The Thief of Auschwitz (30 page)

When the container is empty he goes out and sets it in the yard, and then he returns and stands in the doorway. “Capo?” he calls. And when her pounding and crying doesn’t stop he waits. “Capo?” he calls again, when she’s paused for breath.

Silence answers.

“Had you seen to your duties properly,” he says, selecting a match from his pocket, “this would not have been necessary.”

*

The rumors are everywhere, numberless and varied as birds, as if the warm weather has brought them. Some indicate that one of the prisoners set the fire in a failed suicide attempt that has landed her in the hospital
en route
to a slightly delayed doom. Others say the capo is responsible, big fat Rolak temporarily absent from duty, smoking in her bed during working hours. Some say that every woman in the block survived and some say that all of them died and most of these latter envy them for it. Still others report that the women weren’t present at all, although some of them were called back from their stations to fight the blaze when the fire brigade failed to appear, that band of worthless layabouts busy lolling around the rooftop water tank they’re widely known to use for a swimming pool in warmer weather. Reliable reports suggest they have a diving board, although no one has ever seen it.

Never mind the diving board. Never mind the fire brigade. Jacob asks and asks and asks again, asks everyone he knows and many he doesn’t, hoping that a pattern of reliable information will eventually emerge. He asks all afternoon and he asks all evening and he asks all night, and in the end the only thing he knows for certain—since he’s seen it with his own eyes—is that Eidel’s block has been burned utterly to the ground. Not a stick remains. Perhaps, as those who speak up in defense of the fire brigade maintain, it’s true that some member of the SS kept them at bay and oversaw the destruction personally and utterly. Vollmer, some say. The commandant, say others. And a wild-eyed few maintain that it was Satan himself, although why the devil would want to inflict any damage upon the facilities at Auschwitz is a mystery beyond knowing. Perhaps he too works in mysterious ways.

There’s additional information making the rounds in Canada the next day, but none of it is necessarily more credible than anything he’s already heard. Vollmer’s name comes up again and again. But it always comes up. Prisoners can be counted on to discuss the highest ranks of the camp’s management with the kind of certainty and devotion that men under other circumstances would reserve for the discussion of gods.

Even little Chaim, happening by Canada on his way to who knows where, doesn’t know for certain. “Somebody died,” he says. “That’s all I know. But somebody always dies.”

Friday comes again before Jacob can get any kind of satisfaction. He’d rush through the morning’s haircuts if there were anything to be achieved by it, if he could speed up the turning of the world or alter the fixed routine of the camp by the work of his own hands, but the stream of officers moves on its own schedule and there’s nothing he can do to change it. The day drags. Even lunch at that rough plank table, a sumptuous feast of chicken and apples and root vegetables all roasted together and smelling like a holiday, tastes like ashes.

Chaim snaps him out of his revery with a word and the flash of a napkin that he’s filched from somewhere. “Save that leg for Max, why don’t you?” The cook is gone for a moment and he holds up the white linen like a toreador. “You’ll know about her soon enough. Regardless of what’s happened, Max needs to eat.”

Even the commandant is sober today, sober and entertaining a group of visitors from Berlin who keep him occupied before his haircut and distracted during it and whose presence generally slows things down in any number of frustrating ways. Jacob would kill Liebehenschel if he could. He would kill them all, if the consequences of such a thing weren’t already determined. Standing there armed while the commandant pontificates on some point of military law, his foamy jowls flapping and his already low brow knitted like the most devoted Torah scholar, Jacob vows that he will do just that—he will murder him—if Eidel has been killed in the fire.

What could he and Max live for with her gone?

His mind races as the razor drips. Should his wife be lost, everything will be possible. All strictures will be removed. And he knows exactly what he will do. He’ll persuade Chaim to feign illness, and in the boy’s place he’ll arrange to use Max as his assistant. For just one day. One day is all they’ll need. The two of them, father and son, will murder Liebehenschel together, locking the door to keep the cook and the housekeeper out and tying him to his chair with the linen drape and letting his blood paint the walls and soak the carpets and run down between the floorboards. Then out the window they’ll go. Out the window to freedom or whatever else might be waiting.

An entirely different dream comes true, though, when they reach Vollmer’s apartment.

They find the dining room the same as ever, although the windows are open to permit the breeze to begin scouring away the stale air of winter. Eidel’s materials are neatly arranged in a corner as usual, the painting hidden beneath its white sheet. The easel faces out into the room, and with a kind of urgency that he’s never quite felt before—an urgency driven by fear that she may have set her brush to this panel for the last time—Jacob dares to step over and lift the sheet and see what lies beneath it.

Every bit of oxygen leaves his body. He doesn’t care that the painting shows Vollmer and his family. He doesn’t even
register
that it shows Vollmer and his family. To him they may as well be a bowl of fruit, a sunset, for to him the painting shows Eidel in every stroke, Eidel his one beloved, Eidel and Eidel alone. He stands enraptured before it—before
her
—when Vollmer enters, his usual self, dour, stiff as a hairbrush, and he’s too absorbed to release the drapery and get to work, too dumbstruck to invent some fawning remark as to how handsome the family looks in their portrait, too uplifted to note that he’s been caught transgressing at all.

So Vollmer leads the way instead, taking up another corner of the white drapery and studying the painting with his head tilted at an angle and saying, “One more session, maybe two, and she will be finished.”

“Then she’s still alive,” says Jacob. Saying it without daring to say it. The words just coming out. “After the fire.”

“Oh, yes. She’s very much alive.”

And thus the spell is broken. He can go on.

*

Who else but the junkman? Count on that little itinerant opportunist from the country to gather up such tags and scraps of information as sift down among the dregs of this world and assemble them into something of meaning, if not exactly worth. Count on him to reach, in his own way, the bottom of everything.

