City of God (18 page)

—By this time, a group of houses at the south end of the ghetto had been converted to a new small hospital of thirty or forty bunk beds, the same Germans who had burned the old hospital having decided that those with infectious diseases must after all continue to be isolated, identified, and then dealt with in a more precise and perhaps less wasteful way. Of course Dr. Koenig was resolved never again to hospitalize a patient with typhus or any other infectious disease. At great risk to himself, he treated that patient at home and wrote a false diagnosis on his chart. I have told you of his bravery, and this was one aspect of it. But that was not all. With the complicity of the one other Jewish doctor and Miss Margolin, Koenig would occasionally admit someone for a hospital stay who was not ill but in some way at risk of discovery and execution. Then there was the matter of illegal midwifing. For all these reasons, the hospital was an extremely vulnerable area and its security was constantly monitored by the council.

So now one morning I arrived at the little hospital with a packet
of Mr. Barbanel's writings inside my shirt, and Miss Margolin was in the admitting office with a man who seemed to be annoying her. She glanced at me over his shoulder and shook her head with the slightest motion so that I knew this was not the time to conduct our business. I stood against the wall, near the door.

“You are not sick,” she was saying to the man. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

“How can you be so sure?” He turned around and looked at me with a big smile on his face but with eyes that sized me up, from my runner's cap to my toes. “How can nurse know I am not sick without she examines me?”

He was an ugly, horse-faced man, his teeth broken and discolored. He spoke this odd, not quite right Yiddish. He wore farm clothes and heavy boots caked in mud. A cap on his head which he did not remove though he was indoors in the presence of a woman.

“You must examine me if I say I am sick,” he said to Miss Margolin.

“Your head is what needs to be examined,” Miss Margolin said. “Go back to work, and if you come here again like this, I will report you.”

She opened the door behind her, and glancing coldly at him, she withdrew. The door closed and I heard the bolt slide into place.

“You know my sickness!” he shouted. “A man who is sick with love for you!”

He turned to me, not smiling now. “What do you look at?” he said. He was brazen, he stepped behind the counter and peered at the papers there, the notices on the wall, and everything else that was none of his business. I didn't move. I felt the packet of papers against my skin. I was afraid of him, but also angry and protective of Greta Margolin. I should have gotten out of there, but I hoped that with someone, even a boy, watching him he would feel constrained to leave. A minute later, he whistled a kind of soft nonchalant whistle as he walked by me out the door, tilting my hat over my eyes for good measure.

In all the stories and films, spies are cunning and subtle and it takes the whole story to flush them out. In the ghetto there was nothing subtle about them. They gave off the smell even if they weren't German.

Perhaps that same evening, or maybe the next day, Mr. Barbanel sat
me down in private and told me the archival material he had taken such pains to assemble and that Greta Margolin had been hiding for him was no longer safe in the ghetto. “It must be moved,” he said. “From now on things must be done differently. Do you understand how important this is?” I nodded. I knew. And I knew immediately, without asking, why he was confiding in me, for after all, wasn't I his star runner?

My drab little mind was brought to life by the excitement, the danger of what I was now to do. It was a feverish feeling, quite unhealthy, it was a drug, an amphetamine, this danger to a boy who knew if he was caught he could be tortured and shot.

Yet, in fact, as you might suppose, knowing Barbanel, my expeditions were reasonably safe. The bulk of the archive, a footlocker's worth, had been transported over the bridge and to the city, how or by what subterfuge or bribery, I was not told. It remained for me to smuggle out the current material wrapped in oilcloth and held with precious strips of adhesive tape to my chest and back. I made perhaps seven, perhaps eight trips over that many weeks, from the late summer into the fall. As the weather grew colder I felt safer, because I had not only a shirt to cover my contraband but a sweater and a jacket over that.

Now, this may bring a smile, but as a boy your father had a thick head of hair. You'll just have to believe me. They trimmed it closely and, besides that, dyed it to a color not exactly blond but certainly lighter. This was one of the pains they took to make me as inconspicuous or non-Jewish as possible for the city. I was outfitted in clothing my own size and not too small for me, as my own clothes were. Of course I wore no star or garrison cap. And I was given a fairly decent pair of shoes. These shoes I carried tied by their laces hung from my neck as I made my way out of the ghetto through an abandoned viaduct, so antiquated that the Germans did not know about it. The access to this pipe, incidentally, was by means of the cistern inside a stone mill house. I was not entirely comfortable scurrying along in a crouch like one of the rats who lived down there, trying unsuccessfully to hold my breath because of the cold, rotten smell of iron viscera and earth and animal droppings. But it was not that far to go, really. The viaduct ended in a pile of boulders and rubble at the river's edge maybe a half-mile upstream of the barbed wire fencing around the
ghetto. Here the river was quite shallow and filled with rocks, it was at a bend, so that it was possible to cross unseen behind the cover of trees and undergrowth on both banks.

I'm making it sound more arduous than it was. A simple walk down a lane brought me to a lightly populated residential district on the city's outskirts. I simply waited at a corner for a streetcar. I was equipped with money, a knapsack of schoolbooks, I knew the Lithuanian language, and I had a false identity card with yet another name. Not once on any of these trips was I ever close to being discovered. I was never the object of more than a glance from a policeman or a German soldier, although women of a motherly age, as I got into the heart of the city, sometimes regarded me with curiosity, or even a look of suspicion. I would smile at them brightly and even tip my cap and wish them good day.

