Jakob the Liar (21 page)

He sits down on the bed and tries to look composed, a total waste of time since Rosa continues to look fixedly out of the window. Her forehead leans against the glass so she can obtain the earliest possible view of the transport. A little patch of mist forms on the pane; she is breathing through her mouth, as excited people do.

“Come on over here!” he says.

Why did those idiots have to pick his street of all streets? There are enough others. Mischa feels an urge to get up and go out into the corridor, or at least into Fayngold’s half of the room, which, needless to say, had resumed its former appearance the day after Rosa’s intervention. What in the world will she do? The yapping of the dogs becomes louder; when it subsides for a moment they can hear the sound of the people’s feet on the pavement, even a single voice calling out: “Step lively now, step lively!”

“Mischa,” Rosa says softly.

“Mischa!” she screams seconds later. “Mischa, Mischa, Mischa, it’s our street!”

He is standing behind her now; the thought that her parents must be in that transport doesn’t seem to have occurred to her yet. In a whisper she counts off the names of neighbors whom she recognizes; each of them is carrying something, a bag, a suitcase, a bundle of whatever was worth taking along. Mischa has time to look for her parents; he discovers them before she does, Felix Frankfurter with his inevitable scarf wound about his neck. His walk somehow expresses confidence; his wife, a head shorter, is walking beside him. She looks up at their window; Mischa had never been a secret.

Rosa is still counting off names; her mother’s upward glances give Mischa the push he needs. He grips Rosa tightly in his arms and carries her away from the window, intending to put her down on the bed and keep her there by force. But nothing comes of that; on the way they fall to the floor because Rosa is struggling. He lets her hit him and scratch him and pull his hair while he just keeps his arms gripped tightly around her waist; they lie on the floor for an eternity. She screams for him to let her go, maybe twenty times she screams nothing but the words “Let me go!” Until they can hear no more barking, no more footsteps; her blows become weaker and finally cease. Cautiously he lets go of her, ready to grab her again the next instant. But she lies there without moving, with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, as if after some great exertion. There is a knock at the door, and a woman from the building asks whether she can help; she thought she heard someone screaming.

“No, no, it’s quite all right,” says Mischa through the closed door. “Thank you.”

He gets up and opens the window, otherwise the sun will think no one’s home and will go away again, so we’ve been told. The street is silent and empty. He looks out for a long time, and when he turns around Rosa is still lying on the floor, her position unchanged.

“Come on, get up.”

She gets up — not, it seems to him, because he has told her to. So far not a tear has been shed. She sits down on the bed; he dare not speak to her.

“Your neck is bleeding,” she says.

He goes over to her, squats down in front of her, and tries to look into her eyes, but she looks past him.

“That’s why you came to fetch me,” she says. “You knew.”

He is shocked at the reproach in her words. He wishes he could explain that there was no time to warn her parents, but at the moment she won’t accept any reasons.

“Did you actually see them?” he asks.

“You wouldn’t let me,” she says, and at last begins to cry.

He says he didn’t see them either, not even right at the end of the transport, maybe they sensed the danger in time and found a safe place to go. He knows how ridiculous this is; after three words he realizes the futility of lying, but he finishes his sentences like an automaton.

“I’m sure you’ll see them again,” he adds. “Jacob said —”

“You’re lying!” she screams. “You’re all lying! You talk and talk and nothing ever changes!”

She jumps up and tries to run out of the room, but Mischa manages to catch her just as she flings open the door. In the corridor the woman straightens up, from keyhole level. “Are you sure I can’t help?” she asks.

“For God’s sake, no!” Mischa screams; now he is screaming too.

Offended, the woman withdraws; most likely her desire to help has been quenched forever, at least as far as this screaming maniac is concerned. However, the appearance of a third person has brought Rosa to her senses again, it seems; she goes back into the room without Mischa having to force her. He closes the door. Dreading her silence, he sets to work immediately to take renewed possession of Fayngold’s fallow half of the room: the cupboard against the wall, precisely covering the big square of still-clean wallpaper, the curtain down from the ceiling and in front of the window again. For Rosa is going to be living here now; that much at least is clear.

H
ave you been hearing anything recently about the deportations?” Mischa asks.

“No, I haven’t,” Jacob replies.

“They’ve not only evacuated Franziskaner-Strasse. They’re in Sagorsker-Strasse too and —” 

“I know,” says Jacob.

