The Thief of Auschwitz (14 page)

There he is, past the fence that marks the women’s camp, beyond the great crossed timbers wrapped in their tangles of barbed wire, hurrying along in another man’s oversized uniform: Jacob. He looks nothing like himself—he’s bristly and thin like the rest of them, and his eyes are sunken, and his old mountain-spanning stride has been replaced by a kind of furtive scuttle—but she would know him anywhere. She would know him in Hell itself.

He’s twenty yards distant. The capo is scolding little Gretel right behind her, and guards are posted along the fenceline with machine guns. She can’t call out to him but she does have the bowl and the spoon, so without even thinking she brings them together once, just as hard as she dares. Nothing. He walks on. It’s useless. Just another sound in a place where the air is filled with sound, just one more noise beneath notice. Jacob doesn’t even look up. He’s nearly past her now. She realizes that this may be the last time that they will ever see each other, no matter how long they may live. She thinks of that and she doesn’t think of anything else, certainly not of what the immediate future might bring. Once more thrust into a perpetual present where nothing else matters, she lets her fingers go slack and permits the crockery bowl to crash to the concrete walk. It smashes into a hundred pieces, and gets the attention of everyone.

Rolak leaves off scolding Gretel and comes to the door, arms akimbo like some furious old hausfrau, but Eidel doesn’t see her. She’s too busy looking at Jacob. He’s too busy looking at her. He’s stopped short by the fence, frozen in place and reaching out one hand as if to touch the barbed wire, by this unconscious act daring the guards and a passing SS officer and indeed the whole camp to take note of him and to do with him as they will, which would suit him utterly for he has seen at last the one thing that he has given up hope of ever seeing again in this life.

In that moment he looks like his old self. It’s a miracle.

But the guards turn and shoo him along, and the capo reaches out to pull Eidel back into the kitchen, and the moment ends.

The capo rants for a while about two bowls broken this month—the first one over the crown of Mathilde Kessler’s head, and now this one—as if the prisoners are plotting to overthrow the Reich by means of diminishing its supply of crockery. She says that Eidel would meet the same fate as Kessler herself if the commando weren’t already short. She says that as worthless as Eidel is, at least she’s a step up from this new girl they’ve sent to replace Zofia.

The capo sends her out to clean the walk with her bare hands—no broom and no dust pan, be quick about it and don’t miss a single sharp fragment—and as she bends and works and bleeds she thinks of Zofia. Zofia and the missing silk handkerchief. Zofia and the missing silk handkerchief that was the last link to her own poor lost child.

*

Jacob takes it as a good sign. The image of his beloved there on the walk lingers in his mind like a holy vision, something sent down from heaven to inspire him and lift him and urge him on. Despite his lack of sleep, and despite the fear that goes with this being the first day on which he’ll visit not just the full run of SS officers but the commandant himself, and in his own villa, that one instant of seeing Eidel very nearly puts a spring in his step. Everything else—the entire camp—falls away.

His work begins in the administration building, where he finds that he’s been granted an assistant. An assistant! Imagine! His name is Chaim and he’s just a child, younger than Max by three or four years. Where he’s come from and where he lives and how he came to be here are questions that Jacob doesn’t even bother asking himself. The world is full of mysteries. The more he looks at the boy the more the puzzle deepens, though, for he looks like the very embodiment of everything that the Nazis hate the most. Not only olive-skinned and dark-haired and almond-eyed, he’s slight of build and perhaps even a little girlish. He’s certainly unfit for any labor more demanding than this. But he proves to be cheerful, endlessly accommodating, and infinitely deferential, and Jacob decides that these qualities are the ones that have saved him.

In addition to an assistant, he actually has a parlor. Not a parlor exactly, but a sunlit corner of the kitchen where a counter has been laid out with the tools he’ll need and a shelf has been filled with fresh white linens and water has been set to boiling in pot after pot. The officers will come to him, Chaim says, one every fifteen minutes starting at eight. If anything needs to be communicated, the boy will do the talking. The SS men think of him as a pet, he says, like a trained monkey or a talking bird. The fact that he can communicate at all is a marvel. They never tire of testing his abilities.

If not for the monsters coming in and out every quarter hour, this place would be paradise. The familiar scents of talcum powder and hair tonic and rubbing alcohol bring him back to his father’s shop in Zakopane. The gleaming tools on their bed of white linen are nearly sacramental in their power to invoke a vanished way of life. Even the very smallest of sounds—the snick of the scissors and the complaint of the tap and the brushing of the broom on the hardwood floor—restore him. But that’s not half of it.

For beyond the window is a wide-open view of an unfenced and boundless world. Cars and trucks come and go on the main road. Commerce goes on. Old women and little children stroll on sidewalks sharing treats from the
cukiernia,
as if the village of Auschwitz were still a perfectly ordinary place. As if the whole world were still perfectly ordinary. And he can almost believe it.

The last man comes at noon, and after they have cleaned up and packed away the tools for the afternoon’s work, the cook points them toward a little rough bench and a low table set up behind the washtub. The table is laid out with rations fit for a czar. It’s all Chaim’s doing. He knows all the angles. He’s everyone’s friend. He’s the exception to every rule there is. The platter of food—boiled potatoes with rosemary and pepper and plenty of salt, the overcooked end of a pork loin all caramelized and crusted, chewy bread that has actual caraway seeds on it and no traces whatsoever of sawdust or coal—is mainly for the boy. Jacob is only incidental. And when he whispers across the table that he means to tuck some of this bounty into his pocket, Chaim makes certain that he understands their arrangement.

“My pleasure,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “Help yourself.”

