The Book of Aron (14 page)

They moved her to the quarantine ward and left her on a pallet in another hallway. No one gave her medicine. I was told I couldn’t stay but no one noticed I hadn’t left. A woman holding her baby shouted, “This is supposed to be a hospital! I should burn it down!” Her baby’s face was blue.

We were outside a separate quarantine room for children. When I looked in they never moved their hands but just lay there in their beds.

She wanted me to make sure Boris and his mother knew which hospital it was so my father and brothers would know where to find us. She sent me home to tell them. She told me to stay there but I went back and forth when she slept. They served her blood soup
she liked and spit soup she didn’t. It was spit soup because it used unthreshed grain and the husks had to be spit out.

She was sick for ten days. “I was sad, I thought only of myself, I let you support me,” she told me on one of the days. “The holidays again,” she complained on another. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Her fever got bad and then better and then bad again. She asked if I had any good memories and I told her I did. She asked me to tell her some. I told about things I remembered from before we moved to the city. I told her I remembered a picnic in the woods with blackbirds around me in the thick grass and her standing over me and making a shadow for me in the bright sunlight. She said she knew what happened on the streets and that she saw it for herself. “You get like a little animal,” she said. “You lie, you cheat.”

I asked to see the doctor who’d told her she had the typhus and a nurse said he’d died. My mother was moved to another hallway on another floor and no one said why. “I wanted to be nusik,” she told me. She wiped her cheeks on the pillow to cool her face. She asked if I knew what nusik was and when I told her I didn’t she said that it was something good. Someone useful and smart. She said that if she’d been nusik, then people who couldn’t get along, people with problems,
would have come to her. She would have listened. She would have contributed more than she had.

She stayed sick and the weather stayed windy and sleeting. The Hanukkah decorations fell over in the drafts from the door. She had more trouble breathing. Sometimes I slept under her cot but they found me and drove me downstairs so then I slept near the front doors under the portrait of the hospital’s founder.

“You’re like me,” she said one night after her breathing got so bad it woke us up. “You think if you stay quiet you’ll be able to keep going like everyone else.” She sounded so bad I found a nurse who brought her some beet marmalade and a glass of undiluted spirits.

The spirits made her cheeks red. She raised her eyebrows after a few sips as if she’d been given a treat. She asked if I wanted any. I told her that the first glassful was for her. She nodded. By then she was having such trouble breathing it sounded like she was whinnying.

She asked if I was sorry to have to go on without her. She asked if I thought I could do it. I looked into her face and wondered if she was really going to leave me. The thought made me so mad that I told her I could do anything and she set the glass of spirits on the
floor and tried to sit up and I couldn’t tell from her expression how bad she felt or if this made it any better.

She said the light hurt her eyes so I went down the hall and switched it off. Some of the patients on the cots and the nurse sitting at the end of the hallway with her paperwork complained, but in the dark I could see my family again, my father in his white holiday shirt and my mother and my brothers and even my younger brother, all of their faces at that point blind to what was coming.

On my walk home the streets were very bad and icy. I slipped and fell more than once. It was after curfew but there was no moon and no one wanted to be out in the cold so no one saw me. I walked like I was part of my own funeral procession. At home I let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.

I
WOKE ON MY MOTHER’S BLANKET TO THE SHRIEK OF
a window wrenched open and in the kitchen Boris was throwing my clothes into the street. There’d been a knock on the door and he’d answered it but I hadn’t bothered to see who it was.

I stood in my nightshirt, blinking, my feet cold on the floor. His mother and sister were also in the doorway to their room.

“Leave him alone,” his sister said when she saw me. “His mother just died.”

“And now we’re quarantined,” Boris shouted. I thought he was about to kill me, like somebody might cross a street. “Do you know how much I’m going to have to pay to keep us out of that hospital?”

“That’s not his fault,” his sister said.

“How did they know where to find you and Lutek?” he asked me. “They were there waiting, before you were. I saw them.”

I stood at the sink and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. I couldn’t work out how to get the water going. “Maybe they got lucky,” his sister said.

“They weren’t even keeping watch,” he told her. “And when I asked you where he was then, you said you didn’t know,” he said to me.

He waited for me to answer.

“You just woke him up,” his sister said.

“Well?” he said.

“Sh’maya thinks only of himself,” I told him.

He looked at me. “If it had been my turn to go with you, it would have been me,” he said.

His sister told him she didn’t understand, so he
explained it to her. I was an informer. I worked for the Gestapo. His sister backed up a step and looked at me like I had two heads.

“Won’t he tell the Germans if you throw him out?” she asked.

“No,” he told her, looking at me.

I dressed on the street in the snow. People passing by didn’t seem to find it strange. I pulled the sweater my mother had boiled over three of my shirts. My socks were soaked when I put on my shoes but they warmed up after a while.

There was nowhere to go. I spent the day walking around.

When curfew came I climbed down a covered cellarway and moved a trash bin to block the wind but still got so cold I had to move.

I made it to Adina’s building after hiding every few minutes because of the patrols. I knocked on her window and at first she wouldn’t open the shade and then she wouldn’t let me in. Finally, when I stood on the street and called her name, she opened the window a crack and tossed out some bread.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “Do you want to get me killed too?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“This is all I have,” she said about the bread and
then told me not to come back again and sent me away sobbing and eating it.

Toward the end of the night I found the block where Boris had ambushed the kid from the other gang and crawled down under the rubble into the caved-in cellar. I felt around in the dark for a place I could lie down. The kid he’d hit with the brick was gone. I stayed there and stole from street vendors or smaller kids when I got too hungry. I was a thief that janitors and porters chased away from their doorways with sweeps of their brooms. I drank snowmelt collected in a can. I lay for days under some blankets. When I went out for food starving people slipped out of dark corners and followed me and when one beggar got hold of something the rest of the pack knocked him down and ripped what he had from his hands and then others stole it from them. Once whatever it was was eaten, everyone went back to begging.

