Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  But Moses was worried about his wife. It was the first time that villagers had seen much of Queen Esther in the flesh. She seldom had to roam from their apartment until the Kalmuks began to threaten Dabrowa. There had been no roundups in the village. The German garrison at Zaklików never interfered in the politics of Dabrowa—and the garrison was filled with ghosts now that the rosyjskis were less than two hundred kilometers away.

  The only other time she had ventured from the apartment was at the little party Moses and Queen Esther gave to celebrate Jurek’s First Communion. Elzbieta had been against sending Jurek to confirmation classes in a neighboring village, against his serving as an altar boy, and mingling with other altar boys, who despised him and thought it was the devil’s work to have a zyd recite the Mass. They were vicious tattletales, she had said. They would tell the Gestapo about the village’s Jewish altar boy.

  Moses knew that the boys wouldn’t tell a soul. They and their parents would be punished for harboring zydki. And he had told Jurek time after time, “Son, this is our own secret service, our NKVD. We have to be twice as clever as the Gentiles, or they will scalp us.”

  And the boy said, “Papa, what does it mean to scalp?”

  “To slice off the top of your head. It’s a trick of the red Indians in Ameryka.”

  “Papa, the Indians are komunisti, like Jozef Stalin?”

  Moses had laughed with such force that he had to clamp his fist into his mouth and bite as hard as he could. But he had watched the sadness grow in his son the more he went to Mass and served as an altar boy. It can’t be helped, Moses had muttered to himself, as master of the Kosinski secret service. And then he had a payoff at the Communion party—a kind of acceptance, where the parish priest and the altar boys had to welcome Jurek into the flock. Moses wore his “Sunday suit,” and Queen Esther wore a stunning black dress she herself had designed while she was imprisoned in the apartment.

  The others at the party were in awe of her. They had never seen a woman wear nail polish—a beautiful woman with Queen Esther’s ampleness and dark eyes. She served them cocoa in little cups. They had never had real cocoa in their lives, but imagined that it must have been commonplace at cafés in the capital before the war. And now Queen Esther was wearing that same Communion dress in the forest, as if hiding from the Kalmuks was like another party.

  Women edged away from Queen Esther, while their husbands ogled her. She hummed a Hebrew melody to herself, convinced that no one could hear. But Jurek listened to the song. He wished he could pull a curtain around his matka, not that he wanted her all for himself. She called him her little man—but he wasn’t a man. He was an eleven-year-old boy locked inside a town that didn’t have a circus or an aerodrome or even an arsenal. And he was condemned to sleep in the same room with his mama and papa, while Henio and Katarzyna, the witch who looked after him, slept on the kitchen table.

  Yet he still couldn’t figure out this sleeping arrangement. He wasn’t clever enough, even if his papa had given him a cardboard badge to wear next to his heart, a badge that claimed he was a spy attached to Moses’ secret service. But he should have been able to solve the riddle of why his mama’s and papa’s beds were sometimes together and sometimes apart; Jurek was their accomplice, pulled into this strange tandem. Sometimes he slept alone, or between his mama and papa when the beds were stuck together like Siamese twins, or else he huddled with Moses in one bed, or with Elzbieta in the other. And if he was a spy, well, he could also spy on them. He’d listened to the other altar boys talk about the occult art of copulation, and about the German brothel in Zaklikow, a little makeshift hut right near the barracks; women would arrive in a green bus—prostytutki from the Ukraine, with shaved skulls, wearing skirts ripped out of horse blankets.

  These altar boys had an imbecilic passion for the prostytutki with bald heads, and Jurek himself had grown inflamed. His penis was like a magical serpent that could sleep or suddenly awake. The altar boys had tried to strip him many times, but he’d always managed to escape—no one had seen the punctured serpent in his pants. The lives of his family depended on it. But Jurek was not only a spy; he was a magician who could make the serpent disappear inside a pocket of skin. But he still longed for the prostytutki, and wished their green bus would stop in the woods outside Dobrowa. And no matter how long he watched Moses and Elzbieta with his head half under the blanket, he had never seen them kiss or copulate.

