The Book of Aron (6 page)

We were waiting to go through a week later when Zofia and another girl with dark curly hair walked by with two baskets of goods. They set their baskets down, chatting and laughing, and the other girl shook
out her hair like she’d just taken off a hat, and they pulled off their armbands and hoisted their loads again and walked right past all three sentry posts and out of the ghetto. The green policeman even said some kind of hello as they went by. Zofia waved and said something in response that he seemed to like.

The next day we visited her apartment to ask if she and her friend wanted to join our group. “What group?” Zofia asked, and seemed unimpressed when I told her what we had going.

The new girl’s name was Adina. She was from Baranowicze and you could tell she was from the east from her singsong way of speaking. She said she was a year older than us. She was pale and thin with sad black eyes. She didn’t like to talk and always got angry when asked a question. She said that one day she’d come home late from dropping off some sewing and the Germans had driven her cousins out of town in a truck and forced them to jump into an open fire. Those who wouldn’t jump were shot. A cousin who escaped into the woods had told her about it. Then her whole family had been herded west with other families through three villages and those who couldn’t keep up were shot at like ducks until finally they were all loaded onto some trucks and driven into Warsaw. She said she’d brought her best clothes but that her
mother had managed to bring only her ceramic stew pot loaded with three bottles of cooking oil.

Lutek kept asking her about the fire part of her story until Zofia finally told him that if he didn’t stop she’d throw him into a fire herself.

So I asked about the oil instead. “What are you looking at?” Adina said to me, and made a face. “He’s in love,” Lutek told her. “He worries me,” she told him back. “Why would your mother save oil?” I asked her again.

She said her parents used to have a shop that sold oil her father had produced himself and was very proud of. He died before the war and the shop had gone downhill even before the Germans came. Her mother was bitter about it still and whenever anyone asked for credit or a favor, she always said, “Sure, it’s nice to screw on somebody
else’s
sheets.” Lutek said that that could be our group motto and Zofia said again what made him think there was going to be a group.

“We might as well do something,” Adina told her. Back home she said that there’d always been something she needed to be doing but that here she went out into the street and then in no time at all she’d go back to their apartment again, since what was there for her to do in the street?

Lutek asked what made them think they could
just walk through the gates and Adina told him she’d always had a talent for that sort of thing. When they got to the city and passed through the center for refugees she told her mother that she’d hide their money and made sure she went first when her family had lined up to be searched, and a Volksdeutsche woman felt around in Adina’s hair for a long time, as though she kept her treasures there, then found a bundle in the pocket of her skirt and pulled it free and exclaimed, “And what are these? Diamonds?” and spilled them out onto a table only to discover they were hard candies. The other Volksdeutsche laughed and the woman slapped Adina’s face and threw her out of the room without finding the gold coins she was also carrying.

W
E ALL WORKED TOGETHER FOR A WEEK AND THEN
an old Polish woman grabbed Adina and shouted “Smuggler! Smuggler!” when they were coming back through the gate, so Lutek grabbed the old woman and started shouting the same thing and his father’s friend had to drag all three over to the green and blue police to work the whole thing out. Zofia and I went a block away before stopping to watch. The rule with
us was always if one got stopped the others walked on. The old woman made a racket we could hear from there. Zofia said Lutek had dropped whatever he’d been carrying into her bag.

“This is going to take a while,” she said and I told her she was probably right. Neither of us had anywhere to go. She worried that Adina would be beaten even if they set her free and said she should’ve gone in her place. When she’d been caught, because of her looks the blue policeman had beaten her but not as a Jew.

“What makes old people like that?” she wondered. I told her I didn’t know.

She said that a few days after the city surrendered, someone had told her mother that her father’s father, her other grandfather, wanted to see her. Zofia had never met him. He was a rabbinical scholar, she never knew what sort.

I waited for her to go on. I was happy that we were talking like this.

She said her parents told her that this grandfather had a lot of money, she didn’t know why, and that her mother was excited because maybe this would allow them all to emigrate. Zofia had never met him because when her father married someone non-Orthodox, his
father told him that as far as he was concerned, his son had died, he’d already buried him and mourned his passing.

“So what was he like?” I asked.

“The one thing my father told me was that he wrote letters to God,” she said. “That seemed like an interesting idea. I wondered what he did with them.”

“So what was he like?” I said.

“All my mother ever said about him was that he could dig money out of the ground,” she said. Some trolley brakes screeched around the bend on Chłodna and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it made me wish she was somewhere quiet and safe. “So now I was being summoned to see him, alone, and my mother was very excited and anxious and my father was angry with her for getting everyone stirred up. I remember them fussing about what I would wear and then I was delivered to a big dark house and told to go inside. An old woman opened the door and disappeared and I went up flights of stairs. I didn’t know where I was going and I had to feel my way around the landings but I could see a light on the top floor. The top floor was a long dark room with angled ceilings. At the end of it an old man with a beard sat behind a desk piled with books. Some of the stacks reached the ceiling. There were stacks on the windowsills in
the dormers. There were spiderwebs everywhere, even on his lamp, so I stopped to wait for him to say something. I finally said hello but for all I knew he was deaf. He looked up and gestured for me to come closer. I ducked under the webs as I went. When I was halfway there he held up his palm and I stopped and he watched me for a while. A clock was ticking somewhere in the room. I said hello to him again, then took a step, and again he held up his palm. So I told him who I was. His face didn’t change and he waved his hand upward for me to go away. I took a step back, to see if that was really what he meant, and he went back to his reading.”

“So after all that he didn’t even talk to you?” I said.