They walk on for a bit without speaking, on their way home from the freight yard, having shaken Kowalski at the last corner. He had held back with his questions in Mischa’s presence.

Since that day, five men have failed to show up at the yard, maybe even more; one only misses the five one knows personally. Jacob had thought there were six, having included Mischa among them because he didn’t show up for work that day. Luckily that was a mistake.

“How are things going with Rosa?” Jacob asks.

“How should they go?”

“Are you managing with food?”

“Splendidly!”

“But she can’t go and get any more ration cards, can she?”

“Don’t I know it!”

“Couldn’t someone in the building help out? I have the same problem with Lina. Kirschbaum always used to let me have something for her.”

“I can no longer believe this will end well,” says Mischa. “They’re combing street after street now.”

Jacob seems to hear a veiled reproach in his voice.

“Maybe,” says Jacob. “But think for yourself. The Germans are in a state of panic. The transports are the best proof that the Russians must already be really close! Seen in that light, they’re actually a good sign.”

“Some good sign! Try explaining that to Rosa.”

O
n one of her deadly boring and tear-filled afternoons, Rosa leaves the room, although Mischa has strictly forbidden her to do so. Actually he would have liked to lock her in, regardless of her protests; the only reason he hasn’t is that the toilet is in the courtyard.

She has no fixed destination; all she wants to do is stretch her legs after a whole week of prison. The dangers Mischa is always talking about seem to her exaggerated. In his room she is no safer than anywhere else, it can be this building’s turn any day. And who is there to recognize her? There is hardly anyone left whom she knows, and the street patrols don’t show up until the evening, about curfew time. None of that really matters to her anyway, and besides, Mischa needn’t find out about the walk she’s taking, she won’t stay away long.

Later when, as it happens, he arrives home long before her, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the truth when she tells him that she happened to have the key to her old home with her, and that, without really intending to, she found herself in Franziskaner-Strasse, her feet having taken that route by force of habit, she says.

The street seems eerily empty to her; people also avoid walking through it, as if it had been smitten by the plague. Rosa looks into deserted ground-floor rooms, into rooms of people she had spoken to only the other day. Through one window she notices a boy, about fourteen years old. He is kneeling in front of an open cupboard and hurriedly stuffing whatever he can lay hands on into a rucksack — dishes, bed linen, trousers, a wooden box without checking its contents for usefulness. Rosa stands stock-still as she watches him, the sole living creature apart from herself. The cupboard appears to be completely empty, but the rucksack is not yet full; the boy straightens up and carefully surveys the room. Then he sees the wide eyes outside the window; at first he gets a shock, then he also sees the yellow star on Rosa’s chest, and a conspiratorial grin spreads over his face. He probably takes her for a harmless competitor.

Rosa hurries on, wondering whether someone like that has meanwhile been in her home too: she can’t think of any other word, a looter. While she feels no rage, mere tolerance is not enough. What bothers her is the thought that behind the walls there exists a second, secret life, at first sight not discernible, slowly wiping out all traces.

She quietly opens her front door and listens with a beating heart. She wishes she had Mischa with her, perhaps he could have been persuaded to come, but now she happens to be here without him. One can never be sure, but after a lengthy silence she assumes that there is no one else in the building. She walks quickly up the two flights and looks through the keyhole before unlocking the door. Then she is standing in the room, which looks very tidy. The dust hasn’t had much time to settle; the four chairs are standing neatly around the table, which is covered with a yellow cloth, a tassel at each corner. The tap is dripping. So far no one with a rucksack has been here, Rosa can see that right away, also that her parents must have left without haste. The first thing she looks for is some kind of a message: this only occurs to her when she remembers that her mother never went out for a second without leaving a message. But this time she had broken with her old habit, evidently; this time there is no scribbled note, which anyway could say no more than “I don’t know where to, I don’t know for how long.”

Then Rosa looks again, this time no longer for a message, simply looks around. Mischa tells me she is a sentimental little thing and wanted to get some idea of what her parents had taken with them. Probably she wept buckets as she did so. The brown-and-white-checked shopping bag is missing, as is the black cardboard suitcase, nothing else in the way of containers. Since Rosa knows exactly what had been in the room, she would have been able at the end of her search to draw up a list of what her parents had taken along. Including the album of photos and reviews, the book about Felix Frankfurter’s true life.

