Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  Okay. All right.

  It’s all part of the risk factor in my infiltration mission. I slide my hand into Bibiana’s and walk in step with her instead of jogging ahead. My heart hammers in my chest—I absolutely hate physical contact! I’m just not used to it. In the Home, no one ever bothered to hold my hand. Or else it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten…I’m expecting my skin to burn, or get itchy, or exhibit some other symptom of a contagious disease.

  It seems not. It’s okay.

  The feel of Bibiana’s hand is actually not too horrible. Less horrible than Frau Lotte’s: sometimes, if I’m slow to obey her, she grabs me by the arm with her claw-like hands. That’s when I feel her dry, wrinkled skin, as rough as cardboard, scratchy. No, Bibiana’s is rather soft.

  We walk a while in silence, then she says, ‘Every once in a while, I should pick you up…All right?’ She bends down to me.

  What?

  I stop in my tracks. I take my hand away as swiftly as if a bee had stung me. Bibiana is really overstepping the mark now. Just thinking about her holding me fills me with panic. No one has ever held me. At least not for months, years. It must go back to when I was a newborn, so I have no memory at all of the feeling. I start to tremble, I’m hot all of a sudden. I was enjoying the sun—it’s summer and a heatwave in this damned Polish countryside—but now it’s beating on my dolichocephalic head, my ears are buzzing and I can’t breathe. If Bibiana picks me up by force, I’ll yell so loud, we’ll rouse the whole town we’re approaching. I’ll kick her until she lets go of me, then I’ll roll on the ground and bash my head until I bleed. And that’ll be the end of her! The Unterscharführer in the car following us will notice something is wrong and she’ll get that bullet in the head!

  When she sees my reaction, Bibiana starts to panic, too. She takes three steps backwards. Her sunkissed cheeks turn pale, as if the blood had drained out of her face. ‘Don’t worry! Don’t worry!’ she stammers. ‘Everything will be fine. I’m not going to force you to…’

  She doesn’t have time to finish her sentence because I also stumble backward, trip on a stone, and fall on my face.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she cries out, kneeling down next to me. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  Our voices attract the attention, not of the Unterscharführer in the car, but of a Polish woman passing by. She hurries over to us and I can tell that she’s asking Bibiana what happened. Bibiana makes out that I collapsed from the heat. Nothing serious. Everything’s fine…Everything’s fine. The woman looks at me while I get up and wipe the little trickle of blood from my hands. She doesn’t have much to offer us, a bit of bread and some fresh water. That will calm me down, she says, and, as she has two children, a boy my age and a six-year-old girl, I could come and play with them to put a stop to my tears.

  Off we go with her, and return that night with the address.

  Pleased with this initial success, I decide to redouble my efforts.

  The very next day, while Bibiana and I are walking hand in hand, I turn things over in my head. Do I give it a go? Is it worth it? It’s not too dangerous. There’s always the Unterscharführer who can shoot from behind, and I’m also perfectly capable of defending myself. I can be very violent when I want to be. Let’s see. If I don’t give it a try, I’ll never know. I’m ready to go, but…wait, three more steps and then I’m off.

  One. Two. Two. Two and a half. Two and three quarters…Three.

  I stop dead.

  ‘What’s the matter, Maciej?’ asks Bibiana.

  Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you: yesterday, when we were with the Polish woman who gave us something to drink, we were talking—I didn’t understand everything she said—but when she asked me what my name was, I was incredibly on the ball. If I’d said Konrad, as Frau Lotte insisted—she’s such an idiot—it would have ruined everything; my cover would have been blown. My instincts told me to use a Polish name. I said, ‘My name is Maxètche!’ It just popped out spontaneously; I have no idea why. Well, of course I do know; I love the sound of ‘Max’.

  The Polish woman started to giggle. ‘Maciej, that’s how you pronounce it! Not Max-è-tche! Say it after me,’ she said in a kind voice.

  Mothers always go weak at the knees when children make pronunciation mistakes. And Bibiana looked surprised by my instinctive response—gobsmacked even.