Jacob nods. He folds bread and pork into a little sandwich that won’t leak too much grease onto his uniform and tucks it away inside his pocket, not for later but for Max. He watches the child on the opposite side of the table gorging himself after a morning spent sweeping up hair and fawning on SS officers, and he thinks that his own son deserves this much nourishment and more for the hard labor he’s doing on the water project. For breaking his back under a new and unknown capo.

As they head out for the commandant’s villa, they pass the woman at the desk with the gooseneck lamp and she stops them with word that he’s unavailable today. That’s all she says, looking up at Jacob as if daring him to question her further. As if willing him to pry into the commandant’s business so that he might be punished for it.

But Chaim is her friend too, if not her pet, and he sidles up to the desk and bats his eyelashes and puts on his very sweetest voice to ask her straight out. “Tell me,” he says, is the
obersturmbannführer
away on business, or did he just have too much to drink last night? Thursday is the
Skat
tournament in the Officers’ Club, correct?
Skat
and schnapps have been Herr Liebehenschel’s downfall before.”

Jacob can’t believe his ears. This saucy little villain will get them both shot. But he can’t believe his eyes, either, for the woman at the desk just smiles down at the boy and gives her head a shake and clicks her tongue as she would at a naughty child of her own.

“I thought so,” says Chaim, and as the woman at the desk raises her hand to stifle a laugh he drags Jacob off to the deputy commandant’s apartment.

They go along the hall and out the door, trailing the rich aroma of roast pork like a flag. Jacob is certain that his theft will be detected just by the scent rising from his pocket, but they pass between the guards and out through the gate without incident. Further useful friends that the boy has cultivated. Jacob is completely terrified and so utterly amazed that he fails to appreciate the moment of release, and he’s a free man out on the road before he even recognizes it.

They walk the access road and come to the end and turn onto the main street, not in the direction of the commandant’s villa but the other way. According to Chaim the deputy’s apartment building is a block farther from the center of town, and they hurry along the sidewalk as if they fear being caught out here. People stare. Jacob feels clownish in this big flapping suit of striped burlap, as if he and the boy are being presented as an act in a circus or a cabaret, the foolish adult and the wily child who outsmarts him at every turn.

“Tell me,” he says to the boy as they hurry along the street. “Why don’t you just run off?”

“Why don’t
you?”
says the child, turning back the question.

“Because they’d kill my son. That’s why.”

“Good thinking.” The boy stumbles along, a wooden box in his arms loaded with supplies in little drawers and compartments, fragrant towels stacked on the top.

“They’d kill my wife as well, if they could put the two of us together. If they haven’t lost track of our marriage in all of those numbers they keep.”

“Then let’s hope they have,” says Chaim.

“Besides,” says Jacob, “this way I can bring back a little something for Max. To help him along.” He smiles knowingly and pats the greasy bulge in his pocket, hungry for it already and ashamed by his own animal nature. Within the last hour he’s eaten more than he’s been eating in a typical month, and now he has the audacity to feel hungry. “It’s a father’s duty,” he says, wondering if that remark is a step too far, wondering what’s become of this poor boy’s family, not daring to ask.

But Chaim isn’t troubled. “Do you still want to know why
I
don’t run off?” he asks.

“I do.” They’re drawing near what must be the deputy commandant’s apartment building, the only one of its kind on this block, three stories of red brick with a little portico below. The building looks as if it would be more comfortable if it stood closer to the center of town. It looks as if whoever built it had hopes that the town might one day grow large enough to encompass it, but Auschwitz has grown in another way instead.

“I don’t run off because they’d kill
you,”
says the boy. “They’d kill you for not stopping me.” He says it with a little chirp in his voice, as if it’s the most delightful thing in the world.

Jacob has to agree that he has a point, but as they turn down the walkway he wonders aloud, “Back to me, then. If I ran off would they punish you, in addition to my family?”

“Hardly,” says Chaim, turning to put his back to the glass door. “I’m just a child. I can’t help what a grown man might do.” And he pushes his way through into a dim carpeted lobby, big as life.

Max

In the same way that Venice is a city of canals, New York is a city of elevators. They reach everywhere, they come in all sizes and shapes, and everything travels by way of them. They run the gamut, from big gleaming jewel boxes in the grand hotels to dingy little closets in all but the most exclusive apartment buildings. It’s shocking, really, to discover what shabby elevators people will ride to their multi-million-dollar penthouse co-ops. It’s pathetic.

If you go to the right places and look hard enough, you’ll see teensy little dumbwaiters, too, just big enough to hold a bottle of champagne. I’ve seen them. Plus those big freight elevators that rumble around all over the place—not just in warehouses and factories, but in concert halls and museums, the most sophisticated places in the world. Here in New York, whether you know it or not, Rembrandts ride around in the equivalent of freight cars. Rosens do too, and Warhols and Wyeths—although at least one of those two very different Andys would have said he didn’t mind that kind of treatment a bit. He’d have been all
aw shucks
about it, the old phony.

He thought he could get away with hiding pictures in a barn, for God’s sake.
In a barn.

Anyhow, if it weren’t for the elevator I’d never get down to the basement with this leg of mine. I’d have no access to my storage locker at all, never mind my apartment on the fourth floor. I’d be stranded at ground level. It’s a studio apartment, in case you’re wondering. Half studio, half apartment. You can smell the paint in the hallway, people tell me. You can smell it in the elevator. But who cares? New York smells like paint half the time anyway. Somebody’s always painting something.

If anyone complained, I’d say it’s the price of living alongside someone who’s about to have a retrospective at the National Gallery. But nobody asks. They already know. It’s just urban living, really. I can’t fling wide the windows and let the sweet summer breeze blow through from off the Brandywine, can I? No wonder my work is different from his. Darker and more cramped.