The Thief of Auschwitz (28 page)

One morning she awakens long before the three alarm bells, flat on her back, Eidel asleep beside her. It’s dark, darker than midnight, since the beams of the searchlights move more lackadaisically at this early hour of the morning. Even the guards are weary. She lets her eyes adjust, listening to the breathing of the women around her and listening to Rolak beginning to stir in her compartment and knowing that the day will begin soon. And in the few minutes that she has, she manages to get a good look at the drawing overhead. At the thing that has been occupying Eidel for the last weeks.

The figures aren’t human after all, or not entirely. They’re strange and terrifying and highly particular, creatures called up from a very specific nightmare. Two larger and two smaller, the larger pair alongside one another and one of the smaller ones fitted in between them and the other one seated on a lap. The largest of them is some kind of demon, perhaps a demon whose function is to torment lesser demons, perhaps even Satan himself, his curved teeth arrayed in a great gaping grin, his twisted horns thrust up and out like the horns of a ram, his enormous wings unfurled into black curtains. Beside him sits his bride, for this one is without question a bride, clothed in a wedding dress whose ironic whiteness would be a triumph of technique if only Gretel knew how to perceive it. The face beneath her cunningly invoked veil is a mask of bottomless hunger, and her hands where they jut from the lace of her sleeves are a pair of bony talons, bloody and made for grasping. One clutches a child, a girl, the most human of these creatures and therefore the most horrifying. She has an unfinished look about her, the look of something brought from the womb too hastily and for the wrong reasons. Gretel can’t look at her too closely. Besides, her attention is drawn to the figure in the middle, the figure that to judge by his bundhosen and his stiff white shirt must represent a boy. This one is neither a monster like its father nor a revenant like its dam nor an ill-formed atrocity like its misshapen little sister. This one is a pig. Plain and simple. It’s a young German boy incarnated as both the unthinkable and the untouchable.
Trefe.
And he, even more than the rest of his family, looks deeply proud of what he’s become.

Gretel has seen enough, and for a change the dawnshattering shriek of the alarm bells comes as a relief.

*

So this is how Eidel maintains her sanity: painting one truth by day, and drawing a different one by night. The truth of technique on one hand and the truth of the heart on the other, neither one of which she can hope to alter in the least.

In the apartment, Vollmer only encourages her. He slips around behind the easel at the close of each session and studies her work while she cleans up, admiring the day’s progress and praising what she’s accomplished. Over time he seems almost to forget that she’s a prisoner exactly, and to see her instead as a kind of vessel or passageway or conduit for something else, something greater than either one of them. Call it art or call it the will of God.

His daughter presses him on the point one day, just after he’s swept an indicating hand along the curve of a particular line, asking him how it is that a Jew might create something that he would praise so highly. She asks with the simplicity and innocence of any child, and with the directness that comes from knowing that the person before whom she’s asking the question doesn’t qualify as a person at all.

The answer is obvious, her father says: “God, not man, is the creator. God works in mysterious ways, and quite often He selects the least of us to perform His greatest miracles. Witness this beautiful painting. Witness this lowly Jew.”

Eidel dares to watch him from beneath her eyebrows. There’s nothing kind in what he says, nothing humane, beyond how it permits her to very nearly vanish from her own story. In the camp, invisibility may be the greatest gift of all.

Vollmer bends to tousle his daughter’s yellow hair. “Remember this lesson,” he says, “should you ever doubt the power of the Almighty.”

*

“The problem,” says Max, “isn’t just getting out. It’s getting back in again.”

“They’re
both
problems.”

The two are in the lineup for roll call, waiting while Wenzel flips through some papers on his clipboard. The instant he looks up they’ll have to stop whispering, but the look of consternation on his downcast face suggests that they have a moment. Other men talk, too, and Wenzel doesn’t mind. He’s the only capo in the camp who wouldn’t, no doubt about that. He tolerates a little fraternization, as he calls it, as long as the prisoners observe limits. As long as they snap to attention when the time comes.

Some of the prisoners maintain that this studied laxity of Wenzel’s is going to get him shot one day—probably sooner rather than later—but as long as the work keeps getting done he remains untouched if not untouchable. No one is untouchable.

“Right,” says Max. “They’re both problems. Getting in and getting out. That’s what’s got me thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“That you and Chaim should do it together.”

Jacob can’t help but raise his voice a little. “And send two men instead of one? And double the difficulties? Double the risk?”

“On a Friday, I mean, when you’re already in the town.”

“I see. You’d like us to go on a little shopping trip, then? While we’re at liberty.”

“Keep an open mind,” says Max. “The next time the commandant’s drunk, see, you don’t go straight to Vollmer’s. You take advantage of the change in schedule, and you go to the shop instead.”

“And we tell the antique dealer what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Chaim will think of something.”

“Fine. I’ll leave it to Chaim. But then we just snatch the painting right out from under the man’s nose? Is that what you have in mind?”

“It’s only an idea,” says Max. “It needs refinement.”

“You’re right about that,” says his father.

*

There are ginger cookies and hot tea on the dining room table, and fat little Kurt can’t seem to get enough. He keeps leaving his place in the family tableau and dashing to the table and snatching up another sweet, returning with his mouth full. His father orders him to stop, but his mother intervenes. He’s just a growing boy who needs his strength, she says, although Eidel can see that those bundhosen of his are fitting much more closely now than they did back in the wintertime.

Frau Vollmer sips tea and leans over to replace the cup on the table, asking Eidel what has become of her coat. She hasn’t seen it hanging in the entryway for a long while now.

