The Book of Aron (17 page)

“Ten hours and seven calls,” he said. “Fifty złotys and another promise of five a month.”

She said no one expected him to spend ten hours tramping around in the cold and that his ailments were not going to allow it.

“Which ailments are those?” he asked. He was still on his back but his hand was now over his eyes.

“Your weakened heart muscle. Your pleurisy from pneumonia. Your bladder trouble. Your swollen legs and feet,” she said. “Your hernia.”

They were quiet. “It’s not funny,” she said.

“How did the doctor who refused to perform the hernia operation put it?” he asked. “My health is in ruins.”

Go downstairs
, I thought to myself. I needed to talk to someone about Lejkin. But what would I say?

“You cough and you complain and then you go out without your sweater,” Madame Stefa said.

“What about you? One can’t give you anything,” Korczak said.

He lifted his hand from his eyes and saw her looking at the vodka and water on the table. “Have you noticed that bread and water taste better at night?” he asked.

“And what happens when someone takes you off the street?” she asked. “Where will we be then?”

Her anger made him angry too. “Who says that when I go out the Germans will be about?” he said. “And if they are, who says they’ll be on my street? And if they are, who says they’ll choose me? And if
they do, who says they won’t be persuaded by what I have to tell them?”

“I’m just asking if it’s worth the risk for such a little bit of money,” she said.

He made a noise with his mouth. Then he said, “You know, when I was a child I told my teachers that I knew how to remake the world. Throw away all the money was always step one. My plan always broke down at step two.”

She closed her shawl around her neck with one hand. It was cold. The janitor’s son called up from the courtyard to complain about the light. He said it looked like Hanukkah and he didn’t want to have to tell them again. Madame Stefa went to the windowsill and refastened the blackout paper.

“I have a recurring dream in which one of my boys says about me, ‘He went to sleep when we needed him most,’ ” Korczak said.

“You can’t do everything,” she said.

“How much land have I tilled?” he said. “How much bread have I baked? How many trees have I planted? How many bricks have I laid? How many buttons have I sewn, how many garments have I patched?”

“Sssh,” she told him. “Don’t work yourself up.”

“My father called me a clod and an idiot and a crybaby and an ass,” he said. “He was right. And so were those who believed in me.”

I realized they were talking about something else completely and that I didn’t know how anyone’s mind worked, including my own.

“I know you never promised me anything,” she said. “And I lie awake telling myself, Stefa, you old fool, you got what you deserved.”

“The most splendid assumption still needs verification,” he told her.

“I just always believed that one receives in order to nourish,” she said.

“So what is love?” he asked. “Is it always given to those who deserve it? How do we know if we love enough? How do we learn to love more?”

The room smelled of cigarettes and feet. The blackout paper came loose again and outside the window it was starting to get light.

“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.

“From seven to fourteen I was permanently in love,” he said, “and always with a different girl.”

The windowpanes rattled and it looked like he was listening to the wind. He gave a big sigh.

“I always think that maybe if I hadn’t been so ugly,” she said.

“I tell everyone, ‘Stefa always reminds me that I’m a miserable human being who makes everyone else miserable,’ ” he said.

She said something so quietly as an answer that he asked her to repeat it. “It’s just hard always feeling alone,” she said.

He didn’t answer so she looked at her hands. My legs cramped from having been in one position for so long.

“I’ve gotten back what I paid in,” he finally told her. “Loneliness isn’t the worst thing. I value memories.”

She stood up and crossed to the door and stopped. “I remind myself that it’s not my place to ask for things,” she said. “But even now my ego gets in the way.”

Even I could see her unhappiness in the lamplight, but he ignored it. “Nothing I can say or do can spare you or spare myself,” he said.

“Always you give up, you postpone, you cancel, you substitute,” she told him.

He sat up on his elbows. “I see my feelings through a telescope,” he said. “They’re a little gang huddled on a polar plain. When someone coughs, first I feel pity and then its opposite: maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s going to cause us to use up the rest of our medicine.”

She said she was sorry and that she’d let him sleep.

“I exist not to be loved but to act,” he told her.

“The saint orders and God executes,” she said.

“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Our God may not have the will to enforce the Law, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey it.”

“Whom do we sue for breach of contract?” she asked.

“Rabbi Yitzchak of Berdichov is supposed to have summoned God to a rabbinic court,” he told her.

“I suppose we were never going to find a place where we’d enjoy perfect digestion and eternal peace,” she said.

“Sometimes I think: don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Just listen for another ten minutes to their breathing. Their coughing. Their little noises.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“We’re living tombstones,” he told her. “Israel is where they have the baby carriages and the green growing things.”

She made a noise like he’d slapped her and he fell back onto his bed once he heard her going down the stairs.

A
BOY EVERYONE CALLED MANDOLIN BECAUSE HE
never let go of his instrument, even holding it above his head during his lice bath, died in his bed with both arms wrapped around it. We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it. If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew. All anyone could think about was the table’s next loaf of bread. In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds. We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan. It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand. On the Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard.

