And then I notice—how did I miss it before—that there’s a pretty good view up here. Past the gardens and the outer walls, past the river, all the way to a bunch of other buildings, including some houses. They couldn’t be more than a thousand feet from where we’re standing. Do regular people live over there? Regular people who can just come and go whenever they feel like it? People who can do whatever they want, including not stand in long lines for tiny, lousy meals and not sleep in rooms crammed with forty other people, where you get only one little shelf for all your things, which actually turns out to be plenty of space, because you barely even own anything anymore?
And do they have any idea what’s going on inside this place? That it’s packed with more than fifty thousand people with yellow stars on their chests? Which has to be ten times more people than should be here to begin with? Fifty thousand prisoners who still don’t know why they’re here or what they did wrong? And that maybe kids and regular adults can somehow handle it, but for some reason the old people can’t, because yesterday I saw a cart with at least ten of them, all dead, being pushed right down the middle of the street running right past our building. Most of them were covered in blankets, but only most. Like it was no big deal, like this is just—
“Misha! Misha!” Gida shouts, and elbows me.
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“What? Yeah, of course—”
“So can you play wing or not?”
“Yeah,” I say, because I can. At least I could, back when I used to play soccer, whenever that was.
* * *
“C’mon,” Felix says, “One to zero. No problem. Time for an equalizer.”
It’s me, Felix, Brena, and two other kids against everyone else. Felix is amazing. I can’t even tell if he’s a righty or a lefty. And Brena might be slow, but he’s a pretty solid goalie, because it could easily be 3–0. The other two kids—I think their names are Gustav and Arnosht—they aren’t bad defenders, but when Pudlina has the ball, they’ve got no chance.
Which means I’m the problem. It’s like my feet have never seen a soccer ball before. And I’m still out of breath. The other team keeps doubling Felix, leaving me open. Like right now. And here comes another pass my way. Only I can’t do a thing with it. Gida just takes it from me again, like we agreed I’d give it to him all along. Plus my shoe keeps coming untied.
I look up from my stupid laces to see Gida score, again.
“Sorry,” I tell Felix a couple of goals later. The last one made it 3–1. “I swear I used to be good, I swear.”
Felix isn’t looking at me, just biting the edge of his lip. “Don’t worry about it.” He wipes his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Just cut to the goal. I’ll get it to you.”
And I try, but I’m actually getting worse somehow. I ran to the goal, like he told me to, and he got it to me, like he said he would. But when I brought my foot forward, I somehow kicked the entirely wrong side of the ball, and the thing shot straight out of bounds.
I can tell Felix is fed up with me, because now he’s trying to do it all by himself. But as good as he is, his brother Pudlina might even be better. Together with Pedro, they’re too much for him.
“Goal!!!!” Pedro shouts.
4–1.
I’m about to offer to switch with Gustav and play defense when Brena comes over, grabs the edge of my sleeve and pulls me to Felix.
“I think I know what the problem is,” he says to Felix, and I feel my face get heavy. I’m about to tell them I just remembered I promised to help Franta with something after lunch, when Brena adds, “He doesn’t know the chant.”
Felix squints at me. “You don’t?”
Chant? What chant?
I shrug my shoulders.
“Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim,” Brena says very quietly. “Gustav and Arnosht aren’t Nesharim, so technically we shouldn’t be using it right now.”
“Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Felix says, “Go, go, go, Nesharim. It’s our chant. For when we play other rooms. Franta made it up. He’s our coach.”
“We have a coach?” I ask.
“Of course we have a coach,” Felix says. “What kind of team doesn’t have a coach?”
“We have a team?” I ask.
Brena laughs. “For sure we do. And we’re good, too. Way better than Theresienstadt Sparta, that Gustav and Arnosht play on. A few weeks ago we killed them, six to one.”
“Seven to one,” Felix says.
“Can I be on the team?” I ask.
“Are you one of the Nesharim?” Felix asks
“Yeah.”
“Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim,” Brena says, nodding his head, almost singing.
I try it out. “Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim.”
“Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim.” Felix says it, and a moment later we’re all saying it together in a low, loud whisper, our heads nearly touching.
“C’mon!” Koko shouts from the other side of the field. “Enough of the chitchat.”
Felix pats my shoulder a couple of times and pushes me over to my side of the field.
And it’s not like my shoes are any better or my lungs suddenly remembered how to switch to high gear, but something’s different. Every time I mess up, which is about every thirty seconds, I tell myself, Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim, and it’s like . . . well I don’t know exactly what it’s like, but it’s good. Or at least not so bad.
Felix passes me the ball, and I actually control it this time. I think about shooting, but instead, just as Pedro’s almost on me, I pass it back to Felix, who flies past Erich.
4–2.
Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim. I tell it to myself over and over. The words match up with my breath and somehow bring it under control.
Gida’s dribbling toward me, when I suddenly figure it out. He likes to fake right and go left. So, just like that, I put my foot out by his left. Next thing I know, I have the ball. I kick it over to Felix.
4–3.
Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim. By now the words are just repeating themselves in my head. I don’t even have to think them. And the voice is mine and not mine at the same time. It’s a bunch of voices actually. Felix’s and Brena’s for sure, but then there are other voices too.
Like Franta’s. And I barely know his voice, but I hear it loud and clear, probably because this was his chant first. I hear how he explains stuff to us and reads us stories and tells us to get out of bed in the morning. The way his voice is always super firm and super kind at the very same time.
The ball’s headed my way. Rim, rim, rim, tempo Nesharim. But those aren’t the only voices. Because I hear Father’s voice too. Of course I do. Because he’s the one who would always tell me not to get upset when I made a mistake. He’s the one who always said I could do whatever I wanted if I just focused. He’s the one who picked me up after I fell off my bike the day he first taught me how to ride. He squatted down, hugged me, and wiped the cut on my knee. When he asked me, almost in a whisper, if I was ready to try again, I was. And five minutes later I could ride as if I always knew how.
It’s so weird, because I realize I’ve been trying not to think of Father. For months now. Because why feel that sad all over again? But this time, thinking of him makes me feel something else, too. Sure I’m sad, but I’m more than that, I’m whatever the name is for not feeling that everything’s always going to be as bad as it’s been lately, for feeling that maybe this place, Terezin, might actually be kind of good overall.
I control the ball and look out over the field. Gida’s in front of me. Pedro and Erich are over by Felix. If I can get past Gida, that leaves just me and Koko, their goalie.
So I decide to give Gida a little dose of his own medicine. Fake right, go left. And what do you know, now I’m dribbling fast toward Koko. He’s bearing down, waiting for my shot. I plant my left foot and bring my right forward.
Rim, rim, rim,
tempo Nesharim.
I kick the ball harder than I’ve ever kicked a ball before. But it just sort of makes a weird fart sound, bends around my foot, and squirts ahead a few feet. The voices in my head disappear, and soon I’m just standing there in the middle of all that silence, on top of the fortress wall, staring at a huge dent in the dirt.
“Oh, man!” Koko shakes his head and runs over.
Felix arrives, picks up the dead ball, and flattens the thing between his hands. The ball offers up one last fart.
“I told you that liner was about to go,” Gida says, catching up to us.
“Sorry,” I say, but no one says anything.
“I heard that Room Nine has a decent ball,” Felix says.
“Or we could just play with the rag ball,” Koko says, “like we did last week.”
“No way,” Gida says, “a tin can is better than that thing.”
“No it’s not!” Koko says.
“Whatever,” Felix says. “We need to get back anyway. Tie game.”
“Tie?” Koko says. “What are you talking about, tie? We won four to three.”
“Misha was about to score,” Felix says. “You saw it, he was—”
“About to score,” Pudlina says, grabbing the flat, dirty circle and throwing it pointlessly back toward the rest of the camp.
The four of them, along with everyone else, run down the hill, kicking the flat ball back and forth and arguing about the score. I look back at the houses on the other side of the river, take a couple of deep breaths, and race to catch up.
November 26, 1942
“HEY,” JIRI SAYS, “WANT TO hear a joke?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Okay,” Jiri says, leaning on his rake. “So, two Jewish kids are walking along a street in Prague, when two guys from the SS approach them. They stop the Jews and ask, ‘Who started the war?’ The Jewish kids answer just like they were taught to. ‘The Jews,’ they say. The SS soldiers are satisfied with the answer and start walking away from the boys. But then they hear the boys say something and laugh, so the Nazis come back and say, ‘What did you say? Why are you laughing?’ So one of the Jewish boys says, ‘And the bicyclists.’ The soldiers, very confused, ask, ‘Why the bicyclists?’ So the boy shrugs his shoulders and replies, ‘I don’t know. Why the Jews?’ ”
I smile, but don’t really laugh.
“Don’t you get it?” Jiri asks.
“I think I do,” I say, and start laughing a little.
“Hey, Kapr,” Jiri says, “Misha doesn’t think the bicyclists joke is funny.”
“Because it isn’t,” Kapr says without looking up from his rake.
“What are you talking about?” Jiri says. “It’s hilarious.”
“Hey, who’s that?” I ask Jiri.
He drops his small rake to the ground and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Who’s who?” he asks.
“That girl,” I whisper, even though she’s probably a hundred feet from us.
Jiri follows my eyes over to the line of girls our age spreading hay or straw over the dirt we’ve already raked. We’re preparing the gardens for the winter, not that I know what that actually means. But somehow Mother got me this job out here, I guess she wanted me to be out in the fresh air. All the guys say this is a good job, even if I’m not exactly sure why. So I work here all day, instead of participating in the Program. I’m still not sure how serious that whole thing is, though I did hear one of the guys talking about a test yesterday.
What I do know for sure is that there aren’t many plants left at this point, though every once in a while I notice a carrot in the dirt that someone missed. Every time I see one, it’s like seeing a little bit of gold, because in just the short time I’ve been here I’ve already noticed we’re getting less and less recognizable food to eat. And it’s not that I like vegetables very much, but here you’re glad to have anything that you know is real.
