Joshua is in his office, on the phone, and though I am supposed to be typing addresses on billing envelopes and preparing his schedule for the rest of the week, I find myself, instead, furtively watching the elevator and nodding my head as Shelby wonders off and on if she should ask Ron about the hussy. They had such a nice weekend together, feeding the ducks in Fairmount Park and having a picnic. Maybe she shouldn’t . . . ?
“I don’t know,” I murmur, wondering if Ron is anything like me, and if it will even matter if she asks or not, if he will dare tell her the truth. But maybe he will. If she asks enough, maybe he will be forced to.
Lying can be a second skin, but when you are called out on a lie, it becomes all too easy for that skin to start to peel away. I have been called out before, in my life in America, but never here. Not with Shelby or Joshua. Before, it was my sponsor, Ilsa, as she looked over my shoulder when I filled out my job application.
“You list Poland as your country of birth?” she asked. I nodded. “I thought you were born in Germany?”
“I lived in Germany as a child,” I said, and that was not a lie. I did live in Germany as a child. Ilsa frowned, but she didn’t question me any further. Even if she had, I would not have told her the truth, that I was born in Germany, but in my American life, I want nothing to do with Germany. And even though I lived there for many years, I did not dare write Holland, for it is the country everyone most closely associates with my sister. I settled on Poland for my lie because it seemed a believable explanation for my accent. And I was there, once, a place west of Kraków. I did not know it at the time, but that is where I was. I died there. Afterward, I was born again. A new person. A Gentile.
Jestes diablem.
In my head now, these words, they drown out the sound of Shelby’s voice.
Fifteen minutes past three, I watch her step off the elevator, cautiously, reading the signs above her as if she’s not quite sure she’s in the right place. True Americans, like Shelby and Joshua, always walk with a particular sense of confidence. This woman, I can tell, just from her walk, is not a born American. She is like me.
I look at her carefully as she approaches my desk. I think she is older than me, though it is hard to tell. Her black hair is streaked with gray and pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She wears a black half-sleeved dress and looks nothing in the slightest like the clients who usually step off the elevator, most of whom are men, dressed in richly layered three-piece suits.
“Czesc,” I say to her. Hello. The Polish word, learned yesterday at the library, finds me again as she approaches my desk, and I smile in relief. My studies, they will not fail me, even if they were hastily done.
She narrows her brown eyes at me. “Bryda Korzynski,” she says. “I speak English.” I nod. “I have appointment,” she tells me.
“Have a seat.” I point to the chairs off to the side of my desk. “I’ll buzz Mr. Rosenstein to let him know you’re here.”
She turns, and when she does, I catch something by the lip of her sleeve, on her left forearm, just a trace of dark blue ink, the familiar echo of the letter A.
I blink, and then the image, it is gone. The sleeve has gone back, and she is sitting in the chair across from my desk. I open my mouth, but then no sound comes out. Since coming to America, I have not seen a tattoo like this on anyone else, and the idea of it now, here, in the safety of the office where I work, it unnerves me. Perhaps it was something else, I tell myself. Perhaps the movie being so fresh, my thoughts of Poland, they are making me crazy, making me see things that aren’t even here.
“Is there problem?” Bryda asks, frowning at me, and I realize I am still staring.
“No.” I quickly shake my head and depress the intercom button to let Joshua know she’s here.
Inside Joshua’s office, Bryda Korzynski lifts up her sleeve and thrusts her arm in Joshua’s direction.
I sit in a side chair, observing, as Joshua has asked, though I am not sure if he asks me to interpret I will be able to speak at all. Not because of the Polish but because of the tattooed number, right there, on her arm, in Joshua’s face. I wasn’t mistaken.
Joshua shakes his head. “Miss Korzynski, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine.” His face turns for a moment, darkens in a way I have rarely seen from him, and I think it’s because he is a Jew. I suppose that’s why Bryda is here in his office, thrusting her arm in his face. If I were her friend, I would tell her that American Jews are different, that they don’t understand what it was like to wear a yellow star, to not be allowed to ride your bike or even the bus. They will think they understand, because religion is religion, and Jews have always been a persecuted people. But you cannot understand what you cannot really imagine, and they cannot really imagine it. No matter how much they think they can or how many books they’ve read or movies they’ve seen. In America the Jews still prosper. They are lawyers with houses in Margate and also on the Main Line. I cannot bring myself to hate Joshua for this, though, as it is not his fault, where he was born, what he was born into.
“So,” Joshua says, “let’s talk more about what we discussed on the phone. You said you have a Jewish problem that you want me to handle because I am a Jewish lawyer, right?”
She nods and she thrusts her arm in his face again. “You see this? I already suffer at hands of Nazi. My mother, she gassed immediately after we arrive to Auschwitz. Dominik, my brother, he sent to work and he die in Mauthausen after death march. My father, he die of cholera in Neuengamme. I only one to survive it.”
The names of the camps fall in my brain, in her thick Polish accent. Her words hurt; they are sharp. Needles. Mauthausen, where Peter was said to have died, and I think uneasily of the tiniest of squares that has sat in the bottom of my satchel for nearly a week now.
