But a single oversight on the part of the authorities, he told himself, and all might yet be well. A one-line omission in a list of addresses. He fingered the residence papers in his pocket and kept his eyes fixed on the far corner of the warehouse which stood behind the timber market. The ground there was more sheltered; a light frost lay on the grass. Jakob would be unable to pause for more than a second or two. Sol smelt cooking from one of the cottages and heard children playing. Normal things. He was breathing too quickly. Think of Fischl. Even the most painstaking huntsman could glance away at the instant the quarry crossed the break; the animal could slip into the thick woods and disappear amid shadows. But, this hope, he knew, was a fantasy and no more real than the relief he had felt at the beginning. He thought back to the first days of the occupation. Then, at least, the future that awaited them had been plainly laid out, had they chosen to read it. Only afterwards had they been deceived.
‘Animals!’ his mother had exclaimed. ‘Beasts!’
She dropped her voice and murmured something else. The three of them were in the parlour. She freed one hand from the strap of her handbag and wagged a finger. ‘But I told you the Germans would put a stop to it. I told you, didn't I?’
Sol's father nodded. ‘Of course, Fritzi.’ He looked up at his son, who said nothing. ‘The worst of it's over now.’ His wife pursed her lips.
It had been three days since Sol had returned home with news that the trucks had entered the town. His father had left the house later that night to find out more. The soldiers were Romanians. The Germans were a day behind them. Sol and his mother had digested this news in separate silences. Then his father had mentioned moving out, perhaps to his cousin's house near Sadagora, just to err on the side of caution. For a week or so, no more. His mother had cried. They had got as far as fetching the suitcases from the top of the wardrobe. But then the first noise from the streets had reached their ears.
‘No better than animals!’ his mother burst out again. Her dark blue skirt was speckled with the face powder which she applied in quick dabs every few minutes. It made no difference: the grey pre-dawn light cast its own grainy pallor over their faces. She had made a distracted attempt to clean the apartment the previous evening. None of them had ventured outside for three days. Apparently posters with the new regulations had been posted along Siebenbürgerstrasse and in Ringplatz.
‘Perhaps the Banulescus could go? It's not as if it's far,’ Sol's mother suggested. ‘Just the end of the road.’
‘I'll ask them next time I see them,’ promised his father. ‘Or it might be easier if I went. I need some air in my lungs.’
‘No! . . . ‘
‘Fritzi, for God's sake calm yourself. Sol, go upstairs and ask the Banulescus.’
Sol opened his mouth to protest. A near-imperceptible shake of his father's head silenced him. He rose and began drawing back the bolts and unhooking the chains which his father had hammered into the door after the first rabble had passed the end of the street. They had sung patriotic songs, beating time on saucepans and dustbin lids: a joyless carnival. The shouting and glass-breaking had come later.
Outside, on the staircase, Sol waited for a few seconds in case his mother should think to peer through the letterbox. Her outbursts had subsided somewhat from those of the night before last. She had spent the following day and night sitting rigidly awake. Now she forgets who her neighbours are, thought her son, for she had knocked on the Banulescus’ door the night before last. They had heard their upstairs neighbours’ footsteps, moving about in the apartment above their own but no one had answered.
His father had nailed the letterbox shut later that night, after Petre Walter had left. His father's drinking partner had knocked softly on their own door in the early hours, then, finding no response, had whispered his name, softly and repeatedly, until the door was opened. Petre's face was bruised. His first words had been to say that Rabbi Rosenfeld had been killed; after that Sol's father had led him down the hallway where they had conversed in whispers. That had been the worst night.
Yet their apartment had not been marked out. No stones had been thrown through their windows; they had not been dragged from their home and beaten in the street. They had not been troubled once. They had only listened. They had heard.
‘It's Iron Guard thugs and drunken soldiers,’ Sol's father had said when Petre Walter had left. ‘And the police just stand by and do nothing.’ His mother had cried quietly and his father had put his arm around her. Then he had fetched his hammer and nailed up the letterbox.
Masarykgasse was empty. The sun had yet to rise. Sol walked through empty streets to the main road. To the south, a kilo-metre or so distant, two military trucks had been parked across the thoroughfare. Tiny figures carrying guns stood in front of them. The regulations were impossible to miss. Up and down the length of the road, large notice-boards had been attached by wire to the lampposts at each junction. Sol's eye skipped over the close-set gothic type: ‘ . . . all resident Jews above the age of five years . . . consist in a six-pointed star with a ten cm. diameter . . . shops or offices of Jews will display visible signs . . . applications for exemptions are unnecessary . . . to be in the streets, squares, or other public places after six p.m. nor to enter the public markets before midday . . . to use the tram system or other means of transportation . . . public or private telephones . . . ‘
Calm settled upon him as the import of the words became clear. The cool morning air smelt of fine dust. The town was quiet. He turned and walked slowly back home. In their own street, there was no evidence now that anything had happened at all.
‘She was right,’ he told his father. He glanced towards the back bedroom, into which, he presumed, his mother had retreated. He was unable then to hold back the sense of relief which surged through him and he quickly ran through the list of trivial restrictions by which the newly-arrived administration sought to reimpose order on the town. His father's face cleared for a moment, then his habitual suspicion descended.
