I have no idea what she’s talking about. 2 страница

“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.

These days, no one would question that kind of response.

When I left school that afternoon, headed directly to the bakery as usual, I thought I was seeing an apparition. Leaning on a lamppost across the street was Josek Szapiro. I gasped, and ran to him. When I got closer, I could see the skin around his eyes was yellow and purple, all the jewel tones of a fading bruise; that he had a healing cut through the middle of his left eyebrow. I reached up to touch his face, but he caught my hand. One of his fingers was splinted. “Careful,” he said. “It’s still tender.”

“What did they do to you?”

He pulled my hand down. “Not here,” he warned, looking around at the busy pedestrians.

Still holding my hand, he tugged me away from the school. To anyone passing by, we might have looked like an ordinary couple. But I knew from the way Josek was holding on to me—tightly, as if he were drowning in quicksand and needed to be rescued—that this wasn’t the case.

I followed him blindly through a street market, past the fishmonger and the vegetable cart, into a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. When I slipped on cabbage rinds, he anchored me to his side. I could feel the heat of his arm around me. It felt like hope.

He didn’t stop until we had navigated a rabbit warren of cobbled pathways, until we were behind the service entrance of a building I did not even recognize. Whatever Josek wanted to say to me, I hoped that it didn’t involve leaving me here alone to find my way back.

“I was so worried about you,” he said finally. “I didn’t know if you’d gotten away.”

“I’m much tougher than I look,” I replied, raising my chin.

“And as it turns out,” Josek said quietly, “I’m not. They beat me, Minka. They broke my finger to get me to tell them who my father was. I didn’t want them to know. I thought they would go after him, and hurt him, too. But instead they took his money.”

“Why?” I asked. “What did you ever do to them?”

Josek looked down at me. “I exist, ” he said softly.

I bit my lip. I felt like crying again, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Josek. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

“I came to give you something,” Josek said. “My family leaves for St. Petersburg next week. My mother has an aunt who lives there.”

“But...” I said stupidly, wanting only to unhear the words he had just spoken. “What about your job?”

“There are newspapers in Russia.” He smiled, just a little bit. “Maybe one day I will even be reading your upiór story in one.” He reached into his pocket. “Things are going to get worse here before they get better. My father, he has business acquaintances. Friends who are willing to do favors for him. We are traveling to St. Petersburg with Christian papers.”

My eyes flew to his face. If you had Christian papers, you could go anywhere. You had the so-called proper documents to prove that you were Aryan. This meant a free pass from all restrictions, roundups, deportations.

If Josek had had those papers a week ago, he would never have been beaten by the SS. Then again, he would never have been at Astoria Café, either.

“My father wanted to make sure that what happened to me never will happen again.” Solemnly, Josek unfolded the documents. They were, I realized, not for a boy his age. They were instead for a teenage girl. “You saved my life. Now it’s my turn to save yours.”

I backed away from the papers, as if they might burst into flame.

“He couldn’t get enough for your whole family,” Josek explained. “But, Minka... you could come with us. We would say you’re my cousin. My parents will take care of you.”

I shook my head. “How could I become part of your family, knowing I had left mine behind?”

Josek nodded. “I thought you would say that. But take them. One day, you may change your mind.”

He pressed the papers into my hand, and closed my fingers around them. Then he pulled me into his arms. The papers were caught between our bodies, a wedge to drive us apart, like any other lie. “Be well, Minka,” Josek said, and he kissed me again. This time, his mouth was angry against mine, as if he were communicating in a language I hadn’t learned.

• • •

An hour later, I was in the steamy belly of my father’s bakery, eating the roll he made for me every day, with the special twisted crown on the top and a center of chocolate and cinnamon. At this time of day, we were alone; his employees came in before dawn to bake and left at midday. My legs were hooked around the stool where I sat, watching my father shape loaves. He set them to proof inside the floured folds of a baker’s couche, patting the round, dimpled rise of each one, supple as a baby’s bottom. Inside my brassiere, the edges of my Christian papers seared my skin. I imagined getting undressed that night, finding the name of some goyishe girl tattooed over my breast.

“Josek’s family is leaving,” I announced.

My father’s hands, which were always moving, stilled over the dough. “When did you see him?”

“Today. After school. He wanted to say good-bye.”

My father nodded and pulled another clot of dough into a small rectangle.

“Are we going to leave town?” I asked.

“If we did, Minusia,” my father said, “who would feed everyone else?”

“It’s more important that we’re safe. Especially with Basia having a baby.”

My father slammed his hand down on the butcher block, creating a small storm of flour. “Do you think I cannot keep my own family safe?” he bellowed. “Do you think that’s not important to me?”

“No, Papa,” I whispered.

He walked around the counter and gripped my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “Family is everything to me. You are everything to me. I would tear this bakery down brick by brick with my own hands if it meant you wouldn’t be harmed.”

