A PIECE OF BREAD

                                              A PIECE OF BREAD

                                                              by

                                             MARGARET MENDEL

                                                           

I hadn’t slept well for several weeks. Hippies had moved in next-door and they played loud rock and roll music all night long. James, my husband, refused to ask them to quiet down, he liked the songs he said and appreciated the high he got from the marijuana smoke that drifted out from their apartment.

 So, I trudged off to work each day in a sleep-deprived funk and sat at my power sewing machine waiting for the morning buzzer to sound, the chill of the San Francisco fog cloaking my shoulders and a dull pain throbbing in my temples. The factory floor held the dampness of the night before and my sewing machine felt icy to the touch. By the first coffee break though the place would be warm and the chill in the air would turn sultry from the steam of the presser’s department located not too far from where I sat.

The building, as large as a high school gymnasium, quickly filled with women; young women, older women, women from every corner of the world, sitting, row after row in front of sewing machines, preparing for the day’s work, mountains of fabric piled everywhere.

I knew my job so well I could have worked blind folded--though performing these tasks with eyes closed would certainly have been punished with a needle in the finger. Injuries of this sort were quiet common and even when a worker paid close attention to her task, racing against the piece rate quota put each woman at risk.

A needle has gone through my finger more than once. When it happened I kept calm and removed the needle usually without too much damage. I knew women who had ripped their fingers wide open when they jumped from the shock of the stabbing pain as the needle hit the knucklebone. Helena, the woman who sits at the sewing machine next me has a scar on the side of her finger from a needle that looks as if she had been sliced by a razor. It’s boredom that makes the job dangerous, not the actual sewing. A seamstress needs to be watchful because the monotony of repetition has a way of lulling the worker into a state of mindlessness, until she performs her task like a zombie, unaware of time, place or person, and that’s when the job becomes the most dangerous.

Finally when the morning buzzer rings all the sewing machines are turned on at the same time and the place explodes into a frenzy of roaring motors. And there is the familiar sound of snapping fabric as the pieces of garments are flipped under the needle, each woman bent over her machine, hands working at an inhuman pace.

About a month ago, without thinking too much about it, almost as unconsciously as I sewed, I began to write poetry while I worked. I had never thought of myself as particularly good with words—James was the poet. But the words poured out of me nonstop and I constructed lines of poetry in my head while I sewed. Then I’d quickly scribbled them down on the paper lining that divided each dozen of fabric pieces that I sewed together. I had seen this paper lining thousands of times before, but now instead of crumpling up the paper and throwing it away, as I usually did, I quickly wrote down a rhyme, a phrase, a word, a feeling. Day after day I would sew and write, sew and write.

I felt as if I were going insane, trapped by the boredom of my work, and now I had a gnawing sense that James was seeing another woman. We had only gotten back together recently after a trial separation. During the time we had lived apart I took art classes and spent every night after work doing something fun. Now I came straight home from the garment factory, cooked dinner for the two of us and played at being the good wife.  But things had turned cold again, the way they had been before the separation. Instead of our relationship getting better, it had gotten worse. So, I pushed myself to work harder, and wrote my poems. Some days when I read what I had written, the verse sounded like angry words splattered down onto the paper, they were raw, painful feelings, feelings that I could not somehow get out otherwise.

The two women who sat on either side of me, Helena, the woman with the big scar on her finger and, Sarah, a Jewish woman from Poland, said nothing about my writing. They were both older than me by about twenty-five years. But in this line of work all the women were the same age; we were all old. During our breaks and at lunch we discussed cooking, the weather, and sometimes we did a bit of gossiping. Mostly we talked about our work but neither one of them ever mentioned my frantic writing.

Helena and Sarah had worked together for nearly ten years. I was the newcomer. Sarah was a frail, sickly looking woman with a grey tint to her flesh and a sad downcast mouth. Helena, a husky woman with a jovial disposition had taken it upon herself to help Sarah by hefting both of their large completed bundles of work into the bins that transported them to the next station. Until now Sarah had not said anything to me about her past though I knew by what other women had said that she was a Holocaust survivor. Her entire family had died in a concentration camp; she had lost a baby son, her first husband, her sisters, father and her mother. She always wore long sleeved dresses. Though once when she reached up to change the thread color on her sewing machine, I got a partial glimpse of the numbers tattooed on her arm and a shiver ran down my back.

Helena usually stepped out for a quick smoke after we came back from our lunch break leaving Sarah and I to sit at our sewing machines waiting for the buzzer to sound. The last couple of days Sarah had looked tired and drained. She hadn’t said much lately though in the year that we’d worked together I’d learned that she would get this way from time to time.

 But on this particular day Sarah turned her chair around to face me, the overhead florescent light caught her in such a way that her skin looked even paler and more paper thin than usual. The blue spider veins that traveled across her nose and chin looked all the more prominent. Her eyes burned with anger. Her gaze made me uneasy and I looked away.

“My dear,” Sarah said, and she grabbed hold of my arm with icy fingers. “If I were to tell you how it really was, you would not believe me. No one would believe me.”

The bitter tone in her voice caught me off guard. I turned to face her. She had never spoken to me in this way before.

