The Book of Aron

by Jim Shepard

  The tradesman held the sheets over the hole and pounded in masonry nails. His hammer on the metal was so loud that Zofia put her fingers in her ears.

  “Those will pull right out,” Boris said after he took a look. He had one of his cigarettes going. He collected them off the streets and used a pin to smoke them down to the very end.

  “This breeze is nice,” Adina said.

  We stayed up there to celebrate Zofia’s birthday. Lutek said he’d be thirteen soon too and Adina had made each of us write Zofia a note with good wishes and give her a present. Zofia read each note that was handed over, then folded it into the sack in her waistband. Mine said You Are the Kindest Person I Know and Thank You For Making Us Happier.

  Then came our gifts. Boris gave her candied cherries in a folded packet of newspaper. Lutek gave her a scarf with the constellations. Adina gave her a tin of jam. I gave her a miniature black book that said My Diary on the front.

  Zofia thanked us and said we should share the cherries and that this was one of her best birthdays ever. “I know that’s hard to believe,” she said.

  She said when she was young and they still lived in their nice apartment her mother hadn’t let her play with other children in their courtyard, so instead she’d had to content herself one birthday with going out on her balcony and tossing down cutouts and handmade toys and calling out, “Here, you kids, take these!” and watching them play. And one kid had written in chalk Zofia is crazy on their stairwell.

  “That’s a nice birthday,” Adina said, then asked again how Salcia was, and Zofia said that she might do better if they could cheer her up somehow. She’d left her favorite stuffed bear behind when they moved to the ghetto because while she didn’t know where they were going she knew it would be a bad place.

  “Well, that’s another good birthday story,” Lutek finally said.

  “She has another bear now,” Zofia told him.

  Adina said that she got caught on her last birthday. A Polish woman had grabbed her on the Aryan side and had told the whole street that she had a Jewish nose. Zofia asked what happened then, and Adina said no one had cared and that Adina had answered, “What kind of nose do you have? Look at yourself in the mirror!” and that had made the woman let go and run away.

  Lutek said he was hungry. Zofia said now when her family finished their soup her brother Leon put the pot over his head so he could lick the bottom clean.

  Adina said people in France cooked potatoes in oil, not water, and Zofia said oil-fried potatoes must taste amazing and Boris said that was probably true but good oil could be put to better use.

  Boris and I looked back over the edge of the gutter. The Jew with the smock had finished and he and the German soldier had left and one of the other gangs was already around the hole. A kid with a crowbar levered the metal sheet away from the brick and the masonry nails came out as easily as Boris said they would. The sheet was bent aside but then a German officer and three yellow policemen appeared like magic. When two kids tried to scramble through the hole there were shouts on the other side and they were dragged back. They all lined up against the wall on the German officer’s orders. He had only one arm.

  “That’s him,” Boris said.

  “I know,” I told him.

  Witossek told them each to hand over their money and after counting it he said that he was going to fine them that amount for smuggling. They stood along the wall. He caught sight of an old Jew hurrying across the street a block away and called him over. One of the yellow police had to cross over to get him to come. We could see him trembling from where we were.

  “How old are you?” Witossek asked. Sixty-six, the old Jew told him and Witossek counted out sixty-six złotys and stuffed them in the old man’s shirt pocket. “Now be on your way,” he said.

  He said something else to the same yellow policeman, who walked off and came back with three other Jews. Witossek asked their ages and paid them that amount of złotys. The last woman said she was fifty and he counted out his last forty-eight złotys and said that was now her age instead. Once she left he turned to the smugglers and said, “I’m a good German, aren’t I?” They said he was and he led his yellow policemen away and as soon as he was out of their sight the three of them scattered.

  ON FRIDAY I WAITED AGAIN FOR THREE HOURS AND then Ajzyk the shoeshine boy came out and told me that Lejkin said I should come back on Monday. On Monday Lejkin finally showed me into his office, which was a room next to the toilet. He spread his arms like he was taking in all of Poland and asked what I thought. I told him the house had a nice front hall.

  He said Witossek and other Germans in the Security Police were putting together an anti-crime unit and that Lejkin had picked me to be a part of it. “They’re not hunting smugglers as much as wanting to regulate them,” he said. “You know how the Germans like to keep track of everything.”

  “I don’t know anything about anything,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s been your position,” he told me. “But you do know the old joke that’s now going around again. If two Jews meet, one says to the other, ‘Statistically, one of us must be reporting to the Gestapo!’ ”

  “I have heard that joke,” I told him.

  “There’s no salary, of course, but there are other advantages,” he said. “Including influence in the work camps.”

  “I still don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” I said.

  “Nothing for the time being,” he said. “Maybe some minor reports. Maybe not even that.”

  I sat in my chair and he looked at me. He was so small behind his desk that it looked like he was kneeling on the floor. I could hear an accordion player outside his window.

  “So can I go now?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  He gave his attention to some papers in front of him. He signed two and made a mocking noise at a third. He stood up and came around the front of his desk and said he’d traded for new boots, then walked around and did knee bends to break them in.

