Jim Shepard - The Book of Aron

I turned to face the kid and he stopped but he’d already come too far and Boris swung the brick into the side of his plaid cap and knocked him to the sidewalk and then grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into where the cellar had fallen and no one could see us from the street. I followed him. Boris dumped him there and then picked up another brick and hit him again. It sounded like a shovel going into dirt.

“What did you do ?” I asked. I sounded like a baby.

“Why did you turn around?” he said. He seemed angrier at me than at the kid.

“Is he dead?” I asked. But I could see that he wasn’t. His head was jerking back and forth and his hands were clenching.

Boris squatted and pulled out a safety pin and a note that said LIVE AND LET LIVE and pinned it to the kid’s shirt.

“Give me the honey,” he said. Then he pulled me back onto the street.

“We’re just going to leave him?” I asked. But we already had.

That afternoon we had Chłodna Street to ourselves. Boris said the other gang was probably still out looking for its leader. We used ten or twelve smaller kids to swarm the gate. They went off shoulder to shoulder running as fast as they could and the blue and yellow police beat and tore at the clothes of as many as they could reach but most got through. We paid each a saccharine candy and told them to wait until the gate was at its busiest. Boris found the whole thing funny. He said that because we’d been paid in money for a recent load he was going to have us split up and buy things in Aryan shops outside the wall. He said the trick was to walk slowly and to pass the police as though they were vendors and not to run even if someone made a first step at us. And to clean our clothes and shoes as much as we could before we left. And when we were in the shops to ask for what we wanted as though we owned the place.

“How’s your sister?” Adina asked Zofia, and I slapped my head for not having asked her myself.

Zofia said Salcia was doing poorly. Adina wrapped an arm around her and Zofia asked if she was getting sick and Adina told her that two more families had moved into their apartment. And while those families had been sitting and chatting with one of their uncles another had arrived. She had no idea where they were going to put them all. “Now we’re six to a room,” she said. “And in the cellar and in one corner the water’s always dripping. Next to my head, all night long. We asked them to fix it but they didn’t fix it.”

In the square one of the blue policemen had a kid by the shirt and tore it off his back. “Did you cut yourself?” Zofia asked me.

“He has bad gums,” Boris told her. “Have you smelled his breath?”

So I told them what Boris had done.

“With a brick?” Lutek said when I finished.

“On the head,” I said.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“I think he’s dead,” I said.

“He should’ve realized stealing is wrong,” Boris said.

“Do you think they’ll leave us alone now?” Zofia asked.

“If they don’t they’ll get another brick to the head,” Boris told her.

“Hooray for Boris,” Adina said.

“You already said that,” Lutek told her. And then I understood why Boris had used me instead of Lutek.

“He might really be dead,” I said again, but they all looked like they had their own problems.

“Why are we still sitting here?” Adina wanted to know.

“We’re waiting for confirmation from the other side,” Boris told her. We had to move an exchange location and had sent one of the smaller kids with a note.

I asked Zofia if her father was still sad about the Brysz girls.

“What do you care?” she said.

“I asked, didn’t I?” I said.

“Poor Sh’maya,” Boris said. “No one thinks he cares.”

She said her father was better but that Hanka Nasielska still wept night and day about it. “Hanka Nasielska saw me with you and called me treyf slops in a treyf pot,” she told Boris. He laughed.

“What were you doing with him?” I asked.

“She told me she’d make my mouth kosher again,” she said to Boris. “She put a stone in a pot with some steam but I screamed that it was too hot so she cooled it down before she put it back in my mouth.”

“So that’s how you make a mouth kosher?” Boris asked.

Zofia looked away and wiped her eyes and Adina punched his arm. “There’s not one good Jew among us,” Zofia said.

“The good Jews buy what we bring in,” Boris said.

“What about your brother?” Adina asked.

“What about yours?” Zofia said. “The oldest one.”

“He prays by himself on weekdays and goes to the public services on holidays,” Adina said. “When they have them. Weren’t your uncles religious?”

Zofia said one uncle went to shul but didn’t daven and just sat there, and that the other didn’t even go to shul. Though he always tried to get them a carp or goose for the Sabbath.

A kid who hadn’t gotten through the gate started to come over for his saccharine candy but Boris warned him away with his eyes.

“Sh’maya here had only four people move in with him,” Adina said bitterly. “We had a village move in with us.”

“It could’ve been a lot worse for his family,” Boris told her. “I had six brothers and sisters and five of them died as babies.”

“Your poor mother,” Zofia said.

“And look at the son who lived,” Lutek said.

“I used to tell my mother I was afraid I wouldn’t have children,” Zofia said. “She used to tell me not to say that and that I’d have children; I’d see.”

“Maybe this year,” Boris said. Lutek laughed.

“Where I come from the girls are tough but not smart,” Adina said. “For a while I thought from a kiss you could get pregnant.”

“From mine you can,” Boris said. Lutek and Adina made fun of him for boasting.

“It’s a miracle I’m normal,” Zofia said. “If I am normal.”

“You’re not,” Lutek told her.

“I know you’re not,” she told him.

A work detail came back through the gate. It took a half hour for everyone’s papers to be checked at all three guard posts. Neither of our fathers were in the group. Neither of my brothers were either.

“Did you ever act in the holiday plays in kheyder?” Adina asked Boris. When she saw his look she said she was just asking.

“What’s wrong with you?” he wanted to know.

The kid who’d had his shirt torn off was shrieking in the square from the beating he’d received. Where he was squatting the traffic had to go around him. He was trying to reach the part of his back that hurt.

“Enough already with the noise,” Lutek said. The kid’s shrieking turned to weeping and he crouched around in the dust without standing up.

“I’ll see what’s going on,” Boris finally said. He stood and crossed the street to the pharmacy.

“Where’s he going?” Adina asked.

“From the second floor you can see over the wall,” Lutek told her.

After a few minutes Boris came back and flopped down so his feet went up into the air. “He’s over there,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s waiting for.”

The squatting kid finally stood up and headed over to us like a little cripple.

“Just what we need,” Boris said.

“Give me my candy,” the kid said when he stopped in front of us. No one at the guard posts was paying attention.

“Give him his candy,” Boris told Zofia. She handed him a piece from a little sack in the waistband of her skirt.

“I should get two,” the kid said. He had a lazy eye that made him even uglier.

“Why should you get two?” Boris asked him.

“Because I took such a beating,” the kid said.