The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  Relkin put his hand on Hawkins’s shoulder. “I don’t know what it means for a black to be shut out, but for Jews like us . . . village Jews, ghetto Jews . . . all we had was each other and some old books that only isolated us more. To be shut out was to die. Levy was a strong man, but think of it! Going to bed alone in silence and waking up that way, and all the time in prison, locked away with men who once loved you, but now turned away when you talked to them and looked down when you walked by.

  “They even stole some of his food and soon he was thinner and whiter than anyone and I think he started to die. Not the inner man, you understand. He still folded his blanket and clothes neatly, he still washed himself. He undressed every night, no matter how cold it was, and I can still see him naked, white and skinny in the moonlight, his body hair thick and black in patches while he washed as best he could. After a time he began to shake, even when it wasn’t cold. I pretended not to see what was happening and he pretended nothing was wrong. He even talked to them as if they were still friends. Oh, God, I can still hear him . . . ‘Good morning, Michael, Good night, Isaac.’ They grinned when he did it and kept their backs to him. I can still see the bones showing through the thin meat of their turned backs . . . like binkas . . .”

  “Corpses,” Rachel translated.

  “Luria’s binkas. I hated what was happening but, God forgive me, I didn’t help him. To some of the others it was like a holiday. They had someone to hate who didn’t carry a machine gun, and before long they started torturing him. Childish, terrible things; they stole his cup so he had to beg for another one. No cup, no water . . . no cup, no soup. They knew how important it was to him to be clean, so someone shit in his bed, and he had to clean it up with so little water.

  “Then Walinsky stole Jacob’s shoe, and I thought that would break him. You see, there was every kind of parasite in the camp, and many came in through the feet. If you lost a shoe you would surely get sick, maybe die. So I thought the stolen shoe was the end of Jacob. But he pretended it was only lost, and he searched the barracks for it while they watched him, grinning. Me, too, I stared and grinned with the rest of them at our Jacob on his knees, looking under the bare board bunks for his lost shoe. Walinsky stood there watching, too, and I knew that he would never give back the shoe, that he would let Jacob die, even though he loved him . . . I swear he did. Go figure it out. It was Walinsky who loved Jacob most, who would watch him undress himself at night with so much pity in his eyes, and even some desire . . . the kind you have for the abused one, the kind that makes you want to hold him, comfort him. Tenderness, pity, desire. I saw all those in Walinsky’s face as he watched naked Jacob wash himself at night.” Relkin stopped talking and closed his eyes.

  “Did he find his shoe?” Rachel asked.

  “No. The next day, Luria, looking like a siren come to tempt him—Luria was handsome in those days—Luria came to Jacob and in front of everyone, he knelt to him, took off his shirt, tore strips from it, and took Jacob’s bare foot in his hands, chanting as he did it . . . ‘Jacob, Jacob, here’s a splinter.’ And then with all of us staring, he pulled out the splinter, then rubbed the foot to get the warmth back. You know Luria . . .”

  “Yes,” Rachel said.

  “Then can you picture Luria on his knees to Jacob? Luria tending to Jacob’s feet? Poor Jacob was so moved I thought he would cry at last, and I didn’t want him to because I wasn’t, even when I was only eight, the innocent your father-­in-­law is, and I knew Luria wanted something. ‘Let’s go outside, Jacob,’ said Luria, ‘just the two of us, and walk by the trees like we used to at home.’ And he put his arm around Jacob and took him outside. They walked under the pines, heads bent together, talking. The guards watched them, but all they did was shoot a few branches off the pines, just to scare them. Ah, those pines! They were covered with snow then. In the spring they were light green at the tips, and there was a soft bed of brown needles around them all the time. It was beautiful there. In America it would be a resort or a national park. Nu! Come to beautiful Belzec!”

  He laughed, then stopped and shook his head. “I’m a bizarre man, especially my humor, and the people who know me think I’m brutal and a little crazy.” He shrugged. “They’re right. It’s because of the camp. You’ve heard people say, ‘I do so-­and-­so because I’m from the South or Midwest or North, or Italy or England or somewhere,’ and you understand, don’t you. The place has an effect. Belzec too. It’s my hometown.

