The Devil's Arithmetic

by Jane Yolen

  THEY SAT ON THE BENCHES NAKED AND COLD FOR A LONG time while the barber worked on each in turn. Hannah glanced around cautiously. With their hair gone, they all looked like little old men. She wondered what she looked like herself, resisting the urge to put her hand up to her head again. She would not think about it. Thinking was dangerous. In this place she would not think, only do.

  After a while, time seemed to lose its reality. Only the snick-snack of the scissors and the occasional cry of the barber’s victims marked the minutes. There was a dreamlike feeling in the room as if, Hannah thought, anything might happen next.

  The woman in the blue dress entered the far door and stood for a long moment examining them all with a sour face. Hannah happened to be facing the door when she entered and, without meaning to, locked eyes with her. It was the woman who looked away first, calling out, “Schnell! Into the next room. You must have clothes.” She turned abruptly, signaling with her hand. For the first time Hannah noticed that she had only three fingers on her right hand.

  I wonder how she lost those fingers, Hannah thought. Was she born that way? Then remembered she was not going to think. She rose with the others and shuffled out of the room after them.

  For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to feel hungry. But when she began to wonder about when they might be fed, the still, small voice reminded her, Don’t think, do. She reached out and found the hand of one of the children. Silently she squeezed the child’s hand for comfort.

  The room they were herded into was a small, low-ceilinged place with a single window high up under the eaves. It reminded Hannah of an attic somewhere, she couldn’t remember where. An unadorned light bulb dangled down over several long wooden tables piled high with rags.

  “Shmattes!” whispered a woman behind Hannah in a hoarse voice.

  “Choose!” bellowed the three-fingered woman in blue. “Schnell!”

  Hannah took her turn at one of the tables and started to paw through the clothes. They were ragged and worn and smelled peculiar, with a lingering, dank odor, part old sweat and part something else Hannah did not even want to guess at. She hesitated.

  “Choose, Jews. You cannot be fancy now.”

  Don’t think. Do. Hannah put her hand onto the pile and came up with a dark gray dress with a dirty white collar and cuffs. There was a ragged rip along the hem and deep perspiration stains under the arms. Looking around, she saw that the other women were already slipping into whatever they had chosen. She raised the gray dress over her head and pulled it down. The material was silky and a bit stiff where it was stained. Buttoning the three buttons in front, she remembered suddenly how she had thought the dark blue dress Gitl had given her ugly, how she’d called it a rag. Even that small return of memory was a comfort. She’d called the dress a rag; she hadn’t known anything about wearing rags then. Her arms strained the sleeves of the gray dress.

  “Help the children,” someone near her whispered. It sounded like Gitl.

  Hannah glanced down at the naked child by her side. Was it Tzipporah? The poor little thing had her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids were a bruised bluish color and she swayed where she stood. Hannah rummaged quickly through the pile of clothes and found a blouse and jumper that looked as if they might fit. The child made no move to help, and Hannah had to dress her as if she were a doll, pushing her arms into the sleeves of the blouse as gently as she could.

  They were herded directly into another room and made to line up single file. Another shaven-headed prisoner, with an odd-looking metal instrument, sat at a wooden table. There were guards at the door.

  Hannah could hear a mumble of voices by the table, but she couldn’t begin to guess what they were discussing. Holding Tzipporah’s hand, she moved in the slow, shuffling barefooted rhythm of the line: wait, walk, wait, walk.

  Closer to the table, she saw that the man was using the instrument to write something on each woman’s arm. Strangely, no one protested or drew their arm away.

  Another memory, hazier than the one about the dress, flooded back to her. “This . . .” She heard a familiar man’s voice crying out. “I’ll give them this!” She couldn’t think who it was or what he was giving to whom. When she turned to see who was speaking, everyone behind her was silent, staring at the floor.

  “Next!”

  The man meant Hannah. She walked up to the table and sat down on a chair by the side of the table.

  “Tell me your name,” the man said. “I will give you a number in exchange.”

  That seemed simple enough, but she couldn’t think of a name. There was none that came to her. From behind, Gitl whispered hoarsely, “Chaya. Chaya Abramowicz.”