‘Why would they want our telephones?’ he grumbled. ‘Who on earth has a telephone?’
But by whom, Sol wondered later, had the deception been perpetrated? For in the weeks and months that had followed, it seemed to him, the authorities had been increasingly explicit in their prohibitions and demands: that ‘all resident Jews will move their residence without delay into the quarter of the city designated for them’ and that ‘all expenses incurred as a result of the above measures will be the responsibility of each Jew’. Even the actions, which began in August and took place, exclusively and predictably, on Saturday nights, were conducted in the harsh white glare of powerful arc lights. No, the deceivers were not Commandant Ohlendorf's black-uniformed officers, who sped about the town in armoured transport cars, nor even the battalions of security police recruited from among the Romanians and Ukrainians. And certainly not the grinning officer who, as the three of them tramped down the staircase with their allotted suitcases, had simply put out his hand for the keys to the apartment. Sol had walked ahead and pretended not to notice as his father surrendered them. He had recognised the man as a colleague from the timber market.
The crowded streets had dazed them. Sol staggered under the weight of the suitcase. He remembered the hurried parting from his friends five weeks earlier, behind Ringplatz, on the day their tormentors had arrived. Since the occupation, and confined by the curfew, he had seen none of them. He could not imagine their lives or guess their thoughts now. They had disappeared. It was easier to learn these new truths alone.
The ghetto had been established in September. The residence assigned to them was a single small room in one of the alleys off Judengasse. Sol had left his mother and father sitting on their suitcases, apparently lacking the will to unpack them, and had walked down into the street. He had made his way first to the hospital, where the office of the Jewish Council had been installed. A crowd had gathered outside the main entrance. Inside, trestle tables had been set up and endless lists
of names laid out announcing the work details demanded by the new labour decrees. Sol pushed and shoved with everyone else until he found his name, then pushed and shoved his way out again. As he regained the street the sound of hammering reached his ears above the din of the crowd. He began to force his way forward through the mass of people moving downhill in the other direction. Soldiers were constructing a high wooden barrier at the end of Judengasse. An old man clutching a trunk as large as himself collided with Sol, who struggled to keep his balance. Someone behind him pushed him upright, then grasped at his jacket. He shook himself free without looking around and struggled on. The street was growing ever more crowded. Two small children were being pushed forward by a girl too young to be their mother. All three were crying. Those around them tried to move clear. Sol stepped aside and was about to squeeze past. A hand caught him again and this time would not be shaken off. He turned to confront his aggressor, his own hand raised to free himself. There was a moment of bafflement, another of disbelief. It was Jakob.
But it seemed too disconnected from the circumstances, Jakob's familiar face in the turbulence around them, and what he told Sol in the voice Sol knew so well. These words did not belong in this mouth. Jakob began without preamble, the ghetto walls going up behind them, the crush and panic of the crowds, and the last stragglers being shoved past the cordon by the guards. It should have been said in some other context, where he might have understood it better, but, as the days and weeks passed, he realised that Jakob's words were themselves the only circumstance for their utterance. Only the events yet to take place within that circumstance had been missing.
He had been misdirected by the flat tones of Jakob's voice. For a second or two the simple sentences had made no sense. On the third night of the occupation, Jakob's father had been arrested at his home and taken to the headquarters of the town's new masters in the Palace of Culture. There he had been shot in the back of the neck.
Sol had looked down. He had put his hand on Jakob's arm. The other wore a bemused expression.
‘What you or I say, or even think, no longer matters, Sol. Look at these people,’ he said with contempt. ‘The truth is all around them and what are they doing? Keeping up their spirits, telling each other “Hope for the best!” and “Soldier on!” Idiots! They know they're living a lie and they still can't bring themselves to abandon it.’ His eyes were fixed on something in the far distance. ‘None of us can.’
But Jakob was wrong, he thought, deranged in some way. Soldier on. Hope for the best. There was no alternative.
The work parties assembled in Mehlplatz. Sol joined a hundred or more men, who, once issued with tools, were marched out of the town by security police wearing a hodge-podge of different uniforms who bellowed at them to move faster whenever the pace slackened. The men carried picks and shovels and, as they continued, it began to dawn on Sol what their assignment must be.
They were led from Uhrmacherstrasse down the steep incline, past the Polish church and through Springbrunplatz, to the foot of the hill. Here they were directed left, towards the railway station. A little way beyond it, a German officer passed them on the road, drawing a ragged volley of salutes from the guards, all save one. A young man near the head of the column looked up too late to give more than a startled wave. The officer glared at the offender, stopped his car and barked at the man, making him salute five or six times in a row. Finally satisfied, the officer had climbed back into his car. The other guards had begun to rib the hapless man and one of the work party, a heavily-built man with a moustache, had asked him what he thought he was doing, hopping about like a frog every time a German snapped his fingers. Sol had had the impression that the young guard and he had known each other in some different context. The guard had coloured with embarrassment, but said nothing.