  “Anyway, Luria and Jacob walked and talked as if they were on the village street coming home from shul, discussing a point of Talmud. Only Luria’s bare-­chested and Jacob’s wearing Luria’s shirt on his foot. And this time the goyim don’t throw rocks and yell names, they stand silent and hold machine guns. And by now Jacob’s wife is dead, though he doesn’t know that yet. And Luria’s young wife and his mother and sister. And Jacob’s mother and sister. And all our fathers. No. Maybe some were still alive on that afternoon when Luria and Jacob went for their walk.

  “I watched from the window. All the others watched, too. Then Luria and Jacob laughed and when they came back inside, I knew Jacob had given in. He still didn’t like it. . . .”

  “What didn’t he like?” Hawkins asked.

  “That they were going to kill the Krauts.”

  Rachel sat very still.

  “Why should killing Nazis bother him?” Hawkins asked.

  “Listen, if it were up to me, I’d’ve peeled their skin off slowly, slowly. They’d’ve died over and over again if I had my way. Burnt up,” he laughed, “boiled, broiled, sliced, ground up . . .” He searched for horrors. “I’d’ve sandpapered them to death!” He laughed again, clapped his hands, then he subsided and patted Roger’s knee. “But we’re not supposed to feel like that. Until they sent Jacob to Belzec, he was religious . . . which is, according to some, that you don’t kill. There’re Jews who say we were that close to the Messiah because we suffered so much and that when we killed for Zion we lost Him. I’m not one of them, mind you. Kill the bastards is what I say. Keep what we’ve won, no matter what it costs, I say, because I know what it means not to have a place to hide and I know everybody’ll kill everybody if they have half a reason. Forgive me, but the blacks’d kill the Jews if they could, wouldn’t they?”

  Hawkins didn’t answer.

  “Of course they would.” He patted Hawkins’s knee again as if to reassure him. “Jacob could have been the exception but they ruined him.”

  “Who ruined him?” Hawkins asked. “Luria? the Nazis?”

  “All of them,” Relkin said sadly.

  Hawkins said, “So Levy failed the test and they killed the Nazis?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the guards had machine guns and the Jews were unarmed.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did they kill them then, Mr. Relkin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hawkins leaned closer to Relkin. “What do you mean you don’t know? You were there, you had to know.”

  “But I didn’t. I only saw what was left,” Relkin said. He seemed to be enjoying himself and he leaned toward Hawkins too.

  “What was left?” Hawkins asked.

  “Blood and clay,” Relkin said softly, “just like in Brooklyn and Laurel.”

  Hawkins sat back slowly.

  “Tell me, Mr. Relkin.”

  Relkin said, “They bought wood from the kapos. Kapos were Jew guards. They did it to stay alive, but I heard later, to my delight, that the Nazis killed them in the end, too.

  “The men used the wood to make a long, wide box and they stood it on end in the back corner of the barracks. I thought they were hiding guns in it, or grenades, but when they killed the guards I didn’t hear shots or explosions.

  “You didn’t see what they were doing?”

  “No, they put Danny and me into a trunk and put something heavy on top. Maybe someo
ne sat on it . . .”

  “How did they know when the guards were coming?”

  “They set it up.”

  “How?” Rachel asked.

  “Dworkin strangled one of the kapos.”

  Abe Dworkin. Golda’s father, who had a full head of gray wavy hair at seventy, about which he was vain, who couldn’t save a dime, and who had a yen for creamed herring.

  Rachel tried to see him strangling a turncoat Jew on a late spring night on the edge of a pine forest. But it was hopeless. She saw him at their kitchen table, drinking tea. She saw him showing their book of engraved stationery samples to the blond, tanned Yankee women from the south side of town who always wore tennis dresses or golf skirts, and who were kind to him in the way she imagined they were to hairdressers and saleswomen. What if they knew he’d strangled a man? Not with a scarf, no scarves there . . . she laughed and they stared at her. Hawkins looked worried and Relkin smiled as if he knew what she was thinking. She almost asked Relkin what Dworkin had strangled the kapo with and then she realized that Hawkins would think she was as crazy as Relkin.