“Which girl?” Jiri asks, a little annoyed. “There’s got to be thirty of them over there.”
“That one.” I point with my elbow. “With the red hair and the blue thing on her head.”
Jiri softly kicks Kapr, who’s still raking, on the heel of his boots. “Guess who finally noticed Inka,” he tells him.
“Inka?” I ask.
Kapr looks over at me, shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything.
“What?” I ask.
“Good luck” is all he says. No one says anything for a bit, so I just look at her some more. It’s weird, because I don’t really care all that much about girls. But I can’t stop noticing her. Because it’s not so much that she’s pretty, even though she definitely is. It’s that if somehow, instead of us getting in a line, marching up the ramp, and turning into the ghetto, we turned the other way and were suddenly back in Prague, she’d look like she belongs. After she took her star off, of course. She looks, I don’t know, normal. It’s like she reminds me how everything used to be. And maybe could be again.
“The worst part,” Jiri says, “she’s really nice, too.”
“C’mon, you two,” Kapr says, motioning with his head toward one of the guards at the edge of our group, “get back to work. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later I’m still watching Inka, when I see the strangest thing. She’s on her hands and knees with all the other girls, making sure the straw is spread out evenly. There’s a guard pacing behind them. He walks along an invisible line, about a hundred feet long, and when he gets to the end of it, he turns around and starts back again. Inka’s near the end closest to the canal.
But then this one time, maybe twenty feet after he passes her, the girl to Inka’s left, who’s looking past Inka toward the guard, bumps Inka on the hip with her hip. And then, so fast that all I see is a flash of orange, Inka grabs a carrot from under the hay and sticks it down the top of her shirt. A second later I’m not even sure the whole thing happened.
“Jiri,” I whisper.
“Huh?”
“Inka just . . .”
“Just what?” he asks, not sounding very interested.
“There’s . . . there’s a carrot in her shirt. She put a carrot in her shirt.”
Jiri grins but doesn’t stop raking. “Way to go, Inka. Nice, pretty, and one of the slickest schlojsers we’ve got.”
“Slickest what?” I ask.
“Schlojsers,” he says.
“What the heck is a schlojser?”
“Kapr,” Jiri says, “tell Misha what schlojsing is.”
Kapr stands up straight and uses his rake to pull out some dirt clumps from the bottom of his shoe. He checks to see that our guard isn’t nearby. “If you’re delivering bread, and a roll happens to wind up in one of your pockets, that’s schlojsing.”
“Happens to wind up?” I ask. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Kapr shrugs his shoulders in this exaggerated way. “I was delivering bread, and the next thing I knew, this roll—okay two rolls—wound up in my pocket.”
And then I feel like someone suddenly smacked me in the side of the head. “Stealing? Schlojsing is stealing?”
“No,” Jiri says, like I’m a little dense. “Stealing is stealing. Schlojsing is schlojsing.”
“What’s the difference?” I ask.
“Misha,” Kapr says, starting up his raking again. “Let me ask you something. When you showed up in our room for the first time, which bags did you have with you?”
“Uh.” I try to remember. It seems like two years ago, even though it hasn’t even been a week. “Just my backpack. Why?”
“The rest got delivered later, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So why do you think that was? Because the Nazis run Terezin like a five-star hotel?”
“Your bags, sir,” Jiri says in a silly voice.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Because when you got here, like everyone else, your stuff w
ent through the Schleuse.”
A guard paces past us, so no one says anything for a while. We just start raking instead.
Jiri starts up again. “Anything valuable you had in your bag—”
“But I didn’t have anything valuable.”
“But if you did,” Jiri says, “and a lot of people did, then—”
Kapr snaps his finger. “The Nazis make sure it doesn’t get to you here. That’s what the Schleuse is for.”
I keep raking, though I realize I’m not really raking, just moving the thing over the same patch of dirt again and again. “So what does that have to do with her? With”—I lower my voice—“with what she just did?”
“They have their Schleuse, we have ours,” Kapr says.
“But it’s stealing. That carrot—now whoever was supposed to get it isn’t going to get it. And what if she gets caught? What happens then?”
“If you’re good,” Kapr says, “you don’t get caught.”
The next thing I know, I’m picturing this time Father and I went to King of Railroads. Everyone was crowding around a new track they had set up that morning. But because I’m so short, I didn’t even bother joining them. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see a thing. So I just went over to another, smaller table, where I pushed a tiny black caboose back and forth, until, suddenly my hand was putting it in my pants pocket. A second later Father grabbed my wrist. I looked up at him, and the expression on his face made me want to disappear. Just like that we were standing on the sidewalk. I don’t know what happened to the caboose, but it definitely wasn’t in my hand or my pocket by the time we got outside.
“Michael Gruenbaum,” he said in this calm voice that was somehow much worse than him screaming. “If I ever see you do that again . . .”
Somewhere There Is Still a Sun Page 9
