by Jim Shepard
“Why? You’re finished with me?” I said.
“Oh, Aron,” she said tiredly.
“What?” I said.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She took my hands and squeezed them.
On the stairs I stopped and turned to go back but decided it wouldn’t be a good idea, since I wasn’t the same person I used to be and she wouldn’t have liked me even then.
THAT NIGHT MY MOTHER WAS SURPRISED WHEN I climbed into bed with her after everyone else had fallen asleep. She smelled like cabbage and the coal from the stove. “Did you have a bad dream?” she said in her sleepy voice. Her finger tickled my ear.
“Don’t cry,” I told her, and she tucked my head under her chin. She called me her beautiful boy when I put my arms around her neck. When I woke in the morning I’d wet the bed.
“Tit for tat, my friend,” Lejkin told me when I came out onto the street. I was looking for Boris, who’d gotten up ahead of me. “I helped you; you have to help me.”
He wanted to know what we had planned for the day. He said he had his quotas to fill, too. I told him I didn’t know what he meant and he said that he was getting tired of everything I didn’t know and could I just answer the question. So I told him where we were likely to be and he thanked me and left and an hour later two blue policemen caught Lutek and me with a burlap sack of turnips and threw us and the turnips into the back of a car.
They drove us to a big building with tall columns outside of the ghetto and took us down into the cellar. A German soldier at a desk asked what they were bringing him and they told him they had two for the Streetcar. We were walked down a long dark corridor and pushed into a room with cement walls and no windows.
There were two rows of hard wooden seats with arms along the walls facing forward like a little classroom and I sat in one and Lutek sat in another behind a tall man with a bloody head and wild hair. The walls were covered in scratched graffiti. Next to my bench someone had carved JEZU. Next to Lutek’s someone had drawn a clock and circled the 6. I wasn’t afraid but I was shaking as though I’d been left out in the cold.
Lutek asked the tall man where we were. He told us this was Gestapo headquarters and they called this room the Streetcar because of its shape and that we should ask for coffee when the woman in uniform came past.
She walked by a few minutes later and Lutek asked her and she came back with a mug of coffee with milk in it and passed it to him through the bars. He shared it with the man with the bloody head.
“You’re shaking your whole chair,” he said to me.
He said Boris had told him he’d been here once and found himself in the same cell with the guy who’d pointed him out to some Germans on the street.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“What do you think?” Lutek said.
“It was like they were waiting for us,” he said a few minutes later. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Did you hear what I said? It was like they knew we were coming.”
“Do you think once they talk to us they’ll let us go?” I whispered.
“How would I know?” he said.
He asked if Lejkin had any more war news. I told him no. He said he heard the Germans were taking a beating outside Moscow and Leningrad. The man with the bloody head told him to be quiet. Lutek told him the joke that when Napoleon invaded Russia he put on a red tunic in case he was wounded, and Hitler put on brown pants. The man with the bloody head got up and moved as far away as he could.
Finally two German soldiers appeared with a list. They mispronounced our names but we raised our hands. They took us out into a courtyard in the back without windows. One soldier took Lutek by the shoulders and pushed his back against the wall.
We couldn’t tell if they understood Polish. Lutek said to them, “Are you really going to kill me over some turnips?” and the German who’d pushed him shot him. His head hit the wall so hard that his rabbit-skin cap landed on the dirt in front of him. Because of his wooden shoes each foot skidded out from under him in a different direction. The other German was so upset by the noise I made that he knocked me to the ground. The two of them picked me up and carried me back through the waiting hall past the rooms with the benches and threw me out onto the street.
ON MY WAY HOME MY LEGS ACTED LIKE I KEPT FORGETTING how to walk and I stopped in the center of the road. I threw my own cap away. A truck honked and someone finally dragged me to the curb.
Three or four times a day my mother asked what was wrong. After a few days she told Boris’s mother there was nothing for her to do but to keep her shoulder to the plow until she fell on her face. Boris’s mother said that was all anyone could do. Boris asked me where Lutek had disappeared to and I told him I didn’t know. His sister was always weeping and he told her to shut up from where he was lying on the floor. She rubbed her crippled hand, which was what she did to calm herself. My mother made a new project of painting the beds with turpentine and ammonia to kill the bedbugs but stayed sad that I wouldn’t talk with her. “Someday you’ll wish you had,” she said.
One night I got up and sat with her in the kitchen. She blew on the fire in the stove and waved a rag near the open grate and watched me scratch at my lice. When I was finished she asked if I was hungry. I asked if there was anything she could do about that and she said no.
Boris’s mother said from her pallet in the dark she’d heard that the refugees were taking over the apartments of those who starved to death or died of the typhus. She said that with the cold they invaded any place they could and chopped and burned whatever furniture they found. My mother said that nowadays they took the roof away from over your head the minute you turned your back.
And who was to stop them? Boris’s mother wanted to know.
No one should look for heroes on our street, my mother told her.
I told her not to get herself worked up and she told me that I always wanted to know why she was so upset and meanwhile here we all were, with everyone either dying or waiting their turn. Boris snickered from the hallway.
