The Thief of Auschwitz (7 page)

How many people can rise to the top, after all? This isn’t like business, where you have thousands of companies with thousands of big shots running them. It’s not like medicine or law, where you’re your own boss and nobody other than your CPA can see how well or how poorly you’re doing. Have a bad year? Take out another loan and buy yourself the latest German car. Nobody will be the wiser.

It’s not like that. It’s more like education—college, I mean,
the groves of academe—
where the rewards are lousy and the egos are big.

By the time you’re as old as I am, you’ll have had it with pretty much everybody. Yourself included. After all, you’re the one who fell into the trap. You didn’t have to take it that far. You could have painted for the love of it. For the love of the things you painted. Like my mother.

Once you’ve reached this point, though, the only people you’re going to be comfortable around are the ones who’ve achieved less than you have. And since they can’t stand to be around you, what’s the use? So you take up golf maybe. Find a foursome at the gym if you’re a fitness nut which I’m not or at the synagogue if you’re a religious nut which I’m not either. Some other guys you can talk to about anything other than art. Go chase a little ball around. Get drunk at the nineteenth hole every now and then. Have a little fun in the autumn of your years.

The alternative is to spend every minute either working or thinking about work.

Which means you go out there in the world and you smile and you nod and you wish the whole time that everybody but you would go straight to hell. And then you head home and sit down in front of your easel or your whatever, and you do your best to make that happen.

To save yourself with your own two hands.

That’s art.

Four

The deliveryman doesn’t want her after all. He wants something else. Something negotiable. There’s a great sack of radishes in one of the storerooms. He knows about it because he was here when it was delivered a few weeks before, and he’s watched Eidel and Zofia and the other women dice up the usual turnips and potatoes and carrots in the meantime, but it’s been a rare day when he’s seen a radish. There are surely some left.

“We’re sparing of them,” says Eidel.

“I’m sure. A radish is a rare thing.”

“It adds flavor,” she says. “There’s little enough.”

“Exactly,” The deliveryman rubs his hands together. “That’s why I need a couple of kilos.”

“Two kilos of radishes.” She’s kneading dough for bread. Pushing at it with whatever strength she has.

“Just two. That’s not much.”

“It’s a month’s worth.”

“For you, maybe, but not for a certain guard I happen to know. He eats them like candy.”

It’s unimaginable. The rumors that her own capo grows fat on bratwurst and chocolate are bad enough. Those things come from the outside, arriving in Red Cross packages for the Russians and turning up inside the suitcases of new prisoners who’ve come by train. They circulate in a black market so remote as not to exist at all from Eidel’s point of view. But
radishes.
Radishes aren’t imaginary like chocolate or sausage. They’re real, like potatoes or carrots. Two kilos of radishes could mean life or death for someone on the verge. A woman in her commando, her block, even her own bunk.

“I can’t do it,” she says.

“It’s risky, I know. That capo of yours—”

“It’s not the capo.”

“What, then?”

He’ll never understand, so she doesn’t bother explaining. “I just can’t do it.”

“No matter. I’ll find somebody who will.” He laughs, shaking his head. Today is a coal day, and almost every part of him is black.

“I hope you don’t. These women need the nourishment.”

The deliveryman chuckles at the futility of everything. “You don’t understand,” he says. “That guard of mine will get his radishes one way or another. He’s a Slovak. Cruel as they come. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, bad things will happen.”

“To you,” says Eidel. “They’ll happen to you.”

“No, no,” he reassures her. “Not to me. He relies on me.”

Eidel lifts the dough and throws it down.

“The bad things will happen to the men he oversees.” He raises up his shovel and squints along the length of it as down the barrel of a gun.
“Pop pop pop,”
he says. “No skin off my nose.”

Eidel leans into the dough.

The deliveryman watches her, gauging everything. “So you see how it is. A radish less here, a bullet more there.”

“I can’t help you,” she says. “I have to look out for my own.”

The little misplaced junkman from Witnica leans on his shovel. “Too bad,” he says. “You see, I’ve been making some inquiries as to your husband, after all.”

*

The men are waiting in the yard for their rations, sitting on rocks and squatting in the dirt and speculating about what has happened to Schuler’s twin—exactly when he disappeared, who in particular was the last to see him, where he might be and whether or not they’ll ever see him again—when word comes down that Slazak wants to see Jacob in his quarters. He enters that little rough-hewn square the way he’d enter a mineshaft, tentatively, poking his head through the door to find the capo in a hard chair by the bed, a cigarette burning in his fist and a glass of vodka on a lace doily in the center of the table. The doily is the whitest thing in the room, the whitest thing in the block, and the incongruous sight of it is disorienting. It’s something from another world.

“Come in, come in,” says Slazak. He speaks through smoke.

“Yes, sir,” says Jacob. He’s left Max out in the yard. Better there than here in the lion’s den, but the separation makes him uncomfortable.

“You say you’re something of a barber.”

So it’s true. Slazak does hear everything. “Yes, sir. I was a barber.”

“You were?
Were?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you forgotten how to cut a man’s hair, then?”

“No, sir.”

Slazak keeps on. “Was this all just
talk?”
He draws on the cigarette and his face glows red.