  “Have you heard that the Germans are already in Leningrad?” he asked. I shook my head.

  “So Hitler sees Jesus in Paradise and says to St. Peter, ‘Hey, what’s that Jew doing without an armband?’ ” he said. “And St. Peter tells him, ‘Leave him alone. He’s the Boss’s son.’ ”

  “That’s a good joke,” I told him, after we were quiet for a while.

  “You’re like those shopkeepers who hold goods under their coats and go over to customers only when they recognize them,” he said. “I like that about you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “We have to stick together,” he told me. “It’s a terrible thing to see how the Germans have divided us.”

  “So can I go now?” I said.

  “Do you remember how you felt the first time you saw a Jews Not Wanted sign in the window of a Jewish shop?” he said.

  Another policeman swung the door open and told Lejkin that one of the Czapliński brothers was finally there. Lejkin tossed him two packs of cigarettes and the policeman said that the Czaplińskis smoked too. Lejkin tossed him two more. “Weren’t they both lawyers, as well?” the policeman wanted to know.

  “I think they were, yes,” Lejkin told him. “Back in Lódz.”

  “It’s like a bar association around here,” the policeman said. He said that Mayler was a lawyer too and by the way he was still trying to find out where his wife’s family had been sent. “The Poles complain that we’re privileged because they all got sent abroad and we at least got to work at home,” he told Lejkin.

  “Tell the Organ Grinders,” Lejkin told him, and the policeman left.

  “Who are the Organ Grinders?” I asked.

  “That’s what they call the Judenrat,” he said. “You know: throw a coin to the organ grinder and he plays along with his monkey.”

  He bent to fix his boots and once he was happy with them went back behind his desk and sat down again. “So what’s your decision?” he said.

  We
both listened to the minute hand of his clock click over into the next position. “I think I’ll do what I can to help,” I told him.

  He said I’d be hearing from him and dismissed me. When I was heading down the front steps a long black car pulled up with two Germans in the front and three bearded Jews with terrified eyes in the back. When I told Boris that evening he clapped me on the back for having done the smart thing and said maybe now we’d get some word in advance as to what was going on.

  HANKA NASIELSKA GOT THE TYPHUS AND DIED. SO did Zofia’s Uncle Ickowicz. For a few weeks Lejkin passed along messages from my father and brother and then he said they’d been transferred and he didn’t know where. My mother asked me to find out and told me to spend more time with him until I did. There were more soup kitchens on the street. In September Lejkin said the ghetto would be further reduced in size but that in October some schools could open again. He had our gang hang some new placards forbidding Jews from leaving the housing districts designated for them.

  “What does it mean?” Zofia asked the day we got them, though after we finished hanging them we found out: German soldiers and blue police surprised us at the Immortal Hole and the gang got away but a Pole grabbed me by the back of the neck. Three older kids from another gang also were caught. The Pole gave me a kick in the behind, let me go, and said, “This one’s too short to shoot.” The other kids were told to empty their pockets and stand against the wall. I ran away and after I rounded the corner I heard them shooting. Later the dead kids were still there on top of one another against the wall.

  GOING HOME FROM A SHOP WITH MY MOTHER WE heard more shots and she dragged me to the pavement and covered me with her arm. At dinner she told us that four bodies had been found beside the wall at Nowolipke.

  “A lot of people have typhus,” Boris said.

  She told him they’d been shot for smuggling.

  “That’s why we’re not going to do that anymore,” he told her.

  “Is that the truth?” she asked me.

  “We already decided not to,” I told her.

  Boris told her smuggling had gotten too dangerous and that a housepainter on his way to a job had been ordered by a German to fill in the Immortal Hole one more time and then when that German wandered off, another came along and, seeing a Jew working on a hole in the wall, shot him dead. Boris’s mother asked what the Immortal Hole was and we told her.

  Two days later it was open again. We gave up on it but heard that a German with a bullhorn had announced to the neighborhood that thirty Jews would be shot if it wasn’t permanently closed by noon the next day. We also heard the smuggling went on as before after he left and that he never came back.

  BORIS GOT CAUGHT. HE SAID THAT WHEN THEY WERE about to shoot him a cloud of gnats flew into his eyes and nose and also bothered the Germans, who argued with one another while he stood there against the wall and then for whatever reason just left him there.

  Adina and Zofia embraced him and Lutek said he’d had some close scrapes of his own and the only reason he hadn’t been killed was he was so short that all the bullets went over his head.

  Zofia said, “I think we have to stop.”

  And Boris said, “What’s the difference how you’re done for. You have to eat.”

  “It’s time to think of something else,” Adina told him.

  “Yes,” Boris said, as if he was talking to small children. “Let’s do that.”

