by Jim Shepard
“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.”
THE 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.
“How does one know where to find anything?” he answered. “Look around. Say hello to your father for me.” Then he flicked my nose with his finger, pushed himself off, and rode away.
GIVEN THE NEWS THAT APARTMENTS WERE GOING TO be requisitioned anyway, my father said he’d gone looking for boarders who could pay a little something, that it’d be nice if a Jew saw a herring on his table even once a week. My mother said she would only agree to it if whoever he found first went through the disinfection units and then presented her with their delousing certificates. She thought this would be the end of that problem, since the lines at those stations made you wait all day and night, but a family of four showed up the next morning and handed her their certificates one by one as they passed into our apartment carrying what they had. They were each wearing many layers, both for the cold and to make it easier to carry other things. They didn’t look clean, but as my father told her, they weren’t any dirtier than anyone else, either. “They probably bought their certificates, instead of waiting in line,” my mother said, which was what my father and I assumed, though we only shrugged.
They brought as an offering overcooked kasha with rutabaga preserves, some stuffed cabbage that was much more appetizing, and a tiny jar of honey that the father said we might want to use as barter.
He was a tall man who made jokes and his wife was short and had angry eyes and looked disappointed by everything in our apartment. She looked at our kitchen and said, “Ice in the pot, frozen faucets, and not a drop of water.” Their daughter said she was nineteen and
their son said he was hungry. He was about my age. Once he was eating he told us his name was Boris.
His parents and sister took the kitchen and my mother and father were in the bedroom so the rest of us slept in the hall. It was even colder there. His feet were in my face. In the middle of the night he seemed to know that I was still awake and started talking in a low voice. He said his family had taken over the previous apartment they’d been in, that they’d just stormed the place with another family. Then it had been taken away from them by the Germans. He said in the shelter at the synagogue all of the boys stole bread from one another’s families, and what they didn’t eat they traded for horseshoe spikes they used in games. He said he’d gotten the honey outside the ghetto when an O.D. man had turned his back and pretended not to see him coming or going. I asked what an O.D. man was and it turned out that’s what he called the yellow police, because of the German name for them, Ordnungsdienst, the Order Service. After we listened to my brothers snore he asked if I thought he looked strong.
“Are you talking to me?” I asked. He said he was. He asked again if I thought he looked strong. I told him I guessed so.
He said that that was because he was. “Smugglers eat more than other people because they work harder,” he said. His cheeks had the pockmarks from chicken pox and he had an expression like he was sharing the floor with a sick person.
I told him smugglers didn’t usually tell everyone that they were smugglers, and he snorted. “I don’t think you’re Gestapo,” he said.
“You never know,” I told him.
He asked how long we’d lived there. He said he’d hated his village and that when he and his friends trampled their neighbor’s vegetable garden the neighbor had come out of his house and tried to beat them with a leather strap. Then he turned loose his dog, who bit them. Dogs hate the poor, he added, thinking about it further. He talked with his hands, like a Jew.
He said he’d been thrown out of the Polish Scouting Association after being told that as a Jew he couldn’t be sworn in on a Christian Bible and he suggested to his troop leader that they use a spare-parts catalog instead. He said his only real friend hadn’t shown up to say goodbye on the day he left. He said all of this gave him an advantage because he never felt homesick. And it was better to have no one to miss.
He said his father had a weakness for the bottle and I’d probably already noticed that he never refused a toast. “And why should he?” he asked.
If he was waiting for an argument, he didn’t get one from me. “You’re soon going to have trouble with my mother, too,” he told me. He said it was never long before she was sure she was being cheated and that’s why she was always shouting at someone. I asked if we were going to have trouble with his sister, too, and he said she was so shy she’d told him that if she ever got married she wanted it to be in a cellar where no one would see.
I asked what happened to his sister’s hand and he said that on the way to Warsaw his father had let him take the reins of the wagon and that he had steered the thing so badly when crossing a bridge that he’d turned them over in a ditch.
I asked how they’d managed to get the wagon back on its wheels and he said he told people stories like that because he thought it was important to be clear in your own head on what you could and couldn’t do and this was how he’d grown up to be someone with open eyes. Inasmuch as he’d grown up at all, I said, and he told me he’d show me how much he’d grown up the next chance he got.
I told our group about him and repeated some of his stories and Lutek said I should bring him along tomorrow. Adina wanted to know why and he said she shouldn’t worry about it, since Sh’maya’s friend Boris probably wasn’t going to survive long anyway, given what we were up to.