Her own things lie untouched, among them the ration card, part of which has already expired. Rosa puts it in her pocket; otherwise there are no objects to which she feels especially attached. She forces herself to think in practical terms. A briefcase has been left behind; into it she stuffs her other dress, underwear and stockings, finally her winter coat, wondering as she does so how she can manage to think as far ahead as next winter. With the coat in it, the briefcase won’t close. Rosa considers wearing it, but then she would have to unpick the yellow stars from her dress and sew them on the coat. So she crams it as best she can into the briefcase, which she then ties up with the belt from her coat. If she should run into that boy in the street, he will be envious of her rich booty.

Rosa firmly turns off the tap; she is finished here. As she goes she leaves the key in the door, for the boy or anyone else, as if to draw a line under her past.

“I’ll give you ten guesses,” Mischa says to me, “but you’ll never guess where she went next.”

Rosa goes to see Jacob, whom she doesn’t know, except from Mischa’s accounts, though from them quite well. Since Bezanika they have never spent an evening together without talking about him, about his radio, his courage, about the Russian successes at the front. At the time, when the first rejoicing over the news reports had subsided, Rosa had asked why this Jacob person had waited until now before beginning to pass on reports; after all, they had been living in the ghetto for three years, and if he was keeping a radio hidden he must have had it from the very beginning.

“Most likely the Germans were advancing all the time until just recently. Was he supposed to tell us that things were getting worse and worse every day?” Mischa answered, and that sounded convincing.

So here she is standing outside his door, not, so she tries to persuade herself, out of any desire for revenge or personal resentment. No doubt he is nice and kind and well meaning, but those reports, day by day more encouraging, and then the empty room in Franziskaner-Strasse, the whole neighborhood in fact — she’s going to ask him how one can be reconciled with the other. She’s going to put it to him, is it permissible to raise such hopes in their situation, don’t start telling me about the radio, that can report what it likes, all he had to do was take a look around.

Rosa knocks several times, with no result. Why hadn’t it occurred to her earlier that Jacob must come home at about the same time as Mischa? The waiting saps her confidence; by the time she confronts him her head will feel hollow. There is still time for her to leave and get back to their room before Mischa and avoid the argument that is bound to arise if she doesn’t. The longer she waits, the more clearly she has to admit to herself that she has come with the vaguest of intentions. Jacob will persist in citing his radio, regardless of what she blames him for. She had hoped to survive these times intact; now things have turned out differently, and that, when one gets right down to it, is her whole reason. “She plays faster than she thinks,” her father once said after a game of checkers; her father. The thought crosses Rosa’s mind that Jacob may be spreading news other than what he hears on his radio.

Suddenly Lina is standing at the end of the corridor, just back from the street and Rafael. She sees a young woman with a bulging briefcase outside a certain door, and she approaches, full of curiosity. They eye each other for a few moments, neither of them suspicious. Lina asks: “Are you looking for Uncle Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“He should be here soon. Wouldn’t you rather wait inside?” 

“Do you live here, then?” Rosa asks.

For an answer, Lina takes the key from behind the doorframe, unlocks the door, and gestures invitingly and a little proudly. Rosa enters with some hesitation, a chair is promptly pulled out for her, she has fallen into the hands of an attentive hostess. Lina sits down too, and they continue to look at each other, approvingly.

“You’re Lina, aren’t you?” says Rosa.

“How do you know my name?”

“From Mischa. You’re good friends, I hear.”

“Of course. And now I know who you are.”

“Do tell me!”

“You’re Rosa. Right?”

They exchange whatever information they have about each other. Lina, incidentally, is still cross with Mischa because the whole time she was ill in bed he didn’t come to see her once, just sent his love via Jacob. Rosa looks around surreptitiously — not that she expects the radio to be standing there in full view to regale every chance guest.

“What do you want to see Uncle Jacob about?” Lina asks, any other topic having soon been exhausted. 

“Let’s wait till he’s here.” 

“Have you brought a message from Mischa?”

“No.”

“It’s all right to tell me. He has no secrets from me.” But Rosa refuses to budge; she smiles and says nothing. Now Lina tries a roundabout approach.

“Have you ever been here before?” she asks. 

“No, never.”

