The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “And all I have to do is rent you a room? What else do I need to do?” She didn’t think she needed to insinuate further.

  “Lady, you aren’t my type.” He frowned slightly. “But the Germans are quickly making Karpatyn a jungle. It won’t just be Germans and their stooges you’ll have to worry about. Very soon it’s going to be Jews selling out Jews to survive. Me, I don’t need anything you have except a room. And I am willing to pay.” He smiled and reached out to tousle Stefan’s head.

  “It’s the boy’s room.” She looked down at Stefan. “He will move into mine.” She turned, and the man followed as she went through the sitting room and walked down the hall away from her bedroom to the nursery.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, almost before he had looked around.

  “But you haven’t asked how much or seen the kitchen or worried about where I can get a bed and furniture that will fit. Why are you in such a hurry?” Rita turned and led him back to the living room.

  “I can’t stay where I was. I don’t have time to look around much—”

  Rita interrupted, glancing at the prosperous leather case. “I see that.”

  Ignoring the interruption, he went on, “—and I can’t afford to spend a lot of time looking. By the way, how much?” Rita mentioned a figure. “I can afford that.”

  “Should I have asked for more? Mr. . . . I think I should know your name if you are going to live here.”

  “Erich Klein, at your service.” He plucked her hand and made to kiss it.

  Rita pulled her hand back. “We had enough of that from the Hungarians.”

  So, she had a lodger, and someone besides an eighteen-month-old to talk to. From the first, she had to admit, she liked him. He was easy to look at, in an unusual way. More important, he was interesting, even deep, in some way Rita couldn’t immediately identify. Confident, natural, composed, graceful in his movements, he knew instinctively how to share space. From the first, he took to Stefan. Erich Klein was going to be a pleasure to have around.

  Klein was the bookkeeper at the Terakowski garment factory. He’d been there for almost four years and, in fact, was its manager. The factory was on the west side of town. Before the war they had produced heavy woolen cloth for the British market. They were just starting to make greatcoats for the Wehrmacht. No one had bothered mentioning to the Germans that October was a little late to start producing garments for the Russian winter.

  Rita was avid for talk. The next evening when Erich came in from work, she invited him into the kitchen. She had only started putting kindling in the stove. It was still cold, and he kept his coat on. From it he pulled a long bottle that glowed yellow under the naked lightbulb. “It’s an Alsatian. From Riquewihr.”

  “But how?”

  “Spoils of war?” Erich shrugged and laughed as Rita uncorked it. She had not tasted anything so good since the Russian occupation had begun two years before. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

  “Fried potatoes with the skin still on them. Get used to it. I hope it goes well with”—she sought the label—“a Pinot Gris.”

  Klein enjoyed her smile. “What did Stefan do today?” The boy was weaving his way between chair and table leg pulling a wooden train.

  “He listened to several stories and had another reading lesson. He’s too young, but there is not much else to do.”

  “Perhaps you will let me try to teach him some arithmetic.”

  “Double-entry bookkeeping?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of tensor calculus.” He said it under his breath.

  “What’s that?” she asked, but Klein ignored the question, straddled Stefan upon his foot, and began riding him back and forth. Stefan understood immediately that he was a horseman and began to whip his mount to move faster.

  Rita came back to the kitchen from putting Stefan to bed. There was still half a bottle of the wine, and neither wanted to leave it to the next night. There might not be one. “So,” she began, “we’ve lived in the same town for four years and never met. How is that possible?”

  “Different circles. Karpatyn is a big town,” Erich said as he poured them both half a small tumbler. The lights were off, and the only illumination came from the glow of the open door of the wood-fired stove. Only the contours of their faces were visible in the dark. Both seemed to realize this would encourage conversation. “I’m from Warsaw. I came in ’37 with a close friend, Sylvan Terakowski, the son of the owner of the textile Fabrik. Became the bookkeeper. Sylvan and his father were shipped off to Siberia by the Soviets when they nationalized the plant in ’39.” He paused. “How about you?”