I tried to make myself invisible but kids who had nowhere to go were everywhere and the smaller ones trailed anyone who might have a better situation. I ran away from them but three or four found my cellar and told their friends.

After that I wandered without a plan. I was always without a plan. I slept between the chairs on an old orchestra stand.

It got colder. A woman on the street felt bad when she saw me and gave me an extra pair of stockings to go over my socks but the elastics were broken. I helped another woman carry a milk canister and when we got to her place she gave me an extra coat.

I stole some cooked potatoes and when I finally stopped running and thought I was safe I walked right into Lutek’s sister.

“My God, how you look!” she said. She burst into tears and asked what had happened to her brother. She still had her stutter. She kicked at me and when a yellow policeman came over her friend dragged her away. I found myself on my hands and knees in the slush. The policeman stood over me and nudged me with his foot. Then he left. While I was weeping someone stole the potatoes I had taken.

It warmed up a little so my feet and hands got better. I lost track of the days. I passed a clinic that treated eye infections and started going inside. I let everyone in line get ahead of me so I could sit in the warm waiting room for a few hours. I found one of the buildings where they’d restarted a grammar school and slipped in and took a seat in the back. The teacher noticed but seemed to know why I was there and didn’t throw me out. Then through the window I saw Lutek’s father pass by outside and I never went back.

Near the hospital where my mother died I saw Lejkin and some other police stop someone and hid until they were gone.

I wandered the streets. I spent nights wedged into crannies like a spider. I gave up on thinking ahead. I walked back and forth.

A boy my age caught me trying to steal from his father’s shop while he was watching it and knocked me down with a club he had behind the counter and while I sat there crying and rubbing my head he tied my wrists with a rope and then tied the rope to a cart he had outside. He hefted the cart’s handles and started dragging me. I slipped and stumbled trying to free myself. He was talking about how tired he was of this and how he was going to take me to the Germans himself. But he tied the knot too loose and by scraping it against the back of the cart I got it free. He still didn’t know, dragging his cart along, and the street he turned us onto was empty. I looked at the back of his head. Somewhere he had a mother hoping he’d come home safe. I could take him from her like my mother was taken from me. But instead when I passed an alley I dropped the rope and ran.

I couldn’t even do that right, I thought later. I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the wall. People stepped over my legs.

At curfew someone lifted me off the pavement. I was dozing and shaking from the chill. I was carried many blocks and then down some steps to the basement of a bombed-out house. The room where I was laid down onto a cot was very bright and all around me was noise and confusion. There were bunk beds made from rough boards against the walls. The place was filled with kids on the floor and on the bunks and all of them were dirty and all of them were making noise. Some were playing cards and others were playing with knives. No one seemed to be supervising them.

I couldn’t feel my feet. “This one’s in a bad way,” the man who’d been carrying me told someone else, and I recognized his voice. “This is a satellite shelter,” he told me when he saw that I was awake. “A place people can go who need to get off the streets for curfew. You can have a little soup and warm up and then tomorrow you can go home.”

“I don’t have a home,” I told him, and Korczak looked at me like he’d already known that was what I was going to say.

“Well, then, we’ll have to think about adding you to our little group,” he said. And the kids on the bunks made loud sounds of protest, to make it clear that was the last thing they needed.

T
HE REAL ORPHANAGE WAS NICER THAN THE
shelter but the kids were the same. It was on Sienna Street facing the wall, as far south as you could go. One of the kids said they’d had to move again in October when the ghetto had gotten even smaller. Korczak and the heavy woman Stefa washed me. He said while they were doing it that he’d never seen such a dirty chest and armpits.

Everyone slept on the first floor in one big room and in the morning wooden chests and cupboards were dragged around, mostly by the heavy woman, to make areas where we could eat and study and play. She told the kids to help and some would and some wouldn’t. All of this went on while I stayed in bed, watching. “Who is he, the Prince?” another kid asked, and Korczak told him I was recovering from frostbite.

My feet were burning and while she was sliding a cupboard over near me the woman said I should set
them in a pan of cold water, but she didn’t make me so I didn’t. I only got up for lunch and dinner and when I did it made my feet burn even more. Lunch was a wheat porridge ground up in a meat grinder and then steeped in boiling water and dinner was potato skins mushed into patties and pigweed with turnips. While the kids at my table ate they sang
Julek and Mańka went out of town and kissed so hard the trees fell down
.

“Who weeps at turnips?” a kid said when he saw what I was doing. But I was seeing Lutek still hanging onto his sack in the back of the blue policeman’s car.

“My eyes do this,” I told everyone at the table. “I don’t know why.”

After lunch there’d been a class in Hebrew in a corner of the room near my bed. I pulled the covers over my face. Korczak asked questions in Polish and the kids answered in gibberish. Sometimes he corrected them. His last question was “Are you happy here in Palestine?” and it sounded like everyone had the right answer. The woman said it was time for chores and I could hear everyone getting to their feet and when I pulled the covers down kids were sweeping the floors and washing the walls and wiping the windows. Everyone was calling for something and banging around and knocking into things. When that was finished they all came back near my bed again,
and Korczak said it was time to read his column in the orphanage newspaper. This week’s column was called “Take Care with the Machine.” “The machine doesn’t understand; the machine is indifferent,” he read. He had his glasses on the end of his nose and used his finger to follow the print. “Put your finger in, it’ll cut it off; put your head in, it’ll cut that off too.” I got up to pee. My feet weren’t burning so much.