Once 1 Once

by Morris Gleitzman

  I escaped from an underground hiding place by telling a story. It was a bit exaggerated. It was a bit fanciful. It was my imagination getting a bit carried away. It was a lie.

  “Barney,” I whisper, tugging his sleeve as he creeps up the cellar steps.

  He spins around, startled, and nearly drops his candle. He thought I was asleep like the other kids.

  “I need to come with you,” I whisper.

  Barney frowns.

  I start to explain why I have to go with him.

  He puts his finger on his lips and signals for me to follow him up the steps. I climb after him through the doorway in the ceiling. And find myself in a huge room full of dusty old machinery.

  Barney puts his leather bag down, gently lowers the trapdoor, and locks it with a padlock.

  He sees me looking around and points to the machinery.

  “Printing presses,” he says. “For printing books. Not now. Before.”

  I know what he means. Before the Nazis went right off books. And Jews.

  “So,” says Barney quietly, “why do you need to come with me?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “I need to find my parents,” I say. “Urgently. Because of my rare illness.”

  Barney thinks about this. He gives me a look that I’m fairly sure is sympathetic.

  This is going well.

  “Mum and Dad have got my pills,” I say. “For my rare illness. If I don’t take the pills, my rare illness will get worse and I could die.”

  Barney thinks about this some more.

  “What exactly is this rare illness?” he asks.

  Suddenly I realize what he’s concerned about. The other kids catching it. And him.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It doesn’t invade other people.”

  Barney’s eyes are twinkling in the candlelight. He almost looks amused. I feel indignant. People shouldn’t be amused by other people’s rare illnesses.

  “If I don’t find Mum and Dad and take those pills in the next two hours,” I say, “I’ll get warts growing inside my tummy and my pee will turn green.”

  I stop myself saying any more. I may have gone a bit too far already.

  Barney is actually smiling now.

  “Zelda’s right,” he says. “You are a good storyteller.”

  Poop, I did go too far.

  Barney suddenly looks serious.

  “She also told me,” he says, “that you haven’t seen your parents for nearly four years.”

  I feel myself blushing in the candlelight. What a stupid storytelling mistake. That was as stupid as Father Ludwik telling us Adolf Hitler is a great man.

  Desperately I try to think of a way to make the story better. Would Barney believe me if I tell him that I only have to take the pills once every four years?

  I don’t think so. This is pathetic. I can’t tell a decent story to save my life anymore. Or Mum and Dad’s.

  Barney puts his hand on my shoulder and I wait to be escorted back down into the cellar.

  But that doesn’t happen. Barney hands me the candle, picks up his bag, and steers me toward a big rusty door in the wall of the printing factory.

  “I’m glad you want to come with me, Felix,” he says.

  “Why?” I say, surprised.

  Barney suddenly looks very serious.

  “I have to confess something,” he says. “I read one of the stories in your notebook.”

  I stare at him, stunned. He just doesn’t seem like the sort of person who’d read a private notebook without permission.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “But I wanted to find out what I could about your parents.”

  Before I can say anything about my stories being dumb and not true, Barney grips my shoulder and looks me right in the eyes.

  “You’re a very good storyteller,” he says.

  I don’t know what to say.

  Before I can think of something, Barney goes on.

  “The reason I’m glad you’re coming with me, Felix,” he says, “is because I need your help.”

  We pause in the doorway of the printing factory while Barney looks up and down the dark street.

  In the moonlight I can see his leather jacket has a small hole in the back. I wonder if it’s a bullet hole.

  Did Barney get shot once?

  Did his family?

  Is that why he’s looking after other people’s kids in a secret cellar?

  It might not be a bullet hole. A candle flame could have done it, or a rat. Barney might be a teacher or something. The Nazis might have burnt all the books in his school so he brought some of the kids here to hide them.

  “This is the dangerous part,” whispers Barney, still squinting up and down the street. “If anyone sees us leaving this building, we’re sunk.”

  Or he could be a sailor.

  “Come on,” says Barney. “All clear. Let’s go.”

  The streets of the city are filthy, scraps of paper and rubbish everywhere. Some of the buildings have got bits missing from them. The whole place is deserted. I know it’s night and everything, but we haven’t seen a single person apart from a couple of dead bodies on a street corner.

  I manage not to cry.

  Barney makes us cross over to the other side, but it’s all right—I’ve already seen they aren’t Mum and Dad.

  “Where are all the other people?” I say.

  “Indoors,” says Barney. “There’s a curfew. That means everybody has to stay indoors after seven at night.”

  We go down a narrow lane with tall apartment buildings on both sides. I can’t see a single person through any of the windows. I read once that cities have electric lights, but there doesn’t seem to be much electricity going on around here.

  Finding Mum and Dad isn’t going to be easy, even if I can slip away from Barney while he’s concentrating on getting food.

  “What happens if people don’t do the curfew?” I ask.

  “They get shot,” says Barney.

  I look at him in alarm. I can tell from his voice he’s not joking.

  He holds up his leather bag.

  “We’ll be all right,” he says.

