“So?” Darija asked. “Aren’t we going in?”
As it turned out, it was even more difficult to actually go into the hotel pretending to be someone else than it was to gather enough bravery to walk there in our fancy clothes. “What if we see someone we know?”
“Who are we going to see?” Darija scoffed. “The fathers are all getting ready to go for evening prayers. The mothers are home getting dinner ready.”
I glanced at her. “You first.”
My mother thought I was at Darija’s, and Darija’s mother thought she was at my house. We could easily get caught, but we were hoping our adventure would compensate for whatever punishment we might incur. As I hesitated, a woman swept up the stairs of the hotel past me. She smelled strongly of perfume and had nails and lips painted fire-engine red. Her clothes were not as fine as those of the clientele of the hotel—or the man she was with, for that matter. She was one of Those Women, the ones my mother pulled me away from. Women of the night were more common in Bałuty, the poorer section of the city—women who looked like they never slept, their shawls wrapped around their bare shoulders as they peeked from their windows. But that didn’t mean there was a lack of loose women here. The man walking behind this one had a tiny mustache, like Charlie Chaplin, and a walking cane. As she sailed through the hotel doorway, he cupped his hand on her bottom.
“That’s disgusting,” Darija whispered.
“That’s what people are going to think we are if we go inside!” I hissed.
Darija pouted. “If you weren’t going to go through with this in the first place, Minka, I don’t know why you said—”
“I never said anything! You said that you wanted—”
“Minka?” At the sound of my name, I froze. The only thing worse than my mother discovering I was not at Darija’s house was someone recognizing me and running back to tell my mother.
Grimacing, I turned around to see Josek, dapper in his coat and tie. “It is you,” he said, smiling, and he didn’t even steal a glance at Darija. “I didn’t realize you came here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, guarded.
Darija elbowed me. “Of course we come here. Doesn’t everyone?”
Josek laughed. “Well, I don’t know about everyone. The coffee’s better elsewhere.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He lifted a notebook. “An interview. A human interest piece. That’s all they let me do, so far. My editor says I have to earn breaking news.” He looked at my dress, pinned in the back because it was too big, and the borrowed shoes on my feet. “Are you going to a funeral?”
So much for looking sophisticated.
“We’re headed out on a double date,” Darija said.
“Really!” Josek replied, surprised. “I didn’t think—” Abruptly, he stopped speaking.
“You didn’t think what?”
“That your father would let you go out with a boy,” Josek said.
“Clearly that’s not the case.” Darija tossed her hair. “We’re not babies, Josek.”
He grinned at me. “Then maybe you’d like to come out with me sometime, Minka. I’ll prove to you that the coffee at Astoria puts the Grand Hotel to shame.”
“Tomorrow at four,” Darija announced, as if she was suddenly my social secretary. “She’ll be there.”
As Josek said his good-byes and walked off, Darija looped her arm through mine. “I’m going to kill you,” I said.
“Why? Because I got you a date with a handsome boy? For goodness’ sake, Minka, if I can’t have fun, at least let me live vicariously through you.”
“I don’t want to go out with Josek.”
“But Ania needs you to go out with him,” Darija said.
Ania, my character, who was too boring. Too safe.
“You can thank me later,” she said, patting my hand.
• • •
Astoria Café was a well-known hangout on Piotrkowska Street. At any given moment, you might find Jewish intellectuals, playwrights, composers arguing the finer points of artistic merit over smoky tables and bitter coffee; or opera divas sipping tea with lemon. Even though I was dressed in the same borrowed outfit I’d worn the day before, being in close quarters with these people made my head swim, as if I might become enlightened simply by breathing the same air.
We were sitting near the swinging doors of the kitchen, and every time they opened, a delicious smell would waft over us. Josek and I were sharing a platter of pierogi, and drinking coffee, which was—as he had promised—heavenly. “ Upiory, ” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not what I expected.”