“I mean, lots of people have been coming here lately, and you know what they want?” Lina pauses, to give Rosa a chance to appreciate this special proof of trust, before divulging: “They want to hear the news. Is that why you’re here too?”

Rosa’s smile vanishes: she certainly hasn’t come for that reason; on the contrary, rather. She already regrets having come at all, has regretted it increasingly from the first moment. She feels she is in the wrong place with her despair; here everything is being done honestly and in good faith. She wonders what she would do if Jacob were to come in now and tell her that the transport with her parents on its way to such and such a place had met up with the liberators. And she dare not give an answer, nor to the second question either: whether she has been deceiving herself all along as to the real reason for her coming. She doesn’t exclude the possibility.

“Well?” says Lina. “Is that why you’re here too?”

“No,” says Rosa.

“But you’ve heard about it?”

“About what?”

“That everything’s going to change soon?”

“Yes.”

“So why aren’t you glad?”

Rosa sits up straight; the threshold has been reached where one either turns around or speaks the truth, but what is the truth, apart from her misgivings? “Because I don’t believe it,” she says.

“You don’t believe what Uncle Jacob has been saying?” Lina asks, in a tone implying that she must have misheard.

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you think he’s fibbing?”

Rosa likes the word and wouldn’t have thought of it in this context. She would quite like to discuss nice things with this nice child. On no account continue in the direction already taken; how could she have done that, with a child? Without any conclusive reasons to offer, she is suddenly convinced that she has made a mistake that, she hopes, will have no bad effects. She can’t just calmly get up and leave. So she sits there forlornly, waiting — now no longer for Jacob — but for some convenient opportunity to bring to an end a visit that she now perceives to be wrong. But that opportunity is moving further and further away. After her first shock, Lina becomes almost alarmingly worked up, for her uncle is most certainly not a liar. But Rosa didn’t say that, Yes, that’s exactly what you said, how can anyone say such a thing? Since she heard for herself on his radio that the Russians will soon be here, with her own ears, what do you say to that? A man with a very deep voice told that to another man, she can’t remember his name but she remembers his voice exactly, word for word he said that the whole schlimazl would soon be over, in another few weeks at most. Does Rosa think that man has been fibbing too, what has got into Rosa anyway, to accuse her uncle of telling lies? Just wait till he comes home,
he’d
give her the right answer!

Before she has got it all off her chest in a torrent of verbal indignation, Lina suddenly breaks off and stares past Rosa, with a startled look. Rosa turns her head toward the door: Jacob is standing there, stony faced; no one has noticed the door opening.

Rosa gets up. Regardless of how much or how little he may have heard, she feels he has seen through her, such is the dismay in his eyes. With lowered head she goes to the door, no chance now for a breezy departure; she has put her foot in it. Jacob takes half a step aside for her, but back she must go to the chair for the briefcase lying forgotten on the floor. The whole length of the corridor Rosa doesn’t dare look back. But on reaching the stairs she does: Jacob is still standing there motionless, watching her go. Soon the little girl will tell him what he no doubt already knows.

Let us stay with Rosa. She comes out into the street, in the early dusk, where the next unpleasantness is waiting. What meets her eyes is wild excitement, Jews fleeing into hallways, yet again. At first Rosa can’t make out why. Then she sees a car approaching, a small, dark green van with a man in uniform standing on the running board. Without thinking, Rosa dashes the few yards back into Jacob’s building, caught up in the panic. She leans against the wall and keeps her eyes closed, then opens them when she hears hurrying footsteps. An old man, gasping for breath, stops beside her, also coming in from the street.

“What do they want?” he asks.

Rosa shrugs her shoulders. The van will drive on and soon be forgotten; the scene with Mischa awaits her. The man assumes that it is a matter for the highest authorities, otherwise they would come on foot, as apparently happens every few days. To their horror there is a screeching of brakes; the frightened old man clutches Rosa’s arm so tight that it hurts.

Two men in uniform come into the very hallway they are standing in, leather straps under their chins. The old man clings desperately to Rosa’s arm. Outside, the engine has been left running. At first the Germans think they are alone in the semidarkness, but when they have almost reached the stairs one of them says, “Look!”

They turn toward the two figures against the wall. Rosa seems to interest them more than the man does, but maybe she is just imagining it. They come a few steps closer, then one of them shakes his head and says: “No, no.”

The other one tells them, “Get out of here!”