I look up, and I realize Joshua has said something to me. “I’m sorry.” I shake my head and pull my sweater tighter around my body. “What did you say?”
“I was telling Miss Korzynski that you are also from Poland. But you were lucky that you weren’t there, during the war, right?”
I nod, hanging on to the lie. It was one of the first things he’d asked me, at my job interview, and I’d forced myself to smile then as I’d told Joshua I had gotten the American version of wartime, like him.
Bryda Korzynski stares at me, as if she can see through me. Her eyes are hard brown stones. I wrap my sweater tighter around my body.
When she turns back to look at Joshua, I exhale, not even realizing I’ve been holding my breath. “Anyway,” she says, “the Nazi take everything from me. My family. My life. My country. I don’t even sleep without the nightmares anymore.” She pauses and shakes her head, as if she’s thinking about them. The nightmares. I know them so well, the way screams torture you in the dark. Voices of your family crying for help you cannot give. My sister holding on to my hand with all her remaining strength. The sounds of gunshots breaking my ears.
“I’m very sorry,” Joshua says, “But I still don’t understand how I can help you.”
“My boss is Nazi too,” she says. “And now after the war and now that Anne Frank movie so popular, everybody know you cannot be Nazi anymore. Not in America.”
I bite my lip, drowning in the mention of my sister’s name, said correctly, in Bryda’s thick Polish accent. And then I wonder if Bryda has missed the articles in the paper about the hatred against Jews in Philadelphia. And not just in 1954, but even still, now, my eyes catch on something, all too often. Swastikas painted on synagogues. This was the latest I’d seen, a few weeks earlier.
“Your boss?” Joshua is saying now, and he frowns.
“Mr. Robertson,” she says.
“Robert Robertson?” Joshua raises his eyebrows. It is a name I recognize. Robert Robertson is a prominent local businessman who owns several clothing factories, and who has once or twice brought some business to the firm. “I don’t e
ven think he’s German,” Joshua says kindly. I could not form the words to speak, to tell him that not all anti-Semites are German, even if I wanted to.
She shakes her head. “My friend, she nice Christian girl.”
“Like Miss Franklin here?” Joshua smiles in my direction, and Bryda narrows her eyes at me, so I am forced to look away.
“Anyway,” she says. “She work same hours as me and make two dollar more a week.”
“Has she worked there longer?” Joshua asks.
Bryda shakes her head again. “No, I work there two year more than her.”
“And you think this is because you’re a Jew?” Joshua asks.
She nods. “All the Jews, we make less money. But everyone afraid to complain. President say there hard times. Who else will hire us?”
“I’m sorry,” Joshua says. “That’s really awful.”
“You no be sorry, Mr. Rosenstein. You help me.” She pauses. “My English, it not so good. So maybe I confuse you little bit.”
“I think I’m understanding you,” Joshua says. “You want your boss to pay you what he pays your friend.”
“I want him to pay, yes,” she says. “But not just money. Understand what I say?”
“I understand,” Joshua says. But I wonder if he really does. In German, the way to say it would be Jedem das Seine. But I am not exactly sure what the right word would be in American English.
Bryda sighs. “For so many years I suffer as Jew. Why I still have to suffer, here, in America?”
Joshua nods slowly. “Well, on your own I’m not sure we really have a case but . . .” He rubs his chin the way I’ve seen his father, Ezra, who has a thick white beard, do. Only Joshua’s chin is smooth, like a boy’s. “If we get others. A group litigation.”
Bryda frowns, clearly confused, but from my studying I know exactly what a group litigation is. But I cannot speak, even if I might want to. I am frozen, Bryda’s words about the suffering of Jews echoing in my head.
“That means we’ll get other people from Robertson’s factories, like you, to join in on the suit,” Joshua explains. “If we have more people, we’ll have more power to fight.” He rubs his chin again. “I’ll tell you what, let me talk this over with my father. His name is the one you see on the sign out front.” She nods. “And in the meantime, can you do something for me? Can you make a list of everyone you know who might be interested in joining you?”
“Yes,” Bryda says, and her eyes follow Joshua’s face in the way mine so often do. Suddenly Joshua is her Jewish American hero.
CHAPTER NINE
EVEN AFTER BRYDA LEAVES THE OFFICE, I CANNOT CONCENTRATE on my work because I cannot erase the image of her number, right there, so horrible and obvious, on her forearm. I want to forget about it. But I cannot.
I stare at my typewriter for a while after she leaves. I cannot exactly remember the look of Bryda’s face. But the look of the numbers, the way they were preceded by a sharp dark blue A, I can remember without hesitation.
I know it’s because I was in Poland during the war, just like Bryda. I did not want to be there; I did not really know it at the time. But I was.
In 1944, Mother, my sister, and I waited in line after we were unloaded from the cargo train by thick black-booted men. They had pulled our arms, throwing us off the train as if we really were cargo, laughing, joking with one another in German as they did it, cigarettes hanging loosely from their mouths, thick rings of smoke swirling above their heads. We’d just been transported from Westerbork camp in Holland to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. It was the beginning of September, a month after we’d been ripped from the annex. The sun was shining. To walk in it, it actually still hurt my skin, as if its rays were overexposing me, after so much time hidden away.
