Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “Do we have to stay here?” I asked. “Are there any other places?”

  Papa’s silence gave me my answer. We had no choice in where we lived. We had been assigned this place.

  “Where is the toilet?” asked Leah.

  But Mama and Papa had lost the will to speak. Leah looked at Mama, waiting. She is like that. She will not ask something twice but will stay close to that person until they can bear it no longer, until they eventually give her an answer. But Mama refused to reply, and Leah began to cry. It was perhaps because of the strange smells in the apartment and the pained look on Mama’s face.

  “What is wrong?” Papa asked Leah finally, failing in his attempt to sound good-humored. “This is all right for now. It is only for a short time until the governments can work matters out.” Then, leaning in to speak a bit softer, “Until the rest of the world puts Germany in a corner where it belongs.”

  Mama went straight to the window to watch the streets below, crowded with people waiting to be assigned apartments by Jewish officials. One of the officials followed us in shortly afterward. Mama was the only one who didn’t face him. She refused to turn around. The man handed Papa some coupons and explained that they were to be used to acquire food, but if we wanted more than the amounts allowed, my parents would need to find suitable employment within the ghetto. He said that Papa should report to the Judenrat in the next couple of days if he wished to work at the labor camps, from which he would be able to send home money to his family in exchange for ghetto currency.

  After the official left, Mama told Papa that he was not to go.

  “I may have no choice.”

  “This place is disgusting,” I said, only fueling the anguish that we felt. “Why are we here, and why can’t we live back at our other house? What is the point of this move?”

  “Because the Germans don’t know where to put us while they are fighting their war, since they think we are the cause of their problems.”

  “Will they send us to another country?” The thing that worried me at the time—before I had worked it all out—was that I might never see my friends again.

  “We can hope.”

  “Don’t say that, Mama! This is only temporary. You said that. Papa said that!”

  “Then we lied!” said Mama.

  “We will be all right,” said Papa. “We didn’t lie. I will find a job, and we will find somewhere else to live.”

  “Oh, stop it, Victor!” said my mother, unnaturally shrill, in a voice that I had not heard her use before. “Why can’t you see that this is where it ends for us? Why don’t you just face it . . . we have lost everything! We will never get our life back.”

  “Hannah . . .” said Papa.

  Her veneer of reserve had cracked, and Papa couldn’t find the words to change her line of thinking. He knew her too well. He also knew the truth, deep down. He had known, ever since that time in the Krolewskis’ basement, that life was only going to get harder.

  Leah continued to cry, and Mama could not move herself away from the window. She was scanning the faces of the people. I found out later that she was deciding who she thought was hopeful and who was not.

  I rushed to Leah’s side. “Don’t worry,” I said, picking her up. “Mama is just having a spell.” This was Papa’s expression when someone changed their mood.

  Mama later said that she was ashamed of her outburst, and that it was something she had needed to release. Something she had been holding on to for weeks.

  “So you think my hair will make me too ugly for the ghetto men . . .”

  “It is because of the lice, as well as the men,” says Mama. “The rashes on your head from scratching are getting worse.”

  We had left Leah in the apartment while we went to collect our coupons, but I was not prepared for the ambush by Mama and Lilli’s scissors.

  “You could never be ugly,” says Lilli, who is sitting on her couch, watching us. Her house is much nicer than ours, and she always has more food. “You have your mother’s bones and your father’s coloring.”

  “But I want my hair.”

  “I want to get out of here,” she says, gesticulating, her voice smoky and rough. “We can’t always have what we want.” She draws back on a cigarette: a present from Hermann Manz.

  I watch with disappointment as the long, fair curls fall on the floor. My father used to ask me where I kept my horse, saying my hair was like Lady Godiva’s, and I often acted out the famous story using a broomstick for a horse, galloping around the dinner table. This always made Papa laugh.

  “I wish I was still acting,” I say.

  “You acted?” says Lilli. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “Yes,” I say modestly. “Though not like your famous stage years in Germany.” Lilli told us that she worked as an actress once and was paid very well.

  Lilli possesses several glamorous photos of herself that she displays on her shelves, in which she poses in beautiful clothes. In one she is looking backward over her bare shoulder, directly into the camera lens, like a film star. She was very popular with German men, which makes it all the more strange that they placed her in the ghetto. I used to believe that she was a spy. Now I think she is just unlucky, like the rest of us, to come from a family of Jews.

  “Oh yes,” says Mama. “You should have seen my daughter. I was there at a school performance when she stood proudly facing her audience, her long hair trailing behind her, large dangling earrings, lace-up top, bright-red scarf around her head, and sword in one hand. Her class was reenacting a historical piece, and Elsi was Agustina de Aragón standing behind a paper canon defending Spain against the French. She was magnificent!”

  “Yes. I imagine she was,” says Lilli, eyeing me carefully.

  “I enjoyed playing Agustina because she was so brave,” I say, trying not to sound too boastful; meekness had been pounded into us behind the barbed wire. “Agustina lost everything, including her son, who died in prison after fighting for her cause.”

