The Book of Aron (16 page)

He shook me awake on my cot the next day and told me to get dressed because I was coming with him.

When we got outside it was still dark. I didn’t want to be back out on the streets, I told him. He said he understood.

He talked nonstop as he walked. He said maybe today we’d visit the Germans. He said the officer assigned to supervise the orphanage had been a pediatrician himself and always referred to Korczak as his “respected colleague” and thought that was hilarious. He said the officer called the orphanage his “republic of swindlers” and said the Jews managed to adjust to every situation but never knew how good they had it, like the man who complained he had no golden shoes but didn’t realize that he was soon to lose his legs.

It was windy and muddy and cold and everyone who was out early moved around as if fed up with his own exhaustion. Most were beggars who’d been out all night. We stopped next to a girl with bare arms squatting in front of a little wagon carrying frozen and rotted rutabagas. A younger girl was curled up under the wagon with her feet covered in newspaper wrapped and tied into the shape of shoes. Korczak knelt next to her and put something in her hand. Both girls did everything slowly.

“Enough about the Germans,” he said, once we started walking again. He blew on his hands. He talked about how some of the orphanage girls had surprised him with a movie they made with a waxed paper box and electric bulb.

I asked where we were going and he asked if it mattered. He said that given one circumstance or another we were all tied up like dogs on a chain.

After I didn’t answer he apologized for saying something so unhelpful.

His apology made him quiet. In the darkness we passed Przejazd Street and the Immortal Hole and the building with the slanted roof and the dormers.

He said that in one house the previous week he found six children on a wet and rotting mattress. And when I still didn’t say anything he asked who
wasn’t
sad? He said the world was one great sadness. He said what we needed to do was tell ourselves that we weren’t living in the worst place in the world but instead were surrounded by grasshoppers and glowworms.

From his expression it didn’t look like he was being ironic. I told him again that I didn’t want to be out on the street and when he didn’t answer I said I didn’t want to be at the orphanage either. He said I was free to leave and I hated him for making me feel the way I did and hated myself even more for not just being dead somewhere.

The sun came up and he asked if I was at least happy to be out in the sunshine. I rubbed my arms and face and he asked if I’d heard him. I told him that whether I was happy or unhappy, I took things as I found them. He said his mother used to say when it was sunny and he was particularly gloomy that not even a Jew could suffer on a day like today.

Every few steps now someone was begging or selling or had come out of a hole and was trying to keep warm. One was wrapped in a quilt that was losing feathers in the wind. Someone was selling milk out of their house and we got in line for some. “Wherever there’s a line I stand in it, no matter what they’re selling, because I know I’m going to get something,” he joked.

We began our begging at a rich man’s house. He rang the bell. The man when he answered the door said, “Oh, Pan Doctor, you’re killing me here,” instead of hello, and Korczak asked him what was worse than being an old man and then answered being an old Jew. And what was worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless. And worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful. And worse than that, an old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful and who bore the burden of a large family. And worse than that, someone whose large family were all children. And worse than that, children who were starving.

The man disappeared from the door and returned with some money and dumped it into a sack Korczak held out. Then he excused himself and said good morning and shut the door while Korczak looked into the sack.

He led me to the next house. He said he himself had been well-to-do until his father had to be put into a mental hospital. And that’s when he learned what it meant to have to turn to adults for help. Adulthood was a privileged position against which he’d had to struggle. He’d heard a lot about the proletariat as a teenager, but the world’s oldest proletariat was the child. The child was hounded even by those who loved him. He’d decided then and there that he’d
become the father of orphans and would always work for those who should come first but always came last.

“Like you, I was always slow doing everything,” he said. “When my grandmother would watch me at a chore she’d always say, ‘You. Philosopher.’ ”

“When my father called for my help he always said, ‘Hey! Bungler!’ ” I told him.

“And you always helped him,” he said.

“I didn’t like to work,” I told him.

“The laziest person I ever knew was a man named Krylov who spent the entirety of his adult years on his couch, with all of his books beneath it,” he said. “He would just reach down and read whatever came to his hand.”

We walked to other houses and when the people who answered the door said no he wouldn’t go away. He just repeated, “But my children. My children.” I thought about my mother. “Stay still while I’m talking,” he told me between houses.

At lunchtime we stood inside the door of a café and he shouted, “Is there someone here who can get my children through the winter?” And a man called him over and he approached some others, thanking those who gave and saying about what went into the sack, “Not enough, not enough.” In the afternoon we
stopped at the post office to go through the packages that were undeliverable after the German soldiers had opened them.

Walking back to the orphanage we passed Mrs. Melecówna’s parlor. The sidewalk was blocked by kids standing with their hands out and weeping. He gave something to each.

After we’d gone a few blocks I asked if he wanted to rest because he looked so tired. He said we’d gotten to the point where dead children no longer impressed us. He said that if a man couldn’t look on calmly at the death of another then his own life was worth a hundred times more. He was having enough trouble walking that he leaned on each house railing we passed. He said it was like how some people still went to visit relatives who’d been taken to the hospital.

A pack of kids ran by us and almost knocked him down. He half-sat against a post. His breathing sounded like my mother’s and I thought I would have to run away and leave him on the street if he kept making those sounds. He said to himself that the smugglers lived a little longer and the unenterprising died in silence.

Then he didn’t speak again until we turned onto
Sienna and could see the orphanage. I thought if he died on the street, where would I be then? He took my hand to stop me and looked at where we were going like the building itself could kill him.

