Red Shoes for Rachel by Boris Sandler

Author:Boris Sandler
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780815654063
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2017-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

— Rachel —

Ever since she had begun to understand what her parents went through during the war, Rachel had felt punished. In the little apartment that her parents rented three blocks from their store, there was always a lack of light and air, not so much because those two things physically avoided their residence but because sorrow had settled into every corner, looking out at them with cold, lifeless eyes. Rachel always went around feeling frozen. She used to dress warmly in her father’s coarse, dark-brown pullover with the sleeves rolled up and burrow deeply into the wide old leather armchair, already worn out in spots, which was a gift from Uncle Max and stood right next to the window. There, curled up like a cat, Rachel felt cozy and comfortable, as if the warmth of other people’s behinds and backs squeezed against the soft chair were being transferred to her. She got to love her perch, as her mother called it, and quite often, after school, if she didn’t have to go to the store to help her parents, she would spend her time in the old armchair, either doing her homework or reading a book.

Rachel felt that her father was distancing himself from her more and more; the dark little alcove in the store became his permanent abode. He sat there for days at a time, and as a result her mother had needed to hire Bolek to help her with her work. Bolek was a Polish immigrant. A tall and skinny man, his straight blond hair was always tousled; in contrast, he greatly pampered his yellow mustache, which hung down from the corners of his mouth and almost reached the top of the little dimple on his pointy chin. “He does everything one, two, three!” said Rachel’s mother, swelling with pride about him. She spoke with him in Polish, throwing in English words. The customers liked him too, because he joked with them in his mixed language—they laughed more at his speech than at his jokes. Rachel’s mother was very satisfied with him, but her father hated him. He screamed that Poles were all criminals and Jew-murderers, and that Rachel’s mother should fire him.

One afternoon—Rachel happened to be in the store just then—her father came out of his dark little place and attacked Bolek with screams and fists. Her mother immediately went to her father and tried to calm him. She told Rachel to bring ice in a little bag, and she laid it next to his heart and rubbed his temples with her fingers. Rachel had never before seen her father in such a state: he sat next to her mother on a wooden crate, every drop of blood drained from his face, his hands trembling, leaning his head on her mother’s shoulder; he sobbed like a child, without tears in his lifeless eyes.

Rachel’s mother took him to the doctor, who said that they should put him in a certain hospital in East Flatbush or else the illness “would progress rapidly.

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