The Book of Aron (10 page)

“They should only be taking single men. At first they were only taking single men for the work details,” she said. “So there were a lot of weddings.”

“Do you need to fix your shoe again?” I said.

“How’re yours?” she asked.

“The twine worked,” I told her.

We passed a boy violinist playing “Ba’al Shem Tov” for coins. He stopped playing until I moved farther away from his cup.

“I don’t know why the Germans always find your father,” she said. “On the Sabbath two of them beat him for not saluting.”

“I saw the marks,” I said.

“Another beat him because he did salute,” she said. “That one told him, ‘You’re not in
my
army.’ ”

“Almost everyone comes back from the work details in two or three days,” I finally told her.

“I thought they’d stay here a few months, make us work hard and then leave and we’d have our peace back,” she said.

“The Germans?” I said. She didn’t answer.

“Do you think your friend in the Jewish police could help us find out where they took them?” she asked. “The little pisher with the big ears?”

“He’s not my friend,” I said. “How do you know about him?”

“He said he was,” she said. “He came by looking for you.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“I just said he wanted to find you,” she told me. “Maybe this place,” she said, and stepped into an apartment building. But the shop that had been there was gone. Instead there was a small round table in a bare room with an old man who’d tried to hide his beard by wrapping a rag around his face like he had a toothache.

“Your friend’s one of those smart policemen who don’t like having to order people around and so are
always telling you why something has to be done,” she said once we were back out on the street. “You can see in their eyes that they want to show it’s not up to them.”

“He’s not my friend,” I told her. “But if I see him I’ll ask if he knows anything.”

She led us onto the wooden bridge across Przebieg Street and stopped at the top next to other people who were looking out at the Vistula. We watched a barge float down the river. We could see a little green on the other side. She put a hand on my shoulder and I put one on her back.

Finally we came down off the bridge. “When I was a girl and I was hungry I just stood in front of pastry shops,” she told me. “As if just looking would fill me up. One time I ate pickles I stole from a barrel and got diarrhea.”

“I guess that taught you not to steal,” I said.

“Stealing is always wrong,” she said.

“Starving is always wrong,” I told her.

She asked if I knew they now said, “He sold the pot from his kitchen” instead of “He sold the shirt off his back,” since without a pot you have nothing to cook with.

“I did know that,” I told her.

“It’s hard to keep the peace at mealtimes if families have to look at other families’ fuller plates,” she said.

I was sick of everything including her. I walked with her like she was my biggest problem.

She looked at me like she knew what I was thinking. “I’m angry at the rich for not doing their duty for the poor,” she finally said.

“Why should they help us?” I asked.

“You can hear the street children, hungry all night,” she said.

“Who isn’t,” I said.

“The rich people,” she said. “And they should help more than they do.”

On Grzybowska we didn’t see anyone and then two men gestured us into an apartment where two women were already arguing with them around an open barrel.

“It’s meat,” one of the men said. “You grind it up and it’s still meat.”

“You should be ashamed,” one of the women said. “I’m not eating ground up assholes.”

“No one said you had to eat anything,” the man told her.

My mother pulled me back out onto the street. “There’s another shop on Ceglana,” she said. Her face made me ashamed of how I’d been thinking. We took turns squeezing each other’s hand as we walked. When we came to a long line I asked if this was it.

“This is the place,” she said.

Kids went up and down the line selling cigarettes and candy. A yellow policeman was there to keep the street gangs from shoving to the front. A woman my mother knew asked if she was well and how she was managing and my mother shrugged and said, “With us, nothing’s happy.”

The flour was thirty-five złotys per kilo. There was no more of the bread made from green wheat and only a few loaves made from bran and potato peelings. She bought a kilo for sixteen złotys. It was sticky but it smelled dry. She turned it over a few times in her hands. “If they mix in too much sawdust it feels like you’re eating off the street,” she said as we walked. She pressed her face to the loaf when she thought I wasn’t looking. We went a few blocks before she finally packed it away in her bag. Then she thumped it twice for good luck and took my hand again and we headed home.

O
UR GANG HAD TROUBLE WITH ANOTHER GANG
. They outnumbered us. We sent off two pillowcases of butter beans we stole with Zofia and Adina but outsmarted ourselves because the other gang followed them and took the beans. They also knocked Adina
down when she tried to stop them. She got up and slapped their leader’s face and they kicked her.

“Aron and I are going to take care of it,” Boris told the girls.

“We are?” I said.

“You are?” Lutek said. “Why him?”

“Because three people would be too many,” Boris said.

“Why not me?” Lutek said.

“Because it’s time he did something around here,” Boris said.

“What are you going to do?” Adina asked.

“We’re going to impose a tariff,” Boris said.

“What does that mean?” she wanted to know. But he said she’d find out.

The next morning he led me back to the Chłodna Street gate. “That one’s the leader,” he said, pointing out a boy in a plaid cap and suspenders loafing beside a family that was selling something out of a box on the street.

“How do you know?” I asked, but he ignored me. He took the jar of honey his family had brought with them out of his shirt front and handed it to me.