  He was plagued with the sudden, irrational wish that his mother also had a bald head, and no matter how it excited him, he wished against that wish. He didn’t want his mother to leave on a green bus and live in a brothel. But several months ago, he thought it might happen. While his father was in another town on a mission for the local tax office, the SS captain’s dark blue phaeton had stopped at the farmhouse near the Kosinski apartment. The captain’s driver, who wore a black uniform with a death’s-head pinned to his service cap, snarled at Elzbieta in Polish and German.

  “Quickly, Madame Kosinska, and bring the boy.”

  His mother panicked; her eyes loomed like black pellets under the skin. “But he will miss school, Herr Korporal.”

  “Bring the boy, madame.”

  She disappeared for a moment behind her screen in the main room; and when she emerged, she was wearing her one black dress and not her housecoat. Her lips were colored bright red. The driver leered at her and muttered, “Geschmack, madame—very, very tasty.”

  Ignoring him, she collected Jurek and got into the backseat of the phaeton—the seat was made of plush Moroccan leather, in dark maroon. Jurek could not recall such extravagance; his bottom sank into the seat with a soft plop. His mother smelled of wildflowers. His father sometimes smelled of mildew and machine oil. He worried that the phaeton would bring them to the German garrison in Zaklikow; he would watch while the barber “scalped” his mother, shaved off her black hair, and sent her to that green bus with the prostytutki; would he have to live on board the bus as a kind of brothel boy? It sickened him and made his heart beat like an insane drum.

  But the phaeton avoided Zaklikow and bumped onto another road. It had an escort car with a machine gunner, since German convoys were constantly being ambushed on the region’s back roads. The partisans—white or red—had grown as wild as Apaches and attacked Gestapo officers and SS patrols at random. And it didn’t seem to matter how hard the Germans retaliated, how many villagers they hanged or shot against the wall. Still another Gestapo officer was found dead on his knees, as if at prayer.

  The phaeton arrived at Charzewice. Jurek was disappointed in the castle. It did not have a single turret; its walls were crumbling, and its roof had the rigid, ordinary lines of a farmhouse in Dabrowa. But the castle’s front room was as big as a battlefield. The SS captain greeted Elzbieta and the boy with his wife and his own boy, Horst, who was Jurek’s age and wore lederhosen, like a mountain climber. Frau Flotner had blond hair that blazed in the sunlight seeping through that battlefield. Jurek was in love with her the instant she held his hand. She had his mother’s ampleness, but his mother didn’t have a faint, almost imperceptible, blond mustache.

  “Madame Kosinska, my wife is used to Berlin—yes, the cabarets are gone, and Berlin itself is like a bombed-out brothel, with ration cards that buy nothing but coffee that isn’t coffee and meat that isn’t meat—ah, but one can still have a conversation in Berlin. And I promised that I would bring a little culture to this godforsaken prince’s palace.”

  “But I might disappoint Frau Flotner,” said Elzbieta. “I am not so kulturlich, Herr Kapitan.”

  “Ah, but you are refined. I can see it in your bearing. You are not like the other wives of your village, who have the manners of a sow.”

  “But they are farmers’ wives. They do not sit in coffeehouses. They have never seen one. You cannot blame them for that.”

  “Then why are you and your husband in such a desert, madame?”

  “The war, Herr Kapitan,” Elzbieta said with a brazen smile that she ne
ver would have dared bestow upon Moses. “The war has made beggars of us all.”

  “Ah, but we have a momentary respite at Charzewice castle. Do me the pleasure, madame. Let us have our little idyll.”

  Maids in starched uniforms brought out champagne and tins of sardines, with butter and black bread. These were the haughtiest maids Jurek had ever seen. One of them nearly stepped on his toes. They smirked at his mother, winked at him, ducked under Frau Flotner’s arms with their trays, and disappeared.

  “Whores,” said the captain. “How will I find proper maids in a wilderness? We’re at the mercy of Polish animals. They steal silverware. They smoke cigarettes in the servants’ latrine, and when they have to urinate, they squat in the garden like the animals that they are.”

  “Father,” said Horst, “you could shoot them.”

  “I have considered that. But suppose their sisters sneak into the palace. They’ll poison our soup. But we mustn’t permit them to spoil our afternoon.”

