Jim Shepard - The Book of Aron

Adina asked Lutek why she’d gone to his apartment and Boris reminded her it was the closest. Adina said we had to go to her but Lutek said she wasn’t there anyway, that his father had already made her leave. Who knew why the Germans wanted them, or how hard they’d look? He’d walked her over to an old friend of her mother’s, who took her in without enthusiasm.

I spent three days working as a peeler in a comunal kitchen with my mother and then Adina said Zofia wanted to see me. She gave me the address and said she’d already visited and that the family was gone all day at a shoemaking factory and Zofia said I should ring the bell three times and then stand in the street where she could see me.

The apartment had a wash basin in the sink and a rabbit hutch that was locked with a padlock on a high wardrobe.

“The mother puts the bread up there so I can’t get to it at night when they’re sleeping,” Zofia said. “I just stand here smelling it in the dark.”

“They don’t feed you?” I asked.

“I’m so hungry I suck on my knee,” she said. She said that they gave her food like for a dog. She said Boris had brought the family some kasha for her and that the family ate it instead in front of her.

I told her we could bring her more food. She said she helped with the chores and always tried to be calm and quiet and grown-up but found herself waiting for her mother to come and take her away. She was trying not to always be weeping. She asked me to find out through my friend in the yellow police where her family had been taken.

“He’s not my friend,” I told her.

“Please,” she said, then said she kept thinking about how brave Leon had been. She said you couldn’t believe the thunder of the Germans once they were in a room.

At first Lejkin told me he had no information but when I wouldn’t leave him alone he said he’d see what he could find out and the next day he told me they’d been sent to the country as part of a new initiative and wouldn’t be coming back; they were to be resettled out there. Adina told Zofia, whose response was that she was going to go to them and we all needed to help her get out of the ghetto as soon as possible.

Boris surprised us by saying we should help her and Lutek asked what was so hard, we went through all the time, and Boris told him the difficulty was in getting far enough away to avoid the blackmailers. In the meantime she had to find a new place since her mother’s friend was starving her. Boris found it in a day and Adina took her there when the street traffic was the busiest.

The day before she was to leave we all went to say goodbye. The woman whose apartment it was asked us to visit one at a time so as not to attract attention. Boris went first. Adina said she wanted to go last and Lutek said he didn’t need to go at all.

A woman in a red flowered robe let me in and then shut herself in the bathroom. Zofia was wearing three layers of clothes and her shoes that fit. She tried to keep her hands in her lap but they kept flying around. She said this woman had German visitors and so Zofia hid in a recess behind the toilet in a stored washtub. She said that of course the Germans used the toilet all the time.

I asked if everything was ready and she said that Boris had found a man who said because she had better looks he would give her money to get herself and his daughter out of the ghetto. I asked what she meant by better and she said as in not like a Jew.

She said the man’s wife had scrubbed her in a tub and had to change the water three times. She said the man had said his daughter could pass for Zofia’s sister. She said that he was providing papers for both of them and that they’d almost left two days earlier. He’d led them into the cellar of a pharmacy that bordered the Aryan side where they were supposed to wait for someone, but no one came. She said the new plan was that a wagon driver would pull up with his cart at dawn and stuff them under some bedding and drive them through the gate.

“Don’t go,” I said, while she was still talking. “Stay with us.”

She was surprised by how upset I was. “I shouldn’t try to find my family?” she said.

“Who knows if that’s really where they are?” I said.

“Well, if they’re not there, where are they?” she asked. She stared like I was refusing to tell her.

“You don’t know anybody on the other side,” I said.

She said she did. When I asked who, she wouldn’t answer. Then she said some of the kids in the newer gangs were from the youth movements that left when the Germans marched in.

“Why are they coming back?” I asked.

“To help,” she said.

“With what?” I asked.

“You don’t need to know,” she said. “And don’t pull such a face. But they have contacts on the other side.”

I asked if the kid she called Antek was one of the ones she was talking about. She was annoyed I’d noticed, but then said that he was. We sat there like two strangers at a puppet show.

“Do you have to go?” I said again.

She looked at me like I’d said something shameful. “So I should leave Leon wherever he is?” she said. “And Salcia? And my mother?” I didn’t answer.

“I spend my whole life around people who don’t ask me about myself,” she added. She said she was surprised by how much this disappointed her.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” she asked me. When I again didn’t answer, she said I should go get Adina.

“Why? You’re finished with me?” I said.

“Oh, Aron,” she said tiredly.

“What?” I said.

“You’re a good boy,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She took my hands and squeezed them.

On the stairs I stopped and turned to go back but decided it wouldn’t be a good idea, since I wasn’t the same person I used to be and she wouldn’t have liked me even then.

THAT NIGHT MY MOTHER WAS SURPRISED WHEN I climbed into bed with her after everyone else had fallen asleep. She smelled like cabbage and the coal from the stove. “Did you have a bad dream?” she said in her sleepy voice. Her finger tickled my ear.

“Don’t cry,” I told her, and she tucked my head under her chin. She called me her beautiful boy when I put my arms around her neck. When I woke in the morning I’d wet the bed.

“Tit for tat, my friend,” Lejkin told me when I came out onto the street. I was looking for Boris, who’d gotten up ahead of me. “I helped you; you have to help me.”

He wanted to know what we had planned for the day. He said he had his quotas to fill, too. I told him I didn’t know what he meant and he said that he was getting tired of everything I didn’t know and could I just answer the question. So I told him where we were likely to be and he thanked me and left and an hour later two blue policemen caught Lutek and me with a burlap sack of turnips and threw us and the turnips into the back of a car.

They drove us to a big building with tall columns outside of the ghetto and took us down into the cellar. A German soldier at a desk asked what they were bringing him and they told him they had two for the Streetcar. We were walked down a long dark corridor and pushed into a room with cement walls and no windows.

There were two rows of hard wooden seats with arms along the walls facing forward like a little classroom and I sat in one and Lutek sat in another behind a tall man with a bloody head and wild hair. The walls were covered in scratched graffiti. Next to my bench someone had carved JEZU. Next to Lutek’s someone had drawn a clock and circled the 6. I wasn’t afraid but I was shaking as though I’d been left out in the cold.

Lutek asked the tall man where we were. He told us this was Gestapo headquarters and they called this room the Streetcar because of its shape and that we should ask for coffee when the woman in uniform came past.