  “The murdered kapo set it up just right. The Nazis probably figured to have a real night of fun. Shoot us all, and maybe even bugger the little boys before they killed them. Oh, they’d done that before, too.”

  Rachel looked away from him.

  “I heard a bunch of them come across the compound and I heard them open the door. Nothing happened for a second, then there was the ‘boom’ like a huge rubber mallet pounding the floor, and the Germans started shooting and yelling and then came the whoosh and a man screamed and they were all screaming . . . screaming and screaming in terror, in agony . . . on and on until more came and they were shooting and screaming. Bullets hit the walls and I tried to get out of the box because I thought they’d use grenades and I’d be trapped and burn to death. But the weight was solid and I couldn’t move. The booming went on and the shooting and a grenade went off just outside the barracks. There was a bigger explosion, like a bazooka or antitank grenade, and the booming stopped and I held my breath, afraid that the Germans had stopped whatever it was . . . it was silent a second and then it went again . . . boom, again boom! I cried with relief at the screams and I knew the crashing was their bodies hitting the walls and I waited for the sound . . . crash, another dead, crash, another, and Danny and I hugged each other in the box and rocked with joy as the crashes came faster and faster. Then, above the screams and shots and crashing, I heard Dworkin start to sing.” He finished his brandy and sang to them in a strong clear voice.

  O Lord of the world, O Lord of the world!

  Where can one find you?

  Where can one not find you?

  Wherever I go you are there, wherever I stand.

  Only You, but You, always You, ever You.

  You are here, You were here.

  You are, You were, You will be.

  In heaven, You. On earth, You.

  Above, You. Below, You.

  Wherever I turn,

  Wherever I reach out—You!

  In the dark with Danny in my arms, I sang—I, too, even though I hadn’t sung those songs since I was practically a baby.”

  The memory was too much for Relkin. When he said the word baby, his voice cracked. Hawkins and Rachel didn’t know what to say and Relkin stood up. His face was bright red and there were tears in his eyes.

  “Excuse me,” he said and he left them alone.

  They were quiet after that. They heard water running in the kitchen, a cabinet door slammed, and Relkin came back into the living room and sat down. His brandy glass was full again and he took up the story as if nothing had happened.

  “After that night the Krauts left boxes of food at the door for us and sometimes Danny and me got to open the cans. There was even canned meat. The first smell of it made the back of my mouth ache because by then it had been years since I’d had meat. We had as much to eat as the guards. More. The Germans in Berlin were starving while Jews in Belzec ate canned sausage.” Relkin rubbed his hands together and smiled.

  “Were you the only ones who got food?” Rachel asked.

  Relkin nodded. “They were killing the rest of us as fast as they could by then,” he said.

  “Did you want to save the others? To include them somehow?” Rachel asked.

  He looked at her and said, “You mean feed them and grow thin myself . . . fight for them, die for them?” He smiled. “It never occurred to me. It did to Levy, though, toward the end when they were killing all the time, and Levy didn’t sleep. He walked the barracks, and the path by the pines. The needles were covered with that ash and they turned dark and lusterless until it rained. Then for an hour or so they’d be green again and the sky would be clear.

  “Finally Levy pleaded with the commandant. They were outside. Luria was there, too, and I didn’t hear what they said but Levy actually kneeled to that momzer— kneeled to him. Speiser kept shaking his head, not angry, not contemptuous, but reluctant—like he wanted to say yes to Levy but couldn’t. Luria was disgusted and when the commandant left he faced Levy and yelled at him and sneered like someone had just stuck shit under his nose. Then for the first time, I saw Jacob Levy lose his temper. His skin went white, his eyebrows and beard looked like ink on his face. He grabbed Luria’s hand and with enormous strength for such a small man, he pulled Luria toward the electrified fence. Luria’s a foot taller than Jacob, fifty pounds heavier, but no matter how hard he struggled, Levy was stronger, and he dragged Luria to the fence. Luria screamed and fell to his knees like Levy had done to the commandant, but Levy pulled him through the mud so his knees left a wake in it. He pulled Luria’s hand so it was an inch from the wires. They wanted all the Jews dead by then, so the fence was really juiced up. Levy looked ready to hold that bare shaking hand against the wire until Luria was fried. Then Luria starts weeping. I don’t blame him, we were all weeping. I didn’t care about Luria, mind you, but seeing Levy like that was awful. Levy saw the tears, the mud, his friend’s hand shaking, and like the werewolf turning back into a man, Levy turned back into Levy. He let Luria’s hand go and that was the end of it.