  Rita told him the broad outlines—her family, gymnasium with the Benedictine sisters, the law faculty in Krakow, Urs—but she was more interested in his history. “So, you qualified as an accountant in Warsaw?”

  “No. I learned on the job here. In Warsaw I was a student. Mathematics.” Erich sighed, then he said with great earnestness, “For a long time before the war, Warsaw was the world’s center of mathematics.”

  “And you were there, in Warsaw? But you gave it up and came here. What happened?”

  “Long story. I lost my faith.”

  “Lost your faith in God or mathematics? Is mathematics a religion? I don’t understand.”

  “Something happened while I was doing my doctorate that destroyed all my confidence in math and made me into an atheist too.”

  “What was that?”

  “It’s technical.”

  Rita replied with a hint of annoyance. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Let’s see, how to explain . . . I was in the middle of my studies when I found out that an Austrian—I guess he’s German now—named Gödel had proved something terrible a few years earlier. It was 1931, I think. Shook mathematics so that it hasn’t recovered. He showed that the only way a mathematical system could include all the truths about numbers was if it also contained a falsehood, too, a piece of plain idiocy, a contradiction, like ‘two is an odd number’ or ‘three plus two equals forty-seven.’ And the only way it could avoid such a falsehood was by deliberately being silent, incomplete about some mathematics we knew had to be true. When I found that out—that mathematics had to be either incomplete or contain a contradiction—I just couldn’t go on; I had to give it up. I realized that math just turns out to be a game. It wasn’t the only game, of course . . .” He stopped, momentarily taken by his simile. “That goes for arguments they teach about God’s existence. Same logic, different game. So, now I am an atheist playing the accountancy game! Doesn’t shock you, does it?”

  “Being an accountant? No, I can deal with that.” Rita smiled. “As for atheism, welcome to the club.” By now the stove was cold.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Christmas came, with a falling off in the presence of the forces of order. Most of the SD—the Sicherheitsdienst—had gone back to Germany, and the plain policemen were home in Vienna for a well-earned rest. Even after New Year’s, when the Germans returned and the Ukrainians had slept off their week of celebration, the streets remained relatively safe. Some began to suggest the worst was over. The Wehrmacht was at Moscow; the war would end by spring. Surely its excesses would give way to rationality. Perhaps the Hungarians would come back.

  At six o’clock on a Monday morning late in January, Rita woke to the unmistakable sound of a German truck pulling up at the house. She was frozen in place by the sound, first of the front door being thrown open and then of jackboots on the stair. Her trance was broken by a rapping at the apartment door. It was one of those polite, prewar knocks, not the thud of someone who would break the door down if it were not opened immediately. Erich came to her bedroom door. “It’s Germans. I’ll get it.”

  She came out of the room carrying Stefan to see a military police sergeant and a single private carrying a rifle.

  The Feldwebel spoke to Erich. “Dr. Urs Guildenstern. You must come with us. You have five minutes to pack a case for three days.” He turned toward Rita. “Y
ou must pack him enough food for the journey.”

  “You’ve got the wrong man.” Erich looked relieved.

  “Four minutes to pack your bag.” He pressed a button on his watch. “You’re wasting time,” the man barked. “We are requisitioning all doctors, dentists, engineers, and other skilled persons for priority war work.”

  Rita found her voice. “But he’s not Dr. Guildenstern. He’s my lodger. My husband was named Guildenstern, but he was killed by the Russians.” Perhaps blaming it on the Soviet enemy might soften this Feldwebel. The sergeant looked at Stefan in her arms and back at Klein. Clearly no resemblance.

  “Leutnant,” Erich promoted him. “Here is my Ausweis. My name is Klein. I am not a doctor. Here is my work permit. I am an essential worker at Terakowski Fabrik. There has evidently been a mistake.” He handed the documents over.

