The Book of Aron (4 page)

She asked if I knew Mańka Lipszyc, and I said yes. She asked if I was the one whose brother had just died and then was quiet at my answer.

The trolley never came. She told me she had a younger brother named Leon and an older brother Jechiel and a younger sister Salcia who was only ten months old.

She knew about the pens because her father had owned a stationery store. People came from all over the city for the quality of his paper. He supported their family, their grandmother, the unmarried Brysz girls, their Uncle Ickowicz, and Hanka Nasielska and her parents. For a while her family had so much
money that she’d gone to the kind of preschool where you paid tuition. Her father had a sister in America who begged him to emigrate but he told her that he’d stay where he was in order to mind the shop.

After the Germans arrived they beat him severely and smashed around their apartment hunting for gold. They ended up taking only five meters of dress material from her mother. Even so, her family had been luckier than friends across the street who’d been thrown out of their house and told that their kind of people had slept far too long on soft beds. But then a week after that an SS officer stopped by the shop and was so impressed that he’d instructed her father to arrange to transport the shop’s entire stock back to the officer’s hometown. Her father had been given a receipt.

They’d lived on Żelazna Street in a big apartment but they’d since had to move and their new neighborhood was so backward that some of the streets weren’t even paved and so muddy there were wooden footbridges to the front doors. She said it was sad to watch her mother wade through the mud. She said that her mother had wept for three days and her father had assured them they’d move again soon, that he’d told them that he was starting a broom factory and that the Germans were very fond of brooms.

She said her brother had told her that even before she was born their parents had been to the rabbi twice for a divorce, that her grandmother had insisted on the marriage and told anyone who would listen that her daughter had married an educated man.

I told her I should get going. “Don’t let me keep you,” she said.

But after I didn’t get up she said she remembered thinking to herself that maybe their family’s move would change everything, even her, and things wouldn’t be so bad. She said the years before school that she couldn’t remember had probably been the happiest of her life. I didn’t know what to answer. Finally she stood up and stretched and said she was late. Then she bent down with her hands on her thighs and said that if I carried the pen case under my belt in the back it might be harder to spot.

W
ORK ON THE WALLS BEGAN AS SOON AS IT GOT
warmer. My mother at first celebrated the news that the Judenrat had been ordered to quarantine the Jews who were sick. Then she realized we might be part of the area to be sealed off. She went with our neighbors to report there was no typhus in our building, but that
only meant she spent days waiting to talk to an official who wouldn’t listen and couldn’t do anything.

All day long outside our window we heard wheelbarrows squeaking and trowels scraping and the clink of bricks. It started and stopped, so for days there might be just a few rows and then suddenly something you couldn’t see over. As far as Lutek was concerned, for the time being it was another opportunity. After the workers quit for the day at a dead end near Niska, we carried off two big bags of cement.

In the evenings my brothers argued about what was happening. I had other things to worry about. Whenever there was big news our neighbors with the radio knocked on our door. Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg had all been invaded. I asked Lutek if he thought Belgium would surrender and he said that it didn’t matter, since the way things went for us either one bad thing or another would happen.

No one wanted linens or floors washed anymore, so what I brought home was more important than ever.

In May it got warm and we worked later. Lutek and I got into a scrape, so I ducked into an entryway and waited and was about to leave it when Zofia took my sleeve. She gestured with her head and we
stood there quietly as the shopkeeper and his sons passed by. One had a mallet and the other two had nightsticks. Lutek was somewhere on the other side of the street and might have been long gone. The shopkeeper stopped on the corner in a dry spot and his sons started searching door by door.

“I think you’d better come to dinner,” Zofia whispered into my ear. She was watching through the entryway’s frosted glass with me, her cheek close to mine. “We’re right upstairs. You can bring what you have there as your gift.”

Her parents were polite and pleased by the honey, and her mother told their baby it was rare and expensive. They introduced me to her older brother Jechiel, a yeshiva student. He seemed to think I was standing too close to his sister. He said that for looking too often at a woman one was hung by the eyebrows in Hell. Zofia laughed and told me that because his morning prayer, “Let our days be multiplied,” sounded like “cheap fish,” it had become his family nickname.

She introduced me to her younger brother, Leon, who seemed unhappy and had little to say. His brother talked about him as if he wasn’t in the room, then said that while their parents had hopes for him he’d turned out to be a real dunce, already kept back a grade twice before school had been suspended. Now getting his
certificate was going to be like making it to the North Pole at a snail’s pace.

Zofia’s mother made what she said was a hometown dish, a pudding of buckwheat meal sautéed with onions. She fed it in spoonfuls to the baby, Salcia, who was wedged into a high chair beside her.

Someone rang the bell and Zofia answered the door and stepped out into the hall and talked in a low voice before returning to the table. When her father asked about it she said that the shopkeeper Lebyl was looking for a thief.

They asked about my family and since I had nothing to say I told them about Lutek. I told them that he liked to climb utility poles just to look down on people. I told them that on crowded trolleys he liked to recite details about what happened between a man and a woman. Zofia’s brother was appalled but her father found it funny. She asked if Lutek had ever had a girlfriend and I told her there’d been a girl he admired and that he’d waited every evening for an entire month beside her gate with a letter explaining his feelings but that whenever she came out he’d panic and walk away.

Her father talked about the broom factory and where the money for it would come from. He talked about Zofia’s grandfather, who had never heard a kind
word from anyone and at the age of ten had been sent away every night to eat his evening meal at another family’s house, and once he had his own children he always preferred scrimping on the family’s food to working harder. He said he thought that Zofia took after him. She said she agreed and that as a rule she disliked everyone. He told about how he’d had to throw her out of his shop when she was six years old and had ventured the opinion in front of one of his biggest customers that the price he’d quoted was far too high.