“No, sir. It wasn’t just talk. I—”

“Fine, then. Fine.” Slazak lets out smoke and laughs as the gray cloud of it emerges into the little room. He chuckles as if they’re just friends here. Comrades. “That’s all fine,” he says. “I just don’t want to be found wanting when I make my recommendations.”

“Recommendations?”

“Even a fellow in
my
position has to look out when he makes recommendations.”

“Recommendations?”

“For a new barber. Upstairs.” He looks heavenward, as if the men he reports to live in that direction.

“A new barber.”

“Schuler isn’t long for this world. Look at what happened to that brother of his.”

“Is that his brother?”

“Who knows? We’ll never know now. They’re old men, in any event. We can’t have Schuler passing out in the commandant’s villa, can we?”

“I suppose not.”

The cigarette has gone dead, and Slazak lights it again, grunting into the flame. “I’m doing him a favor by finding his replacement.”

Jacob is dumbfounded.

“You’ll have to prove yourself tomorrow morning. The administration building. Eight o’clock sharp. Some SS clerk.”

“How will I know?”

“You’ll know. They’re expecting you.”

At such a thought, Jacob nearly stops breathing.

“Speak to no one,” Slazak says. “Got that?”

“Absolutely. I’ll speak to no one.”

Slazak turns his attention to his vodka.

“Forgive my asking,” says Jacob before he turns to go, “and believe me, I’m flattered, but do they always come to you for advice in this area? The SS, I mean. Do you have some specialty?”

Slazak puts down the vodka and coughs into his fist and wipes the flat of his palm on his pantleg. “My specialty is what you see. But when I see a chance to improve a man’s lot, I can’t help but take it.” The lot he’s referring to is his own, of course. And if along the way he can heap extra woe upon one or two of the men in his charge, that’s fine too.

Jacob will be up half the night figuring the angles.

To begin with, it will mean light work at least one day a week. Make that
seven
days a week, provided that, like Schuler before him, he gets moved to Canada.

Then again, he’ll be exposed directly to the SS.

And not just to any SS, but to the commandant and the deputy commandant and who knows who else. The highest of the high, and by any reasonable logic surely the worst of the worst. If a person has to watch his step around Slazak, imagine the risks of working directly for such men.

Schuler has done it, though. He’s done it for longer than anyone remembers, and he’s thrived. Just consider those gum-soled shoes of his. Shoes like that boost a man’s health and prolong his life. Every man in the camp lusts after them. Jacob himself has not been immune to their allure.

But on the other hand, Jacob is a father. Shoes even half that fine, were they to come into his possession, would have to go straight to Max. No question about it. To pass them on would be his duty and his joy. Other benefits would accrue to Max as well. Slazak mentioned the commandant’s villa. God knows what delicacies such a place holds. In Jacob’s imagination it’s a kind of gingerbread house, crammed with riches. A prisoner would enter through the back door, and where would the back door lead? Straight into the kitchen, of course. A kitchen, if the rumors are true, presided over by a grandmotherly German with, they say, a kindly heart and a soft spot for the starving.

Consider Schuler! Consider his twin! Those two old men could not have survived this long without help.

He pictures himself leaving the villa, his leather case of barbering tools miraculously restored to him, a bit of bacon or a slice of good black German bread tucked into his pocket.

He decides that he owes it to his son.

Provided that Max can learn to watch his temper. Who knows what might happen, without his father around to keep an eye on him every single minute? Perhaps that’s Slazak’s plan. To get the protective father out of the picture, and have his way with the temperamental son. In such a case, all of the bacon and bread in the world won’t help.

But why would he go to such lengths? He can already punish Max at the slightest whim for any offense, real or imaginary. Why dream up a plot to get rid of Jacob, when Jacob poses no barrier to the worst of his instincts? It could be that all he wants is to burnish his reputation with those higher up. That’s the simplest explanation, and the simplest explanation is usually correct. Which means that Slazak is honestly putting his faith in Jacob, counting on him to do his best when the time comes. And why not? Failure means doom, not just for the barber but probably for his son, and the pot-bellied capo surely has some scheme for removing himself from the equation if he should fall short. In such an event Schuler will get to keep his job after all. Life will go on.

Schuler
, though. If Jacob proves himself in the morning, and he surely will, what will become of Schuler?

It’s almost dawn before he decides that he’ll never figure it all out. It’s almost dawn and he realizes that he doesn’t have any choice in the matter anyhow. Any minute now the three bells will clang, and the work day will commence, and at eight o’clock he’ll be due at the administration building.

*

It’s not fair, but Eidel is long past expecting fairness.
I’ve been making some inquiries as to your husband,
the junkman had said, and her heart had leapt, so in the morning she asks. “What exactly have you heard of Jacob?”

“Not so much, just yet.”

“Tell me.”

“There are…reports.” His voice trails off.

“Reports of what?”

“Reports.”

“All right,” she says. “You’ll have the radishes.”

“And you’ll have the reports.”

“Not
will have.
I want them now.”

“First, the radishes.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She turns her back on him and reaches up to an overhead shelf to pull down a stack of bread pans. She knocks a few of them free with the heel of her hand and greases them with just the tiniest thimbleful of lard and turns back toward him. “You’ll tell me what you know right now, and I’ll give you one kilo of radishes.”

“Two kilos.”

“One kilo to get started. One kilo, and then you’ll take a message to my husband. If he’s still alive.”