  The other man now cleared his voice, and the sergeant turned to look at him. “Feldwebel? Permission?”

  “Ja.”

  “The last man we put in the truck—the old man whose wife was making such a fuss, we had to put her down—he was a Dr. Guildenstern. Perhaps there is a mistake in the list, a duplication.”

  The sergeant took one more look at Erich’s papers, dropped them on the table, and turned for the door.

  They heard the lower door slam closed. Erich looked at Rita. “Was that your father-in-law?” She nodded.

  Now in the eternal cold of deep winter, daylight was brief, but days passed more slowly. One painfully boring afternoon, seeking distraction for Stefan, Rita pulled the fattest of Urs’s medical textbooks off the shelf. She sat Stefan on her lap and opened the book to its illustrations. There were pages and pages of glossy colored diagrams of organs, tissues, and vessels, and finally naked men and hairless women, the skin of their abdomens thrown open in flaps revealing the principal organs. Rita was put off. Stefan was fascinated.

  So, for several days there was something to teach him, till at last, one evening when Erich came home, Stefan proudly identified every organ in the thorax. Erich laughed, looked at the suggestive anatomical diagrams on the succeeding pages, and smiled at Rita.

  That night lying in her double bed, Rita was awoken by Stefan as he lashed out in a dream, from which, however, he did not awaken. She lay there awake, willing herself back to sleep, employing and discarding every device she had contrived over almost a year to find temporary oblivion. Stefan was warm next to her in the bed. Suddenly she knew why she couldn’t sleep. She was thinking of Erich lying alone in the room three meters down the corridor. Despite the cold, she felt as warm to herself as the child next to her. And she began to feel wet, not with perspiration, but down below. Think things through, Rita! Too late to do that? Had she already decided? Finally, Why not, Rita, if you can’t think of a good reason not to? Slipping out from the duvet, Rita rose, closed the door behind her with infinite care, and tiptoed out of the room.

  She reached out to the knob on Erich’s door. Unlocked and ajar. She felt the erotic surge well over her again.

  He was on his back, hands behind his head. Was he lying there waiting for her? She approached. No, he was asleep. Rita drew the sheet and blanket and draped herself along the right side of his body, with her head on his chest. Then she reached back, pulling down his right arm so that it rested over her shoulder. Erich stirred, mumbled something. She whispered, “Sorry, I didn’t understand.” His voice came back “That’s all right,” and he turned over on his stomach facing away from her and began snoring lightly.

  Rita was left with her cheek impaled on his shoulder blade. After a moment, she rose and tiptoed back to her bed.

  The next morning there was no sign that he had been sentient during any part of the episode.

  That evening Erich had taken Stefan into the bedroom to read a bedtime story. When Rita came in, the child was already asleep, and Erich was still reading.

  “Stefan sleeps as soundly as you do,” Rita said as they came into the sitting room.

  She was hoping he would say, “How do you know?” Then she would tell him what had happened the night before.

  He did not pick up on it. Instead, he said, “Do you believe in free will?”

  “I don’t have the energy for philosophy tonight, Erich.” She had energy enough, but not for philosophy. “But the answer is no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Helps me to sleep at night, knowing there is none.”

  “Why is that?” Erich persisted.

  She didn’t want to seem rude. “Without free will, none of those bastards is responsible for what they are doing. They are just sick, crazy, defective individuals we should pity. We have to protect ourselves from them. We can’t help hating them, but it doesn’t make any more sense than hating an avalanche.” She believed it. But she couldn’t feel it.

  “But if the Nazis don’t have free will, we don’t either.”

  “That’s right.” Rita nodded.

  “Rita, you have just made me feel much better about my whole life.” Erich smiled mysteriously, rose, and headed toward his room.

  I’m glad for you, she thought, but I don’t see why that makes life any easier. This time she would not wait till he was asleep.