They had been drawn up in ranks along the river-bank, where a roll-call was taken. Sol called out his name. The moustached man had given the name ‘Gert Scholem’. The commander had nodded to one of his sergeants.
There were a hundred different thoughts among the hundred or so men gathered there, Sol thought later. A hundred kinds of apprehension and a hundred half-envisioned futures. But all of them ended with the trudge back up the hill at the end of the day, the pulling off of sodden boots, nourishment, rest. Jakob's unabandoned lies. None of them ended as Gert Scholem's future did. What had been his thought when he had opened his eyes that morning?
Four men had run forward and pulled Gert out of the line. A fifth had clubbed him across the backs of his knees. They had begun to beat him with the butts of their rifles. Sol had watched the guard who had failed to salute. He was tugging on a cigarette, looking away. After that Sol had turned his attention to the ground, noticing how the the turf was already trampled to mud, then to his rust-spotted shovel, to his shoes, already splitting, then across the river to the rows of graves which stretched along the river-bank and extended into the meadow behind. Sol picked out the spot on the far bank where he and his friends had sat and talked in the July heat. That was where Jakob, Ruth and himself had crossed, and there, a little upstream, was where he had pulled her up out of the water. The arch in which she and Jakob had argued still stood. Who had been talking to him? Chaim Fingerhut? No one had seen him since that day. Nor his sister Lia. Everyone else had survived, Jakob had said, without mentioning Ruth. Sol had had to ask after her by name. Sol imagined them all, sitting on blankets across the river and talking among themselves. Around him, the labour detail waited in a thick silence barely broken by the thud of the rifle stocks. Gert Scholem no longer moved. Sol's imaginary companions faded into the grey of the clouds which stretched to the horizon. The commander barked: ‘Enough!’ Then they were put to work.
Sol shovelled, and as he shovelled, that day and the next and all those that followed, he thought in one way or another about what Jakob had said. There was an insight at the end of his friend's stark equation which resisted him, or which he could not accept. Something inhibited him. His shovel scraped dully under the water. He brought up bricks and fragments of dressed stone and tossed them onto piles which other members of the detail carried to the near bank. A brief autumn came to its end in the third week of October when rainstorms lashed the town for five days and nights. The waterlevel rose to the point where it was no longer possible to work in the river and even the guards preferred to smoke cigarettes under the scant cover of the trees rather than drive them into the swirling flood. The respite had proved brief; the level had soon fallen again and the temperature with it. Sol and the others of the detail felt their feet grow numb in the freezing water.
Sometimes men would disappear: fail to turn up, fall off the roll-call, as if they had never existed. The man who worked with Sol had operated a metal-lathe in a factory. The owner had already been down twice to speak to the guards. A hip-flask had been passed around. The lathe-operator would not be here for much longer, he had confided to Sol in a whisper. For now, however, he raised and lowered a heavy iron bar, driving it into the bed of the river to lever or break up those fragments of brick, mortar and stone too large to lift. Sol worked behind him. They were near the far bank and, as Sol glanced up, he realised that this was the precise spot where Ruth had stood with her skirts gathered. She had offered him her hand and had not looked up, so confident had she been that he was there to pull her up, out of the water, and not let her fall. He was standing on the bank, waiting for her to do just that. Where was she now? He stood in cold water which came up to his knees. There was no one there to pull her up. He was shovelling. He thought, ‘We were the liars.’ And an instant later, ‘But Gert Scholem's murder was true.’
In the spring of the following year, a rumour ran through the ghetto that the town's mayor, Popovici, had prevailed against the wishes of the military governor of the whole of Bukovina and the ghetto was to be dissolved. Sol watched the drawn faces of his neighbours and workmates brighten. He listened to the excited chatter which ran up and down the stairwell as he climbed to his cr
amped quarters. The arrests slowed, then stopped.
Sol, his mother and father were among the last to receive their papers. They watched the constant trickle of men, women and children puff and pant up the street to the dismantled barricade. Once there, the returnees planted their suitcases on the ground and joined the slow line for the security police to inspect their papers. Those unable to wait any longer pooled their resources and bribed their way out. Finally, their own documents arrived.
‘Signed by the mayor himself,’ said his father, transfixed by the crudely-printed papers.
They packed their suitcases and walked up Judengasse, presented their permits and continued up to Ringplatz, where the tables outside the Schwarze Adler were filled with citizens enjoying the unexpected March sunshine. The traffic on Siebenhürgerstrasse was light and orderly. The trolley-car passed them with its conductor leaning out from the footplate, just as Gustl Ritter's father once had done. A great clatter from the timber market signalled a load falling from the hoist, as often happened. These were normal and everyday matters. When they reached the apartment in Masarykgasse they found its door intact and its contents untouched.
All lies, thought Sol, while his mother exclaimed over the undamaged china and his father patted clouds of dust from his armchair. Just as the papers in his pocket were lies: drafted by liars and signed by a liar and carried by one who lied in believing them. And in offering the false example of his defiance, Gert Scholem too had been a liar, if that was indeed the falsehood he had peddled. A further possibility occurred to him as something too fantastical to be entertained: might Gert Scholem have expected to be saved?
In the Shape of a Boar Page 18