  “Of course Levy had pleaded with Speiser for the lives of the others in the camp, and Luria told him he was a contemptible fool to grovel for any reason. Luria was right. You won’t know that until it’s your life or someone else’s. But at night I would wake up and see Levy roaming the barracks, or walking the path at night, his face lit by the glow from the chimneys of the ovens that were going day and night now. After a few weeks he slept better and, by the end of the year, only a week or two before we were liberated, I realized that I hadn’t seen him nightwalking for months. You get used to everything, Inspector.”

  “And you never saw what was in the box?”

  “Never. One morning Danny and I woke up and it was gone. The floor under it was damp, as if moisture oozed from whatever was hidden there. The box being gone meant the Germans were gone. And I ran to the fence and thought I’d jump it or climb it and walk at last in the forest. But I stopped at it and looked into the woods the way I always had.

  “Danny and I played near the barracks after that. Jacob taught us, we slept. . . . A few days later the Americans came.”

  “Then what happened?” Hawkins asked.

  Relkin laughed. “Then? Like a story, eh? Nothing happened. They shipped us to Cyprus where we waited until the Zionists had killed enough Arabs or English or whoever so we could go to Israel—Palestine then—where the Red Cross found me. My mother got me and brought me here.”

  Hawkins didn’t say anything.

  “You want a happy ending?” Relkin asked. “My mother lived to be eighty. I’m rich and I drink and eat as much as I want. I have a beautiful woman to fuck and a loving wife. I have two daughters. One married a dentist, one a teacher. One just had a baby, so I’m a grandfather. Nu? The end!”

 
It was their cue to leave, but Hawkins said, “One more question, Mr. Relkin.”

  Relkin smiled. “Ask away. I got a whole night to kill.” When he said that, Rachel realized how quiet the big opulent house was. She wondered where the children and grandchildren were spending Sunday afternoon.

  “Was there a very tall man in the barracks?” Hawkins asked.

  “Luria’s tall.”

  “Taller than Luria.”

  “No,” Relkin said, “Luria was the tallest. Why?”

  “A witness saw a big man come out of the basement in Brooklyn where the boys were killed.”

  Rachel didn’t hear the rest. The fire was suddenly too hot and she wanted to get out of there. She grabbed her purse and stood up.

  “You want my advice,” Relkin was saying. “Find a cabalist.”

  “What for?” Rachel asked sharply.

  “Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Relkin said gently. “What could it have been but magic?”

  There was a thrill to the word, they all felt it.

  “And who does our magic?” Relkin said, “cabalists. Go to Brooklyn, Mrs. Levy, find a cabalist.”

  Like Rabbi Loew of Prague. But she couldn’t imagine herself saying the words, What if they built a clay man ten feet tall and it killed for them.

  “What’s a cabalist?” Hawkins asked.

  Relkin shrugged. “A charlatan, a madman, a fool. A wise man, a mystic, a holy man. Depends on who you ask.” Relkin grinned. “You know a holy man?” he asked. Hawkins didn’t answer.

  “No?” Relkin said with mock surprise. “Then ask a devil. Ask the commandant of Belzec. He’s probably chairman of the board of Mercedes-­Benz by now.”

  §§§ Pretty.

  Chapter 3

  Levy wandered through the house turning lights on and off as he went. Downstairs the rooms were silent, empty, clean. Upstairs the bedrooms were neat. The curtains in Leah’s room hung still, the ducks paralyzed on the fabric. He hadn’t eaten since last night sometime and he knew he should try, but the thought of food made him sick. If Rachel was there he could eat, at least some soup. Then he heard a car and he ran to the window, praying it was Rachel at last. It was Deb Fineman’s Continental.