The Book of Aron (2 page)

My two older brothers got jobs outside of town driving goats to the slaughterhouse and were gone until after dark, and like my father they thought my mother should stay at home, so she confided in me about her plan to expand her laundry business. She said it was no gold mine but it could be a serious help, especially before Passover and Rosh Hashanah. She
told me she used some of their hidden savings to buy soap and bleach and barrels and that every time my father passed the money’s hiding place she had a block of ice under her skull and could feel every hair on her head. I said why shouldn’t she take the money, and she was so happy she told me that once I turned nine she would make me a full partner. And this made me happy, because I knew that once I had enough money I would run away to Palestine or Africa.

The week before Passover we set giant pots of water to boil on the stove and we pushed all the bed linens and garments we’d collected from her customers into two barrels with metal rims and she lathered everything with a yellow block of soap before we rinsed it all and ran it through the wringer and dragged all that wet laundry in baskets up to the attic, where she’d strung ropes in every direction under the rafters. Since we opened the windows for the cross-breezes, she couldn’t rest that night and whispered to me about the gangs that specialized in crossing rooftops to steal laundry, so I slept up there so that she could relax.

“See? You don’t only care about yourself,” she whispered when she came to wake me the next morning. She put her lips to my forehead and her hand to my cheek. When she touched me like that, it was as
if the person everyone hated had flown away. And while he was gone, I didn’t let her know that I was already awake.

I
DIDN’T NEED TO PLAY WITH ANYONE, SO AFTER
school I came home and helped her instead. While my younger brother napped, we talked about our days. I told her about a soldier on a horse near the trolley stop on Gęsia who took some coins from his saddlebag and handed them to me, and she asked if I’d thanked him and of course I hadn’t. She agreed it was a strange thing he’d done and wondered if he’d been thinking of his own little boy. We listened to our neighbors arguing across the hall, and she said the father spent his days in the synagogue securing himself a place in the next world while the mother wore herself out seeing that everyone was fed. She said that the mother had had fourteen children and only six had survived. I said maybe they were finished having children, and she said that for the mother’s sake, may a six-winged angel descend with the news.

I did kindnesses for my mother but she always wanted me to do them instead for my little brother. He was afraid of everything. She kept a lit candle near his
bed to drive shadows out of corners because his window had no shutters and at night he always thought someone was standing beside it outside or knocking on the wall, and he cried himself to sleep about it. When she went to comfort him his eyes were so full of fear it scared me to look at them. Our father shouted at him to stop, which made things worse. He reminded my brother that everyone in the building understood that parents didn’t need to hold back and could give rule-breakers what they deserved. He’d work himself up about it and then our mother would placate him in the other room after telling me to stay with my brother and do what I could to quiet him down.

My brother had all sorts of medicines and drops and inhalerpots on his bedside table and my mother taught us how to grab his head and tilt it forward when he had trouble breathing and started to choke. He hated being inside all the time and finally ran away and left a note saying he’d had enough of this life, and he was missing for two days. Once he was back my mother locked him in the apartment and he pulled his chair to the window so he could see outside.

I didn’t understand him but liked the blank way he didn’t complain. He cupped any treat he was given in his hands and peeked at it before passing it along to one of us. If he wasn’t napping or staring out his
window, he stayed near my mother. When he got angry he didn’t hit anyone or shout but instead went for days without speaking. My mother had a saying about how quiet he got, that his wisdom died inside of him, something her own mother had said about her. She told the neighbors that as a toddler he’d once laid himself spread-eagled on the trolley tracks to prevent her from leaving, and she’d had to carry him home, and that when she asked him about it afterwards he’d put his hands over her mouth.

H
E LOVED THE RADIO AND IT WAS BECAUSE OF HIM
that I first heard Janusz Korczak’s show. Thursday afternoons I had to sit with him and we could hear it through the wall, since our neighbor’s wife was hard of hearing. The show was called
The Old Doctor
and I liked it because even though he complained about how alone he was, he always wanted to know more about other people, especially kids. I also liked that I never knew what to expect. Sometimes he interviewed poor orphans in a summer camp. Other times he talked about what he loved about airplanes. Or told a fairy tale. He made his own barnyard noises. When I asked my mother why the show was called
The Old Doctor
she said there’d been complaints
about allowing a Jewish educator to shape the minds of Polish children.

That was also the year I first ate in a restaurant. My father took me to celebrate some good fortune he never explained. It was the first time I was able to choose my own food. He quizzed me on Jan Henryk Dąbrowski while I ate since he considered himself an amateur historian. While I was eating dessert he made me laugh by breaking walnuts with his teeth. That night I dreamed that a raven was sitting on my shoulder in the wind and a black cloak was streaming out behind me. When my father was getting dressed the next morning I put my arms around him. “What’s the matter with him today?” he asked my mother before he left.

T
HE KIDS ON MY BLOCK REACTED TO MY LACK OF
interest with their own. Sometimes they threw stones at me. Another whole summer came and went. I wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle, so I went to a boy who owned one and he said he would teach me. I could get on by myself after the first lesson but then he wouldn’t teach me anymore. I met Lutek one evening when I sat near some kids I didn’t know and they told me to leave but I didn’t. He had a rabbit-skin cap with
earflaps and when one of the kids asked where he got it he said that he’d found it between the kid’s mother’s legs, so they started pushing him around. They knocked him into me, so I shoved the kid who’d done it and he landed on his back and head on the paving stones. The other kids chased us and Lutek led me into a cellarway hidden by a coal chute and they all ran by. I asked how he’d found it and he said he’d been hiding since before I was born. While we sat there in the dark I asked him more questions but he stopped answering and just sniffed at the air like a dog.