“With all respect,” Eidel says, frowning down at her palette, “I was able to pass it on to someone more needy.”

“More needy?” laughs the woman of the house.

“I hope you don’t mind.”

Kurt pipes up, his mouth full of crumbs. “I know about this,” he says. “I’ll bet she traded it for food.”

“Now, Kurt. Don’t be ridiculous. A beautiful coat like that.”

Eidel mixes paint.

“There’s a whole black market,” says Kurt, swallowing and giving his head a vehement shake. “Isn’t that so, Papa?”

Vollmer doesn’t move. He may as well be posing for a photograph as for a painting, his chin horizontal, his eyes fixed straight ahead, the faintest suggestion upon his lips of a smile withheld. “There
is
a black market,” he says. “No question. I don’t suppose I need to add that it’s strictly against regulations.”

Eidel adjusts herself in her chair.

Frau Vollmer leans forward. “You wouldn’t have traded that beautiful coat of mine for something as fleeting as food, would you?”

“Of course not, Madam,” says Eidel. “Never.”

“I believe you,” says the woman of the house.

“Thank you, Madam. It’s the truth. I received nothing for it.”

There are still cookies on the plate when the session is over, and the instant she’s alone Eidel takes two of them. The first she eats right off while she puts her things away, keeping her back to the room in case someone should return. The cookie is soft and thick and dusted with crystalline sugar that she licks away first, trying to pace herself but fearing to be caught. Small bites lead to larger, panic and hunger getting the best of her good intentions, and soon it’s gone. The sugar makes her lightheaded and raises her heart rate a little, and she can feel it pumping through her veins like a drug as she hides the other cookie in the pocket of her uniform. The housekeeper returns for the dishes and makes no remark, but Eidel’s heart doesn’t slow. The cookies are loaded with butter, fragile as dreams, and as she leaves the apartment and makes her way back to the camp she goes carefully lest the one in her pocket crumble to dust.

The delivery commando’s wagon is pulled up near the kitchen, and the two men—the little junkman from Witnica and Blackbeard himself, the mender of pots—are hauling a dead woman down the steps. Her legs trail behind, one shoe having come off on the doorsill, her heel scraping against the concrete and leaving a trail of blood. They grunt and toss the corpse onto the wagon—which is loaded up with coal today and not flour, thank God—and then they tip their caps in Eidel’s direction, smiling their toothless joy.

She ducks her head and goes in. The door is propped open and the room smells of fire and burned meat, and a woman unknown to Eidel is scraping the top of the stove with a blackened spatula. Whatever she is working at is stubborn as death. Standing at the table nearby is Gretel, looking smaller and more pale than usual. She grits her teeth and draws one shallow breath after another, a little tremor in her jaw, her arms and hands nearly too weak to knead the dough before her.

Eidel comes to the table and reaches into her pocket. The cookie is still nearly intact. She describes it to Gretel, whispers that she’s stolen it to appease Rolak, but perhaps—

“The capo is in a rage,” says Gretel, barely loud enough to be heard over the scraping of the other woman’s spatula. “Don’t go wasting it on me.”

“Half, then,” whispers Eidel. “Just half.”

“Rolak would know. You’d be next. Or I would.”

“But you need it.”

“We all need it.” Gretel turns a few degrees, putting her shoulder toward Eidel, a stance that shuns any act of kindness. Through the open door they can see the deliverymen climbing back into their seats, and Gretel tilts her chin to indicate the body on the wagon bed. The face blackened on one side, the uptilted palms worse if anything could be worse. “Go on and give it to the capo,” she says. “You must.”

Max

That tattooed girl keeps me up to date on how the retrospective is coming along. Just the logistics of it are incredible. Day after day, paintings show up from all over the world. The truth is they’ve visited places I’ve never been myself. Venice, for example. I’d love to see Venice, but for some reason I’ve never made it there and I guess it’s probably too late now. Venice was where they built the first ghetto. I wonder how many people know that. How many people, even good Jews, know that the word
ghetto
comes straight from Italy.

Italy of all places. You’d think Germany. Poland.

At any rate there’s a gallery over there with two or three things of mine in it. If they hadn’t been kind enough to loan one of them to the National Gallery, I don’t suppose I’d have ever seen it again. That’s the way it is. You paint something and it means the whole world to you while you’re painting it and then it’s gone.

By God, this thing is turning into a big family reunion. A family reunion without a family, but still. Everything I’ve ever done is coming home to roost, thanks to that tattooed girl. The one who now spends half of her time here in New York, keeping an eye on me.

I’ll bet the Venice picture looks different over there than it will look in Washington. I say
the Venice picture
even though it doesn’t have anything to do with Venice other than that it’s been on a wall over there for thirty-five or forty years. I wonder if that famous Venetian light has transformed it in some way. I wonder if I’ll have trouble recognizing it.

Light, though. As a painter you think about light all the time. You think about light the way a swimmer thinks about water. Light affects everything. It changes everything. By some measure, it
is
everything.

I made a few trips to the basement and brought up some old things from the locker. Paintings I hadn’t looked at in the longest time. The light in my studio apartment isn’t exactly the misty light of Venice, but it’s served me well enough. It’s the light I need. That’s how it is. You don’t just find the subjects that suit you, you find the light that suits you too. Mine comes in a third-floor window in Brooklyn. Willowtown, they call my neighborhood, although there isn’t a willow tree in sight. There are plenty of sycamores, though, and they soften the light just enough. In the winter months they don’t soften it at all, and that’s fine too. Hard light and darkness. That’s a lot of what I do.