by Clinch, Jon
Wonder of wonders, though: as time goes by, the men of the delivery commando prove to be incorrigible flirts. Imagine that. This pair of ragged scarecrows, thin as sticks, worn down by work and woe to a condition beyond any determinable level of vitality or even age, behaving like youngsters at a country dance. Who could have foreseen such a thing? They are shy at the outset, though. Shy as Eidel’s own son was and forever will be, God rest his soul. They communicate with sidelong looks and diffident postures. They linger by the door and whisper to each other, secretive as field mice, glancing up timidly from beneath the brims of their low-slung caps. But they are full-grown men after all, and their reserve can’t last. Certainly not here in the camp, where time is both compressed and nonexistent. Where all things must occur at once or never occur at all. Where whatever happens will happen again and again without ceasing, as everything must always happen in the mind of God.
*
Most of the men in Jacob’s block work on a water project, digging trenches for the new women’s camp. It’s dry work in the hot sun. The capo—the individual in charge of the work and in charge of the block too—is Slazak, pot-bellied Slazak from Lodz, denizen and product of one ghetto after another. He is both a Jew and a disgrace to Jews, and if Jacob had encountered him back when he was a free man freely at work in his father’s barber shop in Zakopane, he wouldn’t have stooped to cut his hair. Even six months ago, working for a couple of apples at a time, he would have turned his back. But six months ago Slazak was already ensconced here at Auschwitz, already proving himself the sort that the SS could depend on, clawing his way up toward that subtle meniscus where the prisoner begins to confuse himself with those who have imprisoned him. The role of the capo is an essential position but a tenuous one, because in order to earn the job and the green patch that goes with it a man must demonstrate a capacity for cunning and brutality that will surely doom him one day. For certain men, though, the dream is irresistible. No one believes in the future anyhow.
No one believes in the future, and yet the work proceeds. Progress occurs. The men dig trenches and lay water pipes and bury them again, inch by inch. Jacob and Max work like Percherons and eat like monks. A daily slice of bread and a partial bowl of thin soup, and in the evening a scrap of fatty meat or moldy cheese. It pares them down and it builds them up, at least for a little while. It builds them up out of nothing but the will to go on. Each of them has spent sufficient time in the mountains, traversing from peak to peak with never quite enough in the way of food and water, to have labored long on an empty belly before. But it was nothing compared to this.
They work through hunger and they work through pain and they work through broken hearts. They work through visions of Eidel and memories of Lydia, Max with his back bent and his gaze down and his father keeping a watchful eye on him for all the good it might do, here in this place that has already cost him one child.
Among the things that keep them both going is the idea of a new women’s camp. It floats before them like a mirage. For if there is to be such a thing as a new women’s camp, then the SS must be planning to move women into it—one of whom might be Eidel. So when Jacob’s legs can support him no more and Max’s hands are too bloody to hold the shovel, they think of her—they think of how this very trench will come to hold pipes that will come to hold water that one day she might come to drink—and they carry on.
For her, if not for Lydia. They can do nothing for Lydia.
Each morning, well before dawn, the men rise to the clanging of three alarm bells and drag themselves out to the yard to be counted. Slazak is always first. Slazak is everywhere first. A couple of old fellows from the country, as alike as a pair of skeletons, are always the last. One of them is named Schuler, Ernst Schuler, and the other one has no name at all that Jacob or Max has ever heard. The men call him Schuler’s Twin because he models himself so closely on the other man and sticks to him as if they’ve been fused together, but they’re probably no relation. Schuler has an airy manner about him in spite of everything. He stands upright in his rags like royalty and he never lowers himself to complain. Not about the sleeping accommodations and not about the rising heat and not about the awful rations. The reason is that he doesn’t work on the water project, although his twin does. Schuler works in the sorting facility, out by the train platform, going through the belongings of new arrivals in search of whatever treasures they might have abandoned in pockets and handbags and the linings of coats.
It doesn’t take long for Jacob and Max to understand how this sets him apart. Schuler’s feet give him away. He owns an extraordinary pair of shoes, gum-soled and comfortable-looking as the pillows on which some sultan might recline, and one of them is tied with regular laces instead of salvaged wire or baling twine or nothing at all. Jacob considers his own shoes, poor burst things never meant for the abuse they take each day on the water project, and he works his way over to where Schuler stands to ask him where he happened to come by such a pair of marvels.
“Canada,” whispers Schuler.
“Canada?”
“Oh, yes. Canada.” Nodding imperceptibly. Keeping an eye on Slazak. “It’s the land of plenty.”
Schuler’s twin explains. Canada is what they call the sorting facility. In Canada, a man with sufficient cunning can get his hands on practically anything at all. Sometimes even food. Particularly food. Cheese from every country in Europe. Chocolate wrapped in golden foil. Foods that keep well, foods that uprooted people will bring with them on a long journey, foods that even the starving will permit themselves to eat only sparingly because they’re so precious and because they remind them of home.
No wonder Schuler doesn’t complain about the rations.