I had been telling him—shyly—of the plot for my story: of Ania, and her father the baker; of the monster who invades their town by masquerading as a common man. “My grandmother used to talk about them when she was still alive,” I explained. “At night, she would leave grain on the wooden table at the bakery, so that if an upiór came, he would be forced to count it until the sunrise. If I didn’t go to bed when I was supposed to, my grandmother said the upiór would come for me and drink my blood.”
“Pretty grisly,” Josek said.
“The thing is, it didn’t scare me. I used to feel bad for the upiór. I mean, it wasn’t his fault he was undead. But good luck getting someone to believe that, when there were people like my grandmother running around saying otherwise.” I looked up at Josek. “So I started to daydream a story about an upiór, who may not be as evil as everyone thinks. At least not compared to the human who’s trying to destroy him. And certainly not in the eyes of the girl who’s starting to fall for him . . . until she realizes he may have killed her own father.”
“Wow,” Josek said, impressed.
I laughed. “You were expecting a romance, maybe?”
“More than I was expecting a horror story,” he admitted.
“Darija says that I have to tone it down, or no one will ever want to read it.”
“But you don’t believe that . . . ?”
“No,” I said. “People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don’t, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?”
A slow smile spread across Josek’s face. In that moment, he looked handsome. At least as handsome as Herr Bauer, if not more. “I didn’t realize Łód had the next Janusz Korczak in its midst.”
I fidgeted with my teaspoon. “So you don’t think it’s crazy? For a girl to write something like this?”
Josek leaned closer. “I think it’s brilliant. I see what you’re doing. It’s not just a fairy tale, it’s an allegory, right? The upiory, they are like Jews. To the general population, they are bloodsuckers, a dark and frightening tribe. They are to be feared and battled with weapons and crosses and Holy Water. And the Reich, which puts itself on the side of God, has commissioned itself to rid the world of monsters. But the upiory, they are timeless. No matter what they try to do to us, we Jews have been around too long to be forgotten, or to be vanquished.”
Once, in Herr Bauer’s class, I had made an error during an essay and substituted one German word for another. I was writing about the merits of a parochial education, and meant to say Achtung, which meant “attention, respect.” Instead, I used Ächtung, which meant “ostracism.” As you can imagine, it completely changed the point of my essay. Herr Bauer asked me to stay after class to have a discussion about the separation of church and state, and what it was like to be a Jew in a Catholic high school. I wasn’t embarrassed at the time, because mostly I didn’t even pay attention to what made me different from the other students—and because I got to spend a half hour alone with Herr Bauer, talking as if we were equals. And of course it was a mistake, not a stroke of brilliance, that had led me to make the observation in my paper that Herr Bauer thought was so insightful . . . but I wasn’t about to admit to that.
Just like I’m not going to admit to Josek, now, that when I was writing my story I never in a million years was thinking of it as a political statement. In fa
ct, when I imagined Ania and her father, they were Jewish, like me.
“Well,” I said, trying to make light of Josek’s explanation. “Guess I can’t put anything past you.”
“You’re something else, Minka Lewin,” he said. “I’ve never met another girl like you.” He threaded his fingers through mine. Then he lifted my hand and pressed his lips to it, suddenly a courtier.
It was old-world and chivalrous and made me shiver. I tried to remember every sensation, from the way all the colors in the café suddenly seemed brighter to the electric current that danced over my palm like lightning in a summertime field. I wanted to be able to tell Darija every last detail. I wanted to write them into my story.
Before I could finish my mental catalog, though, Josek wrapped his hand around the back of my head, drew me closer, and kissed me.
It was my first kiss. I could feel the pressure of Josek’s fingers on my scalp, and the scratchy wool of his sweater under my palm. My heart felt like fireworks must, when after finally being lit, all that gunpowder has somewhere to go.
“So,” Josek said after a moment.
I cleared my throat and looked around at the other patrons. I expected them all to be staring at us, but no, they were tangled in their own conversations, punctuating the air with gestures that cut through the haze of the cigarette smoke.
