The Thief of Auschwitz (12 page)

“Who believes in winter?” says Max.

The evening roll call is approaching and Jacob must sew his serial number into the new uniform in time, so he sits working furiously with a needle and thread. Clouds are moving in and the light is dying and he squints. Another prisoner comes by and watches him work, a prisoner named Rubin who claims to have been a tailor and who scoffs at Jacob’s hurried work. “I could do that for you in a moment,” he says as he walks away, “but you’d have to give me the jacket for my trouble.” An ironist.

Jacob’s fingers won’t cooperate, and the roll call draws nearer, and he begins to wonder what this infernal new uniform will cost him in the end. Slazak walks past and gives him the resentful look he once reserved for Schuler. He walks past in the dirt and continues around the corner and then comes back and looks more carefully, clucking and stroking his chin. “It would be a shame to go to roll call without proper identification,” he says.

“Yes, sir,” says Jacob, not even looking up. He sticks himself with the needle and blood drips onto the patch he’s sewing and Slazak clucks again.
Shame, shame, shame.
Sweat beads up on Jacob’s forehead and he swipes at it, leaving behind a red streak. “Incredible,” says Slazak. “A few days of soft work, and you’ve lost every bit of strength you once had. This won’t go well.”

“I’m doing my best,” says Jacob.

“Perhaps you need a few extra minutes.”

There is nothing more dangerous than Slazak in a solicitous mood. “Oh, no,” says Jacob. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be finished in plenty of time.”

“Perhaps we should put off the roll call until after rations.”

Jacob looks up. “Rations first?” A few other men in the yard stir, like the first members of a pack of wolves picking up some fresh scent. Getting rations before lining up for roll call would be the rarest of delights—not just because the men would eat earlier, but because they would be guaranteed to eat at all. It has been a while since the first evening roll call stretched on into the blackest hours of the night, but you never know. Word spreads in some intangible and unknowable way, as if on chemical traces carried by the air itself. Footsteps stir within the block. Men poke their heads out the door.

Slazak makes the call, rations it is, and they start to line up. Rain begins, a soft rain that patters down on the dusty clay. Max stands and his father stands alongside him and Slazak says, “Oh, no. Not you two. First you must finish the needlework on that fine new uniform.”

So that’s how it will be. Jacob hurries, working his fingers even more frantically than before, but by the time he finishes sewing and they’ve made their way to the back of the line the rations are gone. Slazak sees their disappointment and grins. Jacob merely turns and walks off toward the yard, but when they get a few steps away and the bell sounds for roll call he apologizes to Max, saying that this may be all of the punishment that Slazak feels comfortable meting out to him in his new position. They’ll need to be careful, though. He can always punish Max instead.

They line up with their stomachs complaining. It’s late and the sun is down and the yard is lit by searchlights. The soft rain keeps up. Slazak patrols the perimeter with a pair of other capos, one of them a German convicted of murder and rape before he was freed and sent to Auschwitz, although he has only gone downhill here. Behind them in the darkness are the guards with their machine guns, black guns carried by gray men in shadows that swim with rain. Two SS men stand on the platform looking straight ahead, one of them the young one who rides the bicycle and the other one the sergeant whose hair Jacob cut last week, Drexler. In Jacob’s chest a kindly feeling toward him rises up unbidden, a feeling connected to the sergeant’s approval of him as the new barber, but he fights it down. One personal kindness is nothing compared to the
Totenbuch.
He hears Max’s stomach growl and knows himself responsible for it. So much for not calling attention to himself.

The sky opens and thunder rolls and the rain begins in earnest. It’s a cold rain after a warm day, and although it refreshes the men and washes them clean it feels good for no more than a moment. If it felt good, the SS wouldn’t let them stand out in it. Jacob watches Drexler adjust his hat and gather his coat around his shoulders and he thinks that he looks like a man prepared to stand in the driving rain for as long as it takes. There’s a sour look on his face, though, a look that says he would be happier filling the
Totenbuch
with lies than standing out here counting prisoners in a rainstorm. It’s a clear look of regret, and Jacob thinks that perhaps Drexler has learned a lesson of his own.
Keep a low profile.

