The Thief of Auschwitz (24 page)

An artist who makes that demand isn’t an artist anymore, no matter what he accomplishes with paint or stone. He’s a
masseuse.
And all he really wants is for you to rub his back in return.

Fourteen

It isn’t possible that Max has lost track. There can’t be a selection this morning—the SS and the guards have been coming every second day, steady as a drumbeat, and they came again yesterday, he’s certain—but the trucks are pulling up outside and the men are climbing out and the hospital door is bursting open and there they are. Everybody shrinks or runs as usual, everybody except Max and the French doctor, but something is different this time.

“Delousing,” says the first of them through the door, that old skeleton of an officer. He stations himself beside the coal stove and waits grinning as his men go about their duties, some chasing prisoners who’ve run off into the latrine or vanished into a crawl space beneath the building, others stumbling in weighed down by machine guns, pressure tanks, and lengths of red rubber hose, gas masks dangling from leather straps around their necks. “Everyone up,” says the officer, with a look toward Max that says he is excused from this as from everything else. The look also indicates that he would rip off the boy’s forearm and impale him with it if he could, right through the heart, but that there will be no opportunity for such joys today. “Everyone up and out.”

The door is wide open, and at a certain tilt of the officer’s head his men throw open the windows as well, letting the weather pour in with a vengeance. The temperature was already perilously low, but in a heartbeat it drops another twenty or thirty degrees. “Lose your uniforms,” says the skeleton, and the prisoners obey. “Blankets, everything. Mattresses. Pile it all by the door.” His face bears testimony to his impatience and disgust. If only most of these men didn’t have to be killed every other day, perhaps they could master the routine.

Two of them carry everything to a waiting wagon while the rest line up shivering along the walls. One or two collapse from the cold, hugging themselves with arms of bone, and one or two more are collapsed already, entirely unable to stand. These the officer directs to the waiting van, these and a handful more, chosen for reasons that no one—perhaps not even the officer himself—will ever know. They all pass through the door into the blowing weather, naked as they came into this world. They climb into the van and the van pulls away for the gas and the wagon pulls away for the laundry and the rest of the prisoners are chased outside and herded to the baths, the real baths, with real ice water instead of Zyklon-B, where they will spend the rest of the day waiting for the return of their deloused clothing. Some will die of exposure and some will simply die, and by evening the hospital will have been freshly supplied with openings for new patients, who will continue to arrive without ceasing.

Only Max stays behind as the van disappears and the guards chase the ambulatory few across the frozen ground, only Max and the French doctor, to wait outside the hospital walls while a team of men in gas masks go to work with their tanks and hoses.

*

It’s like the old days, but neither Jacob nor Eidel knows. It’s like the old days in Zakopane, when from time to time they would discover that a single thought had somehow settled upon both of their minds at once. It was as if they possessed only one mind between them, and one mind was enough. The thought could have been anything at all. A line of music. A desire for some favorite pastry from the
cukiernia.
A notion to bundle the children into their beds early and spend the evening together, just the two of them, either by the firelit hearth under a snowfall of blankets or out in the moonlit garden under a high canopy of stars, cradled all around, in either case, by a familiar ring of invisible mountains.

The thought that has invaded their minds now, and that links them across the gulf of time and distance and barbed wire that has come between them, is the unanswered question of Lydia’s portrait. What on earth has become of it? Where in the world has it gone, if it’s gone anywhere besides up the chimney? For one must of course consider the fireplace, after all. The fireplace is the first thing that a certain kind of person would think of for disposing of such an object, and they’ve endured exactly that kind of person for an eternity now.

Jacob tells himself that the remains of the painting weren’t in the fireplace on Friday noon, but he can’t be sure. Almost a week had gone by since Eidel had made whatever confession she’d made. Anything may have happened. A dozen fires had burned in the grate, the weather has been so blustery and bitter. Perhaps twice that many.

Such a quantity of ashes. So much smoke gone up the chimney. Each day, at work outdoors in Canada, he studies the gray skies as if he has missed the flight of the last bird.

Chaim has different ideas, though, and more practical ones. “She paid good money for that picture,” he says. “They wouldn’t have burned it.”

“Then they’ve put it away,” says Jacob. “They’ve stored it somewhere.”

“I doubt that. I doubt that very much.”

“In a crawlspace. In a cabinet in the basement. Somewhere.”

“A painting of a Jew? It’s bad enough that they’re about to own a painting whose
artist
is a Jew, but they’ve gotten over that for the sake of their pride.”

“Then they must have burned it,” says Jacob. “They burn Jews. They certainly wouldn’t flinch at burning a picture of one.”

Chaim shakes his head, an old scholar with infinite wisdom to impart. “They don’t burn us while we still have value,” he says.

“Value.”
Jacob laughs out loud, right there in the open, by the side of the broad main street of the village of Auschwitz, shaven head and shivering frame and burlap uniform and all. People pause to stare.
This one has finally gone mad,
their looks say.
For months now we’ve permitted him to walk our streets, and in the end he’s proven to be just another defective.

Chaim lifts a quieting finger to his lips and urges Jacob along. “Value,” he says. “Yes. You work, you live. That’s the bargain.”

