
“Daniela?” she called, looking in the direction of my bedroom, where Daniela was hiding behind the door. “May I?” Sarah asked, and without waiting for an answer walked into the room, where I could see her trying to hug her daughter, pleading with her to join us. I could hear Daniela crying but finally the two of them came out, Daniela holding on to her mother’s dress.
Then Inge arrived, her hair hanging in two long braids, tied with red ribbons. Mr. Winkler was happy to see “a real Austrian,” as he liked to call her.
Sarah followed my mother into the kitchen, where the two of them stayed for a long time. I tried to eavesdrop when I came with food orders from the living room but they stopped talking whenever they heard the door open. Finally they emerged with trays of drinks and slices of cake. “I wish you the best of luck,” I heard my mother whisper as they walked past me.
Mr. Winkler had turned on the radio to the light music station. I sat next to him eating my cake as I listened to my father trying to talk Inge out of leaving the country. She was shaking her head.
“For me, home is where I am happy and comfortable,” she said, “and I am neither happy nor comfortable in the Middle East. I am not used to this climate, this food, this landscape. I can never call this home!”
“But Inge,” my father said, “what happened in Austria can happen anywhere else.”
“Maybe I’ll go to America.”
“So you will just leave! After all we went through, you will just leave?”
“Yes, Henry. Whenever I can, I will just leave.”
My father didn’t answer right away. When he did, he was very angry. “I feel very differently, Inge. I saw a future for this country, a home worth fighting for . . . Do you think I lost my eye for nothing?”
His face had turned red. He got up and stumbled out of the room. I wanted to go after him but I didn’t. I thought he might be going outside to calm down by gardening.
Meanwhile my mother disappeared into the kitchen. When she didn’t return, I followed her and found her stuffing cake into her mouth. She offered me a piece but I didn’t want any more. I wanted something else.
“What did Sarah tell you, Mutti?”
“She is engaged to be married, and will take Daniela home at the end of the month.”
This was great news to me. I hugged my mother, and the two of us returned to the living room. There, Mr. Winkler was dancing with Inge to the tune of a Strauss waltz. Taking her mother by the hand, Daniela led her into the bedroom we shared, saying that she was going to put her doll to sleep. I was happy for everyone. Then suddenly my father barged into the room, his hands tightly clenched around one of the long hoes he kept in the shed. He looked like a wild man. In a low, hoarse voice, he said, “Would you all please follow me? There is something I want to show you.”
Obediently, we stood up and followed him out of the room. I stayed close to my mother who looked frightened. As we left I noticed two pairs of startled eyes peering out of the bedroom. My father led us to the lot behind our house. He stopped at the tool shed and pushed open the door.
“Look!”
Compelled by the tone of his voice, we squeezed inside.
“There!” he said, pointing his finger toward the open cabinet. “Look at that!”
The old cabinet door had fallen off its hinges. Bloated, rusty cans of preserved vegetables and stewed fruit were crammed onto its shelves, along with cans of Spam and other food that must have come in packages sent by my aunt in the States. There was a glass jar full of yellow powdery stuff that I knew was dried egg powder to make scrambled eggs. The powder had green veins of mold running through it like rivers on a map.
“What on earth is this?” cried Inge.
“Disgusting!” my father bellowed.
We stood there like a group of mourners in front of an open coffin.
“Why did you keep this food from us, Della? Why did it have to sit here and rot when all of us are hungry?” my father demanded.
“The poor woman. I feel bad for her.” That was Mr. Winkler’s voice. “War can bring out the best or the worst in people. I’ve seen it before,” he continued, taking Inge’s arm and leading her out of the shed.
“Let’s get out of here, Mutti!” I pulled my mother away. She held onto my shoulder, hurting me with her grip. As we walked back into the house she leaned on me; I almost staggered under her weight.
* * *
After our company had left, I walked out to the sand dunes. I kicked off my sandals and walked barefoot further away than ever before, until I could see nothing but sand and sky. The beige color of the dunes, their warmth after the day of hot sunshine and the silence that hung over them comforted me. I sat for a long time, watching their shadows lengthen until they disappeared.
When the sun began to set, I picked up my sandals to go home. On one of the lower dunes I saw a dead dog lying in a niche against the hill, legs stretched out. It was shrouded in a cloud of insects that feasted on its flesh. Its lips were gone, revealing long pointy teeth in a grotesque smile. A strong wind picked up, blowing waves of sand that exposed even more of the carcass. I ran home as fast as I could.
* * *
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my own cries. Quickly, I jumped out of bed. Daniela, still asleep, tossed and turned in the bed next to me. Soon she would be gone. For a moment I wondered how it would feel without her here: I had become used to her company.
I tiptoed into my parents’ room, which had always been my place of refuge from bad dreams. Usually I’d crawl into bed with them, pushing myself in between their bodies until my fears and heavy breathing subsided. But tonight, by the light of the moon, I saw my father sleeping in a chair, wrapped up in a blanket like a cocoon. My mother was alone in the bed; her blanket had slid to the floor, exposing her large body in her thin white nightshirt.
“Want to come in?” she murmured, moving to make space for me.
“No, Mutti. I’m okay,” I whispered. I covered her with the blanket and left.
* * *
As I passed the kitchen, I saw Mr. Winkler bent over the table drinking a glass of water. As usual, he had the radio tuned to classical music. I didn’t say anything to him. I continued silently to my room: I needed my bed. As I pulled the blanket up to my chin, I could still hear the sound of the music. It was comforting. Tomorrow I would ask him to tell me again the story of Der Rosenkavalier.
AYALA ADLER
Thirty-five years ago Ayala Adler wrote twelve short stories depicting life in Israel during and shortly after the Second World War. Since then she has practiced as a clinical social worker and an addiction counselor. Now retired, she has decided to publish her stories. “Black Market, 1949” is the first one to appear in print.