The Book of Aron (18 page)

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“The carbide in the lamp,” he said.

The vodka bottle was gone. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Raw alcohol I mix with water and a dissolved hard candy for sweetener,” he said. He asked why I hadn’t eaten dinner and when I told him I hadn’t wanted to, he said fatigue and apathy were symptoms of malnutrition. I asked why he hadn’t eaten dinner and he said eating was work and that he was tired.

I sat next to him on Jerzyk’s bed. Jerzyk was sweating and his eyes were open. “Alcohol mixed with warm water takes away the ache and sore eyes,” Korczak said.

While he wrote he kept his face close to the paper. “What are you writing?” I finally asked.

He said it was to the Judenrat, requesting he be allowed to take over the public shelter that housed a thousand children on Dzielna Street. He said on his application he was spreading rumors that he was a
thief who would let children starve so he could qualify for the job. He’d said he was unbalanced and excitable and his health had passed the test in the Gestapo’s prison the year before: that despite the exacting conditions there, not once had he reported sick, not once had he requested a doctor, not once had he absented himself from work in the prison yard. He said he told them that he presently ate like a horse and slept soundly after ten shots of vodka and that experience had now endowed him with the ability to collaborate with criminals and born imbeciles.

“What does the job pay?” I asked him.

He said he’d requested a trial period and a minimum of twenty thousand złotys for the children’s upkeep.

“Do you think you’ll get it?” I asked.

“I already got it,” he said. “I was handed the job permanently and given one thousand złotys. Who’s going to deny the Old Doctor from the Radio the privilege of overseeing kids who are dying at the rate of ten a day?”

“So then what are you writing?” I asked him.

“I had imagined the criminal types among the personnel there would voluntarily leave since they obviously found the place so hateful,” he said. “And they
were bound to it only by cowardice and inertia. But instead they closed ranks against me. I’m the stranger. The enemy. The one good nurse died of tuberculosis. I’m trying to get the rest sacked.”

“The salt of the earth dissolves and the shit remains,” I told him. It was something Lutek always said.

“That describes it,” Korczak said.

Jerzyk told us he was thirsty and Korczak pulled himself off his bed and went down to the kitchen and returned with a cup of water. “Here I have four ways of dealing with undesirable newcomers,” he said to me. “I bribe them; I agree to anything; I lie low and mark time, waiting for the moment to strike; or I wear them out. There, none of these will work.”

“Thank you,” Jerzyk said, and Korczak told him he was welcome.

“Today everyone will be restless because I’ve got a headache,” he said. “Or because it’s cold. Or because they want an outing.” Jerzyk drank his water.

“Oh, listen to me,” he finally said, and put his hand on Jerzyk’s head. “I remember an old teacher who got indignant with us because our hair grew too fast.”

T
HE NEXT DAY HE WAS TOO WEAK TO GO ON HIS
rounds but the day after I heard him exclaiming, “I’m up! I’m up! I’m on my feet!” even from the floor below where I was sleeping.

“This one again?” Zygmuś said when he saw us getting ready to leave. “I think Pan Doctor has a new favorite.”

We went to a butcher shop Korczak had heard would be open for the day. “Is this made from people?” he joked when the woman told him the price. “It’s too cheap for horsemeat.”

“How would I know,” she said. “I wasn’t there when they made it.”

On Twarda the road was blocked by Lejkin and a line of yellow police. He called to us and left his spot in the front to come over to talk.

“I understand you’ve been given new responsibilities,” Korczak told him. Lejkin bowed, and Korczak turned to me. “Mr. Szeryński was arrested for black marketing in furs.” I told him I didn’t care and he explained that it meant my friend was now in command of the Order Service. I said he wasn’t my friend and Lejkin said, speaking of that, one of the new imperatives was a daily quota for deportation and Service members who failed to fill their quotas
would be departing themselves. And some of his men would prefer not to select their neighbors and maybe they could use the rest of my old gang since smugglers were always a good place to start.

“Leave the boy alone,” Korczak told him.

“I’m giving him fair warning,” Lejkin said. “About business we’ll be transacting in the future.” Korczak pulled me away.

“You needn’t hide behind him,” Lejkin called. “I can see you.”

But then he left us alone and Korczak told me after a few days that I could stop hiding. “Mr. Lejkin has other things to worry about,” he said.

It got hot again on Shavuot, the Feast of First Fruits, and the fly problem got so bad that Korczak finally set up a toilet-fee scale: you had to kill five flies to piss and fifteen to shit. Whoever was next in line was the one who checked. Mietek asked me one morning if he could kill them later because he couldn’t hold it and I told him I’d do it for him.

Then at the beginning of June everyone had diarrhea and the chamber pots boiled over. Korczak and Madame Stefa figured it was something that had been in the bread. The Children’s Home was now a home for the aged, he told her one night, and the whole
group was worn down and mutinous and resentful. You could hear kids moaning on the chamber pots and on the toilet.

She said maybe the Germans would stop and he told her the Germans were running the world’s largest enterprise and its name was war and they weren’t playing at it and it wasn’t clean or pleasant or sweet-smelling. He said that
We are the Germans
meant
We are the steel roller
. And then when she started to cry he said without sounding sorry that this was how he felt as well.

T
HE NIGHT THE YELLOW POLICE CAME FOR ME I WAS
able to hide. There was shooting all night and Madame Stefa was weeping the next morning and wouldn’t stop until Korczak had two of the staff members take her upstairs. He gathered the kids around him and told them that Madame was distraught because one of her favorite boys had been killed. He named the boy and no one knew him and he explained that he’d already graduated. One kid asked what was happening and he said no one knew but that night I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Germans were exterminating all of the smugglers. Soldiers with dogs broke down doors and dragged people out of houses. The
Order Service now patrolled the ghetto wall. They’d painted white numbers every fifty meters, with every policeman responsible for his own numbered area. The plan was apparently to use those Jews to starve all the other ones to death.