  So now Bibiana is asking me what’s wrong, why I’ve stopped dead, and she starts to go pale again, like yesterday. She’s scared I’m going to have another tantrum.

  I hold my hands up to her.

  ‘You…You want me’—she doesn’t dare finish, she’s scared stiff—‘You want me to pick you up?’

  Well, duh! You got it. Stop looking at me with those eyes like a dead fish. (Do fish even have blue eyes?)

  She comes closer, gently, as if she was about to pick up an armful of freshly laid eggs. She leans over, puts her hands under my armpits and, upsy-daisy, she picks me up.

  ‘Oh, you look so fragile, but you’re heavy enough, my little chap!’ she exclaims happily, still with an edge of anxiety in her voice.

  Anxiety that I might suddenly start yelling. Because I’m frowning, my face is all scrunched up, my lips pursed, and my fists clenched. The thing is, I don’t know myself whether I’m going to start yelling or not. I haven’t decided yet. In the meantime, I’m staying rigid. She relaxes a bit and puts her right arm under my bum and supports my back with her left arm. Then she starts walking again, as if, holding her armful of eggs, she is also stepping onto a carpet of eggs.

  So…

  It’s not that bad, for the moment anyway. At least my feet get a rest. The soles on my stinking clodhopper Polish boots are worn thin and I’ve got splinters in my feet…I relax a bit and lean my head closer to Bibiana’s. I’d been holding myself away from her and now I’ve got a crick in my neck. I can smell her sweat, but it’s not too pungent. At least she doesn’t have stinky breath like Frau Lotte, who splutters over me when she’s speaking—I always feel like I’m going to drop dead, her breath is so foul. I relax even more and let my cheek brush against Bibiana’s. I can tell she’s relaxing, too. She takes her left hand from behind my back, holds my right hand, and gives it a little squeeze. I know from yesterday that this is just fine. Out of the corner of my eye I notice she’s smiling. A sloppy smile: as her smile widens, her eyes fill with tears.

  I recognise this smile: it’s the same one the mothers had when their hearts melted at the sight of my angelic little face.

  That evening, we return with three addresses.

  The more friendly Bibiana and I are, the more addresses we get.

  The next day, she picks me up several times on our way to the village the Sisters had shown us on the map. I even have a tantrum at one point when she tries to put me down and I don’t want to walk.

  Another Polish woman comes over to chat. ‘Aren’t they naughty at that age? It’s terrible.’

  Excellent result: the address of a house with four children.

  The day after next, Bibiana says, ‘Let’s see how fast you can run! Try and catch me!’

  I catch up to her (because she cheated and let me win on purpose), trip her up, and she falls over, taking me with her. So both of us end up rolling in slimy mud, which is all over the place since the rain. When we get home that night, the Sister says, ‘Ach! You are disgusting! A real little Polack!’

  What are you whingeing about, you old bag? You got your six addresses today, didn’t you?

  Another day, Bibiana tickles me and I start giggling like mad. Then she sticks her lips on my cheek…Weird. Sort of disgusting. I don’t scream or cry, but I must look funny as I rub my cheek really hard, because she bursts out laughing. When she asks me to do the same to her, I refuse. Not for now, at least.

  One day after lunch we fall asleep together in the sunshine. I’m the first to open my eyes and I shake Bibiana, but she doesn’t wake up. All of a sudden, I’m terrified. What’s happening inside my head? I can’t work it out. It�
�s like I’m remembering that story Josefa told me, about when I was a baby and I was found in the arms of the corpse, the dissident whore who kidnapped me. So I think Bibiana is dead. Perhaps all the women who come from the camps are the same, and all die fast? It’s as if Bibiana has the same face as the whore who tortured me. Oh dear, it’s all so muddled in my mind. Sometimes, certain vague, shifting images haunt me. My brain is too immature to be able to file memories away, and the compartments get mixed up. Before they’re banished forever, those memories invade my peace of mind.

  Anyway, this day, a woman comes over to us when she sees me crying and shaking Bibiana. ‘What’s the matter, you poor little boy? Is your mummy hurt? No, look, she’s fine! She’s just asleep. It’s too much for our poor children, isn’t it? The trauma they’re suffering. It’s no wonder,’ she says to Bibiana, who finally stirs.