I had never seen him like this. My father, who was always so sure of himself, always ready with a joke to diffuse the most difficult situation, was barely holding himself together. “Your name, Minka. Short for Wilhelmina. You know what it means? Chosen protection. I will always choose to protect you. ” He looked at me for a long moment, and then sighed. “I was going to save these for a Chanukah gift, but I’m thinking maybe now is the time for a present.”

I sat while he disappeared into the back room where he kept the records of shipments of grain and salt and butter. He returned with a burlap sack, its drawstring pulled tight as a spinster’s mouth. “ A Freilichen Chanukah, ” he said. “A couple of months early, anyway.”

With impatient hands I yanked at the knots to untie the package. The burlap pooled around a shiny pair of black boots.

They were new, which was a big deal. But they were nothing fancy, nothing that would make a girl rhapsodize over their fashionable stitching or style. “Thank you,” I said, forcing a smile and hugging my father around the neck.

“These are one of a kind. No one else has a pair like them. You must promise me to wear these boots at all times. Even when you are sleeping. You understand, Minka?” He took one from my lap and reached for the knife he used to hack off bits of dough from the massive amoeba on the counter. Inserting the tip into a groove at the heel, he twisted, and the bottom of the sole snapped off. At first, I could not understand why he was ruining my new present; then I realized that inside this hidden compartment were several gold coins. A fortune.

“No one knows they are in there,” my father said, “except you and me.”

I thought of Josek’s broken hand, of the SS soldiers demanding money from him. This was my father’s insurance policy.

He showed me how both heels opened, then fitted each back to the boot and whacked them a few times on the counter. “Good as new,” he said, and he handed the boots to me again. “And I mean it—I want you to wear them everywhere. Every day. When it’s cold, when it’s hot. When you’re going to the market or when you’re going dancing.” He grinned at me. “Minka, make a note: I want to see you wearing them at my funeral.”

I smiled back, relieved to be settled on familiar ground. “That may be a little tricky for you, don’t you think?”

He laughed, then, the big belly laugh that I always thought of when I thought of my father. With my new boots cradled in my lap, I considered the secret we now shared, and the one we didn’t. I never told my father about my Christian papers; not then, not ever. Mostly because I knew he would force me to use them.

As I finished the roll my father had baked just for me, I looked down at my blue sweater. On my shoulders, there was a dusting of flour that he had left behind when he grabbed me. I tried to brush it off, but it was no use. No matter what, I could see the faint handprints, as if I had been warned by a ghost.

• • •

In November, there were changes. My father came home one day with yellow stars, which we were to wear on our clothing at all times. Łód , our town, was being called Litzmannstadt by the German soldiers who overran it. More and more Jewish families were moving into the Old Town, or Bałuty, some by choice, and some because the authorities had decided that the apartments and houses they had owned or rented for years should now be reserved for ethnic Germans. There were streets in town that we could no longer walk down but instead had to take circuitous routes or bridges. We were not allowed to use public transportation or to leave home after dark. My sister’s pregnancy became visible. Darija went on a few dates with a boy named Dawid, and all of a sudden she thought she knew everything there was to know about love stories.

“If you don’t like what I’m writing,” I said one day, “then why don’t you stop reading it?”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Darija replied. “I’m just trying to help you with realism.”

Realism, to Dariya, meant reliving her moments of passion with Dawid so that my character, Ania, could have just as romantic a kiss. From the way Darija talked, you’d think Dawid was a combination of the Green Fields actor Michael Goldstein and the Messiah.

“Have you heard from Josek?” she asked.

She wasn’t saying it to be mean, but Darija must have realized that the odds of me getting mail were very slim. The post did not come and go with any regularity anymore. I preferred to think that Josek had written me often, maybe even two or three times a day, and that these missives were piling up somewhere at a dead letter office.

“Well,” she said when I shook my head. “I’m sure he’s just really busy.”

We were at the studio where Darija practiced ballet three times a week. She was good—at least as proficient in her craft as I was in my writing. She used to talk about joining a dance company, but these days, no one talked about the future. I watched her pull on her jacket with its yellow star on the front shoulder and back, and wrap a scarf around her neck. “The bit you wrote about consuming an upió r ’s blood,” she said. “Did you make that up?”

I shook my head. “My grandmother used to tell me that.”

Darija shuddered. “It’s creepy.”

“Good creepy or bad creepy?”

She linked her arm through mine. “Good creepy,” she said. “People-will-want-to-read-it creepy.”

I smiled. This was the Darija I knew, the Darija I missed because she was usually too busy fawning over her new boyfriend. “Maybe tonight we can stay over together at my place,” I suggested as we walked out of the building, knowing that she was probably planning to go on a date with Dawid. There was a barrage of soldiers passing as we exited, and instinctively we ducked our heads. Once, when soldiers passed, I used to feel a cold ache in the pit of my stomach. Now, it was so commonplace I didn’t even notice.

There was a buzz in the street; from a distance we could hear screams. “What’s happening?” I asked, but Darija was already moving in that direction.