  She said it aloud. “Chaya.” It felt—and it did not feel—like hers.

  The man looked at her and his eyes were the saddest she’d ever seen, a muddy brown, like river sludge. His mouth was puckered and old. It dropped open as easily as a slot in a machine, and a sound—not quite a cry—came out.

  “I knew it would come,” he whispered. “Some day. The malach ha-mavis.”

  “What? What?” Hannah asked.

  “That is my daughter’s dress you are wearing, Chaya Abramowicz. My Chaya. I brought it as a present for her in Lublin.”

  “Chaya,” Hannah said.

  “The same name, too. God is good. Your name means life.” His voice broke.

  “Life,” Hannah repeated.

  He nodded, then shook his head, the one following the other like a single movement. “You are Chaya no longer, child. Now you are J197241. Remember it.”

  “I can’t remember anything,” Hannah said, puzzled.

  “This you must remember, for if you forget it, life is gone indeed.” The tattooing pen burned her flesh, leaving a trail of blue numbers in her arm above the wrist. J197241. She didn’t cry. She wouldn’t. It was something more she just remembered: her promise to Gitl.

  When the man finished the number, he reached out and touched the collar of her dress, smoothing it down gently. “Live,” he whispered. “For my Chaya. For all our Chayas. Live. And remember.”

  There was a loud clearing of a throat and Hannah looked up into the guard’s unsmiling face. “Next!” he said.

  Little Tzipporah was next, and Hannah held the child on her lap, covering her eyes with ice-cold hands and crooning a song into her ears. It was a wedding song, the only song she could come up with, something about a madness forced upon them. The words didn’t matter, only the melody, only the soothing rhythm. The child, Tzipporah, J197242, lay silent in her arms.

  The barracks they were assigned had a long brick oven along one end and deep trenches on the sides in which sleeping shelves were placed, like triple bunk beds, at impossibly narrow intervals. Privies were outside.

  Hannah helped Tzipporah onto one of the low shelves. There were neither blankets nor pillows, but the child did not complain. She curled into a fetal position and lay still, her thumb back in her mouth.

  “I will see if there is any food,” Hannah whispered to her. “And socks. And shoes. I will see if there are blankets. Or pillows. You sleep.” When she stood up, she saw Gitl helping Fayge onto another shelf, about halfway down the building. She knew it was Fayge because, even with her hair shorn, her face the color of an old book, and wearing a shapeless brown print dress, Fayge had an unearthly beauty. But her eyes were strangely blank; she moved where Gitl pushed her.

  Gitl looked up and stared at Hannah. Putting her hands on her hips, barely covering the garish flowers on the red print dress, she smiled mockingly. “So?”

  “So!” Hannah whispered back. In that dark, cold place it seemed a kind of affirmation. At that very moment, her stomach rumbled, horribly loud in the silence of the barracks room. That, too, had the sound of life.

  Gitl’s head went back and she roared with laughter.

  “How can you laugh?” Hannah asked, shocked.

  “How can you not?” Gitl said. “Without laughter, there is no hope. Without hope, there is no life. With
out life . . .”

  “Without life . . .” Hannah’s voice trailed off, remembering the old tattooer.

  “Without food there is no life,” Gitl said. “We will go and see if any of these monsters believes in food.”

  The moment they tried to set a foot outside, a guard blocked their way. With their Yiddish, they were just able to understand his German.

  “You will not leave,” he said, his baby face stern.

  “We have children in here who have not eaten for days,” Gitl answered.

  “They will get used to it,” the soldier said as if the words were rote in his mouth. “They will get used to it.”

  “Just like the farmer who trained his horse to eat less and less,” said Gitl. “And just when he had gotten it to the point of learning to eat nothing at all, the ingrate up and died. I suppose you have heard that story?”

  “I hear nothing important from Jews,” the soldier said. “But I have something important to tell them. See that?” He pointed to a brick chimney towering over a flat-roofed building where a thin line of smoke curled lazily into the air. “That’s Jew smoke! Learn to eat when it’s given to you, Jew, or you, too, go up that stack.”