  We spend the afternoon at the woman’s house, and she tells us about her friends in the neighbouring village. That evening our pockets are full of addresses.

  We continue like this for weeks, until one day, out of the blue, Bibiana asks me, ‘Maciej, where is your mummy?’

  I don’t reply; I’m eating. I can’t do two things at once, eat my sausage and talk. I mean, I can’t talk properly, can’t articulate it like I’m telling you; my five-year-old way of talking is not up to putting it into words. So I just mumble a few sounds typical of a child my age. ‘Me, no Mummy!’

  Bibiana lowers her eyes and starts fiddling with a leaf—we’re sitting on the ground in a forest; she’d decided we could have a little rest after working hard all morning. Now the leaf is in shreds.

  After a minute of silence, she says, ‘I understand. Your mummy is dead, isn’t she? In the bombing? After all, you people are getting a few bombs, too.’

  That’s got nothing to do with it. Bibiana is on the wrong track completely. I don’t have a mother. That’s the word that I erased from my vocabulary. I don’t even know anymore what it means exactly, except for what I observe with the Polish children.

  ‘And your father?’

  I keep chewing my sausage, but I can’t swallow. I’m sick of sausages! Frau Lotte always gives me the same thing to eat every day. Why doesn’t she put sweets in the basket, like there were in the big pocket of her uniform when we were on the road together? I grimace to show how disgusting the sausage is.

  ‘Your father’s dead, too, is that right? Poor little Maciej, are you an orphan?’

  Huge tears trickle down Bibiana’s cheeks. It’s ridiculous she’s making herself sad like this, for nothing. She was talking to herself and answered her own questions.

  Still, I don’t like seeing her so upset, and I’m not an idiot—I can spout a few sentences when I want to. ‘My mother is Germany, and my father is the Führer!’ And I raise my arm in a salute. Nice and straight, like a sword. Then I yell, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Bibiana recoils. There’s a strange glint in her eyes. For a split second, I think she’s going to smack me. Instead, she comes closer, grabs my arm, lowers it, pulls it towards her, and kisses my hand. I feel like doing the same thing to her, so I kiss her, too. On the cheek.

  I thought we’d beat our record for addresses that day. In fact we didn’t. Well, we did get heaps of them. But what the hell has got into Bibiana?

  When we get back, instead of giving the papers with the addresses to the Sister and saying goodnight to me before going to sleep in the cellar of the town hall, like she does every other night, Bibiana stands in front of the Sister and, with an arrogant look I’ve never seen on her, which transforms her normally pretty face into a hideous mask, she proceeds to eat all the pieces of paper. She stuffs them into her mouth one after the other, so fast that the Sister, aghast, has no time to react.

  Why did she do that? Why?

  If she was so hungry, why didn’t she tell me? I’d have given her my sausage. I forced myself to eat it and it’s sitting like a stone in my stomach.

  I’ve got a tummy-ache.

  I want to vomit.

  The tummy-ache won’t go away.

  It feels like my intestines are refusing to obey the orders issued by my stomach. They’re in revolt: twisting, cramping, making odd sounds, gurgles, as if there was a voice in my belly moaning and groaning. Frau Lotte says I’ve got diarrhoea from an illness I caught from Bibiana. But I don’t have diarrhoea. I’m the one who sees what goes into the toilet bowl. Nice consistency, a bit hard sometimes. I can tell by the sound my turds make when I push them out. Plop! Plop! Mortar shells.

  A stomach-ache at my age is a sign of Psychological disturbance. You don’t even know that, useless Sister? Simply put, it means something’s wrong in my head. As a result of stress, or a traumatic event.

  I haven’t done anything for days. I stay by myself most of the time. Lotte is with me in the house, but she’s always got her nose in her dossiers, filing index cards on children for whom she now has addresses, sticking on code letters or colours. Anyway she doesn’t matter; she’s too ugly, too old. She’s not a real companion.