  And it was miraculous for the boy—champagne and sardines on a slice of bread and butter. Elzbieta had no qualms about letting him drink. The bubbles in the champagne tickled his nose. Elzbieta, the captain, and the captain’s wife took turns playing Chopin and Liszt on the prince of Charzewice’s grand piano, attacking a particular étude like some relay team while they laughed and guzzled champagne. And the two boys played “horse and master,” each one riding on top of the other. Jurek could survey half the palace from the vantage point of Horst’s back.

  They had to leave before the sun went down and the risk of ambush was too great. But the captain’s driver stopped in the middle of the road. He kept leering at Elzbieta and licking his tongue. He climbed out of his seat like an acrobat and sat with Elzbieta and Jurek at the rear of the phaeton.

  “Frau Jewess,” he said, “I’ll let you and your son free if I can have one feel.”

  Jurek wanted to defend his mother, but he didn’t understand the meaning of “one feel.” The driver spat his words in a Polish-German patois.

  “Madame, we can go into the woods if you like. I’ll lend your son my pistol in case the partisans come.”

  Elzbieta stared back at the driver. “Herr Kapitan will hang you if he ever finds out.”

  “Hang me? He’s too busy entertaining Jewesses—madame, I have to touch your breasts before I die.”

  The driver reached into Elzbieta’s dress with one of his blistered hands. She slapped him so hard that his cheek seemed to squash. He fell onto the floor of the phaeton. A rage gathered under his eyes.

  “I’ll kill you here in the woods—you and the boy.”

  Elzbieta slapped him again and beat his crown with her fists. He whimpered and covered his head. He wanted to kiss her hand.

  “I’ll shoot myself, madame, if you don’t forgive me.”

  She kicked him with her summer boots, thin as paper. He crawled back to his seat and returned Elzbieta and the boy to Dabrowa. There was a smile on his face that Jurek failed to grasp. Had he witnessed some odd copulation that included punches and kicks and could be accomplished without either party removing any clothes? But his mother wouldn’t have copulated with an SS corporal.

  “You must tell your father nothing,” she said. “The visit to Charzewice will remain our secret.”

  So now he was part of his mother’s secret service, but what kind of agent could he have been if he slid past every clue? He had sensed something—the pitiless constitution of the maids at Charzewice, women who were secret assassins in the Home Guard, the white partisans’ little army. They slaughtered Frau Flotner and Horst in their beds a week after Jurek’s visit, and beat Herr Kapitan’s brains out with the sturdy legs of the grand piano.

  — 28 —

  BY THE THIRD DAY IN THE FOREST, the whole village had begun to starve. Jozef Stepak had sent his own spies into Dabrowa, and they had found nothing but a few drunken Kalmuks sleeping in a barn.

  Jozef interrogated his spies.

  “And none of the crones we left behind were raped?”

  “Brothers, we did not hear one cry.”

  Jozef gnashed his teeth. “It’s a trap, I tell you. The second we show ourselves, the Kalmuks will rape our women and steal our strongboxes.”

  Moses was eager to knock some sense into Jozef, but a zyd hiding in a Catholic village couldn’t bite and elder’s ear or pull on his nose. The village would starve to death if it stayed here . . . or fall upon its own kind and eat a brother’s or sister’s flesh. And Moses knew that the Dabrovans would fall upon a zyd first, and his little tribe would be devoured. So he had to use all his cunning, all his wits. And if he should fail . . .

  He played out an elaborate pantomime, gathered his little flock. “Come,” he said.

  “Where are we going, Papa?” asked Henio, his little angel, who could sing and talk and dance at the age of four. He wasn’t like that dark-eyed devil of an older son, who contradicted Moses at every turn and conspired against him with Queen Esther.

  “We are going back to Dabrowa,” he shouted.

  The villagers were stunned. They couldn’t let a zyd who had joined the Polish Workers’ Party, the PPR, suddenly become the vanguard of Dabrowa. This Moses-Mieczyslaw was a little too sly. Those wicked red partisans of the PPR were tied to the rosyjskis, and who knows what could happen to a village caught between the PPR and the Home Guard? The Dabrovans formed a ragged line and followed Mieczyzlaw at a safe distance.