We stood in line, and I held on tightly to my sister with one hand, my mother, with the other. Mrs. van Pels was somewhere behind us.
“We’ll be killed,” my sister whispered to me as we waited there for what felt like forever, the soles of our feet beginning to burn from standing still. It was warm outside, and we were sweating, thirsty. Even my sister’s whisper sounded hoarse.
“Shhh,” I told her. “No, we will not.” I felt I was lying to her then, but it seemed a necessary lie. I was terrified she would hear the pounding of my own heart in my chest. “Just do what they tell you,” I whispered slowly. “Don’t struggle.”
The woman in front of us in line was an older lady, older than Mother by twenty years at least, and her back was already hunched; her arms fell frail around her sides. The guards yelled at us in German to undress, and when she was naked, her flesh hung off her bones, loose, wrinkly. It seemed she was too old to be so naked.
Then the guards came to shave us, and she began shouting. “Jestes diablem. Jestes diablem.” She shouted it, over and over again. So loud, her voice hurt my ears.
“You are the devil,” Mother whispered, translating. “It’s Polish.” Mother knew a little Polish from a childhood friend.
My sister’s almond eyes opened wide, the way they often did. “She’s so brave,” she whispered.
“Don’t even think it,” I whispered to her, because it seemed they must have had a way of knowing then, even our thoughts. When you are stripped naked, shaved bare, nothing is yours anymore, nothing is left.
We stood in line again for a long time, and her words, they began to hurt my ears. My bare flesh turned numb. My ears felt like they were bleeding. Jestes diablem. The Polish woman screamed and she screamed.
The guard held her down as he tattooed her arm, and then he shoved her roughly and yelled at her in German to shut up. She was still screaming.
Finally another guard came and pulled her away into the other line, made up of people, I would later learn, who were immediately gassed, instead of put to work. They were not supposed to tattoo you if you were to be gassed right away, but with her, they made an exception.
My sister was standing just in front of me watching all of this. I saw her open her mouth, and I covered it with my hand and pushed her back behind me so I could be tattooed before her. I wanted her to see that it wouldn’t be so bad.
“It’s only a little ink, just a number. Don’t scream,” I whispered to her. “Don’t struggle. Just be quiet and do what they ask.”
Her almond eyes stared back at me, so wide they could burst. She opened her mouth again but no sound came out.
I held out my arm, closed my eyes. My skin singed and cried out in pain, but I did not say a word. I bit my lip.
I opened my eyes again, and there it was, thick dark ink on my forearm: The letter A, followed by five seemingly random numbers.
My sister went just after me, and her number was one digit higher than mine.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Mother said afterward. “It is nothing. It cannot mean something. We cannot make nothing mean something, girls.”
“When we go home, it’ll be a badge of honor,” my sister said.
“Margie.” Shelby interrupts my thoughts. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yes,” I whisper. So many ghosts. Everywhere, all the time. I am one myself, am I not?
“Your face is so flushed,” Shelby says. “It’s warm in here. Take your sweater off. It’s 1959, for goodness’ sakes. A girl can show a little skin.” She laughs and holds out her own bare pale freckled arms, which radiate from her blue cotton short-sleeved dress.
But I shake my head. I will not take my sweater off. I will never take it off.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN I WALK OUTSIDE AT 5 P.M., MY ARM THROUGH SHELBY’S, who is trying to convince me to go get a drink with her, I see Bryda Korzynski sitting on the bench outside the office building, and then I think my heart may stop.
She stares right at me: brown eyes, hard like stones. So I know she has been waiting there, just for me.
“You go on ahead,” I murmur to Shelby. “I should study tonight.” But I’m wondering whether I can outrun Bryda. I am a fast runner. I outran a train, once; outran the men who I thought were chasing after me. When my life depends on it, I can run.
“Oh, Margie,” Shelby says. “One of these days I’ll loosen you up a little bit.” Paragon of virtue, my sister taunts in my head, the way she always did when she teased me about being too good. But Shelby goes on without me, without any more of a fuss, because, as she mentioned in the elevator on the way down, Ron has agreed to leave work early for once and meet her there.
“Miss Franklin,” Bryda says. She doesn’t stand, but I stop by the bench. Mainly because she is Joshua’s client and I don’t want her to tell him I am rude. Without that, I’m pretty sure I would be running right now.
“Yes,” I say to her. “Can I help you with something?”
“You not from Poland,” she says.
“What?” I let out a laugh that catches in my throat, so it’s possible it’s not a laugh at all, but a scream. “It’s been a long time. But I am,” I say. Lying is a second skin. It suits me better than the first one, maybe. It is not the kind of skin a paragon of virtue wears, is it?
“Where in Poland?” she asks, her eyes narrowing to slits.
“Kraków,” I say, too quickly.
“You not from Kraków,” she says. “Austria, maybe. Germany?”
I shake my head. “But I am,” I say meekly. “It’s just been so long.”
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