Jim Shepard - The Book of Aron

Go downstairs , I thought to myself. I needed to talk to someone about Lejkin. But what would I say?

“You cough and you complain and then you go out without your sweater,” Madame Stefa said.

“What about you? One can’t give you anything,” Korczak said.

He lifted his hand from his eyes and saw her looking at the vodka and water on the table. “Have you noticed that bread and water taste better at night?” he asked.

“And what happens when someone takes you off the street?” she asked. “Where will we be then?”

Her anger made him angry too. “Who says that when I go out the Germans will be about?” he said. “And if they are, who says they’ll be on my street? And if they are, who says they’ll choose me? And if they do, who says they won’t be persuaded by what I have to tell them?”

“I’m just asking if it’s worth the risk for such a little bit of money,” she said.

He made a noise with his mouth. Then he said, “You know, when I was a child I told my teachers that I knew how to remake the world. Throw away all the money was always step one. My plan always broke down at step two.”

She closed her shawl around her neck with one hand. It was cold. The janitor’s son called up from the courtyard to complain about the light. He said it looked like Hanukkah and he didn’t want to have to tell them again. Madame Stefa went to the windowsill and refastened the blackout paper.

“I have a recurring dream in which one of my boys says about me, ‘He went to sleep when we needed him most,’ ” Korczak said.

“You can’t do everything,” she said.

“How much land have I tilled?” he said. “How much bread have I baked? How many trees have I planted? How many bricks have I laid? How many buttons have I sewn, how many garments have I patched?”

“Sssh,” she told him. “Don’t work yourself up.”

“My father called me a clod and an idiot and a crybaby and an ass,” he said. “He was right. And so were those who believed in me.”

I realized they were talking about something else completely and that I didn’t know how anyone’s mind worked, including my own.

“I know you never promised me anything,” she said. “And I lie awake telling myself, Stefa, you old fool, you got what you deserved.”

“The most splendid assumption still needs verification,” he told her.

“I just always believed that one receives in order to nourish,” she said.

“So what is love?” he asked. “Is it always given to those who deserve it? How do we know if we love enough? How do we learn to love more?”

The room smelled of cigarettes and feet. The blackout paper came loose again and outside the window it was starting to get light.

“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.

“From seven to fourteen I was permanently in love,” he said, “and always with a different girl.”

The windowpanes rattled and it looked like he was listening to the wind. He gave a big sigh.

“I always think that maybe if I hadn’t been so ugly,” she said.

“I tell everyone, ‘Stefa always reminds me that I’m a miserable human being who makes everyone else miserable,’ ” he said.

She said something so quietly as an answer that he asked her to repeat it. “It’s just hard always feeling alone,” she said.

He didn’t answer so she looked at her hands. My legs cramped from having been in one position for so long.

“I’ve gotten back what I paid in,” he finally told her. “Loneliness isn’t the worst thing. I value memories.”

She stood up and crossed to the door and stopped. “I remind myself that it’s not my place to ask for things,” she said. “But even now my ego gets in the way.”

Even I could see her unhappiness in the lamplight, but he ignored it. “Nothing I can say or do can spare you or spare myself,” he said.

“Always you give up, you postpone, you cancel, you substitute,” she told him.

He sat up on his elbows. “I see my feelings through a telescope,” he said. “They’re a little gang huddled on a polar plain. When someone coughs, first I feel pity and then its opposite: maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s going to cause us to use up the rest of our medicine.”

She said she was sorry and that she’d let him sleep.

“I exist not to be loved but to act,” he told her.

“The saint orders and God executes,” she said.

“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Our God may not have the will to enforce the Law, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey it.”

“Whom do we sue for breach of contract?” she asked.

“Rabbi Yitzchak of Berdichov is supposed to have summoned God to a rabbinic court,” he told her.

“I suppose we were never going to find a place where we’d enjoy perfect digestion and eternal peace,” she said.

“Sometimes I think: don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Just listen for another ten minutes to their breathing. Their coughing. Their little noises.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I do.”

“We’re living tombstones,” he told her. “Israel is where they have the baby carriages and the green growing things.”

She made a noise like he’d slapped her and he fell back onto his bed once he heard her going down the stairs.

A BOY EVERYONE CALLED MANDOLIN BECAUSE HE never let go of his instrument, even holding it above his head during his lice bath, died in his bed with both arms wrapped around it. We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it. If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew. All anyone could think about was the table’s next loaf of bread. In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds. We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan. It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand. On the Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard.

Though there was no food, Korczak had us all address and mail invitations to our Passover seder on April first. We divided up his list of benefactors. When the day came, fifty guests arrived and sat near the door. The long tables were covered with tablecloths. I sat next to a kid whose blisters and scabs were so thick his neighbors called him Fish Scales. We had no eggs or bitter herbs and only a bit of soup and a matzoh ball each, and the smaller kids were excited because it was announced that Madame Stefa had hidden an almond in one of the matzoh balls. Our holiday starvation, Zygmuś joked, would be like the rest of our week. But Korczak told the guests that no child at his table had been abandoned and all were joined by the loving spirits of their absent mothers and fathers, and when he said that many of the kids started crying. Most of the audience did too. Mietek got the almond.

For a week no one came round to bother me. Then someone pounded on the orphanage door late in the evening, and Madame Stefa answered it and came over to my cot and said a Jewish policeman wished to see me.

At the door Lejkin said that he needed to find the apartment where my friend, the pretty one, had stayed before she’d left the ghetto. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said if I refused then the Germans he was with would take ten kids from the orphanage and shoot them. He said the Germans would be happy to tell me which ones they would shoot. He waited while I got dressed and then walked me down the stairs and we got into a car with Germans in the back. One of them asked him in Polish why I was crying and Lejkin said, “That’s what he does.”

At first I gave them the wrong address but once we stopped there I panicked and told them I’d been mistaken and gave them the right one. That was only seven blocks farther on. Something was caught in the heater in the car’s dashboard and made a fluttering sound. While I waited in the front seat, Lejkin and two Germans went up to the door and knocked and asked the woman who answered to step outside. She was in her red flowered bathrobe. She looked over at me in the car. One of the Germans shot her where she stood and they left her there outside her front door.