So this was Yehoshua X, Secret Agent Mystery Boy, in action. My trips were designed to put me in the heart of the city in the late afternoon, when the streets were active. But a crushing revelation awaited me each time I arrived. True, it was a wartime occupied city, with troop carriers rushing through the streets, and Nazi flags flying from the city hall, and not exactly a profusion of goods and foodstuffs in the stores and shops, and not exactly a well-fed or happy populace to be seen going about their business. . . nevertheless, to see the urban expanse around me, to be assailed by the sights and sounds of the city I had been born in and had gone to school in, the streets of stone apartment houses with courtyards, electric power lines, street railways, overhead signs that suggested the vast extent of city environs, to be recalled to the assumption of a normal historically grounded modern civilization, as wretched and anti-Semitic as it had been. . . and to compare this inevitably to the pathetic impoverished little slave camp in which we lived, with our rural hovels, penned like animals, and isolated, displaced, and habituated to the terror of not knowing each day if we were to be allowed to live to the next. . . it was unfortunate for anyone, let alone a child, to have this acute instruction driven home. I mean, if I had not been assigned to make these trips with Barbanel's documents, I would not have so keenly felt the terrible loss that had been incurred, nor understood with a voluminous awareness the catastrophe that had happened and was still happening. . .

My destination was a small Catholic church in a working-class
neighborhood not far from the railroad station, a stone church, with a small graveyard in the front. Unfortunately I cannot remember its name. It probably wasn't that big, nothing as grand as the cathedral in the central square, but it seemed formidable enough to me, and I have to say, the moment I entered through the oaken doors was always the uneasiest moment of my journey. It was dark in there, with banks of flickering candles, those votive candles that reminded me of the yahrzeit or memory candles that, when we had them, we lit in the ghetto for our dead. I couldn't understand why there were gates, like prison bars, to separate the altar from the people praying in the pews, sometimes a German soldier or two, but more usually women, elderly women with babushkas over their heads. The women and the candles seemed very Jewish to me, although this could only be a puzzling thought, what with the large, painted, and very realistic plaster Christ hanging on his crucifix in the apse behind the altar with blood dripping from his forehead and hands and feet.

The procedure in which I had been trained required me to kneel and cross myself and then repair to one of the confessionals off to the side, on an aisle. Here I would wait for a few minutes until, having seen that the coast was clear, a priest, Father Petrauskas was his name, opened the door and led me to his rectory.

He was a kind man, the father, he would nod and smile in genuine friendship when he greeted me. Some of his teeth were missing. His head was shaven, and his face was so wrinkled with grooves, folds, and crosshatches that it seemed made of parchment. His eyes were slitted in his cheeks. His black suit was tight on him and very shiny. After I had removed my shirt, he would unwind the adhesive tape, always taking care where it had to be peeled from my skin, and accept the packets of material, and when I was again buttoned up, he would give me something to eat, a piece of bread with jam, or some soup, and sit across the table from me and watch me eat. I do not mean to libel the Catholic Church, but it has occurred to me from time to time over the years that this father may have been a Jewish convert to Catholicism. I don't know why I have that feeling, I have no evidence this was the case. Somehow he was known to Barbanel as a trusted friend and had taken this risk for what, given the exigencies of the times, might have seemed an almost abstract cause, the cause of the historical record, the helpless cause of no redress but memory.

I would leave, usually as darkness was setting in, and retrace the route and take the streetcar back to the edges of town, getting off one stop before or after my corner, where I drifted down the lane to the river crossing. Here I would once more remove my Lithuanian boy's shoes and crawl back through the viaduct into the ghetto. I would arrive exhilarated and go looking for Mr. Barbanel to report my success, and then I would change into my clothes like an actor after his performance and set my runner's cap firmly on my head.

—You can go up to look at birds in the short summer of the Canadian Arctic, flying from Yellowknife low in a DC-3 over the startled herds of caribou to Bathurst. There you camp on top of the impregnable tundra and go out in outboard motors with the Inuit, the people who live up there. In the summer, the lower Arctic is a sea, and they take you out in their open boats to an island where they know one eagle lives, or a clutch of phalaropes, or a white gyrfalcon raising a nest of chicks. The numbers are small in the Arctic, whatever is alive is noticed. The genuine face of pleasure of our guide at the tiller pointing up as a yellow-billed loon beat past I thought of as a collegial satisfaction. Some of these little islands you stop at seem to be made of eggshells and feathers and guano. There is another kingdom of life that has nothing to do with us. The Inuit who've not gone to the cities, those who stay behind living the old way—modified, of course, they use snowmobiles for their wolf hunting in winter—the Inuit hunt and fish, and navigate these waters by taking their position from a distant mountain, which appears as a face looking at the sky. The face is Indian, the top of the mountain is the nose, and these Inuit are therefore known as the People of the Nose.

Spent a half a day waiting below the gyrfalcon's nest and finally saw her, the mother, pounding over the valley with a shockingly large prey in her talons, a gopher, which was deposited with a great hovering whir of wings in the nest she had built on a rock ledge. The sky was an icy blue. She was a broad-chested bird, not as tall as an eagle. The fledglings screeching, my companions clicking their cameras, and I adrenalized with joy to see this beautiful predatory creature that Yeats
had seen and that made me wonder what other way to live than boating through the Arctic seas to look at birds.