*
For a while, Eidel believes that she might kill herself. She thinks of it night and day, lying breathless in her bunk or sitting at the big table in the kitchen slicing potatoes for soup. A knife in her hand. Once she slips the blade along the flesh inside her left wrist, just opposite the tattoo, and presses to see if she can draw blood. Just to find out if it’s possible. It is.
Suicide would be a way of cementing that endless present in which she tries to exist, and the idea of it is comforting in a way. It doesn’t clear her mind, but it does give her something to think about other than the obvious. It crowds out Lydia, at least for a moment or two, but soon she returns—Lydia and Max too, for Max was a child as well and he must have been doomed to the same fate as his sister—and all thoughts of saving herself by bringing about her own end vanish.
I have no right, she tells herself. No right to choose her own fate when Lydia and Max were given no say in theirs. No right even to distract herself with the idea of it. Such faithlessness is unbecoming of a mother. It’s a betrayal of her family.
And so she goes on. Thinking that as long as she keeps her two children in her heart they are alive at least somewhere. Unwilling to extinguish that light from the world.
One morning, one of the deliverymen asks her name. It happens on a day when the wagon is loaded with flour, and he and his partner are white from head to toe. Later she’ll realize that there’s a reason for the haphazard haste with which they go about their work—at the end of the day there’ll be a few ounces of coal or flour in their pockets and cuffs—but for now she sighs and gives not her name but her number. The number tattooed onto her wrist and sewn onto her uniform.
The deliveryman is persistent, though. He says his name is Oskar Wirtz, and he’s from Witnica by way of Barlinek by way of Krakow, and he’s pretty certain that he’s seen her somewhere before, no doubt under better circumstances. He leans there in the doorway like a scrawny ghost in his pale rags, smiling at Eidel with a kind of punch-drunk optimism, proving that some things never change. Even under conditions as hopeless as these.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ve told you mine. Now you have to tell me yours.”
“Eidel. Eidel Rosen.”
“Eidel,” he says.
“You can call m
e Mrs. Rosen.”
“What happened to your Mister?”
“He’s around here someplace.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Lucky you,” says the ghost in the doorway, crestfallen. “My own Missus ran into some difficulty. I’m sure you understand.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
The female capo who runs the kitchen, a gigantic Pole whose last name is Rolak and whose first name no one has dared speak in so long that it has entered into the realm of myth, hurries past in pursuit of some prisoner who isn’t where she’s supposed to be. Eidel puts her head down. Don’t draw attention. The deliveryman smiles brightly at Rolak, though, and doffs his whitened cap to her, and she smiles back. They have some kind of understanding. “Don’t be flirting with these women,” she says, tossing the words back over her shoulder. “They don’t have time for your nonsense.”
Eidel has never seen the capo talk to an ordinary prisoner this way. Like a human being. Rolak is a great fat woman, astonishingly so for as long as she’s been confined here in Auschwitz, but Eidel has never seen her eat so much as a bite. It must happen elsewhere. There are rumors. Rumors of imported delicacies consumed in secret. Eidel pictures her alone in one of the storerooms, shoving aside bushel baskets of turnips and beans to reach such rare foods as she might keep hidden in the darkness behind them; she pictures her in her little boarded-off room within the block, the private quarters behind whose padlocked door she might keep hidden anything at all. She pictures her luxuriating on the bed—a bed with a mattress! think of it!—her mouth crammed full of chocolate or sausage or cheese. Drowning herself in food.
“The capo,” she says to the junkman. “Do you get food for her?”
“I can get anything.” He smiles and takes one step toward the table where she sits. “A fellow in my position moves pretty freely around the camp. I know lots of people.” It’s true. For a junkman from Witnica, he’s come up in the world.
Eidel hardly even knows what she is asking when she asks it. “Can you get information?” she says.
He cocks an eyebrow, putting his knuckles on the table. “Information? Of course!”
“I need to know just one thing.”
“One thing,” he nods—slowly, again and again, like the handle of a pump—leaning forward. “Everyone wants to know one thing. Remember, though: I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t predict your future.”
“I know you can’t.”
“For that, you’d need a gypsy.” He smiles, all teeth.
“I don’t want to know my future.”
He shrugs. “Why not? It’s the one thing we all want to know.”
“I’ve already seen my future,” she says. And she’s right. There’s no denying it. Not even for him.
“All right, then,” says the deliveryman. “What’ll it be?”
“My husband. Jacob Rosen. I need to know if he’s alive.”
“But you told me he was around here someplace.”
“I was lying. I don’t know for sure.”
Again he looks crestfallen. Now that he’s quit feigning shyness, this seems to be one of his two modes of communication. He looks either disappointed or predatory, depending. “You were lying,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, heartbroken. “You were lying, to me.” Straightening up. His knuckles leaving white rings on the rough wood of the table.
“His name is Jacob Rosen. Jacob Rosen from Zakopane.”
“Zakopane!” he says, all smiles once more. “That’s where I’ve seen you!” The junkman from Witnica never gives up hope.
*
Schuler says that he can’t work properly without adequate shoes.