I had a brief flashing image of myself and Josek, living abroad, and working together at our kitchen table. There he was, his white shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows as he furiously typed a story on deadline. There I was, chewing the top end of a pencil as I added the final touches to my first novel.
“Josek Szapiro,” I said, drawing back. “What’s gotten into you?”
He laughed. “Must be all this talk of monsters and the ladies who love them.”
Darija would tell me to play hard to get. To walk out and make Josek come after me. To Darija, every relationship was a game. Me, I got tired of figuring out all the rules.
Before I could answer, though, the doors of the café burst open and a swarm of SS soldiers exploded into the room. They began to smack the patrons with their truncheons, to overturn chairs with people still in them. Old men who fell to the floor were trampled or kicked; women were thrown against the walls.
I was frozen in place. I had been near SS soldiers when they passed, but never in the middle of an action like this one. The men all seemed to be over six feet tall, hulking brutes in heavy green wool uniforms. They had clenched fists and pale silver eyes that glittered the way mica did. They smelled like hatred.
Josek grabbed me and shoved me behind him through the swinging kitchen doors. “Run, Minka,” he whispered. “Run!”
I did not want to leave Josek behind. I grabbed on to his sleeve, trying to pull him with me, but as I did a soldier yanked on his other arm. The last thing I saw, before I turned and sprinted, was the blow that spun Josek in a slow pirouette, the blood running from his temple and broken nose.
The soldiers were dragging out the café patrons and loading them into trucks when I climbed through the window of the kitchen and walked as normally as I could in the opposite direction. When I felt I was a safe distance away, I started to run. I twisted my ankle in the kitten heels, so I kicked them off and kept going barefoot, even though it was October and the soles of my feet were freezing.
I did not stop running, not when I got a stitch in my side or when I had to scatter a group of little beggar children like pigeons; especially not when a woman pushing a cart of vegetables grabbed my arm to ask if I was all right. I ran for a half hour, until I was at my father’s bakery. Basia was not at the cash register—shopping with Mama, I assumed—but the bell that hung over the door rang, so that my father would know someone had entered.
He came out from the kitchen, his broad face glistening with sweat from the heat of the brick ovens, his beard dusted with flour. His delight at seeing me faded as he noticed my face—makeup streaked with tears—my bare feet, my hair tumbling out of its pins.
“Minusia,” he cried out. “What happened?”
Yet I, who fancied myself a writer, couldn’t find a single word to describe not only what I had seen but how everything had changed, as if the earth had tilted slightly on its axis, ashamed of the sun, so that now we would have to learn to live in the dark.
With a sob, I threw myself into his arms. I had tried so hard to be a cosmopolitan woman; as it turned out, all I wanted was to stay a little girl.
But I had grown up in an instant.
• • •
If the world hadn’t been turned inside out that afternoon, I would have been punished. I would have been sent to my room without dinner and barred from seeing Darija or doing anything but my schoolwork for at least a week. Instead, when my mother heard what had happened, she held me tightly and would not let me out of her sight.
Before we walked home, my father’s arm tightly anchored around me and his eyes darting around the street as if he expected a threat to leap out of an alley at any minute (and why should he think any differently, after what I had relayed to him?), we went to the office where Josek’s father worked as an accountant. My father knew his father from shul. “Chaim,” he said gravely. “We have news.”
He asked me to tell Josek’s father everything—from the time we arrived at the café to the moment I saw a soldier hitting Josek with an iron rod. I watched the blood drain from his father’s face, saw his eyes fill with tears. “They took people away in trucks,” I said. “I don’t know where.”
An internal battle played over the older man’s face, as hope struggled with reason. “You’ll see,” my father said gently. “He’ll come back.”
“Yes.” Chaim nodded as if he needed to convince himself. He looked up then, as if he was surprised to see us still standing there. “I have to go. I must tell my wife.”
