After the Hurricane(88)
Santiago looked out at the city. It was so big. And beyond that, what? The things he had read about, the Japanese palace, castles in France, churches in Spain, a wall in China. He did not know if he truly believed that any of it was real. Could anything outside of New York, and the island, be real? Was California real? This life, here, wanted to take him, and hold him, and never let him go.
He looked out at the next building over. It was barely a foot between the two roofs. Something surged through his body as he realized that, and then looked up, ahead, to the next building, and the next, all the same level, stretching out up the avenue, beckoning him, demanding that he move forward, to the next step, and the next. To leave New York, to walk on and on and on until he was somewhere completely new, somewhere perhaps that was not even real, but would become so, to him. If he could keep his eyes open, if he could see beyond, it would be possible. If he cut out the noise, the things that would grasp at him and try to pull him back—the cruelties and jealousies, the hands of his uncles, his grandmother, the pull of the island, the cries of his mother, yes, even those, he could go forward. He could move, he could rise.
Before he could think about it, stop himself, he was running, jumping, and over onto the next rooftop. His blood was on fire, his legs were weightless, and he kept running, jumping, roof to roof. He made it all the way to Third Street before he knew what had happened, his heart beating furiously, laughing at how easy it had been, how quickly he could move.
If he didn’t carry anything with him, let nothing, no one, stop him, how far could he get?
“Have you thought any more about where you might like to apply?” Mrs. Schultz said, looking up at him, her eyes big behind her Coke bottle–thick glasses. Santiago, looking back at her, wondered if people thought that they were both part of some kind of glasses club, both of them bespectacled, peering out at the world with large magnified eyes.
Mrs. Schultz was shorter than most of her students, a quality that, when she had been transferred to Santiago’s public school, had given the principal pause. It was a diverse school, with students from many backgrounds, most of them less than privileged, and the children had a tendency toward disobedience, anarchy, rebellion. They needed a firm hand, and he was concerned that Mrs. Pearl Schultz, with her neatly teased bouffant, her seed-pearl necklace, her twinsets, and her big eyes topping a sharp little nose, would be the tortured mouse to her catty unruly students. In short, he wondered how a woman who looked more like a suburban Jewish housewife would contain, let alone instruct, forty rambunctious teenagers from Lower Manhattan.
However, within her first week, Mrs. Schultz proved the principal egregiously wrong. Her outer appearance may have been that of a rather startled mouse, but on the inside, Pearl Schultz was a warrior. She had been ten years old when the Nazis had taken her city, Jihlava, a benign little city at the border of Bohemia and Moravia, places that would disappear from history, becoming other countries entirely after the war. Back then, her name was Jitka.
As a child, she watched her brother shot in front of her, his body going limp and strange like a marionette’s. She watched her sister separated from her children, screaming like nothing Pearl had ever heard before, watched her father be beaten and lynched in the town square. It was Pearl, little Pearl, the spoiled baby, who melted snow for her mother to drink and hid a few precious things stitched up into the soles of their shoes and the hems of their dresses, and held on, tighter and tighter, so that when she and her mother and her sister were being sorted into groups, the three of them were together; Pearl, who pulled her sister Darja on and on, who made sure they always had something, anything, to eat as the three women labored in Majdanek; Pearl, who flirted with the guards to keep her family from the gas chambers, no matter how it turned her stomach, what could disgust her anymore?
Pearl made it through the war by force of will, refusing to die, refusing to let her mother and sister die. When the war ended, she led what was left of her family into America, hollow wraiths that they were. Just before the ship docked, Pearl took a knife she had made in the camp and split open the old shoes, the hems of filthy dresses, things she had not allowed anyone to take from her, and pulled out rings, bracelets, a pearl necklace. She washed her mother and sister’s faces, and fastened earrings in their ears and bracelets around their gaunt wrists.
When asked her name at Immigration, she christened herself Pearl, her hand at her throat, touching the things she had kept safe for years and years from men who wanted her and everyone like her dead. The jewelry would begin her family’s life in the New World. It would pay for an apartment, it would help them eat. They settled in Brooklyn, where Pearl’s mother worked as a cook and Pearl cleaned houses and took classes at Brooklyn College. Darja never recovered, never stopped screaming for her children, and by 1950, just after Pearl’s twenty-first birthday, she came home from school, where she was studying to be a teacher, and found that Darja had hung herself with a bedsheet. Pearl’s mother wept as Pearl untied the sheet and laid her sister down, setting the bedding to soak in bleach and calling for the rabbi.
Pearl met her husband, a third-generation German Jew who had spent the war in a training camp in Macon, Georgia, through a fellow teacher, his sister, Goldie. Goldie had invited her to Shabbat dinner, and while Pearl wasn’t sure how she felt about God anymore, she went, and there, over roast chicken and dry challah, she met Joseph. They were married within six months. When they discovered, after a few years, that they couldn’t have children, Pearl did not let this knowledge kill her love for her work, for children. Instead, it made her even better, for if she could not be one child’s mother, she was determined to be the best teacher she could be for as many children as possible. She had helped countless students over the years, a recommendation here, extra attention there; sometimes all it took was talking to them, or better, listening to them.