  I don’t want to learn nursery rhymes or do arithmetic like I used to.

  All I do is daydream. I replay the recent days as if I’m watching a film: waking up early, getting dressed in my funny costume of rags, Bibiana arriving, and then us setting off into the countryside, hand in hand.

  Hand in hand.

  I go back over our long walks, the chasing games, the tickling, the laughs we had together. I picture Bibiana’s face, her bright, blue eyes, her cheeks freckled by the sun, her blonde hair that had begun to grow back without lice. Sometimes, I can even hear her voice.

  And I think about all the children we came across. When we went into the Polish women’s homes, we would stay there an hour or two and I had time to play. Occasionally things didn’t go well because I’m pretty nasty, I like to give orders, yell, be the boss. I even whacked a few little Polacks on the head with my Thor’s-hammer-Excalibur-sword, or knocked them to the ground and stomped on them—to copy the SS soldiers in the streets when they decide, just like that, on a whim, to attack a Pole. That’s when Bibiana pretended to reprimand me with a smack; the truth is she just tapped me on the bottom. I liked that.

  I miss all that, and meeting all those mothers and children. I hate idleness. I’ve had enough of playing by myself upstairs in the bombed-out house.

  I sit on the ground for ages, daydreaming, no longer aware of how my body works, but swaying backwards and forwards. When she sees me like this, Lotte grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. ‘Heavens, Konrad, what’s the matter? Would you please stand up straight? You look like an old Jew praying!’

  Bitch. She knows how to touch a sore spot. I leap up straightaway and raise my arm in a salute to show that I am not an old Jew. I am the prototype-child-typical-of-the-pure-Aryan-race! The perfect specimen, conceived according to the wishes of Reichsführer Himmler. The protégé of Doctor Ebner. The mascot of the Lebensborn program. Sieg Heil!

  She’s the one who must have Jewish blood, she’s so old, so ugly. I don’t know why Doctor Ebner doesn’t put her through the selection process. They wouldn’t have to measure her nose or her forehead or the position of her ears or the height of her cheekbones—it’s perfectly obvious that nothing in her face corresponds to the standards of the Nordic race. As for her eyes, they’re small and black like ball bearings. Like the eyes on the teddy bear that I found in the room of the boy who used to live in the house. He must have been very attached to it because it was snuggled up in his bed, under the blankets. I took out my anger on that bear and tore it to shreds. I yanked off its nose, its eyes, and ripped open its belly, until there was nothing left of it. That filthy disgusting Polack bear!

  The older I get, the more I realise how weird and full of contradictions adults are. The Brown Sisters attended courses with ‘physiognomists’ to be able to tell, at a single glance, whether a person can claim to belong to the Nordic race or not. Haven’t they ever thought of standing in front of a mirror? Of req
uesting their own ‘relocation’?

  As for the rocking—my mouth open like I’m swallowing flies, my gaze blank—somehow I manage to cut down on it; otherwise they’ll think I’m mentally retarded and send me off to be ‘purified’.

  But I’m not retarded at all. In fact, I know exactly what happened to Bibiana. It wasn’t because she was hungry that she ate the addresses in front of the Sister. It was her act of rebellion. And rebellion gets punished. Very severely. The first few days, when no one came to get me in the morning, I asked, ‘When will Bibiana come?’

  ‘She’s not coming. Not today, not tomorrow. She is no longer a member of our team,’ Frau Lotte said stiffly, careful not to make eye contact with me.

  A code sentence. The first possible meaning: Bibiana suffocated on the paper she swallowed. Not likely. Second possibility: she ended up getting that shot in the head. Far more likely. Lotte pulled me aside when Bibiana started snacking on the paper; she took me to my room so I wouldn’t see what happened next: the other Sister calling the soldier, and bang! The soldier fired. I’ve seen a lot of this, whenever I play sniper games in the house and look out the window. SS soldiers get a group of men or women guilty of sabotage and line them up against the wall, and bang! bang! they execute them. Or else they kill a bunch of innocent people to punish the guilty ones they haven’t manage to arrest. Or else they lock them in a church and set fire to it.