He was even smaller than me. He was so small he said he had a younger sister who everyone thought was older. He said the village he was from was pitiful. It didn’t appear on maps and it was just three lanes of cottages, fences, and mud. He’d gone to school for a year at one at the Talmud-toyres on Miła Street, which he said was famous for graduating ignoramuses. He said his father was the strongest porter in the city and pulled a handcart he harnessed to himself like a horse. He was especially good with the huge machinery crates from Lódz that three men had trouble budging. Otherwise he sat in a tavern. He worked at the railroad station near Jaruszewski’s courtyard. That neighborhood scared me. Smoke from the slag heaps always darkened the air over the loading docks.

My mother was happy I’d made a friend but soon upset that I was never around to watch my younger brother once Lutek took charge of my education. He showed me how to steal from the vegetable carts, and how one of us by making a commotion could hide what the other was doing, even when the peddlers were watching out for one another. With a French pamphlet he took from a bookstall he proved I didn’t know anything about girls, and discovered I knew so little that I didn’t even know what he was talking about. After he had cursed some filthy Russians he also said I didn’t know anything about politics, which was also true.

He taught me that no one else’s problems should get in the way of our having a good time. I told him about all the trouble I’d gotten into with Yudl, including the broken school windows, but he was unimpressed. His family had moved three times since coming to Warsaw and in one neighborhood he’d been hauled in by the police for breaking down the door of a boy who’d stolen his cap, and in another for having put a hole in a kid’s head with a jeweler’s hammer. He said the kid was okay after a while, though he’d had to wear a head-bandage and everyone had called him the Sheik.

I asked if his father beat him for such offenses and he said he’d had more luck with his father’s strap since
he’d learned to rub garlic and onion onto the welts. And that he was lucky that his father was more upset about his sister’s stutter. His father tried to cure it by mimicking her, to shame her into getting over it. She liked me because when I had to wait for her to finish what she was saying I never got impatient. She told Lutek that I was kind and he should bring me around more often, so he had me talk to her while he slipped money from her secret hiding-spot. He said she knew he stole from her but she never complained about it. When he took enough we would buy sausages and ride the trolley.

O
N THOSE DAYS I WAS AROUND AND MY YOUNGER
brother was feeling better my mother ordered me to take him to the park so he could get some fresh air. He was always thrilled to go. The back courtyard with the garbage bins got no light and was deserted except for the occasional stray cat. Lutek always found us wherever we went. He said that being saddled with a consumptive wasn’t the end of the world and we could always find some uses for him, so one day we persuaded him to steal a jar of jam and on another to sing to a policeman. Or else we went about our business and he followed along. Whenever Lutek saw his blank
look he asked him, “So how’s the weather in Wilno?” a joke my younger brother never understood.

On our way home I told him not to tell our mother about whatever we had done, and then she said he had to, and so he did, and I wouldn’t get supper that night. Then after he went to sleep she would sit at the foot of my bed and we’d look at each other. Neither of us would speak until she finally asked me to try to remain a decent human being and then kissed my cheek before wishing me a good night. And I would look up at my ceiling in the darkness and remember that I gave her nothing in return for what she gave me, and almost never had. Then I would plan my next day with Lutek.

S
HE GAVE ME A PARTY FOR MY NINTH BIRTHDAY. THE
day after the party Lutek’s sister asked how it had been, and he said what was there to tell about it. We had raisin cake and the guests were my younger brother and Lutek. My younger brother gave me a book of his drawings and my mother sewed me a leather satchel.

That whole winter my younger brother’s health improved until it got worse and he had to go to the hospital. Before he got sick my mother had pneumonia and took to her bed for a week, and he spent the
whole time on the end of her blanket, staring. When she woke up she would ask me to get him a sweater and I’d ask if he was cold and he would say no. He was starting to cough too, and she finally got out of bed to drape a muffler around his neck. Then after she said she was feeling better he got so excited he ran around the back courtyard in a rainstorm and came in soaked and shaking.

For a while she tried to take care of him herself at home. She had me read to him in the afternoons, and he always chose a book called
Jur
about two brothers, one sickly and in constant need of looking after and the other a picture of health who ended up dying. My younger brother always liked the end in particular, when the sickly brother stood over the healthy brother’s grave and talked about how much he missed him.

Finally it turned out that he had pneumonia too and had to go to the hospital. By then he had to be carried through the streets in an ambulance.

My mother and I sat with him when we could. My older brothers and father visited once, all together. They brought him a big tin of sweets that they opened and sampled.

He hated being left at the hospital at night and screamed at our leaving. My mother always wept all the way home. After three days his fever was so high
he didn’t recognize us. The nurses brought him compresses but he was so hot they couldn’t keep them cold. They brought him bread soaked in milk and we helped him open his mouth to eat it.

The day he died I told him that he was acting like an older boy, being brave. My mother had brought him home and he said he wished he could buy me the tailor shop’s miniature uniform of the Uhlans Regiment, which was my favorite. My mother was at the pharmacy and he asked when she was coming back. He said she’d been telling him how much better he was getting, but that now she sounded less sure. He breathed like someone was sitting on his chest, and it was hard for him to say even that much.

When my mother returned she found him out of bed and standing in his nightshirt on a chair to look out his window. She warmed his feet and got him back into bed and told him that if he looked outside when he woke, then all of his dreams would escape. She sent me to the kitchen to make him some tea and asked if I thought I could do that much. While I was filling the kettle I could see them both. She took his hands and called for him to look at her. She said she wanted to tell him a story, that it was going to be a long story, and he needed to stay awake for it. He seemed to come out of a daze and smiled at her. The story
was about a poor Jew and a sultan. She said about one of the sultan’s decisions, “Isn’t that amazing?” and while she was asking him, he died.