  I wonder what’s in the bag. Money, maybe. Or something the Nazis need. I hope it’s not guns they could use to shoot Jewish booksellers.

  I change the subject.

  “Why is there a curfew?” I ask.

  Dad taught me to use every new word as much as possible after hearing it for the first time.

  “This is a ghetto,” says Barney. “It’s a part of the city where the Jews have been sent to live. The Nazis make the rules here.”

  I think about this.

  Barney knocks on a door, and while we wait he turns to me with a serious expression.

  “Felix,” he says, “you might not be able to find your parents. I know that’s a hard thing to hear, but you might not.”

  It is a hard thing to hear.

  Luckily he’s wrong.

  “The Jewish people who’ve been brought to the city,” I say, “are they all in this ghetto or are there other ghetto curfew places as well?”

  Barney doesn’t answer.

  Perhaps I didn’t say the new words right.

  A woman leads us into a back room in the apartment. There are several people in the room, all wearing coats and all standing around a bed. The man lying on the bed is wearing a coat too, and holding his head and groaning.

  “Lamp, please,” says Barney.

  Somebody hands Barney an oil lamp. He bends over the bed and looks into the man’s mouth. The man groans even louder.

  I glance at the other people. They don’t look very well either, though none of them are groaning.

  Barney opens his bag and takes out a bundle of metal poles and leather straps. He fits the poles together using little metal wheels to make a kind of robot arm. From his bag he takes the foot pedal from a Singer sewing machine like Mrs. Glick used to have. He connects the poles to the pedal with the leather straps.

&
nbsp; My imagination is in a frenzy. Is Barney going to show these people how to mend their clothes? Their coats are fairly ragged. Or is this a machine he’s invented that helps people grow food in their own homes? There are lots of damp patches on these walls and these people do look very hungry.

  After all, this is 1942, so anything’s possible.

  “Salt water,” says Barney.

  While a couple of the people get water from a bucket, Barney attaches a short needle to the end of the robot arm and pedals the sewing machine thing with his foot. The straps make the needle spin around very fast with a loud humming noise.

  Suddenly I realize what Barney has just put together.

  A dentist’s drill.

  Barney gives the man in the bed a glass of salty water and a metal bowl.

  “Rinse and spit,” he says.

  The man does.

  I stare in amazement. I take my glasses off and wipe them on my shirt and put them back on.

  Barney is a dentist.

  Mum went to a dentist once. Me and Dad met him in his waiting room. He was very different from Barney. He was a thin bald man with a squeaky voice who didn’t do house calls.

  “Felix,” says Barney, “over here, please.”

  I jolt to attention. Barney wants me to help him. I’ve never been a dentist’s assistant before. Will there be blood?

  I squeeze through the people until I’m next to Barney. He’s taken the top off the lamp and is holding the tip of the drill in the flame. Heat kills germs—I’ve read about that.

  “Felix,” says Barney as he dips the drill tip into the water the man has spat into the bowl, “tell the patient a story, would you?”

  The water bubbles as the drill cools. My brain is bubbling too, with confusion.

  A story?

  Then I get it. When Mum went to the dentist, she had an injection to dull the pain. Barney hasn’t given this patient an injection. Times are tough, and there probably aren’t enough pain-dulling drugs in ghetto curfew places.

  Suddenly my mouth feels dry. I’ve never told anyone else a story to take their mind off pain. And when I told myself all those stories about Mum and Dad, I wanted to believe them. Plus, I didn’t have a drill in my mouth.

  This is a big responsibility.

  “Open wide,” says Barney.

  He starts drilling.

  “Go on, Felix,” he says.

  The groans of the patient and the grinding of the drill and the smell of burning from the patient’s mouth make it hard to concentrate but I force myself.

  “Once,” I say, “a boy called William lived in a castle in the mountains and he had a magic carrot.”

  The patient isn’t looking at Barney anymore, he’s looking at me.

  “If the boy held the carrot right,” I go on, “he could have three wishes. About anything. Including parents and cakes.”

  Barney knocks on another door. A big door at the front of a big building.

  “This one will be different,” he says to me. “But you’ll be fine.”

  “I hope so,” I say.

  My feet blisters are hurting and I’m a bit worried by the Nazi flag flapping over our heads.

  Barney puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “You did a really good job back there,” he says. “Poor Mr. Grecki was in a lot of pain, but your story helped him get through it. Well done.”

  I feel myself glowing, which I haven’t done for years, not since the last time I helped Mum and Dad dust the bookshelves and straighten up the folded-down corners of pages.

  It’s true—Mr. Grecki was very grateful. He and his family looked very sad when I asked them if they’d seen Mum and Dad and they said they hadn’t.

  The door opens.

  I nearly faint.

  Glaring at us is a Nazi soldier.

  Barney says something to him in Nazi language and points to our dentist bag. The soldier nods and we follow him in. As we climb some stairs, Barney whispers to me.

  “This patient is German. Tell him a nice story about Germany.”

  Suddenly I feel very nervous. I don’t know much about Germany. I think I read somewhere that it’s completely flat and has a lot of windmills, but I could be wrong.

