The Book of Aron (3 page)

S
HE STAYED IN BED FOR TWO WEEKS. I DID WHAT
housework I could. My father and brothers ate at taverns. I made my own dinners. Lutek stayed away. Once the sun had set my mother took to talking to me in the dark. She wouldn’t let me light any lamps until my father and brothers came home. After my brothers went to sleep, my father would sit up at the kitchen table with vodka and weep without making any noise.

She said she forgave me. She said none of us had done all we could for my younger brother. She said she still remembered when she’d been a little girl and a teacher had said, “I predict that someday you are really going to amount to something.” She said this teacher had told her favorite students, “Well, you’re sitting on the wagon. Let’s see how far you can travel down the road.” She said this teacher had awarded her with a book inscribed
For your good conduct and many talents
.

She said she’d lost all of her energy for work, but that maybe it would return in time. She said her feelings were like a coin in a strongbox and that from now
on maybe I alone would have the key. She said she knew that my father was spending what little money they had saved. Let him take it and choke on it, she said. Maybe then he’d leave her in peace.

She said that when she was ten she’d had to care for her infant sister, who screamed when she was wet, screamed when she was hungry, and screamed when she was poorly diapered. She said she used to run all over the house holding her sister, not knowing what her sister wanted from her. She said she’d lived for the day when her mother would come home and take her sister back, and everyone would be happy with the good work she had done.

When it got warmer, she started cooking again and doing a little cleaning. She went outside. My tenth birthday came and went without raisin cake. One morning when I thanked her for my breakfast she said that the older she got, the more of an infant she became. I asked if she was feeling better and if she wanted to walk in the park when I got home from school, and she said that yes, she did. She said that sometimes it felt as if everything had been taken from her, and that all she wanted was to take something back.

T
HE NEXT MORNING MY FATHER TOLD ME TO GET
up because it was war and the Germans had invaded. I didn’t believe him, so he pointed at the neighbors’ apartment and said, “Come to the radio, you’ll hear it.”

People had spent the day before taping up windows and running through the streets buying up food. In the morning our teacher told us that as of the next day our school, which had had an anti-aircraft battery moved onto its roof, was under military control, that we should leave our registration books to be signed, and that he would see us after the war. We wanted to go to the roof to view the anti-aircraft guns but a soldier wouldn’t let us on the staircase.

When I got home, my father and older brothers were taping our windows and one of my brothers showed me a blue glass filter that would fit over our flashlight.

That afternoon we saw an airplane with smoke coming out of its tail and two others chasing after it. Another plane flew over very low and a soldier took his rifle and started shooting at it until people on the street screamed that he was endangering everyone, so he stopped.

There were air raid sirens at night but for a few
weeks nothing happened. Lutek would tell me the next day how much he liked the sirens because everyone had to get out of bed whatever time it was and the kids in his building would meet in the basement and play. He said all of the kids in his building liked the air raids except one whose mother was crazy and caused a lot of trouble by running out into the street and uncovering the windows while the sirens were still going.

For a few days in the afternoons we went to our neighbors’ apartment to hear the news. It was all bad.

The bombardment of the city lasted all day and night without stopping and went on into the next day and night. We stayed in the cellar and the wailing and crying and praying drowned out the explosions if they were far away. My mother sat against the wall with her arms around me and whenever I stood to stretch my legs she asked where I was going. My father and brothers sat against the opposite wall. After three days things quieted and someone came down the stairs and shouted that Warsaw had surrendered. My mother told us not to leave but my brothers and I climbed out into the street.

Dust and soot hung in the air. There were giant craters in the intersection. The big tree on the corner
had flown all apart. Our back courtyard was covered with broken glass. Down Gęsia Street something was still burning.

My mother led us back up to our apartment, which only had some broken windows. She sent us out to look for planks to board them up, so I walked over to Lutek’s neighborhood. He threw his arm around me and grinned and said, “Well, we survived the war.” I told him what we were looking for and he led me to an alley fence that was blown apart. Together we brought home so many planks that my father told my mother to leave me alone whenever I wanted to go out during the day. We especially needed water since nothing came out of our faucets, and Lutek showed me how to steal from his building’s cistern.

We gathered anything we might need. Sometimes we were chased off but not often. The destroyed buildings were a great playground and we always found something surprising in the rubble. One building’s entire front had been sheared away and we could see into every apartment up to the roof, and near the top a family was still living there. They looked like a store display. One leg of an iron bedstead hung out into space. In the attic, sparrows flew in and out of the holes made by the artillery shells.

On the way home with my water I was stopped
by a bald-headed man in a filthy green surgical apron who was carrying a little boy. The man had eyeglasses covered in dust and a yellowish goatee. “Where’s the shoe store that was here?” he asked.

“There,” I told him, and pointed.

He looked at the smashed walls that had fallen in on one another. “I just found him in the street,” he said. The boy looked asleep. “He can’t walk on all this glass without shoes. I have to carry him until I find something for his feet.”

I recognized his voice and said, “You’re the Old Doctor from the radio.”

“Would you have shoes at your house that might fit him?” he said. But then someone else called, “Pan Doctor! Pan Doctor!” and he turned and carried the boy off in that direction.

W
HEN THE GERMANS MARCHED IN, THE CROWDS
were so quiet I could hear a fly that was bothering a woman a few feet away. Lutek said there was more noise at the parade on his street and that some people waved little flags with swastikas on them. At the market square the next day no vegetable stalls were set up and instead more Germans unloaded crates from trucks. One talked to me in Polish. “Bring us
something to drink,” he told me, and then he and his friends straddled the crates and waited.