  Ten minutes later, just as Erich blew out the candle by his bed, she slipped into his room, still carrying her lit candle. Its glow was reflected in the sheen of a black negligee she had bought for Gil and never worn for Urs. Standing before him, one strap fell from her shoulder. She smiled without adjusting it. He smiled too and made room on the narrow bed.

  As she got in, she brought her shoulders forward to give him a view down the décolletage, moved her face over his, and opened her mouth, with a wet tongue ready to play against his. As their noses brushed, Erich turned his head away and gave a little laugh. “Rita, I’m sorry. You’re not my type . . . I told you . . . that day when I first moved in. Maybe I was too subtle.” He sat up in the bed and took a lone cigarette out of a shirt pocket on the chair next to him. “I was saving this. Let’s share it.” He lit up and passed the cigarette to her. Then he put an arm around her in a way she could only think of as brotherly. She inhaled, and he watched her nostrils flare around two shafts of smoke.

  “I go with men.” There, he said it. How would she react? Why hadn’t she figured it out before? Perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to.

  The words sank in. Rita was suddenly burning with embarrassment. How stupid! How idiotic! The hints and clues came back to her in a rush. The first morning his reassuring her she didn’t need to worry, his urgent need to find new lodgings, coming to Karpatyn with a young man—a close friend, he had said.

  She moved to sit up next to him and took another deep pull on the cigarette. She had not had one in months. She felt light-headed as she passed it back.

  The gesture of sharing a smoke immediately relieved Erich. It was going to be all right. In the light of the candle, they watched the smoke curl up from the glowing end of the cigarette.

  The intimacy, the darkness, the aroma of smoke, scent, and bodies emboldened Rita. “What do men do exactly?”

  “Some of them do the same things men do with women.” He was not going to be more explicit than that. “But I’ve never been able to. What I like is . . .” He didn’t want to use the Polish. “Do you know the word fellatio?”

  “Of course. Do you like to give it or get it?”

  “Both . . . in equal measure.”

  After a moment Rita looked up, gauging his slightly sheepish smile, blew out the candle, and began moving down the bed beneath the coverlet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Einsatzgruppen were not a solution. Too many Jews, not enough bullets. According to reports from Latvia, sometimes it took several days to dispose of twenty-five thousand people. Impact on morale was bad too, especially where shooting children was required. Leideritz had, in fact, lost two more subordinates who refused to carry out such orders. And there was always the chance, never so far encountered, of a thousand or so Jews overpowering a h
undred men armed only with machine pistols. So, now a solution had been contrived, finally.

  His Jews were to be herded into three ghettos, A, B, and C, a total of 520 houses. Each ghetto was to be repeatedly filled and liquidated. Disposal was to be at the extermination camp Belzec. The task of making Galicia Judenrein—clean of Jews—could be completed in a year or less if the facility at Belzec was properly run.

  With a little warning, Erich had been able to think things out. In the days before the move, he chose a house at the edge of ghetto A, the largest of the three. The building was a two-story clapboard structure, with a front porch and a few steps. A short footpath from the rear door led to a privy. Immediately behind that, a boundary wall—really just a slatted fence—was being built to keep the vermin in.

  As he led Rita and Stefan straight toward the house, she asked, “Why this one, Erich?”

  “It’s your lifeline. Biggest ghetto, longest fence, hardest to guard. With your house back up right to the wall, easy to trade across the fence.”

  He had been thinking ahead. They were only allowed to bring in what they could carry. For Stefan that meant a large stuffed dog. Only Rita knew it contained the morphine, the poison, and the gold coins Urs had left them. She knew Stefan would never lose hold of his stuffed bowwow, and guards would not search it on the way in.

  When the three finally settled down in a room on the top floor at the back, overlooking the wall, they were surprised to find themselves alone. The house had been assigned twenty occupants, and they had the largest room on the upper level, with a small woodstove, to which five thin mattresses had been allocated. Erich headed back to Rita’s apartment to carry in another bag of necessities. With a work permit, he could come and go with relative freedom before the curfew.