When Darija came after dinnertime to find out about my date with Josek, I told my mother to make an excuse and say I wasn’t feeling well. It was the truth, after all. That date seemed unrecognizable now, so badly tarnished by the firestorm of events that I couldn’t remember what it used to look like.
My father, who picked at the food on his plate that night, went out after the dishes were cleared. I was sitting on my bed, my eyes squeezed shut, conjugating German verbs. Ich habe Angst. Du hast Angst. Er hat Angst. Wir haben Angst.
We are afraid. Wir haben Angst.
My mother came into my bedroom and sat down beside me. “Do you think he’s alive?” I asked, the one question that no one had spoken out loud.
“Ach, Minusia,” my mother said. “That imagination of yours.” But her hands were shaking, and she hid this by reaching for the brush on my nightstand. She turned me, gently, so that I was sitting with my back to her, and she began to brush out my hair in long, sweeping strokes, the way she used to when I was little.
• • •
What we learned, from information that leaked through the community in tiny staccato bursts, like rapid gunfire, was that the SS had rounded up 150 people from the Astoria that afternoon. They had taken them to headquarters and had interrogated the men and women individually, beating them with iron bars, with rubber clubs. They broke arms and fingers and demanded ransom payments of several hundred marks. Those who didn’t have the money with them had to give the names of family members who might. Forty-six people were shot to death by the SS, fifty were freed after payment, and the rest were taken off to a prison in Radogoszcz.
Josek had been one of the lucky ones. Although I hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, my father told me he was back home with his family. Chaim, who like my father had Christian clients as well as Jews, had somehow made the arrangements for money to be brought to SS headquarters in exchange for his son’s freedom. He told everyone who would listen that if not for the bravery of Minka Lewin, they might not have had such a happy ending.
I had been thinking a lot about happy endings. I had been thinking about what Josek and I were speaking of, moments before
Everything Happened. Of villains, and of heroes. The upiór in my story, was he the one who terrorized others? Or was he the one being persecuted?
I was sitting on the steps that led to the second floor of the school building one afternoon while the rest of the students had Religious Studies. Although I was supposed to be crafting an essay, I was writing my story instead. I had just started a scene where an angry mob beats at Ania’s door. My pencil could not keep up with my thoughts. I could feel my heart start to pound as I imagined the knock, the splinter of the wood against the weapons the townspeople had brought for the lynching. I could feel sweat breaking out along Ania’s spine. I could hear their German accents through the thick cottage door—
But the German accent I heard was actually Herr Bauer’s. He sank down beside me on the step, our shoulders nearly bumping. My tongue swelled to four times its normal size; I could not have spoken aloud if my life depended on it. “Fräulein Lewin,” he said. “I wanted you to hear the news from me.”
The news? What news?
“Today is my last day here,” he confessed, in German. “I will be going back to Stuttgart.”
“But . . . why?” I stammered. “We need you here.”
He smiled, that beautiful smile. “My country apparently needs me, too.”
“Who will teach us?”
He shrugged. “Father Czerniski will take over.”
Father Czerniski was a drunk, and I had no doubt the only German he knew was the word Lager. But I didn’t need to say this out loud, Herr Bauer was thinking the same thing. “You will continue to study on your own,” he insisted fiercely. “You will continue to excel.” Then Herr Bauer met my gaze, and for the first time in our acquaintance, he spoke Polish to me. “It has been an honor and a privilege to teach you,” he said.
After he walked downstairs, I ran to the girls’ bathroom and burst into tears. I cried for Herr Bauer, and for Josek, and for me. I cried because I would not be able to lose myself daydreaming about Herr Bauer anymore, which meant more time would be spent in reality. I cried because when I remembered my first kiss, I felt sick to my stomach. I cried because my world had become a raging ocean and I was drowning. Even after I splashed my face with cold water, my eyes were still red and puffy. When Father Jarmyk asked if I was all right during math, I told him that we had received sad news the previous night about a cousin in Kraków.
The Storyteller Page 21