“When I was little I told myself that if I wasn’t going to be taller than anyone else I could at least be meaner,” he said. He told me to wait a half hour
and then to let the boy see the honey when I passed him and to lead him to Mirów. He said to make sure I stayed on the left side of the street coming down Mirów and if more than two of them followed me then I should take off my cap once I turned onto Elektoralna. He said not to sweat it and that I wouldn’t lose a hair on my head.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Shut up and carry the honey,” he said.

“We don’t even know what he’s like,” I told him.

“He’s a bandit, like us,” he said.

I waited and then did as he said. At first I thought it hadn’t worked but on Solna when I looked back I saw the kid turn towards a shop window.

On Elektoralna there were fewer people around, and even fewer on Mirów, since it was so short and led directly to the wall. Down that far there weren’t any occupied buildings, only a doorway with half a sign over it standing in the ruins. I could see in a window across the street that the kid had gotten closer. What are you going to do when you run out of street? I wondered as I passed the doorway and saw Boris down in the rubble with a finger to his mouth and a brick in his other hand.

I turned to face the kid and he stopped but he’d already come too far and Boris swung the brick into the
side of his plaid cap and knocked him to the sidewalk and then grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into where the cellar had fallen and no one could see us from the street. I followed him. Boris dumped him there and then picked up another brick and hit him again. It sounded like a shovel going into dirt.

“What did you
do
?” I asked. I sounded like a baby.

“Why did you turn around?” he said. He seemed angrier at me than at the kid.

“Is he dead?” I asked. But I could see that he wasn’t. His head was jerking back and forth and his hands were clenching.

Boris squatted and pulled out a safety pin and a note that said
LIVE AND LET LIVE
and pinned it to the kid’s shirt.

“Give me the honey,” he said. Then he pulled me back onto the street.

“We’re just going to leave him?” I asked. But we already had.

That afternoon we had Chłodna Street to ourselves. Boris said the other gang was probably still out looking for its leader. We used ten or twelve smaller kids to swarm the gate. They went off shoulder to shoulder running as fast as they could and the blue and yellow police beat and tore at the clothes of as many as they could reach but most got through. We
paid each a saccharine candy and told them to wait until the gate was at its busiest. Boris found the whole thing funny. He said that because we’d been paid in money for a recent load he was going to have us split up and buy things in Aryan shops outside the wall. He said the trick was to walk slowly and to pass the police as though they were vendors and not to run even if someone made a first step at us. And to clean our clothes and shoes as much as we could before we left. And when we were in the shops to ask for what we wanted as though we owned the place.

“How’s your sister?” Adina asked Zofia, and I slapped my head for not having asked her myself.

Zofia said Salcia was doing poorly. Adina wrapped an arm around her and Zofia asked if she was getting sick and Adina told her that two more families had moved into their apartment. And while those families had been sitting and chatting with one of their uncles another had arrived. She had no idea where they were going to put them all. “Now we’re six to a room,” she said. “And in the cellar and in one corner the water’s always dripping. Next to my head, all night long. We asked them to fix it but they didn’t fix it.”

In the square one of the blue policemen had a kid by the shirt and tore it off his back. “Did you cut yourself?” Zofia asked me.

“He has bad gums,” Boris told her. “Have you smelled his breath?”

So I told them what Boris had done.

“With a brick?” Lutek said when I finished.

“On the head,” I said.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“I think he’s dead,” I said.

“He should’ve realized stealing is wrong,” Boris said.

“Do you think they’ll leave us alone now?” Zofia asked.

“If they don’t they’ll get another brick to the head,” Boris told her.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“You already said that,” Lutek told her. And then I understood why Boris had used me instead of Lutek.

“He might really be dead,” I said again, but they all looked like they had their own problems.

“Why are we still sitting here?” Adina wanted to know.

“We’re waiting for confirmation from the other side,” Boris told her. We had to move an exchange location and had sent one of the smaller kids with a note.

I asked Zofia if her father was still sad about the Brysz girls.

“What do you care?” she said.

“I asked, didn’t I?” I said.

“Poor Sh’maya,” Boris said. “No one thinks he cares.”

She said her father was better but that Hanka Nasielska still wept night and day about it. “Hanka Nasielska saw me with you and called me treyf slops in a treyf pot,” she told Boris. He laughed.

“What were you doing with him?” I asked.

“She told me she’d make my mouth kosher again,” she said to Boris. “She put a stone in a pot with some steam but I screamed that it was too hot so she cooled it down before she put it back in my mouth.”

“So that’s how you make a mouth kosher?” Boris asked.

Zofia looked away and wiped her eyes and Adina punched his arm. “There’s not one good Jew among us,” Zofia said.

“The good Jews buy what we bring in,” Boris said.

“What about your brother?” Adina asked.

“What about yours?” Zofia said. “The oldest one.”

“He prays by himself on weekdays and goes to the public services on holidays,” Adina said. “When they have them. Weren’t your uncles religious?”

Zofia said one uncle went to shul but didn’t daven
and just sat there, and that the other didn’t even go to shul. Though he always tried to get them a carp or goose for the Sabbath.

A kid who hadn’t gotten through the gate started to come over for his saccharine candy but Boris warned him away with his eyes.

“Sh’maya here had only four people move in with him,” Adina said bitterly. “We had a village move in with us.”