  Moses laughed in some labyrinthine chamber of his heart. He wasn’t frightened of Kalmuks who were on the run and had nothing in their wake but German ghost garrisons. So much of their fury depended on the lightning bolts of the SS. But the bolts were gone.

  Moses stepped into Dabrowa in his cardboard boots. The village was as quiet as the dead wind after a storm. He did not find the entrails of a single slaughtered cow. A cock crowed, as if it commanded the town. Moses started to dance in the July dust. Jozef thought he had brain fever. The dust flew, and a Kalmuk walked out of the mirage. He had red paint in one eye, and wore no shoes. He was trembling. He fell into Moses’ arms.

  “Brothers, sisters,” Moses shouted. “Are you blind? We have our first prisoner. The poor fellow is starving. Give him some wine.”

  And that’s how Dabrowa came back to life. Farmers’ wives went into their cellars and returned with wine the color of black mud. Other women fed the Kalmuk pigweed soup and raw potatoes. One little girl gave him an unripe berry. The Kalmuk was seated in the village square on a simple throne that the elders sometimes used. The square itself was a rotting mound between two barns.

  They couldn’t converse with the Kalmuk. They were shorn of language except for their farmers’ lingo and church Latin, and a few phrases the villagers had learned from the Russian and German pythons that were squeezing them to death. And this Kalmuk was from another world, where all men were warriors who clogged one eye with paint and let their children grow into wild packs.

  But they were wrong. It was the zyd who unlocked this wild man. Mieczyslaw had found a way to talk—with his hands, his eyes, and a few words in a Russian dialect that made little sense to the villagers. When they discovered that the Kalmuk had become a Christian, they rejoiced and gave him flowers to wear. He was a farmer, like themselves, had a family somewhere in Siberia. The Germans, he said, had paid him to kill, had sworn that the Polish were a godless people who copulated with their daughters and produced little devils. And the Kalmuks wore red paint in one eye to protect themselves from these devil children.

  The villagers were fond of their new friend, but they couldn’t hide him here. The rosyjskis were coming, and there would be reprisals if a Kalmuk was ever found. They dressed him in a Polish farmer’s cap, wiped the paint from his eyes, and sent him out of the village.

  They had their own trump card—Moses’ wife. She looked like a rosjanka with her dark eyes. They put her on the welcoming committee. They dressed their infants in replicas of Red Army uniforms that they had to buy from a tailor in
another town. The elders draped Russian flags on the door of Jozef’s barn, which doubled as Dabrowa’s town hall. They heard bugles in the distance, could smell the smoke of guns. But where the devil were the rosyjskis?

  And suddenly three NKVD men arrived, dressed like generals in blue-and-bloodred epaulets, and with them was a pudgy officer in Red Army colors, some kind of political commissar. But they didn’t go to Jozef’s barn, even though every flag and sign pointed them in that direction. They climbed the steps of the zyd’s apartment and vanished within its walls. Who was this Moses? A demon sent to devour them, or an angel who had plopped into their lap?

  — 29 —

  HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN DRAWN to the NKVD men, who were secret agents, after all, with beautiful clapboards on their shoulders. But they were a little too smug, a little too convinced of their glory. And Jurek didn’t like the way the three NKVD generals looked at his mother, savoring her in their own minds—it was almost like an act of copulation. But the fourth man, a commissar with a magnificent double chin, did not stare at his mother. He had a kind face. The NKVD generals wanted to punish the whole village for having shielded the wrong partisans, that stinking Home Guard, with their visions of an independent, imperial Poland.

  The commissar disagreed. His name was Gavrila. He didn’t wear shoulder boards and a starched military tunic. He wore a simple blouse and the boots of a common soldier. But perhaps these generals weren’t generals at all. They listened to Gavrila, who smoked rosyjski cigarettes that stank to heaven, though his father insisted there was no such place as heaven.

  “Comrade,” Gavrila said to Moses, “you are on the Home Guard’s death list. So are your wife and son.”

  Moses struck his temples and groaned, and then fell back behind his mask. “But why would they be after my wife?”