Though there was no food, Korczak had us all address and mail invitations to our Passover seder on April first. We divided up his list of benefactors. When the day came, fifty guests arrived and sat near the door. The long tables were covered with tablecloths. I sat next to a kid whose blisters and scabs were so thick his neighbors called him Fish Scales. We had no eggs or bitter herbs and only a bit of soup and a matzoh ball each, and the smaller kids were excited because it was announced that Madame Stefa had hidden an almond in one of the matzoh balls. Our holiday starvation, Zygmuś joked, would be like the
rest of our week. But Korczak told the guests that no child at his table had been abandoned and all were joined by the loving spirits of their absent mothers and fathers, and when he said that many of the kids started crying. Most of the audience did too. Mietek got the almond.

For a week no one came round to bother me. Then someone pounded on the orphanage door late in the evening, and Madame Stefa answered it and came over to my cot and said a Jewish policeman wished to see me.

At the door Lejkin said that he needed to find the apartment where my friend, the pretty one, had stayed before she’d left the ghetto. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said if I refused then the Germans he was with would take ten kids from the orphanage and shoot them. He said the Germans would be happy to tell me which ones they would shoot. He waited while I got dressed and then walked me down the stairs and we got into a car with Germans in the back. One of them asked him in Polish why I was crying and Lejkin said, “That’s what he does.”

At first I gave them the wrong address but once we stopped there I panicked and told them I’d been mistaken and gave them the right one. That was only
seven blocks farther on. Something was caught in the heater in the car’s dashboard and made a fluttering sound. While I waited in the front seat, Lejkin and two Germans went up to the door and knocked and asked the woman who answered to step outside. She was in her red flowered bathrobe. She looked over at me in the car. One of the Germans shot her where she stood and they left her there outside her front door.

The next day the kids were talking about how many people had been shot all over the ghetto. Korczak told Madame Stefa to let me sleep, so the room was set up for the day around me. I told myself I wasn’t going to move and if I cried until I dried out that was fine too. No one knew how many people had been killed. One of the staff members finally told Mietek that she’d heard they’d all been connected to an illegal newspaper. Korczak said this didn’t need to be discussed with the children within earshot. The next day I was made to get up and do some chores and when I was washing dishes I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Jewish Council had circulated a memorandum saying that the Germans said the executions had been a singular event and wouldn’t be repeated.

After that there were daily roundups at barricades the Germans set up on different streets with a few sawhorses and signs. Once the barricades went
up you only had a few minutes to get away before the cross streets and alleys were blocked too. “Now the day’s a success if you just manage to get where you’re going without an incident,” Madame Stefa said.

Korczak’s solution to all of this was letter-writing. Just because things were as bad as they could be, he said, that didn’t mean we had to accept that action was useless.

All of those with acceptable penmanship were set to writing
Please if possible send packages to the Orphans’ Home at 16 Sienna Street for the sick children
. He said there was more and that he would dictate the rest. He said to write that peaceably they run around and play, these children who so recently arrived wounded, frozen, abused, hungry, and hunted. Some of the kids asked how to spell peaceably and he told them it didn’t matter. He said to write that there was no food for them and a lot of the smaller children had stopped growing. That nightmares and weeping were their permanent experiences. And yet his teaching had been borne out, since when the adult community wouldn’t provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender. I wrote that sentence twice, I was so taken with it. He said to write that there were always more children imploring him
to be admitted, coming to him in groups on the street and making their proposals like little skeletal aldermen. He said to sign the letters with our names and then
for Dr. Henryk Goldszmit/Janusz Korczak/The Old Doctor from the Radio
.

F
OR THREE DAYS I DIDN’T LEAVE MY BED EXCEPT FOR
meals and Korczak again told them to leave me alone. The bedbugs spared only the bottom of my feet. During the day, before the kids hung the blackout paper, a new rule said they had to stand to the side of the windows to watch the street, because now the Germans were firing at any movement indoors. A policeman the staff members called Frankenstein because he looked and acted like the monster in the film never missed an opportunity, they said, to break a window if he saw a silhouette.

The kids watched the roundups at the barricades. They could hear them starting with the whistles and the shouting. Sometimes they saw someone they knew. Jews went by carrying all sorts of things: cages or bowls or horns. One had a pot with a seedling in it. They were all going to the depot the Germans called the Umschlagplatz where the trains took them away.

On the fourth day Korczak again got me up to go
on his rounds with him. Madame Stefa insisted he wear a warmer shirt and he had to struggle into it. She had to help him with his suspenders.

Out on the street he couldn’t remember where he was going. In one doorway he rang the bell and said to me, “What did I come to see him about?” In the gloom of another he said, “What is it I’m looking at?” The instep of his shoe came loose and flapped when he walked. The coal smoke in the air left grit on our teeth. Everyone moved as if in a daze and looked at me like I was a piece of bread. A woman ahead of us in a shop complained about the price and Korczak said to her, “Listen. These aren’t goods and this isn’t a store. You’re not a customer and he’s not a shopkeeper. So you’re not being cheated and he’s not profiting. This is just what we’ve decided to do, given that we have to do something.” On the way back his legs were so swollen he had to hire one of the bicycles with seats attached for passengers. He asked me to choose the strongest-looking driver and while we rode he leaned over to me and said in a hoarse voice that he was always moved by how gentle and quiet the drivers were, like oxen or horses.

M
ORE KIDS GOT SICK BUT MADAME STEFA STILL
slept downstairs with the healthy ones and Korczak upstairs in the isolation ward. “It’s cold for May,” he said to me one night when I came up to sit with him. He was writing something while everyone else slept.