  “It is an image I can never forget,” says Mama. “One could almost see the original heroine standing there. Sometimes I love her spirit so much it hurts,” she says to Lilli. She is referring to me, not Agustina. And Lilli is watching me still, attentive, aware of things that I am perhaps not.

  “Maybe after the war I will take you to Germany, yes?” says Lilli to me.

  “Oh no, she is never going to Germany,” says Mama.

  It is quiet then, except for the clacking of the scissors.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MATILDA

  I have been kept locked in the small house behind the big house. Catarina would not complain about our house in Romania if she lived in here. There is no fire, and the floor is too cold to walk on in the mornings. There is no moss here to fill up the gaps in the wood that let in the night air. I throw the blanket across the space between my mattress and the toilet pot each morning so that my feet don’t touch the floor. I do not have a window, but I can see a few things through the narrow gaps of wood. Each morning a boy walks to the small house and takes my pot, which I must pass through a flap he opens from the outside. He empties this, then returns it and bolts the flap again. When I said hello, he replied in badly spoken German that he is not allowed to speak with me.

  I was counting the days in my head at first, but now with the end of my spoon, I scratch a line into the wood for every day that I am here. I must stay here as long as I can. I am hoping that Papa has come home and found me gone, and that he is on his way to take me back. I want him to see where they have kept me. I want him to be very cross with Catarina for signing a paper that says I am the property of Germany.

  In the mornings a girl—a different one from the one who brought me here—brings a bowl of oats and water, and these are passed through the flap, also. Another of the smaller children comes to collect the empty bowl in the afternoon. She does not talk either.

  It is so dark at night. One time I heard something howling; another time I heard s
omething scratching at the wood. I think there are rats that are trying to get in.

  Nurse came with a piece of paper and a pencil on the first day. She said that I must write something in German, and each day she comes with a new sheet of paper and takes back the last one. The first time, I returned it blank. But now I draw pictures. The first one was of a dog with a really long tongue, and the next was of a goose laying an egg. Then the next one was a picture of the dog standing upright on his hind legs and cooking the goose on a frying pan. I know they want me to write in German. I will not give them what they want.

  “You are your own enemy,” says Nurse. “You are making this harder than it needs to be.”

  I can tell that Nurse hates the task of visiting me here. She does not like to step too far in from the doorway, and she is always in a hurry to leave. Perhaps she is afraid that the small house might trap her, too.

  I do not know the person in the reflection of my spoon. It is a girl with wild hair and a very pale face. I would love a bath. Better still, I would love to swim in the creek where my brothers and I used to play, or lie on the grass and let the warm rain wash my face. There is never enough to eat. I wipe up every trace of the thick oat porridge with a piece of bread.

  “I’m still hungry,” I say to Nurse next time she comes. She leaves and returns with Frau.

  “Nurse tells me you are still hungry.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Frau Haus.”

  I do not see it coming: the baton to the side of my head above my ear. I believe that Frau likes to have reasons to punish. The sudden pain is like a burn, and I rush to the other side of the room. When I turn back, the door is already shutting behind her.

  If I should die in here, what will Mama say? She will first be angry with me for not speaking German.

  The only links I have to the world outside this house are the women who punish me and the children who open the flap in the wall. I put my eye against the gaps I find around the walls. The small children come to play on the swings outside, and several older girls sometimes sit in a circle and talk or jog in a paddock next to the house. Sometimes the older girls sing while they march in the fields. I put my ear against the wall to be close to the sound. They are happy when they sing. The two groups—the small children and the older girls—do not mix together.

  Sometimes the children from the swings look toward my house. I have waved at them, but they cannot see me. Nurse is always there and tells them things I cannot hear. I wonder what she has told them about me. One time one of the older girls opened the flap to look at me. I tried to talk to her, but she just pointed at me and whispered to one of the other girls nearby, then broke into laughter. I wonder what it is they find so funny.

  Early in the mornings the little children carry buckets with their urine and turds to empty in the outdoor toilet. I cannot see where they live, but I do not think it is in the big house because they walk from a different direction. There is also another small house on the other side of the swings, and I sometimes watch another woman walk in that direction from the kitchen and return from there with bowls of fruit and small sacks that I think carry food. Frau rarely goes outside, except to punish me for something I said.

  I am given a German book to read, about the Führer of Germany, but the book remains shut on the floor beside the mattress. I do not want to know about him. I have heard Tata say hateful things against him, and my father is a learned man, says Theo. The next day I put the book in my toilet pot and push it through the flap when the boy comes to open it. I am wondering when I will start my schooling. I am wondering what I am doing here. When I was home, I went to a school. Tata used to say that the school was not smart enough for me, that one day I will go to a university. Mama used to tell him to stop telling me things like that. She did not want me to get silly ideas. Sometimes I tell myself stories out loud, like the ones Tata told me, so that inside my head I am free. Sometimes I make up my own stories.