The green and blue police lost patience and started beating Adina and Lutek on their heads. Adina put her hands over her head, so one of them beat her hands. Then he stopped and everyone went back to their posts.

“I shouldn’t even be with you, you’re so unsanitary,” Zofia said to me. I put a hand to my neck, as if I could hide the lice.

Lutek and Adina disappeared down Żelazna Street and the old woman stood there talking to herself for a few more minutes before she finally left. Once she
was gone, Zofia stood up and brushed the dirt from her skirt.

“When the war started, when it came to food I was always more sly and would push through somehow, while my father and brother would stand and stand in the lines and get nothing,” she said. “My mother thinks that what keeps me going is a well of spitefulness.” She thumped her chest. “I think she’s right. I can feel it right here.”

T
HE TYPHUS WAS EVERYWHERE WORSE AND ZOFIA’S
building was filled with it. She carried around a tin of oil and paraffin to rub on herself to keep the lice away, and wouldn’t let me sit anywhere nearby. She wouldn’t let Lutek, either, but when she told him that he said, “Who wants to?” We watched the street trading on Gęsia. In front of us a woman was selling children’s underwear and the lining from a coat. When she saw us looking, she held up what she had as though it was a pot of gold and told us she must’ve gone out of her mind because she was giving these items away for almost nothing. A beggar beside her sat on his hands and held his cup with his bare feet. We were waiting there because someone was bringing us orders to fill and he was late.

“Maybe he’s got the typhus too,” Zofia said, and Lutek said that the typhus was now the other subject he was sick of. Were we supposed to talk about nothing but food all day like him, Zofia wanted to know, and he said that he couldn’t decide who was more boring. All the rich talked about was when they were going to get the inoculation and all the poor talked about was when they were going to get the disease.

My mother asked if my friends were clean and I told her
I
had more lice than anyone. So she dragged me back to the sink and doused my head and neck and chest again with kerosene. My brothers, about to leave for work, held me down and cheered her on.

“You
sound
good,” she said, once I got free and she listened to my breathing. She told me to stay away from the quarantined streets.

Zofia said that their house sanitary warden told her father that Krochmalna Street was the main incubator in the ghetto and that the Germans had said they’d burn it down if they could.

“I’m glad no one we know lives on Krochmalna Street,” I told her.

Adina said it was fenced off now, anyway, and they were taking everyone in big trucks to the baths on Spokojna. You could see she felt sorry for Zofia,
who whenever she found a louse acted like it was the end of the world.

“Do the baths work?” Zofia asked.

Adina said that she’d asked someone that but instead of answering he’d told her children and fish shouldn’t have voices.

“The baths are where you catch the lice,” Lutek said. “Or the delousing queues. And the sulfur they use doesn’t kill anything anyway.”

“Shaved like a goy,” the beggar next to the woman sneered at him. “Where are your peyes? Your family doesn’t wear any? Maybe they’re not the fashion anymore?”

“And what’re you, the Rabbi of Warsaw? Shut your mouth,” Lutek told him.

The man we were waiting for never showed up and it came time for the new business we called Catching the Trolley. We’d worked a deal with the blue policeman who escorted the number 10. Zofia had been the one to approach him. It was forbidden for Aryan trolleys to stop in the ghetto but the 10 had to slow down to make the turn onto Zamenhofa, where Adina kept watch and left her hat on if all was clear, and then Lutek and I ran out for the sacks thrown off.

We got caught one day by the green police and they chased Lutek instead of me and I hid in a shop
that sold matches and cigarettes and small bottles of homemade medicine until the owner thought I was waiting to steal something and threw me out. A yellow policeman who’d been standing next to his bicycle with a young woman walked over to me. He was wearing his own jacket and trousers with the yellow uniform cap and armband. He was shorter than I was and had huge ears. He took my sleeve and asked what I had in the sack and I told him I had to leave. He smiled and held up a finger, showing off for the woman. She wasn’t very tall but she was taller than he was.

“You don’t recognize me?” he said, and then I did: he’d been one of the foremen at my father’s cousin’s factory, the one who’d sent me to the cloth-scraping. His name was Lejkin.

“I like your boots,” I told him.

“So does she,” he said, and the woman blushed. “You know what they say: a constable in shoes is only a half constable.”

I told him again that I had to go. He said I didn’t, in fact, and that I could either get on the handlebars and come with him or walk with him over to the next block, where he would tell the Germans he’d found a smuggler.

Come with him where, I asked, and he said he’d
give me a ride home. I asked him why and he said that he liked doing favors for people. “We short fellows have to stick together,” he said. He strapped my sack of onions to a rack over his back wheel and tipped his cap to the woman. Then he steadied the handlebars so I could sit on them. I wanted to tell him his bicycle was too big for him but I was afraid he would turn me over to the Germans.

“See you soon,” he said to the woman and she laughed and said, “We’ll see,” as he started pedaling away.

I was so bony the handlebars hurt on the cobblestones. I couldn’t tell if any of my friends had seen what had happened.

He asked if I knew anyone else in the Jewish Order Service. I told him no. He asked if a lot of young men I knew wanted to be in the Order Service. I told him no. He pedaled for a while and then said that it was odd: he’d only gotten the job because his cousin had entered his name on a list. Someone had handed him a hat and a yellow armband and a rule book and just like that he was on duty.

“Of course we had some training,” he added when I didn’t say anything.

“You’re going to find me a bootjack,” he said a few
blocks later, after he dropped me in front of my building. “I need a proper bootjack.”

“How would I know where to find a bootjack?” I asked him.