In one of the squares three men were hanging from gallows so new I could still smell the sap of the trees their timber had come from. A group of people had gathered; at the front of the crowd, a woman was weeping and trying to get to one of the dead men, but the soldiers wouldn’t let her. “What did they do?” Darija asked.

An elderly lady beside her replied. “Criticized Germans here in the city.”

The soldiers began to move through the crowd, telling people to go home. Somehow, Darija got separated from me. I heard her calling my name, but I worked my way forward until I was standing at the edge of the gallows. The soldiers didn’t pay attention to me; they were too busy dragging away the family of the deceased.

This was the closest I had ever come to someone dead. At my grandmother’s funeral, I was little, and all I remember is the coffin. The man who was now twisting like a leaf on an autumn tree looked like he was asleep. His neck was snapped at a strange angle, and his eyes were closed. His tongue protruded a little. There was a dark shadow in his pants, where he must have urinated. Before or after? I wondered.

I thought of all the blood and guts in the horror story I was writing, of the upiór eating the heart of a victim, and realized that none of it mattered. The shock value was not in the gore. It was in the fact that a minute ago, this man was alive, and now, he wasn’t.

That afternoon when my father and I walked past the gallows, he tried to distract me with conversation about our neighbors, about the bakery, about the weather, as if I did not notice the stiff forms of the men behind me.

My parents argued that night. My mother said I should not be walking around town anymore. My father said that was impossible; how would I go to school? I fell asleep to their angry voices and had a nightmare. Darija and I were at the hanging, but this time, when I got closer to the body and it slowly rotated toward me so that I could see the face, it was Josek’s.

The next morning I ran to Darija’s home. When her mother let me in, I was dumbfounded—the house, which was usually neat as a pin, was in total disarray. “It’s time,” Darija’s mother told me. “We’re going to the Old Town, where it’s safer.”

I did not believe it was safer in the Old Town. I didn’t think it would be safer until the British started winning the war. After all, they’d never lost one, so I knew it would only be a matter of time before Hitler and his Third Reich were conquered. “She is very upset, Minka,” Darija’s mother confided. “Maybe you will be able to cheer her up.”

Music from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty seeped from beneath the closed door of Darija’s room. When I walked inside, I saw that her rug had been rolled up, the way she sometimes did when she danced. But she wasn’t dancing. She was sitting on the floor cross-legged, crying.

I cleared my throat. “I need your help. I’m totally stuck on page fifty-six.”

Darija didn’t even look at me.

“It’s this part where Ania goes to Aleksander’s home,” I said, frantically making it up as I went. “Something has to upset her. I just don’t know what it is.” I glanced at Darija. “At first I thought it was Aleksander with another woman, but I don’t think that’s it at all.”

I did not think Darija was listening, but then she sighed. “Read it to me.”

So I did. Although there was nothing written on the page, I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider’s web, spinning a make-believe life. That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?

“Death,” Darija said when I was finished, when the last sentence hovered like a cliff. “She needs to see someone die.”

“Why?”

“Because what else would scare her more?” Darija asked, and I knew she wasn’t talking about my story any longer.

I took a pencil out of my pocket and made notes. “Death,” I repeated. I smiled at my best friend. “What would I do without you?”

That, I realized too late, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Darija burst into tears. “I don’t want to leave.”

I sat down beside her and hugged her tight. “I don’t want you to leave,” I agreed.

“I’ll never get to see Dawid,” she sobbed. “Or you.”

She was so upset, I didn’t even get jealous about being the second party in that sentence. “You’re just going across town. Not to Siberia.”

But I knew that meant nothing. Every day, a new wall appeared, a fence, a detour. Every day the buffer zone between the Germans in this city and the Jews grew thicker and thicker. Eventually, it would force us into the Old Town, like Darija’s family, or it would shove us out of Łód completely.

“This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen,” Darija said. “We were supposed to go to university and then move to London.”

“Maybe we will one day,” I replied.

“And maybe we’ll be hanged like those men.”

“Darija! Don’t say that!”

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” she accused, and she was right, of course. Why them, when everyone had spoken badly of the Germans? Were they louder than the rest of us? Or were they just picked at random to make a point?

On Darija’s bed were two boxes, a ball of twine, and a knife for cutting it. I grabbed the knife and sliced the fleshy center of my palm. “Best friends forever,” I vowed, and I handed her the knife.

Without hesitation, she cut her own palm. “Best friends,” she said. We pressed our hands together, a promise sealed in blood. I knew it didn’t work this way, because I had studied biology at Gymnasium, but I liked the thought of Darija’s blood running through my veins. It made it easier to believe I was keeping a piece of her with me.

Two days later, Darija’s family joined the long line of Jewish families snaking out of this part of town toward Bałuty with as many possessions as they could haul. On that same day, the men who had been hanged were finally allowed to be cut down. This was clearly meant as an insult, since burial in our religion was meant to happen as quickly as possible. During that forty-eight-hour stretch, I passed the gallows six times—going to the bakery, to Darija’s, to school. After the first two times, I stopped noticing. It was as if death had become part of the landscape.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21