  “Jew smoke?” Gitl whispered. But the soldier was already closing the door against her protesting hands.

  Hannah bit her lip. The smokestack and the ominous black curl emerging from it, dissipating against the bright blue sky, reminded her of something. Yet she couldn’t quite touch it. It slipped away from her. Something about smoke. About fire. About ovens. “Oven,” she whispered.

  “Well,” Gitl said, “at least we know something.”

  Hannah looked up at her, the slip of memory gone. “What?”

  “That we will be fed.”

  “When?”

  “God only knows. And let us hope that He tells the Germans!”

  They turned back to stare around them, straining into the darkness of the barracks. Hannah saw that almost all the sleeping shelves were filled. The women and children lay as still as corpses.

  “Look, not even the thought of food tempts them,” Gitl said.

  Hannah could not keep herself from rubbing her eyes. The thought of sleep, horizontal sleep, suddenly overwhelmed her.

  “What am I thinking of?” Gitl said, the heel of her palm striking her forehead. “You are only a child. You need sleep as well as food.” She put her hand out to touch Hannah on the head and then, as if thinking better of it, patted her instead on the shoulder. “Go to sleep, Chaya.”

  “Go to sleep . . .” Hannah glanced down at her wrist. “Go to sleep, J197241, you mean.”

  “You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me. You are my brother’s child. You are my blood.”

  Hannah shook her head slowly, but neither she nor Gitl knew what she really meant by it. She rubbed her fingers across the numbers on her sore arm as if memorizing them. Then she let Gitl lead her to an unoccupied shelf, where she rolled herself onto it and, without even minding the rough surface, fell asleep.

  She dreamed of roast beef, sweet wine, and bitter herbs.

  13

  HANNAH WOKE TO A STRANGE MECHANICAL BELLOWING. For a moment, she thought it was the clock radio by her bed. She sat up suddenly and hit her head with a loud crack on the shelf above her. Stunned, she looked around. Clock radio? The words sat lumpily in her mind. She was not sure what a clock radio was. Besides, her head hurt where she’d banged it and her back ached from lying on the hard shelf. Even her leg hurt. She drew her knee up to look. There was caked blood and a big scab along her shin.

  Then she remembered: the trip in the cattle car, the long hungry days, the heat and the cold, the smell, the dead baby, the tattoo, the shorn hair. Cautiously she reached up and felt her head. What hair was left was a stubble. She did not dare look at the number on her arm.

  Swinging her legs carefully over the side of the shelf, she eased herself onto the floor, aware that the bellowing horn had stopped. Others in the barracks were performing the same slow unfolding. She looked around, her eyes and mind still fuzzed with sleep.

  The door to the barracks was flung open and a guard stuck his head in.

  “If you want food, get in line. Now. Schnell. You must eat. Hungry Jews are dead Jews. Dead Jews do not work.”

  “Food!” Hannah whispered to herself, and the dream she’d had came back to her: all that Seder food and the familiar faces around the table, faces she could almost—but not quite—name. She imagined the taste of the roast beef and saliva filled her mouth. Standing, she smoothed down the wrinkled skirt of her dress and looked around for Gitl.

  Gitl was bending over one of the lowest shelves. Hannah recognized her by the awful red print dress. Hurrying over, Hannah called out, “Food, Gitl! They’ll give us food. If we hurry. At last!”

  Gitl stood up slowly and stared past Hannah to the door as if she did not see her. Her mouth whispered something but no sound came out, and her hands clenched and unclenched into fists.

  Something forced Hannah to bend down and stare into the shelf. Little Tzipporah lay curled in a ball, her finger in her mouth like a stopper in a bottle. There was a fly on her cheek. Hannah reached out to brush it off.

  “Do not touch her,” Gitl said.

  “But . . .” Hannah’s hand hovered over the child’s cheek and the fly that would not leave.

  “I said: Do not touch her!” Gitl’s voice was strangely hoarse.

  Hannah still reached toward the fly, unbelieving, and Gitl grabbed her hand, spinning her around. She slapped Hannah’s face twice. “Do not,” slap, “touch her,” slap.