Madame Stefa remembered when the boy who’d been killed had helped bring in half a cow in six valises over the roof of a building that had been emptied by typhus and how much the beef had thrilled all the children. She remembered that after the city surrendered he broke into a warehouse of army stores and came away with two pillowcases filled with rice and sugar.

She asked Korczak if he wanted tea and he told her that if she wanted to make tea she should make some for Jerzyk, whose fever was worse. She asked if he wanted saccharine water and he said that if she wanted to make some saccharine water she should make it for a staff member who’d given his portion at dinner to one of the weeping little girls.

The next morning I was assigned the coal chute in the cellar and while I was down there Zygmuś came down the stairs with a carbide lamp. The carbide hissed. He said first that I looked like a chimney sweep and second that a boy had come to the door with a message for me and said that I’d know who he
was. The boy said to tell me that Adina had come out of hiding because the Germans had called to her and told her they would kill her friends if she didn’t. And that once she did, the Germans hung her in her apartment in front of her mother. And the boy wanted me to know he was going to find me and kill me. When he finished, Zygmuś made a face as if to say that was that, then kicked at some loose coal and took his lamp back up the stairs.

“Y
OU KNOW ABOUT MY OTHER LATE-NIGHT COMPANION,
I assume,” Korczak told Madame Stefa when she appeared in his doorway and saw me sitting on Mietek’s bed. Mietek had the fever now as well.

“You can’t sleep?” she asked, and gave me a sympathetic look. The whole house was quiet. Only a few kids were having noisy trouble breathing.

“There was so much wind and dust yesterday,” Korczak said, once she sat at the foot of Jerzyk’s bed.

“For a while I thought the storm had cleared the air and it would make breathing easier,” she told him. It was so hot that kids had pitched their sheets onto the floor. Everyone who could walk had spent two days washing and washing the floor and it still smelled everywhere of the diarrhea.

I was with him because now each time the lights went out I remembered my mother when she woke and couldn’t find me in the hospital and then her surprise at her inability to make a fist. I saw Lutek’s face when his rabbit-skin cap flew off.

“While I was lying here I invented a machine,” Korczak said from on his back. “It was like a microscope that could look into you. It had a scale that ran from one to one hundred and if I set the micrometer screw for ninety-nine, then everyone who hadn’t hung on to at least one percent of his humanity would die. And when I ran the machine the only people left were mostly beasts. Everyone else had perished.”

“You’ve had a hard week,” Madame Stefa said.

“And after I set the screw to ninety-eight I was gone too,” he said.

“Yes, well, that would be terrible,” she said, and he let it go. Mietek flailed his arms in his sleep.

“The children now say even birds won’t fly over us,” Korczak said, and she rubbed her face, tired or impatient. He said reading had begun to fail him and that this was a very dangerous sign.

“I saw Bula yesterday,” she told him. He smiled at the name and she went on. “Can you imagine he’s forty now? Not long ago he was ten. He asked me in for cabbage soup. He’s still smuggling. He said each
morning he gives his boy a half a pint of milk and a roll. I asked why he never visited and he said when he was well off there was never time and when he wasn’t how could he come by looking so ragged and dirty?”

“Bula,” Korczak said, and they were quiet.

“Did you tell him that now he has to stop?” he finally asked.

“You know Bula,” she said.

“Do I have to do everything?” he said. “Do I have to go and find him?”

“He’s not going to listen,” she told him. And he closed his eyes and didn’t answer.

“I have no idea what we’re going to do with Balbina,” he told her instead. “If you want to measure your resistance to going crazy, try helping a shlemiel.”

“She’s still getting her bearings,” she said. “She didn’t have as much responsibility at the other orphanage.”

“You put the paper in her hand. She has to deliver it today; here is the address and the hour,” he said. “But she’s lost the paper or forgotten to take it with her or got frightened or the porter told her to go somewhere else. She’ll go tomorrow. She’ll go the next day. She’ll go when she finishes the cleaning. And was it so important anyway?” He put his hand over his eyes and Madame Stefa told him that he was being unkind.

“I am unkind,” he said. “To work here you have to be unkind. You have to be smeared with crap, you have to stink, you have to be crafty.”

“You seem presentable enough when you make your calls,” she said.

“I don’t make calls,” he said. “I go to beg for money and food. It’s hard and degrading.”

“I know that,” she said.

“You,” he said to me. “You never read. Do you want to sink into idiocy?”

“Leave him alone,” Madame Stefa said. “He’s making progress in his schooling.”

“His
schooling
?” he said. “This is a prison. A plague ship. An asylum. A casino. A sprung trap. Bodies you clear from the street in the morning have piled up again by the evening.”

“That’s no reason to frighten children,” she told him.

“Everyone’s been tainted by this,” he said.

“You have a lot to do tomorrow,” she told him. “You need to rest.” She filled his glass from the pitcher beside it. He took it and had a long swallow.

“Do you know how Jerzyk got here?” he asked. She took a deep breath and told him no. He said Jerzyk’s whole family had died in quarantine and he’d dug up his father’s body to get a golden dental bridge to sell
for food but then had to use the money to buy his way out of the Umschlagplatz. “Do you understand what I mean?” he said. “He had to dig his father’s head out of the dirt and then pull the bridge out of his father’s mouth. And then he didn’t get the food he needed anyway.”

Someone cried out downstairs and Madame Stefa left to investigate. Korczak was so still afterwards that I thought he’d fallen asleep.