“Why’re you calling me that?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what your brothers call you?” he said.
When everyone was asleep that night, I told Boris he should come meet the group. He said he looked forward to becoming our leader. I told him that as far as he was concerned school was starting once the sun came up the next morning, so he should get some rest.
MY MOTHER AND FATHER WERE UPSET BY THE NEWS that the three trolley lines for the Jews were going to be shut down and in the worst part of the winter. My mother asked why she had to live to see such awful years and my father told her there were probably worse years to come. The trolley lines were to be replaced with just one that was given no number but only a shield with the Star of David. Lutek said our bigger worry was that they would stop running the Aryan trolleys through the ghetto, and a month later they did.
There was no announcement so we waited for three days before figuring that out for ourselves. Then Zofia asked what we would do now and Boris said we could start by not playing so nice. To show us what he meant he went along when Lutek delivered our last sack from off the trolley and told the men who’d ordered it that they couldn’t have it until we got more money.
“We agreed to what we agreed to,” one of them told him.
“They agreed to it. I didn’t agree to it,” he said and Lutek told us they went back and forth about it and the men made some threats but eventually got scared by all the patrols coming and going. He said Boris held everyone up like he didn’t even notice the police until he got what he wanted: not only an extra bag of potatoes but also some raisin wine. He shared both with the rest of us.
AT DINNER MY FATHER TOLD US IT SEEMED LIKE NO matter where he went, German soldiers followed. My mother got alarmed and asked why and he said he had no idea.
Boris’s family was in the back room talking in low voices, and my father said, “Maybe they’re planning a coup.”
My mother again brought up the idea of getting Aryan papers and told us Czerniaków’s sister-in-law had assured her it could be done and for not much money, but when she said how much it was, my father asked, “For each person?” so loud that she had to shush him. She told him that was what a birth certificate and an identity card cost. She said there were cheaper ones but they looked suspicious even at a glance.
My father asked how she thought we would eat while we saved that much money and who we would contact on the other side to help us, or would we be all alone. He pointed at me and said, “And do you think this one can pass?” He reminded her she’d said about me that the minute I opened my mouth you could hear the Jew in me.
My mother looked at me sadly and said, “Aron, what do you think?”
“I think we’re doing all right here,” I told her. I could feel my ears burning.
“There,” my father said. “Even he thinks we should stay.”
My mother said she would ask my brothers when they got home but I could tell by her voice that she’d already given up.
But they never got home because they were picked up on the street outside our apartment by soldiers and the yellow police for the work battalions. We heard the shouting but didn’t understand what it was. My mother pulled me from the window and then our neighbor rushed in to tell us. She said that another man had pulled money from his pocket and handed some to each of the soldiers and policemen and they’d let him go.
She thought they were taking them to Józefów. At least that was what one of the police had told her. My father pulled all the money we had from our hiding places and rushed off to try to catch them before they got to the police station. I ran after him. It was almost curfew.
The column was being marched double-time and the yellow police were in the back, shouting and thumping with fat sticks the ones who didn’t keep up. The Germans at the front every so often looked back and then there was more shouting and thumping.
“Listen,” my father called when he got close enough to the last yellow policeman.
“Go away or you’ll end up with them,” the man warned him. My father lagged back but I took the money from his hand and passed him because I’d noticed Lejkin up ahead.
“Look who it is,” Lejkin said when I fell into step alongside him. “Do you want to go to a
labor camp? Where’s my bootjack?”
“I found a beautiful one,” I told him. “But I also have a deal for you.” I showed him the money I held inside my coat.
“Who’s being saved?” he asked. I pointed out my brothers a few rows up. In their misery they still hadn’t seen us. “And what’s in it for me?” he added.
“More where this came from,” I told him. Though as far as I knew we didn’t have any more.
He let us march another half block just to let me suffer and then said something to the trailing policeman and they both went forward and pulled my brothers from the line and dragged them back to my father, who made such a cry of happiness and relief that he almost gave the whole thing away.
“I NEED A BOOTJACK,” I TOLD LUTEK.
“A bootjack?” he said. “What do you need with a bootjack?” We were standing next to each other to get warm back at our old Leszno Street gate. It was snowing. Lutek was trying to get our old arrangement going again, but his father’s friend had more business than he knew what to do with so he was making us wait. Lutek kept bringing up phlegm and spitting it onto the pavement to watch it freeze. Our shoes were soaked through and coming apart and we were stamping our feet.
“I have a contact that maybe we can use,” I told him.