  Then, as suddenly, she put her arms around Hannah with such force, Hannah gasped. Gitl buried her face against Hannah’s shoulder, sobbing, “Yitzchak . . . what will I say . . . Tzipporah . . . he must be told . . . what can I . . . monsters!”

  It was all Hannah could do to free her arms enough so that she could pat Gitl’s shorn head, touching it with as much tenderness as she could muster, while her cheeks still burned from the unwarranted slaps.

  They were the last ones out of the barracks. Even Fayge had managed to get onto the proper food line before them, with the help of one of the women from her village. Emerging from the building, blinking into the noon sun, Hannah saw that Gitl’s eyes were dry but they still held a reserve of some awful unspoken anger.

  The line moved quickly, silently. At the first table, a girl handed them each a metal bowl. Plain-faced, with a broad forehead and deep-set brown eyes, she greeted them with a smile as if they were old friends. Hannah guessed she couldn’t have been more than ten years old, yet her face seemed ageless.

  “You must take good care of your bowl,” the girl said to them. It was obvious she had recited these same words to each group of newcomers, yet her voice held a sweetness and a patience quite out of keeping with the information she delivered. “I call them Every Bowls because they are everything to us. Without the bowl, you cannot have food, you cannot wash, you cannot drink. Memorize your bowl—its dents, its shape. Always know where you have put it. There are no replacements.” She winked at Hannah. “That is the official speech. My mother, may she rest in peace, used to give it and now I take her place. If you meet me tonight after supper, I will tell you the rest. And if you cannot find me, ask anyone for Rivka. Rivka.”

  Too exhausted to react, Hannah nodded and held up her bowl for its dipperful of watery potato soup. At the next table, she was given a small slab of dark bread. She began to eat even before she left the line. She was too hungry to eat slowly, and the soup and bread were gone before she had time to look around.

  After the meal, the zugangi were lined up again in what seemed to Hannah to be a totally arbitrary order, orchestrated by the same three-fingered woman. She dealt out slaps and pushes with such fervor that they all did her bidding without protest. Hannah managed to dodge a slap. The slap meant for her hit Shifre, who cried out in pain and was hit again
for the noise. Hannah bent her shoulders over against Shifre’s muffled sobbing, guilty because she had been the cause of it, relieved because the blow had not fallen upon her.

  When they were lined up to the woman’s satisfaction, she nodded abruptly and walked to the front to address them.

  “You wonder what to expect from now on?” she asked. “I will tell you what to expect. Hard work, that is what. Hard work and more hard work. And punishment if you do not perform well and on time, without complaints.”

  Her speech was short enough that Hannah took a deep breath in relief. She was just starting to relax when a man in a dark uniform jangling with medals walked over to the woman. The woman bowed her head and then looked up at the gathering of prisoners, smiling an awful warning.

  Standing for a long moment, hands behind his back, the officer silently surveyed them. Hannah felt as if he were looking deep inside her, toting up her abilities, guessing at her chances. Someone else she knew stood that way. Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Mr. Unsward. She had the name and could almost see him in her mind’s eye, but she couldn’t remember who he was, only that he was someone who stood up in front of a group and shook his head just like that. She wondered if she should smile at the officer and whether it might help. Sometimes it worked in school. With Mr. Unsward. In school! There—she had it, an elusive slip of memory. Then as quickly it faded, replaced by another, much more vivid memory: little Tzipporah, lying still on the low shelf, her finger corked so finally in her mouth. That image stopped any chance of a smile.

  The officer cleared his throat. “You will have discipline,” he said suddenly, without preamble. “You will work hard. You will never answer back, complain, or question. You will not try to escape. You will do this for the Fatherland. You will do it—or you will die.” The officer turned smartly on his heel and left.

  Then the three-fingered woman came forward to tell them about the work that lay ahead and what they were to expect each day.

  Above them, a quartet of swallows dipped and circled, twittering madly as they plunged after insects. There was a drone of machinery somewhere off to the right. In the distance, beyond another long row of barracks, Hannah could see a single strand of smoke rising against the bright spring sky, curling endlessly out of a tall chimney stack.