She said she wasn’t a young woman and that if it wasn’t for my sake she wouldn’t have had the strength to do this.
Do what? Boris wanted to know. Keep us all awake?
She said my still being here with her was beshert. Did I know what beshert meant?
I didn’t, I told her. I was tired of her talking.
Beshert meant “meant to be,” she said. She said she knew I needed her, even if I didn’t. She was wearing the nightshirt my father liked, though it wasn’t as warm, in case he came home in the middle of the night. I wiped my eyes so hard I blinded myself at first.
“Why do you act like this?” Boris’s mother said from her pallet. “Do you think your mother needs this now?”
“Shut up, all of you,” Boris said. When his sister whimpered he said, “You shut up too.”
My mother and I watched the embers in the stove through the grate. “I work and I worry,” she said. “That’s what I do.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“I know,” she said and then told me I should try to sleep.
I didn’t see Boris for a day and then he came home and stood in front of me, enraged. I asked where he’d been and he knocked me down with a forearm to my face. That night he threw my sleeping pallet into my mother’s room. She asked what was going on and I climbed into her bed.
She fell down the next morning when she tried to wash herself near the stove and we couldn’t get her up. At first Boris wouldn’t help but then finally we carried her to the hospital and a doctor who was sick himself told her she’d gotten the typhus she’d been waiting for. She passed out after he told her. They put her on a cot in the hallway and another patient beside her told her the news about America having entered the war. Her reaction disappointed him. She had such a fever I could feel the heat standing next to her and her chills were so bad the other sick people moved their cots farther away. While I sat with her she wept and tr
ied to keep covered up and apologized for the smell. Her diarrhea meant she had to keep getting up and she no longer had the energy to fully clean herself. She said she didn’t want me to catch anything and told me to leave and then asked me to stay. I told her she’d probably caught what she had from me.
They moved her to the quarantine ward and left her on a pallet in another hallway. No one gave her medicine. I was told I couldn’t stay but no one noticed I hadn’t left. A woman holding her baby shouted, “This is supposed to be a hospital! I should burn it down!” Her baby’s face was blue.
We were outside a separate quarantine room for children. When I looked in they never moved their hands but just lay there in their beds.
She wanted me to make sure Boris and his mother knew which hospital it was so my father and brothers would know where to find us. She sent me home to tell them. She told me to stay there but I went back and forth when she slept. They served her blood soup she liked and spit soup she didn’t. It was spit soup because it used unthreshed grain and the husks had to be spit out.
She was sick for ten days. “I was sad, I thought only of myself, I let you support me,” she told me on one of the days. “The holidays again,” she complained on another. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Her fever got bad and then better and then bad again. She asked if I had any good memories and I told her I did. She asked me to tell her some. I told about things I remembered from before we moved to the city. I told her I remembered a picnic in the woods with blackbirds around me in the thick grass and her standing over me and making a shadow for me in the bright sunlight. She said she knew what happened on the streets and that she saw it for herself. “You get like a little animal,” she said. “You lie, you cheat.”
I asked to see the doctor who’d told her she had the typhus and a nurse said he’d died. My mother was moved to another hallway on another floor and no one said why. “I wanted to be nusik,” she told me. She wiped her cheeks on the pillow to cool her face. She asked if I knew what nusik was and when I told her I didn’t she said that it was something good. Someone useful and smart. She said that if she’d been nusik, then people who couldn’t get along, people with problems, would have come to her. She would have listened. She would have contributed more than she had.
She stayed sick and the weather stayed windy and sleeting. The Hanukkah decorations fell over in the drafts from the door. She had more trouble breathing. Sometimes I slept under her cot but they found me and drove me downstairs so then I slept near the front doors under the portrait of the hospital’s founder.
“You’re like me,” she said one night after her breathing got so bad it woke us up. “You think if you stay quiet you’ll be able to keep going like everyone else.” She sounded so bad I found a nurse who brought her some beet marmalade and a glass of undiluted spirits.
The spirits made her cheeks red. She raised her eyebrows after a few sips as if she’d been given a treat. She asked if I wanted any. I told her that the first glassful was for her. She nodded. By then she was having such trouble breathing it sounded like she was whinnying.
She asked if I was sorry to have to go on without her. She asked if I thought I could do it. I looked into her face and wondered if she was really going to leave me. The thought made me so mad that I told her I could do anything and she set the glass of spirits on the floor and tried to sit up and I couldn’t tell from her expression how bad she felt or if this made it any better.
She said the light hurt her eyes so I went down the hall and switched it off. Some of the patients on the cots and the nurse sitting at the end of the hallway with her paperwork complained, but in the dark I could see my family again, my father in his white holiday shirt and my mother and my brothers and even my younger brother, all of their faces at that point blind to what was coming.
On my walk home the streets were very bad and icy. I slipped and fell more than once. It was after curfew but there was no moon and no one wanted to be out in the cold so no one saw me. I walked like I was part of my own funeral procession. At home I let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.