  I do not like to be alone, thinking about my brothers somewhere, in another place where I can no longer go. The freedom to run, pushing each other into the long grass where we would roll on our backs and squint to see the sun through the tall leaves. Our last horse, before it was taken—stolen like I was—how it felt to rub my cheek against its smooth, warm flank, to stroke my hand across its long neck, its stringy mane. These are things I think about, with so much time to think.

  Will Dragos go to war, or will he stay to play soccer? Is Theo lying on his bed, his head “stuck in a book,” as Mama used to say? Since Tata went to war, no new books have come into the house. Theo will read all the same books over and over again until new books come from Opa. Mama will be last to bed, turning off the lamps, checking the windows.

  It is becoming unbearable not to hear others breathe in the night. Sometimes I imagine my brothers breathing nearby. Theo would always play a game before sleep. He would say a word, and I had to find another word that had the same meaning as the first. Then we would play the game in German. Tata used to say that the more words we can think of, the smarter we will become. Tata loves words as much as I do.

  The sun is shining on the other side of the world, and I feel the blackness closing in on me again. The room, a hole, too deep to climb out of. My eyes start to flood, and I blink away the tears.

  One morning after Tata left to fight, I saw my mother’s sad face and puffed-up eyes. When she saw me, she looked away, ashamed.

  “It is fine sometimes to show your sad face,” I said.

  “We are never alone, Tilda,” she said. “If the night spirits hear you crying, they will sit at the bottom of your bed and laugh. They follow the ones who are weak. Their souls are the easiest to steal.”

  I wish someone would tell me what I am doing here. Perhaps the children outside don’t know either. Perhaps they are waiting for the commander to come and tell them.

  I cannot stand it anymore. With the spoon I hit at the wood at the bottom of the flap to split it from the lock so that I can crawl out through the small opening. After several hours, the wood has chipped in places, but it is not enough for it to break. Before Nurse comes with her piece of paper, I put the blanket near the wood I have marked. But Nurse is quick to notice everything, and she removes the blanket and sees the damage. She goes to find Frau.

  “You stupid girl!” And Frau is once again raising her baton.

  Afterward I lie on the bed, sore—and hateful of everyone, especially Frau, and even my mother. But not my brothers or Tata. Not them. They would hate Frau, too.

  Catarina once said that my mouth would get me into trouble. If she were here, she would tell me that I am foolish, that I need to control my temper, to speak to them in German. But my brothers would not tell me that. They would tell me to stab Frau with the end of the spoon. But then my brothers did not get taken.

  Later I unbutton my nightgown, and with the reflection of my spoon, I try and see if there are bruises on the backs of my shoulders. I cannot see much, but it hurts when I wrap my arms around my back and press on the skin. Frau is breaking her own rules. I hope the bruises are still there when the commander comes so that I can be sent elsewhere. Anyplace else would not be as bad as this prison.

  When Nurse comes in next, she does not look at me. Her eyes stay fixed on the floor as if I am someone who must not be looked at. I feel like an animal that has been trapped in the forest. I know how they must feel, to suddenly have their freedom taken, to no longer have the trees and the air and the space.

  My shoulders ache from the bruising.

  The nights are even colder. I have one blanket, but it is not enough. A draft comes through the bottom of the walls. My skin feels gritty with dirt. The mattress is stained with filth.

  Each time Nurse comes, I ask for something. I want the beatings now. It is contact, at least.

  “Can I have more blankets?”

  “Can I have something more to eat?”

  “Can I see the children?”

  “Can I come
out?”

  But Nurse has stopped telling Frau.

  The last time she replies, “You have shown nothing but insolence. Only when you can conform to the rules can you come out. However, Frau Haus is losing patience. Matilda, help yourself. Do what Frau wants. She is thinking of getting rid of you even before the new commander arrives. He will never even know you were here.”

  I do not think this is a bad thing. It is what I want. To go elsewhere. She seems to know that this is what I am thinking.

  “I can tell you that the alternative will be worse. The rooms there are even smaller than this one, and they will chain your legs to the floor.”

  That night a storm erupts from my face. Under the blanket, I cry and cry until my eyes are stinging. I don’t care if the night spirits are watching from the end of my bed. By the time I stop crying in the middle of the night, I have made a plan.

  It is the next day when Nurse enters my room again. Sometimes she does not even look at me, like today. In perfect German, I say, “I am sorry that I have not been honest with you, that I have been difficult. Please, may I see the other children? Please, can I help with chores?”

  Nurse crosses her arms. There is no expression on her face, but I know that she is pleased she has broken me. I would be pleased if I were in her shoes.

  She returns with Frau, who wears glasses and a warm coat with fur at the collar.

  “So, you are speaking German. Let us hope that you are remorseful, too.”

  Remorse is the last thing I feel.

  I then decide to do something else. I break into the German song I sometimes hear the older girls sing in the field, about German loyalty, and German women, and noble deeds. It is a hideous tune, and I stretch the vowels as I sing, to make the language and the song sound even worse than they are. This will show them that they do not have complete control, and they cannot tell me how to think. Though, even as I am singing, I am aware that Frau still carries her baton.