 “I had lived in a ghetto in Poland,” she continued. “I saw many miserable sights. But, when my group was brought to the concentration camp, I saw people on the inside of the camp looking out at us. I searched the eyes of the crowd, looking for answers, but none would come. The looks on these faces watching us through the fence went beyond my imagination.”

“When my group entered the compound, our clothing was stripped from us. We were publicly humiliated and threatened. They gave us clothing that was either too big or too small, making us look foolish and ridiculous. Frightened, confused, I had no idea what would happen next, so after an hour of being in the camp, I looked like everyone else. I was no different. Just one hour. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. I had become like those pairs of eyes watching when we entered the camp, waiting, not knowing who would live a day or an hour longer.” Sarah’s eyes focused on me as though she were in a trance.

“I made a friend there,” she said, “and we helped each other in any way that we could. With precious little food, blankets or hope, anything that we could do for each other was appreciated. We slept together with twelve other women on a long wooden bed, crammed together like sardines in a can. Yes, this was the way we slept. Someone would die and they’d be taken away. Then they’d bring in another one. You didn’t think much about it, this was just life.”

Sarah stopped talking for a moment. She turned away from me and glanced at Helena returning to our workstation, bringing with her the smell of cigarette smoke. Helena didn’t say anything and grabbed a heavy bundle of unfinished garments and set it down in front of Sarah. I watched Helena as she picked up a few fallen scraps of fabric around Sarah’s chair, and then sat down at her own sewing machine.

Sarah glanced at the bundle of work and then her dark eyes once again focused on me, and she continued with her story. “One night my friend saved a piece of bread from the evening meal. We never had enough to eat. We were always on the verge of starving and she didn’t know if she was going to have anything for breakfast, so she put the piece of bread behind her head when she went to sleep, to save it.

“The next morning I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t answer. She had died in her sleep. People were always dying there. Once, I went into the bathroom area and a woman sat and sat on the bucket. Finally, I gave her a little nudge and told her to hurry, that she couldn’t sit there all day. And she fell over, dead. It was that way so much of the time. You never knew when it might be your turn.

“I felt bad my friend was dead, but for her it was over. I still lived. I took that piece of bread she had put behind her head and I ate it, breaking off small pieces, like a bird will do. It swelled in my mouth and felt soft, warm. The taste brought back memories of a time before this madness, a time that tasted sweet through all the difficult struggles. I clung to this bread, as though that one slice were life itself, but it tasted bitter. And that was the way life was in that place. What went on was real, but I still don’t believe it.”

Sarah’s eyes dug deep into mine and she asked, “Why? Why did these things have to happen? Why did I survive and everyone else died?”

I wanted to say something, yet I didn’t know what to say. Her haunting questions made me uncomfortable. “I don’t know, Sarah,” I said. “I don’t know why these things happened.”

“You don’t know. I don’t know, either.” Sarah picked up a piece of fabric, turned her back to me and began to organize her work.

The buzzer rang. Each woman rushed back to her sewing machine. Like race horses in a starting gate, rearing and kicking, ready for the lunge forward. All the sewing machines were turned on again and I imagined the minds of these women floating off into the world like phantoms, while they sat trapped behind their sewing machines, mindlessly competing with yesterday’s quota. I saw Sarah like a thin wisp of gray smoke searching for her family through mounds of bodies, her angry eyes raking through the soil of the earth looking for answers.

From that point on Sarah told me many stories about growing up in Poland, about her family and how hard they worked, but mostly she told me about what it was like in the camp and each time I heard one of these stories I didn’t know how to respond. What could I say?

Helena continued to lift bundles for Sarah and along with me she would listen to Sarah’s stories. We would listen but neither of us could answer the ever-present question, why.

Sarah’s stories made my problems with an unfaithful husband seem trivial. Yet, I could not help but feel depressed. James told me he needed two nights out a week and that I should take my evening art classes again. The coldness that grew between us hurt, almost as though it were a bruise. I secretly wished him dead and wrote several poems grieving him.

Then when I could stand it no longer, one night while James and I were lying in bed, I said, “This is not working between us. I’m not happy. I want out.”

James said nothing. He looked intently at his fingers, as if they contained a collection of words that could be used to tell me another one of his lies. “You’re right,” he said finally. “I’m not happy either.”

Neither of us cried, pleaded or promised to change. Our marriage was finished. That night I tried desperately not to touch James as we fell asleep. Yet, in the morning we were in each other’s arms and James’ head lay on top of a nest of my hair.

We said very little to each other in the next couple of weeks and I could feel my love for James withering and becoming encrusted with anger and regret. I blamed myself for having a failed marriage and could not wait for him to leave.

Before James moved out he confessed that he had taken up with one of the women from next door and that they would be getting an apartment together. As I sewed my dozens of pieces of fabric together the pain of having a ruined marriage became unbearable and I wondered how I’d be able to live with the hurt and disappointment. I could not bring myself to tell Sarah that I had thrown away a husband, while she still mourned, after almost thirty years, the dead husband of her youth. So, I worked harder, and rattled off my poems and listened to Sarah’s stories, until one day I understood how Sarah had survived. She had survived because the days just kept coming, one after the other, no matter what happened.  (Click here to return back to the Gdansk, Poland post.)