Jim Shepard - The Book of Aron

AFTER THE LIGHTS WERE SWITCHED OFF THAT NIGHT and we were settled on our cots Korczak appeared out of the darkness and sat on mine. “I saw you at the window this afternoon,” he said. He was being as quiet as he could. “It’s annoying to have to stand on tiptoe and barely see out, isn’t it? Like not being able to see in a crowd.” I agreed with him. “Tomorrow is Thursday and Thursday is when the admissions committee meets to review the new applicants,” he added. “Has Madame Stefa talked to you about the application?” After I shook my head he asked, “Can you write?”

“A little,” I told him.

“Do I intrude on your business?” he asked Zygmuś. Zygmuś rolled over on his cot.

“She’ll help you with it tomorrow,” he told me. “Do you have any family at all?”

I cleared my throat and had nowhere to spit so I swallowed it. “You’ll be fine,” he said, after he put a hand on my face and felt my tears.

My weeping seemed to tire him out. “The whole thing’s become just a formality anyway,” he said. “Someone mentions the candidate, no one says anything, we all stare into space, and then after a few minutes someone else asks who it was we were talking about in the first place. Someone makes a motion to accept, someone else complains about lunch, and the discussions slide around like a drunk on an icy hill.”

A few other kids rolled over or made other noises. At the far end, one snored like a snuffling pig. “Everyone starts out with big plans,” I told him. “Then they figure out that’s not how things are going to be.”

He laughed to himself. “The Book of Aron, chapter 2, verse 2,” he said. “And mostly what they achieve is weakened eyesight and tired feet.”

His ears looked even wider and his neck even thinner in the dark. I didn’t know what he wanted. “When I think about all the strength I squandered in just blundering around,” he said.

He asked if I did a good job on the chamber pots. I told him I did. He told me their condition would often let you know the quality of an orphanage.

He stayed where he was sitting. He seemed to be listening to everyone’s breathing.

I asked if he remembered that boy he was carrying after the city surrendered. The one who needed the shoes.

“That boy,” he said. “Of course. The morning the British entered the war we joined a crowd outside their embassy. Poles and Jews rubbing shoulders like brothers again! Everyone singing ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost!’ That same afternoon seven shells hit the orphanage. One blew out the windowpanes of the dining hall and another blew my hat off. I remember telling him we had to leave the street because my bald head was too clear a target for the planes.”

“Did he ever get his shoes?” I asked. But even in the dark I could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“He used to go with me on my rounds,” he said. “After the bombing we got a storekeeper to donate her lentils by arguing that the Germans would confiscate them anyway. I always remind those I’m asking that it’s Jewish honor I’m upholding and they can either give to my orphans or the Germans. He was a lot like the boy who got into trouble today,” he said. “Wherever a bruise or a bump on the head was involved, there he was.”

“Bad luck,” I said.

“There are people who just don’t think,” he said, “just like some don’t smoke.”

I didn’t answer. I wanted someone to miss me like that.

“But you couldn’t get angry with him,” he said. “It’s like Słowacki said: God loves power the way he loves wild horses.”

He patted my leg like he thought I was the boy who was gone. “A lot of people are afraid to sleep during the day because they worry it’ll spoil their night,” he said. “It’s the reverse with me.”

I took his hand and he didn’t move it away. Something about that made me start weeping again.

“Lately I’ve been smelling schmaltz at night,” he told me. “Do you smell it?”

I shook my head.

“It drives me crazy,” he said.

“I don’t smell it,” I said.

“I think about Europe in Polish,” he said. “And I think about Palestine in Hebrew. But I think about eating in Yiddish.”

“I just think about eating,” I said. It made him chuckle again.

He told me the next day I should help with the coal delivery and I said I would. He started talking to himself about it. He said now you had to give the coal man twenty złotys extra to get whole pieces and not just chips. He said if the rumors about the Germans requisitioning even more were true, then we could all start burning furniture. Of course, he said, if you gave the Jews a single quiet day, each one of them would start producing rumors.

“Everyone wants to figure out what to do next,” I told him.

“We can’t even see to the bottom of the cup we hold in our hands,” he said, then blew his nose into a handkerchief and wished me a good night.

“Good night,” Zygmuś said.

“My apologies for having disturbed you,” Korczak told him.

“What was that all about?” someone else said out of the darkness after he’d left.

“Pan Doctor isn’t doing so well,” Zygmuś said. I could hear his yawn.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Go to sleep,” he answered.

I TURNED OUT TO BE GOOD AT UNLOADING COAL, which meant I was covered in coal dust from the waist down and not head to toe. I also helped with a shipment of groats that the heavy woman mixed with horse blood for our breakfast. I was invited to join the choir and told them I couldn’t sing, and invited to join the drama club and said I couldn’t act. The heavy woman talked to me about my application and seemed to think my situation was more than pathetic enough and I needn’t worry about being kicked out onto the street. And she told me to please start calling her Madame Stefa.

The Germans told Korczak the windowpanes now needed to be covered with black paper at night and so she sat me at a worktable and carried over a crate filled with paste and scissors and rolls of black paper and put me in charge of four other kids in making the shades. When they wouldn’t listen to me she told Zygmuś to help out. He asked why it was his job but she only gestured to where she wanted him to sit and then left. He gathered up his friend Mietek and two others and told them that it was the health officer’s orders and when Mietek asked why he called her the health officer, Zygmuś said that the real health officer wouldn’t speak to Jews but just pointed at the pots he wanted lifted in order to see whether the bottoms were clean.

He had me measure and the others do the cutting and pasting. The kids talked about nothing but eating. One said that when he was young he could go all day without eating but now he was an empty pot. He said that the soup was no sooner poured down into his stomach than he was hungry again. He had the same blank and accepting expression as my little brother and I had to stop looking at him. I moved a stepstool over to the windows and did arm lengths to estimate sizes.

One of the other kids asked Zygmuś if he had any brothers or sisters and he said he had three sisters. He said his parents used to have a mill that ground buckwheat flour and one day he and his sisters had gone to get milk and when they returned, people were robbing the mill and a neighbor was saying, “You people are robbing these kids and they’re orphans,” and that’s how they found out their parents had been killed. He said his older sister had then been attacked by some German soldiers and had run away over the Russian border and that really put them out of business as a family since she’d been the only one left who could cook.

Madame Stefa was in charge of the daily routine. Her scoldings always began with “Let me tell you” and when she was asked a question she didn’t want to answer she always said, “Let’s not worry about it.”