Later that week they set up a soup kitchen and handed out free bread. The soldiers seemed to never be sure where they wanted everyone to line up. They enjoyed herding people from place to place. A little girl with big ears waited three hours in line with us and when she got her soup she handed it to Lutek and said she wasn’t hungry. After she left he told me she was a neighbor and that her parents and sister had been buried in their building during the bombardment. He said that when you saw the building you knew they wouldn’t be dug out until Christmas.

That night two Germans showed up at our door looking for furniture. They roamed around our apartment before deciding we had nothing they liked. They went next door to our neighbors with the radio and took two chairs and a soup tureen. The husband told us after they left that they’d pulled him around by the nose with pliers because he hadn’t said a courteous enough hello.

The next day the Polish police had taken over the soup kitchen and the soldiers were gone. Then the day after that the Polish police were gone and so was the soup kitchen.

T
HAT WINTER WE DID ALL OF OUR SCROUNGING IN
heavy rain. Streets were like marshes because of the big dirty puddles between the cobblestones. We had to be careful because everything was extra slippery. It didn’t help that in January Jews could no longer be on the streets after nine and before five. Lutek’s father sometimes had to leave his crate where it was and get it in the morning. Most were so heavy that no one could steal them anyway. He told us about one of the other porters who claimed that because he was so ugly the Germans constantly interrupted his work to take pictures of him.

All Jews had to wear yellow armbands. Lutek said that the extra layer would help keep us warm.

There was always a new rule. My mother was upset about the one that made Jews show a delousing certificate to ride the trolleys. Then she was upset that we could no longer ride certain trolleys. Then she was upset that we had to declare our possessions and said it would be the first step in stripping us of everything we had. My father reminded her that the Germans had already been in our apartment and had found nothing worth taking.

Lutek and I rode whatever trolleys we wanted
because he taught me how to wear a half-sleeve over a long-sleeved shirt so we could roll it down to cover our armbands. And he showed me how you had to jump off if the trolley drivers slowed in a certain way because it meant that Germans were waiting at the next stop. Once we jumped off right into some German police but they only took us by the collars and told us to help a doctor who was being made to empty all of the silver from his sideboard into some waiting cars. The doctor kept asking us to be careful with everything. After the last load he asked a German if he could keep his grandmother’s saltcellar, a little boat he showed us because it had great sentimental value for him, and the German said no.

“Who leaves so many things lying around?” my mother asked at dinner about the loot I brought home, and my father said what did she know about it, that she should be quiet and count her blessings.

“It’s a blessing he’s safe and I want to keep him that way,” she told him.

“Does he look like he’d do anything dangerous?” he said.

Lutek agreed this really was the best thing about me: that I didn’t. We specialized in pantry and bathroom windows that you wouldn’t think a cat could fit through. I’d give him a boost and then wait at the end
of the alley for his whistle. If all was clear I’d whistle back and he’d dump whatever he’d found down to me and off I’d go, to meet up with him later on.

When it came to tools he had an eye for things you couldn’t find a use for at first. He lifted a thick short wire off the flatbed of a truck and it turned out to be perfect for working through a sash and casement, because once it was through it was rigid enough that you could tap the hook until it popped from the eyelet.

He had found someone who would trade most of what we got for most of what we wanted, so some days I’d bring my mother coal and some days flour and some days something else. One night I brought home almonds, but it didn’t matter because some women in fur coats had been ordered to wash the pavement with their underwear and then to put the underwear back on again, wet, and my mother and everyone else had been forced to watch, and she was still upset.

I told Lutek about it and he told me about having come across an old Jew atop a barrel with some German soldiers cutting his hair, with a crowd gathered around laughing. He said all they were doing was cutting his hair and he couldn’t tell how upset the old Jew was but that he’d told himself then and there he would never let himself end up on top of that barrel.
So whatever else happened to him he could always say to himself, well, you’re not on top of that barrel.

We celebrated our big talk by stealing two expensive fountain-pen sets from a shop and hid them under our shirts while we waited for the trolley. The trolley was only two blocks away but it hadn’t moved for ten minutes and men were standing around the front of it.

We debated whether or not to just walk home. My shoes no longer fit and my blisters had broken, so I argued we should wait.

There was a girl sitting next to us and Lutek asked her who she was looking at. She asked him who he was looking at. “What kind of hat do you call that?” she asked.

He told her to go screw herself with an onion. An onion would be better than him, she said. Then she said those were Lamy pens we thought we were hiding. She recognized the cases.

I buttoned my top button and Lutek rubbed his eyes.

She suggested we take them to Siekierska’s in Wilanów. She explained when we didn’t answer that no one else would buy such expensive pens.

“Let’s just walk,” Lutek told me and then stood up. When I hesitated he went off without me.

I stayed beside the girl for another few minutes. “Your friend Rabbit Hat doesn’t take chances,” she said.

I asked what she thought had happened with the trolley and she said it was a good question. I told her my name was Aron and she said she hadn’t asked. I asked what her name was and she said Zofia, then turned and looked at me and shook my hand. I asked where she’d gone to school and she said over on Third of May Avenue. She said she’d been picked on as the only Jewish girl. I said she didn’t look Jewish. She had light hair and a small nose. She thanked me and then said that I did.