“You’re still here!” he says to Jacob as Blackbeard pulls the old horse to a stop alongside the outdoor sorting tables of Canada. With the change of the seasons the work here is perhaps a little better than before, but the scale is always relative.

“Oh, yes,” says Jacob. “I’m still here. My pardon hasn’t come through.”

“What a kidder,” says the junkman. “If you’re still here, it’s only because your wife hasn’t finished the painting.”

“The
sturmbannführer
said she has another session or two.” He says it like a person who enjoys consulting with the
sturmbannführer
on a routine basis.

“Today’s Sunday,” says the junkman, lifting his hat to scratch underneath it. “So that’s one down. One to go.”

“One what?”

“One more session before it’s over. You heard about the picture, didn’t you?”

“Heard about it? I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Right there in Vollmer’s dining room. It’s a masterpiece.”

“No. Not
that
picture.” The junkman cranes his neck to be sure that Jankowski isn’t observing them. “I mean the
other
picture. The one she drew in her bunk. The one that Vollmer burned down the block to get rid of.”

“I don’t know about any such picture.”

“According to what I hear,” says the junkman, “it was’t especially flattering.” And then Blackbeard clicks his tongue and the horse begins to draw away and the junkman tips his hat, raising it with a slowness that gives this farewell a quality of absolute valediction.

*

Jacob finds himself praying that someone will die soon, and he doesn’t care who it might be as long as it’s someone who deserves one of Wenzel’s special burial details. There hasn’t been any pattern to these things that Jacob can discern, any connection to the dead man’s nationality or reputation or duties, any link to the weather or the time, but that just makes his prayer all the more fervent. He doesn’t even know whom he’s praying to, exactly—the God of Abraham or some other god, lesser or greater—but pray he does and with a vengeance.

A special burial detail will be Max’s opportunity to escape. Never mind the painting of poor lost Lydia. Never mind rescuing it and never mind preserving it. It’s gone and Lydia is gone and very soon Eidel and Jacob himself will be gone too. The time has come to accept all that.

Max, though.

Max, he can save.

So he tells him there’s been a change in plans. He’s to forget the pipedream of salvaging Lydia’s picture. He’s to escape, simple as that. He’s to go out on a burial detail and never return.

“I won’t go without you,” says the boy. For he’s still a boy, regardless. A boy to whom his father cannot and will not explain everything.

They’re in the bunk again, back to front, the father dripping lies into the son’s ear like poison or its antidote. “They won’t,” he says. “Your mother is still in an enviable position. They won’t harm us, not while Vollmer needs her. And if you go now, while she still has a good bit of work left, they’ll forget about you altogether.”

“They never forget.”

“They do. They will.”

“No.”

“Yes. In this case. Vollmer’s pride will make him forget.”

Max stiffens.

His father presses himself closer, whispering. “That painting of your mother’s will save us all if you let it. But you’ll have to be the one to go first. You must have faith.” It’s an impossible request, but he makes it.

Max breathes. “What about you?”

“We’ll come along later. We’ll find a way. I promise.”

*

The days pass slowly. Men die. One by one and two by two and a dozen at a time they go off to be buried or burned by the
Sonderkommando,
but not once does a special burial detail materialize. Day follows day, bringing death but not enough of it. Jacob waits and watches and wonders what sort of creature he’s become.

Wednesday crawls past with Jacob propped against his table in Canada, leaning forward and then back as he works, unconsciously recapitulating the motion of old men at prayer. Thus do the ancient forms come back, invoked by the flesh if not by the spirit. Jankowski is in a jolly mood today, perhaps his first on record, and life in Canada is placid, so Jacob’s intense concentration goes unnoticed and unremarked. As he works he watches the yard for the appearance of anyone from his block—they’re at work extending a bit of railroad track on the other side of the camp, and the labor is brutal and the footing is treacherous in the spring mud and from time to time an injured or dead prisoner will return either on foot or in a wheelbarrow. Losses have been high. He watches and hopes and he lets two dreams mingle in his mind, one of Max making his escape tonight, and the other of himself committing murder tomorrow—with no possibility of retribution beyond the two deaths that are already fated. This time, though, it’s Vollmer, not Liebehenschel, who goes under his razor.

But Friday morning comes all the same. Max breaks off for Canada and Jacob breaks off to meet Chaim by the fence, but not before telling his son to keep an eye out. Keep his fingers crossed. Perhaps tonight will be the night when their good fortune strikes.

Max says there’s no hurry, and his father doesn’t disagree.

At the administration building, though, word awaits that neither Vollmer nor Liebehenschel will require the barber’s services today. The clerk tells Chaim that they’ve been called to Berlin, but Jacob doesn’t believe her. Something is afoot. Perhaps the painting is already complete and Eidel is dead—the kitchen door was closed again today, so who knows?—and Vollmer has given orders that Jacob is to go straight to the ovens when his morning’s work is finished. But how could that be? Wouldn’t Vollmer have done the thing right away, if Eidel had finished the painting last Saturday? Wouldn’t Jacob have felt something, some deep and unmistakable burst of woe within his heart, if she were already under the ground?

And yet the day passes. He cuts hair and he shaves necks and he believes that each mustache he trims will be his last. Noon comes and the cook sets out a meal according to her custom, but Jacob doesn’t have any appetite. He watches Chaim eat, settling his stomach with sips of water and putting a little something in his pocket for Max, thinking that this morsel will see one of two very different fates. Either the entire Rosen family will be wiped out tomorrow and this will have been his son’s last proper meal, or else Max will get away tonight without having had the opportunity to eat it—leaving it to be found instead in Jacob’s own pocket when they go through his clothes.