The roll call proceeds. The men line up and count off, giving their serial numbers. Slazak and the other capos circulate and listen and make marks on paper as the count proceeds, and when it’s over they compare their figures against other figures on other papers. Today’s count versus yesterday’s. They shake their heads and confer, standing in the rain, and after a few minutes they order the prisoners to count off once more. Drexler and the other officer watch without comment, without even showing frustration or disgust. On the second count the numbers come up short again, and once more the capos order another roll call.

This time, though, the figures seem to match, and the capos deliver their various papers to Drexler for review. He studies them under a flashlight’s dull beam, frowning dramatically, looking like a man who’s trying to persuade himself that this job—an enormous and soggy demotion from the clean, dry office work he once did—is not only important but worthy of him. He flips through the wet pages—cheap paper that clings to itself and tears and separates—and he scans the columns with the help of a gloved finger. Everyone holds his breath.

“No good,” he says finally, stabbing at the tally sheets. “This one’s missing.”

The capos bend together in a little circle of dismay. Two of them add their pointing fingers to Drexler’s. “That’ll be one of Slazak’s,” says one. “Just look at the handwriting,” says the other.

Slazak bows his head, beaten. “That’s one of mine all right,” he says.

Drexler tears the pages loose and thrusts them at Slazak and tells him to count again. The other capos risk smiles, and the young officer with the bicycle sees them and clears his throat, and Drexler says
everyone
must count again, not just Slazak. It’s all or nothing.

They all step away, but Slazak stops. “Wait a minute,” he says.

“Wait a minute?”
Drexler looks as if he’s never heard the words before.

“Just so. Another count will do no good, you see. I know the man.”

“The missing man?”

“The missing man,” says Slazak. “I know who he is. I know
where
he is.”

“Are you quite certain?”

“Leave it to me.”

“It will be my supreme pleasure,” says Drexler.

Slazak leaves the platform and strides off down among the ranks of prisoners. No heads turn to track his progress, but each man he passes relaxes just a little as he goes by.
It’s not me he wants,
their postures say.
He’s after someone else.

He slows as he draws near to Jacob. He stops and he folds his hands behind his back and he smiles, his face streaked with rain. “You” he says. “You know the missing man.”

Jacob has no answer. He knows so many missing men, after all.

Slazak goes on. “Don’t be coy,” he says. “He would be right here among us if not for you.”

So now it’s twenty questions. “I don’t—” says Jacob.

Slazak leans in toward him and spits out a mouthful of numbers.

Jacob shows the serial number sewn to his jacket. It’s not a match.

“I’m not talking about
you,”
says Slazak. “I’m talking about Schuler. The man whose job you stole.”

Of course. Everyone must be accounted for at roll call. Even the dead.

“Go get him,” says Slazak. “We won’t wait forever.” He takes Jacob by the collar of his new uniform and heaves him down the line, from darkness into darkness.

Max calls after his father. “Three days,” he says. “He’s been in the ground for three days.” It’s a hint as to how far back in the excavation his father will find the body, and Slazak doesn’t appreciate it. He steps back and clouts Max’s jaw with the back of his hand and Max staggers backward but doesn’t fall. It takes courage not to fall. The sweep of a searchlight freezes this instant and one of the guards raises his gun but Slazak lifts his hand. Perhaps he has other things in mind for the young man. The guard shifts his stance and aims instead at Jacob, tracking him as he moves down the line.

The men wait and the rain comes down and Jacob trudges off with a shovel over his shoulder and a guard at his back. There’s no speaking to the guard and there’s no telling what time it might be other than by his own weariness, and his weariness makes a poor indicator because he’s always weary. They come to the course taken by the water project and they follow the line of the excavation to the road it passes beneath and then beyond that, the earth growing more disturbed as they go, more heaped up and less compacted. Jacob counts his paces. He casts back in his mind as to how many days ago it was that they tunneled underneath the road and he subtracts from that number the three days that Schuler has been dead, thinking that he can calculate an average number of paces per day and perhaps get close to the man’s corpse on the first try.