Salcia didn’t like the pudding, so her mother cleaned it from her face with a spoon and then offered it to her again and asked if this Lutek I was describing was despite all of that a good boy. I said yes and Zofia said no. Her father laughed and her mother made a face. They never looked at each other but still the family seemed to get by.

It got quiet. Jechiel looked at me as though I was missing something. Zofia’s father reminded me about the curfew and her mother thanked me again for the honey, which she hadn’t served. Zofia showed me to the door and I didn’t know what to make of her look before she closed it and left me in the hall. I told myself as I went down the stairs that there was nothing wrong with having friends, but that there’d be no butting in where I wasn’t wanted.

E
VERYONE IN MY FAMILY WAS EXCITED ABOUT THE
news that the Germans were fighting in France, and then miserable about the news that the Germans had taken Paris. One of my brothers said it was because they had an airplane that converted to a tank when it set down on the battlefield. My other brother said it was because they had something called a heavy-air bomb that surrounded their parachutists with a shield that no bullet could penetrate. My mother said that one believed this and the other believed that but what was fated to happen always will. My father said that one way or another the joke he’d heard at his cousin’s factory was that thousands of hammers had arrived from America to pound dreams of salvation out of our heads.

When it was finished the wall was three meters high with another meter of barbed wire on top. I still helped my mother with her chores and each morning she went out to look at it. I asked if she was hoping to find it taken down. They built a wooden bridge across Chłodna Street near St. Karol’s Church to connect the two ghettos that were separated by the street and trolley line. Farther down a gate sealed off Żelazna and all the traffic stopped so the trolley could run through.

And now there was typhus in the building across the street. Packages were left on the sidewalk outside the front entrance because the porters refused to carry them inside.

My mother and father fought more about what I was doing. He said having a macher at a time like this wasn’t such a bad thing and she said the big macher was dragging the little macher around on a string. He said she didn’t complain when the soup was hot in front of her and she said I was going to get killed or bring the typhus home.

Every morning she searched my clothes for lice and doused my head over the sink with kerosene. She rubbed my neck and behind my ears with a kerosene-soaked rag and scrubbed at my scalp like my hair was the problem. She reminded me she had thought we were partners. I told her that hadn’t changed. So where was her partner, she wanted to know. Her partner was off at his own business, I told her.

She rinsed and toweled my head and I got my satchel. Later I felt guilty and told her we could work together all day tomorrow, but she told me she’d already learned not to get attached to anything. She asked if I missed my younger brother. She said that if she hadn’t been self-centered she wouldn’t have survived either. I repeated that we could spend the whole
next day together and she said that the day after that we could visit the Promised Land, where everyone ate figs and honey and fish with noodle soup.

N
OTICES WERE HUNG OVER THE GATES TO THE
ghetto warning that it was threatened by an epidemic. My mother and father stopped visiting neighborhoods outside the walls and asked me to do the same. I told them I would and went on doing whatever I wanted wherever I wanted to. My mother said that seven people had died across the street, including Mrs. Lederman and the Globus twins, and wondered if we were just going to be walled in with all the sick people until everyone was dead. My brother said he’d heard that after the peace the Jews would all be sent to Madagascar, and my mother asked what we would all do in Madagascar. “Let’s get there, first, and then we’ll find out,” my father told her.

A week later she heard from the woman who sold her soap that all Jews were to be expelled from the streets crossing Ujazdowskie Avenue and the area adjoining the Vistula. My father asked why we should believe her and my mother reminded him that the woman was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law. Two days later he read the same news aloud to us from the paper, as
though we’d been arguing with him. Jewish residents in the German quarter had to move out immediately; those in the Polish district could remain for the time being; and all new Jews arriving in the city had to go straight to the walled Jewish district.

Where were they going to put everyone, my brother wanted to know.

“I think they believe that’s our problem,” my father told him.

Lutek reported the next day that his father and the rest of the porters had been told it would soon be forbidden in our district to rent to Aryans, and that Christian families were already negotiating to exchange apartments with Jews from other parts of the city. “So?” I said, and Lutek said, “You’re an idiot,” and that we would have a field day what with all the carts and wagons going back and forth, and he was right.

Proclamations kept appearing in the newspapers and my father kept reading them to the family, always first announcing, “And under the heading of Things Get Worse …” Each proclamation listed new streets that were to be cleansed of Jews. Pages advertised Aryan-owned apartments inside the walls to be traded for Jewish-owned ones on the outside. Finally
in October all Jews were given two weeks to move into the district and told that it had been shrunk by an additional six streets, which meant that those who had already exchanged apartments to get onto those streets now had to exchange apartments again. This was necessary to protect the health and well-being of the soldiers and the general population.

The result was like the worst street bazaar of all time combined with an evacuation. Every road we looked down was a sea of heads and all we heard was a terrible clamor and shouting. Lutek and I spent most of our time at the Leszno Street gate. Jews were hauling overloaded pushcarts and wagons in while Poles tried to haul the same out and the arguments about who could proceed and who had to wait meant that it took hours to get anywhere. Collisions spilled tables and chairs and stoves and pans onto the cobblestones, and half a family’s load got snatched away before they could reassemble the other half. Lutek and I rode the crowds up to the wagons and carried off whatever we could. Sometimes kids or old people on the wagons saw what we were doing and shouted to those in front, but in the crush the fathers or older kids could never get to us in time. I got a mantel clock and Lutek pulled away a whole Oriental rug. The German and Polish
police ignored the Polish carts but grabbed anything they wanted off the Jewish ones. One of the Jews complained, so they overturned his.