Jerzyk and some other boy were playing in the street with some rope, taking turns whipping each other. We could hear their laughter. “You know what I dream of?” Korczak said. “A room in Jerusalem with a table and something to write on. Transparent walls so I wouldn’t miss a single sunrise or sunset. And I’m just the silent Jew from who knows where.”

We stood where he’d stopped us. He held the lamppost to keep himself steady. Then he made an after-you gesture with a bow and cleared his throat behind me all the way down the block.

“D
ID YOU THINK YOU WERE GOING TO HIDE IN THAT
orphanage until the war was over?” Lejkin asked. I hadn’t realized he was behind me on the street. I’d been sent out with Zygmuś and a handcart to pick up a barrel of pickles someone had told Korczak he’d donate.

“Let’s have a talk,” Lejkin said. “Your friend can handle the stolen goods.”

I stopped and Zygmuś kept pulling. He rattled the
cart over the trolley tracks and around the corner and out of sight.

“They’re not stolen,” I said.

“Our friend Obersturmführer Witossek thought I should remind you that you’re still a member of the anti-crime unit,” Lejkin said. “It’s not as though our problems have gone away while you’ve been settling in at your new home.”

I shoved him as hard as I could. “You said they weren’t hunting smugglers,” I said.

He straightened his collar and stuck out his chin. “The Germans do what the Germans do,” he said. “What
you
want to remember is how to keep them from doing it to you.”

He said I should let him buy me a hot chocolate and pulled me to a café down the street.

The café was full and warm enough from its stove that its windows ran with condensation. Outside of it a boy sat cross-legged with a baby next to him on a spread handkerchief, the baby on its side and panting like a pigeon. Inside we sat there looking at each other and he handed me a napkin for my eyes. “You cry more than any other person I know,” he said. A woman approached our table and he said, “Watch: this one carries a photograph of herself from happier days to show what a wreck she’s become.”

When the waiter came he ordered for me. He asked if I’d heard about Lübeck and when I said no he told me, after making certain no Germans were near, that the British had bombed it flat. When I didn’t say anything he said that everyone in the Order Service, optimists and pessimists alike, believed Germany would lose in the end, but the pessimists claimed that before that happened Germany would gain control of the world. The optimists said Germany had waged total war in Poland, lightning war in France, an installment war in England, and a fatal war in Russia. He said people had started writing 1812, the year of Napoleon’s defeat, on the walls.

He said he’d asked Witossek when he thought the war would end and Witossek had answered when Germans were eating once a day and Jews once a month.

When the hot chocolates arrived he toasted to good fortune and when I asked what good fortune he said he was moving up in the Order Service and was now Szeryński’s deputy. So you could say he was second in command of the entire yellow police.

He was just making conversation, he said finally, when I still hadn’t answered.

I told him I needed to get back.

He said they would like me to tour certain areas with them in case I might have some hard-won knowledge that would come in handy.

“You want me to help you kill someone else?” I said.

He asked if I wanted my hot chocolate and when I didn’t answer he drank it. “The requisitioning is about to get more extreme,” he said. “No potatoes. No bread. No coal for the orphanages but plenty for the coffeehouses.”

What could any of us do, I told him. None of us had any luck.

“Think of it like this,” he said. “Are we to dole out spoonfuls to everyone, with the result that no one will survive? Or give a fuller measure to the few?”

“I need to get back,” I said.

“I’m going to talk to you as though you can understand,” he said. “Shyster to shyster, as it were. Those with no talent for swindling always suffer.” He gestured outside. “You and I both know that no compassion can be expected from the Germans. Whether we live or die depends on how long they’re in power. If they have enough time, they’ll kill us all. If not, some can be saved.”

I stood up and he didn’t try to stop me. “We won’t need you until the end of the week,” he said.

“Why do you need
me
?” I said. “Why can’t you get someone else?”

He ran his finger around the inside of my cup. “It’ll help to think about others the way my boss Szeryński does,” he said, then stood up himself and made an after-you gesture like Korczak’s. “He says that refugees are like autumn leaves.”

He followed me out onto the sidewalk. It had begun to snow and he pulled up his collar and then pulled up mine. Then he cleaned off his seat and got on his bicycle and rode away. Because of the snow it slipped and slid all over on the cobblestones and he had to put his foot out every so often for balance.

T
HE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS SLEPT IN A BUILDING
next door but Korczak had his office and bed on the floor above us in what everyone called the isolation ward for the kids who were the sickest. His bed and night table were in the middle of the room with the kids’ beds arranged around them. Each bed had a pail next to it on the floor and all the kids had compresses on their heads. Korczak looked to be asleep, even
though his lamp was lit and his clothes were still on. The kids were asleep. It was after four in the morning.

There was a heel of black bread on the table and another piece in his hand, as if he’d fallen asleep eating.

I had crept up the stairs to talk to him. I heard a noise and hid behind his desk and then Madame Stefa appeared in the doorway and watched him sleep before moving over to the side of his bed.

“I always try to nap for an hour before the beehive starts to buzz,” he told her, and I realized he was awake though his eyes were still closed. “When I was a child, I pretended to be asleep and then opened my eyes suddenly so I could see my guardian angel before he could hide.”

She lowered herself to sit on the edge of one of the kids’ beds. She looked as tired as he did. “How was your day today?” she asked. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.” And I could hear in her voice what I’d heard in my mother’s when she’d asked me for news.