The ground is soft enough where he sinks the shovel in, but it’s heavy, mostly clay, and it’s saturated with rain. He digs a channel perpendicular to the water line and not much wider than the blade of the shovel, pausing whenever he strikes something harder than the surrounding dirt and going down on his knees to see if he’s located Schuler. No. Not on the first pass anyhow. He digs all the way down to the iron pipes without finding a trace of him. All the way across to where the clay is solid and undisturbed and too hard for digging. The guard shakes his head and laughs. He would be out somewhere standing his watch in the rain anyhow, so this is nothing to him.

Jacob paces off a yard’s distance further on and starts back across. “Not so fast,” says the guard. “Fill in the first trench.”

“I’ll fill that one with the dirt from this one,” says Jacob, daring to speak to the armed Ukrainian thanks to the darkness and the rain and his desperation, demonstrating his intent with the first shovelful. “It’ll save time.”

“And you’ll dig ten more holes and find what you’re after and then what?” says the guard. He lifts the gun and lets loose a fusillade of bullets into the ragged earth three feet from Jacob, showing him exactly where he wants the dirt restored. Jacob does as he’s told.

So it goes until the fourth pass, when the shovel finds bone and the touch of it is unmistakable. It’s no rock, no root, no iron pipe or bit of substrate from the road. Oh, no. He can feel a human being at the other end of the shovel the way you can feel a human being on the other end of a telephone connection, perhaps more so because of the unmediated physicality of it. Flesh to flesh and bone to bone. He goes to his knees and clears away the mud with his hands and sure enough, it’s Schuler’s pantleg and shin and ankle. A dead man in a dead man’s shoes, buried no more than three feet down. It could be worse.

Jacob comes to his feet and begins excavating the spot, calculating the position of the body inch by inch, working the shovel as cautiously as he dares. He’s conservative but within limits. Come too close, and he risks striking the dead man again, perhaps even taking off a finger. Give the corpse too wide a berth, on the other hand, and he’ll do more work than is entirely necessary. The rain keeps up and the clay turns to mud and the mud runs. Schuler’s striped uniform is saturated with it and Jacob’s is saturated too. His hands slip on the wet handle of the shovel and he pitches forward onto the dead man in the ditch, embracing him. The corpse gives under his weight, limp, a couple of days past rigor mortis. Swollen and straining the wet burlap. Just something in a sack. He lifts it up.

The Ukrainian makes him fill in the hole before he goes, although when the time comes he will make him dig it open again and lay Schuler back down at the bottom of it and cover him up once more, but until then it’s a matter of principle. Jacob labors on steadily, wet and cold. He pictures the men standing at attention in the yard waiting for his return. He pictures Max, standing there all night without a thing in his belly, a bruise growing on his jaw like a shadow from the blow of Slazak’s hand. Fourteen years old. Then he takes up the body and hoists it onto his shoulder and drags it back, like some figure in a fairy tale bearing a burden that whispers its own well-known and wordless demands.

With the addition of Schuler’s body, the count is complete. Everything adds up, so Slazak is happy and the other two capos are happy and the young officer is happy. Even Drexler is happy or at least satisfied. No one says a word more than is necessary. Conservation of energy is the order of the day.

The sodden men, prisoners and guards and SS alike, wait in the rain while Jacob drags Schuler’s corpse back to the water project and buries it where he found it. It’s another hour’s work. Dawn would come soon if it could break through the cloud cover, but the rain keeps up and threatens to keep up forever. One more black day. He comes back staggering, supporting himself on his shovel, as unsteady on his feet as some golem conjured up. Drexler recognizes him at last. The barber. He calls to Slazak and asks how a man in such condition is supposed to present himself before officers of the SS in the administration building tomorrow, never mind the commandant’s villa and the deputy commandant’s apartment on the main street.