I WOKE ON MY MOTHER’S BLANKET TO THE SHRIEK OF a window wrenched open and in the kitchen Boris was throwing my clothes into the street. There’d been a knock on the door and he’d answered it but I hadn’t bothered to see who it was.
I stood in my nightshirt, blinking, my feet cold on the floor. His mother and sister were also in the doorway to their room.
“Leave him alone,” his sister said when she saw me. “His mother just died.”
“And now we’re quarantined,” Boris shouted. I thought he was about to kill me, like somebody might cross a street. “Do you know how much I’m going to have to pay to keep us out of that hospital?”
“That’s not his fault,” his sister said.
“How did they know where to find you and Lutek?” he asked me. “They were there waiting, before you were. I saw them.”
I stood at the sink and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. I couldn’t work out how to get the water going. “Maybe they got lucky,” his sister said.
“They weren’t even keeping watch,” he told her. “And when I asked you where he was then, you said you didn’t know,” he said to me.
He waited for me to answer.
“You just woke him up,” his sister said.
“Well?” he said.
“Sh’maya thinks only of himself,” I told him.
He looked at me. “If it had been my turn to go with you, it would have been me,” he said.
His sister told him she didn’t understand, so he explained it to her. I was an informer. I worked for the Gestapo. His sister backed up a step and looked at me like I had two heads.
“Won’t he tell the Germans if you throw him out?” she asked.
“No,” he told her, looking at me.
I dressed on the street in the snow. People passing by didn’t seem to find it strange. I pulled the sweater my mother had boiled over three of my shirts. My socks were soaked when I put on my shoes but they warmed up after a while.
There was nowhere to go. I spent the day walking around.
When curfew came I climbed down a covered cellarway and moved a trash bin to block the wind but still got so cold I had to move.
I made it to Adina’s building after hiding every few minutes because of the patrols. I knocked on her window and at first she wouldn’t open the shade and then she wouldn’t let me in. Finally, when I stood on the street and called her name, she opened the window a crack and tossed out some bread.
“Are you crazy?” she said. “Do you want to get me killed too?”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“This is all I have,” she said about the bread and then told me not to come back again and sent me away sobbing and eating it.
Toward the end of the night I found the block where Boris had ambushed the kid from the other gang and crawled down under the rubble into the caved-in cellar. I felt around in the dark for a place I could lie down. The kid he’d hit with the brick was gone. I stayed there and stole from street vendors or smaller kids when I got too hungry. I was a thief that janitors and porters chased away from their doorways with sweeps of their brooms. I drank snowmelt collected in a can. I lay for days under some blankets. When I went out for food starving people slipped out of dark corners and followed me and when one beggar got hold of something the rest of the pack knocked him down and ripped what he had from his hands and then others stole it from them. Once whatever it was was eaten, everyone went back to begging.
I tried to make myself invisible but kids who had nowhere to go were everywhere and the smaller ones trailed anyone who might have a better situation. I ran away from them but three or four found my cellar and told their friends.
After that I wandered without a plan. I was always without a plan. I slept between the chairs on an old orchestra stand.
It got c
older. A woman on the street felt bad when she saw me and gave me an extra pair of stockings to go over my socks but the elastics were broken. I helped another woman carry a milk canister and when we got to her place she gave me an extra coat.
I stole some cooked potatoes and when I finally stopped running and thought I was safe I walked right into Lutek’s sister.
“My God, how you look!” she said. She burst into tears and asked what had happened to her brother. She still had her stutter. She kicked at me and when a yellow policeman came over her friend dragged her away. I found myself on my hands and knees in the slush. The policeman stood over me and nudged me with his foot. Then he left. While I was weeping someone stole the potatoes I had taken.
It warmed up a little so my feet and hands got better. I lost track of the days. I passed a clinic that treated eye infections and started going inside. I let everyone in line get ahead of me so I could sit in the warm waiting room for a few hours. I found one of the buildings where they’d restarted a grammar school and slipped in and took a seat in the back. The teacher noticed but seemed to know why I was there and didn’t throw me out. Then through the window I saw Lutek’s father pass by outside and I never went back.
Near the hospital where my mother died I saw Lejkin and some other police stop someone and hid until they were gone.
I wandered the streets. I spent nights wedged into crannies like a spider. I gave up on thinking ahead. I walked back and forth.
A boy my age caught me trying to steal from his father’s shop while he was watching it and knocked me down with a club he had behind the counter and while I sat there crying and rubbing my head he tied my wrists with a rope and then tied the rope to a cart he had outside. He hefted the cart’s handles and started dragging me. I slipped and stumbled trying to free myself. He was talking about how tired he was of this and how he was going to take me to the Germans himself. But he tied the knot too loose and by scraping it against the back of the cart I got it free. He still didn’t know, dragging his cart along, and the street he turned us onto was empty. I looked at the back of his head. Somewhere he had a mother hoping he’d come home safe. I could take him from her like my mother was taken from me. But instead when I passed an alley I dropped the rope and ran.