  “I don’t speak German,” I mutter to Barney.

  “Doesn’t matter,” says Barney. “Say it in Polish and I’ll translate.”

  The soldier leads us into an upstairs room and I feel even more nervous.

  The patient is a Nazi officer. Not the one who did the shooting when we arrived in the city, but he could be a friend of that one. He’s sprawled in an armchair holding his face, and when he sees us he scowls and looks like he’s blaming us for his toothache.

  Barney sets up the drill. He doesn’t ask for salt water. I think this is because the Nazi officer is swigging from a bottle. Whatever he’s drinking smells very strong. He’s doing a lot of rinsing but no spitting.

  I don’t understand. Why is Barney drilling a Nazi’s teeth? And why doesn’t the German Nazi army use its own dentists? Perhaps the officers don’t like them because they’re too rough and they use bayonets instead of drills.

  Barney picks up a lamp and looks inside the Nazi officer’s mouth.

  That’s amazing. I’ve never seen that before. The lamp is connected to a wire. It must be electric.

  “Go on, Felix,” says Barney.

  He wants me to start. My imagination goes blank. What story can I tell to a Nazi officer in a bad mood? I want to tell a story about how burning books and shooting innocent people makes a toothache worse, but I’d better not risk that.

  The soldier comes back in with a bulging cloth bag. Poking out the top is a loaf of bread with hardly any mold on it and some turnips and a cabbage.

  “Thank you,” says Barney as he starts the drill.

  I understand. This is why we’re giving this Nazi dental treatment when we could be giving it to a poor Jewish person.

  To earn food.

  I think of the kids back in the cellar. I didn’t tell them a story before, but I can tell one for them now.

  “Once,” I say to the Nazi officer, “two brave German booksellers, I mean soldiers, were hacking their way through the African jungle. Their mission was to reach a remote African village and help mend a, um, windmill.”

  Barney translates.

  I start making up the most exciting and thrilling story I can, with lots of vicious wild animals and poisonous insects who say nice things about Adolf Hitler.

  The Nazi officer seems to be interested. Well, he’s not shooting anybody. But he could at any moment.

  I try hard to stop my voice wobbling with fear.

  I want to do a good job so this patient will be as grateful as the last one was. So that afterward, when the drilling and the story are over, he’ll feel warm and generous toward me.

  That’s when I’ll ask him if he knows where Mum and Dad are.

  a dentist stopped me from asking a Nazi officer about my parents and I was really mad at him.

  I still am, even after a sleep and a long sit on the bucket.

  I want to break this stupid toothbrush he made for me into tiny pieces. That’s why I’m scrubbing my teeth so hard.

  The Nazi officer was smiling by the time I was halfway through the story. By the time I’d described how the two German soldiers turned the windmill into a giant water pump and built a lake for the African kids to go ice-skating on, he was laughing. He made me carry on with the story even after Barney finished drilling.

  At the end the Nazi officer asked me to write the story down so he could send it home to his kids.

  Of course I said yes.

  I told him it would be in Polish and it would take me a couple of days. The Nazi officer didn’t mind at all, just asked me to drop it off when it’s finished. I don’t think he’s a friend of the other Nazi officer, the murderer. I think when he hears about what’s happened to Mum and Dad he’ll want to help them.

  But before I could start telling him,
Barney grabbed me and the bag of food and we left.

  “Too dangerous,” Barney told me in the street, but he wouldn’t say why.

  This toothbrush is unbreakable. It’s only wood and bristles, but Barney must have some dentist’s secret of making it really strong.

  “Felix,” says a muffled voice.

  I look down.

  Zelda has joined me at the teeth-cleaning bowl. Her mouth is already foaming with Barney’s toothpaste that he makes from chalk dust and soap.

  “When you went out with Barney last night,” she says, “did you find our parents?”

  I don’t know what to say.

  Her eyes are shining hopefully above the foam and suddenly I feel terrible. Here’s me moaning about waiting two days to have a conversation with a Nazi officer, and poor Zelda still doesn’t even know her parents are dead.

  Her face falls.

  “You didn’t find them?” she says.

  I shake my head.

  We look at each other. I try and think up a story about how parents aren’t really that important, but I can’t because they are.

  “I know a place we can see them from,” says Zelda.

  I smile sadly. At least she’s learning how to use her imagination.

  “Up there,” she says.

  I look up to where she’s pointing. A needle of daylight, bigger than the others, is coming in through a crack where one of the walls meets the ceiling.

  “Jacob says that from up there he can see outside into the street,” says Zelda.

  I sigh. Everyone’s a storyteller these days.

  “It’s true,” says a voice behind me.

  Jacob is climbing off his sack bed, blinking very indignantly. Several of the other kids are waking up too.

  “It’s easy,” says Jacob. “You make a pile of beds and climb up. I did it last night.”

  “He did,” says Zelda. “But he wouldn’t let me.”

  I look at them both. I can see they’re telling the truth. When people lie, their toothpaste foam droops.

  “Let’s do it now,” says Zelda excitedly.