*

Eidel closes the kitchen door behind her and wraps her arms around herself and hurries toward the gate, planning a second morning with the pencil and the sketch pad. She’s not ready for anything further. She couldn’t seem to get the composition right last week, and she’ll have to try again. She’s forgotten so much. She fears that she can’t trust her own hands the way she once did. They’ve gone stiff and clumsy, thick with calluses and burned in places and incompletely healed where they’ve healed at all. To say nothing of the pressure that comes with this particular project. The only thing that ever depended on any of her old paintings, the paintings to which she had devoted so many hours of the life that she had before this one, was the capturing of a single moment in an endless river of moments: a window gathering light, a child at play, a sunrise. If she failed, another moment would come along soon enough.

It’s no longer the case. Just one more lesson of the camp. Nothing endures.

The day is gray but slowly clearing and sleet has fallen overnight and the walks have been cleared but not perfectly. Her shoes are broken down, the heels in particular, and she must shuffle to keep from stepping out of them. She skitters rapidly but carefully across a thin scrim of ice, keeping her wits about her. Against the gray morning the windows of the shops are yellow with light that spills out thick as buttermilk, spreading across the walks but giving no warmth to an outsider.

The housekeeper greets her with a cautious enthusiasm. On the table in the entry hall is a new pencil sharpener in a box packed in wood shavings that it might have generated of its own will; perhaps this replacement has cost the housekeeper something and perhaps it hasn’t, but either way she’s learned that Eidel possesses some value in this equation.

She whispers that the family is already gathered in the dining room. She says they’re quite eager to see what progress she might make today, giving her words a dark edge. Eidel scrapes her collapsed shoes on the mat one last time and goes in. There can be no delay. No slipping out of a coat, for she has no coat. No checking herself in the mirror, for her gray head is rimed with stubble and her poor slack face simply will not bear study.

The dining room still smells of breakfast. Grilled sausages, omelettes stuffed with cheese and peppers and onions, hot yeasty breads with butter. Each scent in the densely charged air stands out, like a pin stuck into the map of Eidel’s deprivation. Even the dregs in the coffee cup that the
sturmbannführer
has just set down reach out to her. She dips her head and sits in the wobbly chair and takes up her sketch pad, daring at last to look at them. They’ve settled into a different arrangement this time, a tableau of their own invention that they no doubt believe suits them better, and she decides that the time has come to stop interfering and let them have their way. She might be hearing the familiar voice of desperation, but on the other the hand it might be the impulse of her old art, making itself known through the acts of these willful monsters. Saying
leave well enough alone.
Saying
paint what there is and nothing more.
Saying
make of the world only what you can.

The pencils have been freshly sharpened, every one of them, although by exactly whom she can’t say. Perhaps it was another burden laid upon the housekeeper. More penance if there was any penance to be done. It doesn’t matter. Her hands are frozen and her touch is all wrong and the first point snaps the moment she touches it to the paper. A pistol shot couldn’t have startled her more. She looks up at the family with a fragile crystalline smile and sets the pencil down, rubbing her hands together and blowing into the crevice between them.

“Perhaps some tea would warm you up,” says Vollmer. “Or coffee, if you’d like.” The
sturmbannführer
himself, smiling and solicitous. Finding himself in need, and catering to another’s need as a result.

“Yes, sir. Please. That would be a great help.”

“Coffee, then? Or tea?” He tilts back on his chair and steadies himself with one hand on his son’s shoulder and reaches back with the other to rap on the kitchen door, bringing the housekeeper on the run.

“Either one,” she says. It’s all too much.

“But you must choose,” he says. There is a threat in his command, although he might not intend it that way. There is a threat in everything.

She chooses coffee, coffee inspired by the fragrant dregs that have called out to her since she entered. The housekeeper produces a cup of it in no time, lighting the stove and reheating a potful that has gone cold and would otherwise have vanished down the drain.

“Sugar?” says Vollmer. “Cream?” Holding the housekeeper in the doorway by the power of a sideways glance. Sugar. Cream. It’s plain that nothing is too good for the artist. Unless he’s testing her again, if he was testing her the first time. Forcing a decision.

Poor Eidel. A teaspoonful of sugar is a good deal more nourishment than she would otherwise see today, and a treat that she hasn’t enjoyed since she can’t remember when. Certainly long before she arrived at the camp. The very last sugar she recalls encountering was scraped from the bottom of a canister in some rented apartment in a village whose name she might as well have never heard for all she can remember, scraped up and stirred into a cup of tea for Lydia, who was catching cold.
Cream,
though. Cream is beyond imagining. She nearly goes dizzy imagining the fattiness of it, the smooth tactile embrace of its touch upon her tongue. It would be too much to endure, she decides, steadying herself in that wobbly chair with her back to the void above the fireplace, the intoxicating scent of coffee swimming in her head. She might not be able to endure the richness of cream. It might curdle in her stomach and then where would she be.

“Just a little sugar,” she says. “Please. If it isn’t too much trouble.”

*

Two more weeks and the cast will come off. Max is restless. He wants to go home from the hospital, if you could call it home. Back to the block, anyway, and back to work or something like it. Something invisible. He feels like a living target here, loafing in the bed reading dusty German medical textbooks to the French doctor, translating everything on the fly into their mutual Polish. Every other morning the skeletal officer arrives with his wagon and his van and his squadron of brutes, and every time the selection is finished Max feels that he’s narrowly escaped some particularly inhuman punishment that’s building up inside the man like a head of steam inside a boiler. He wonders how long his protection will last, for it certainly can’t last forever. His mother must be making some progress on that painting. She’s always worked fast. If only she knew the trade that she was making—her days for his—perhaps she’d go slowly, take her time, stretch things out. Maybe even make a few false starts. But she can’t know, and so she must be making good progress.