  We liked to meet outside Mrs. Melecówna’s matrimonial introductions parlor because she let young people in the courtyard and it had an awning besides. One morning Adina and Boris and I waited an hour before Lutek finally arrived. He was sweating so much from running that the bill of his cap was soaked through. He said Zofia had popped up at his window at midnight the night before. Her family had been getting ready for bed when they heard boots on the stairs, which was always bad news after curfew. Her mother tucked Zofia and Leon into a space she’d made under the bedframe before going to the door. The Germans searched but had been distracted by all of the valises they’d dragged out from under the bed and emptied. Zofia and Leon didn’t make a sound though they heard Salcia crying and Jechiel and their father protesting and their father telling the Germans about his broom factory. Their mother told the Germans, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” as if saying goodbye to Zofia and Leon. They stayed quiet after everyone left, climbed out, and then in the street walked into more Germans. While they were being chased she shouted to Leon to run in one direction and she’d go in another and he was shouting back “Why should I run that way?” when the Germans caught him. She spent the night weeping that this had been the last thing he’d said to her.

  Adina asked Lutek why she’d gone to his apartment and Boris reminded her it was the closest. Adina said we had to go to her but Lutek said she wasn’t there anyway, that his father had already made her leave. Who knew why the Germans wanted them, or how hard they’d look? He’d walked her over to an old friend of her mother’s, who took her in without enthusiasm.

  I spent three days working as a peeler in a comunal kitchen with my mother and then Adina said Zofia wanted to see me. She gave me the address and said she’d already visited and that the family was gone all day at a shoemaking factory and Zofia said I should ring the bell three times and then stand in the street where she could see me.

  The apartment had a wash basin in the sink and a rabbit hutch that was locked with a padlock on a high wardrobe.

  “The mother puts the bread up there so I can’t get to it at night when they’re sleeping,” Zofia said. “I just stand here smelling it in the dark.”

  “They don’t feed you?” I asked.

  “I’m so hungry I suck on my knee,” she said. She said that they gave her food like for a dog. She said Boris had brought the family some kasha for her and that the family ate it instead in front of her.

  I told her we could bring her more food. She said she helped with the chores and always tried to be calm and quiet and grown-up but found herself waiting for her mother to come and take her away. She was trying not to always be weeping. She asked me to find out through my friend in the yellow police where her family had been taken.

  “He’s not my friend,” I told her.

  “Please,” she said, then said she kept thinking about how brave Leon had been. She said you couldn’t believe the thunder of the Germans once they were in a room.

  At first Lejkin told me he had no information but when I wouldn’t leave him alone he said he’d see what he could find out and the next day he told me they’d been sent to the country as part of a new initiative and wouldn’t be coming back; they were to be resettled out there. Adina told Zofia, whose response was that she was going to go to them and we all needed to help her get out of the ghetto as soon as possible.

  Boris surprised us by saying we should help her and Lutek asked what was so hard, we went through all the time, and Boris told him the difficulty was in getting far enough away to avoid the blackmailers. In the meantime she had to find a new place since her mother’s friend was starving her. Boris found it in a day and Adina took her there when the street traffic was the busiest.

  The day before she was to leave we all went to say goodbye. The woman whose apartment it was asked us to visit one at a time so as not to attract attention. Boris went first. Adina said she wanted to go last and Lutek said he didn’t need to go at all.

  A woman in a red flowered robe let me in and then shut herself in the bathroom. Zofia was wearing three layers of clothes and her shoes that fit. She tried to keep her hands in her lap but they kept flying around. She said this woman had German visitors and so Zofia hid in a recess behind the toilet in a stored washtub. She said that of course the Germans used the toilet all the time.

  I asked if everything was ready and she said that Boris had found a man who said because she had better looks he would give her money to get herself and his daughter out of the ghetto. I asked what she meant by better and she said as in not like a Jew.
>
  She said the man’s wife had scrubbed her in a tub and had to change the water three times. She said the man had said his daughter could pass for Zofia’s sister. She said that he was providing papers for both of them and that they’d almost left two days earlier. He’d led them into the cellar of a pharmacy that bordered the Aryan side where they were supposed to wait for someone, but no one came. She said the new plan was that a wagon driver would pull up with his cart at dawn and stuff them under some bedding and drive them through the gate.

  “Don’t go,” I said, while she was still talking. “Stay with us.”

  She was surprised by how upset I was. “I shouldn’t try to find my family?” she said.

  “Who knows if that’s really where they are?” I said.

  “Well, if they’re not there, where are they?” she asked. She stared like I was refusing to tell her.

  “You don’t know anybody on the other side,” I said.

  She said she did. When I asked who, she wouldn’t answer. Then she said some of the kids in the newer gangs were from the youth movements that left when the Germans marched in.

  “Why are they coming back?” I asked.

  “To help,” she said.

  “With what?” I asked.

  “You don’t need to know,” she said. “And don’t pull such a face. But they have contacts on the other side.”

  I asked if the kid she called Antek was one of the ones she was talking about. She was annoyed I’d noticed, but then said that he was. We sat there like two strangers at a puppet show.

  “Do you have to go?” I said again.

  She looked at me like I’d said something shameful. “So I should leave Leon wherever he is?” she said. “And Salcia? And my mother?” I didn’t answer.

  “I spend my whole life around people who don’t ask me about myself,” she added. She said she was surprised by how much this disappointed her.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?” she asked me. When I again didn’t answer, she said I should go get Adina.