They’re walking now, Jacob’s commando on its way to the excavation and Schuler about to split off toward Canada. He tells Jacob he needs the gum-soled shoes because he isn’t on his hands and knees sorting through castoffs seven days a week. Oh, no. Not at all. On Fridays he’s on his feet for the whole day, a man of his age, and he’s working under a kind of crippling pressure that someone like Jacob can’t possibly imagine. One false move and it’s all over. He drags a finger across his own neck.
A young SS officer comes pedaling past on a bicycle. Schuler inclines his head toward him. Very softly he says, “He’s one of them.”
“One of what.”
“One of the sons of bitches I’m required to keep looking sharp.” The SS man’s hat falls off in the breeze and he stops the bicycle to retrieve it. “Every Friday,” Schuler says, “I cut the officers’ hair.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Jacob hasn’t given this kind of thing any thought. The only barbering he’s seen around here has been so brutal—his own occasional passage, for example, under the rusty razors of the commando of sadists and mental defectives in the shed out by the train platform—that it’s never occurred to him that his skills might have any real use around the camp. Use of the sort that might get him away from digging trenches now and then. As a rule, keeping out of sight is a good idea; dealing with the capo is a terrible enough fate, without exposing himself directly to the SS. But on the other hand, the work doesn’t seem to be doing Schuler any harm. He seems to be thriving on it.
“What came first?” he asks the old man. “The barbering business, or Canada?”
“Oh, the barbering. I was transferred to lighter work once they’d seen how valuable I was.” He walks along, puffed up by more than his gum-soled shoes.
The SS officer with the bicycle is beating the dust out of his hat and watching the commando march past, smiling as if he finds the very sight of them amusing. The way they stumble over the rocky path in their ruined shoes and their bare feet. Jacob hazards a quick look in his direction, and notes a cowlick pointing straight up from the crown of his head. That’s not all. His sideburns are uneven as well. Jacob decides that old man Schuler might not be quite as valuable as he thinks he is.
*
“Everything has a price,” says the junkman.
“But all I need is to know something,” says Eidel. “I’m not after food or anything else like that. Not like—you know.” Puffing out her cheeks, doing her best impression of the capo.
“Information has a price, too,” says the man in white. But before he has a chance to suggest what that price might be, the capo has come back and is shooing him out the door. Seriously this time. Vehemently. Her fat face is red and she has a rag wrapped around her fist and a piece of ice from the icebox is melting inside the rag. She’s injured her hand in some way. Eidel can guess how. That stray prisoner she’d been running down. And sure enough, as the capo stands rubbing her fist and watching water trail along her arm and drip from her elbow onto the dusting of flour that the deliveryman has tracked in, she vows that next time she’ll use a stick of kindling or maybe a poker. One of those big rusty soup ladles if nothing else. Letting it be known. Next time.
The deliveryman may have outworn his welcome for this morning, but there will be a next time for him as well. In a world where nothing changes, there’s always a next time.
Max
My mother was a wonderful painter, I can tell you that.
Even then, you see, I had an eye. Even as a boy. You wouldn’t have imagined it to look at me, but how could it have been otherwise? With a mother like mine?
The most remarkable thing about her work is that she was completely unschooled—by which I mean she schooled herself. She trained her eye by studying good work. How you can tell good work from bad when you don’t have anybody around to educate you is the mystery, but it’s the first indicator of a gift. It’s where the gift begins.
She loved Vermeer, and you could see it everywhere in her work. She used to poke fun, calling herself the third-rate Vermeer of the shtetl, but there was nothing third-rate about what she did. And she’d never lived in the shtetl, for that matter. She grew up in Warsaw, under conditions of comfort if not opulence. Her father was an attorney. And then
she met my father and they got married and set up housekeeping in Zakopane. Zakopane was a resort town then, just as it is now. They were privileged to live there. We were all privileged.
The only time she spent in the shtetl was toward the end, and it was then that she finally gave up painting. Nineteen-forty, nineteen-forty-one.
She’d never dressed things up. As beautiful as her work always was—and her paintings were beautiful, whether or not you happen to believe that beauty has anything to do with art—it wasn’t because she was actively making it that way. Pushing things around, consciously or unconsciously. I suppose that’s why she stopped when the going got bad; she’d never gilded the lily and she wasn’t about to start. She was entering into a difficult period where everything around her was changing for the worse, and she didn’t have any desire to document it. You have to respect that.
My mother was one hell of a painter, though. That’s the main thing.
Take my word for it.
Three
Eidel makes no distinctions among her fellow prisoners. She plays no favorites and she bears no grudges, and this sets her apart. It makes her inscrutable. When the women line up for their ration of bread and soup, she sinks the ladle to a point exactly halfway down into the pot for every one of them. Halfway and no more. Halfway and no less. There is always someone who will beg her to go a little deeper just this once, please—either for her own bowl, or for the bowl of a friend whose vitality is dangerously waning—hoping that down on the bottom of the pot the ladle will dredge up a couple of beans or a thin slice of carrot in addition to the filmy water that constitutes their usual undoctored portion.
But no. She never even looks up to dignify such a request.
