Jim Shepard - The Book of Aron

“Oh, listen to me,” he finally said, and put his hand on Jerzyk’s head. “I remember an old teacher who got indignant with us because our hair grew too fast.”

THE NEXT DAY HE WAS TOO WEAK TO GO ON HIS rounds but the day after I heard him exclaiming, “I’m up! I’m up! I’m on my feet!” even from the floor below where I was sleeping.

“This one again?” Zygmuś said when he saw us getting ready to leave. “I think Pan Doctor has a new favorite.”

We went to a butcher shop Korczak had heard would be open for the day. “Is this made from people?” he joked when the woman told him the price. “It’s too cheap for horsemeat.”

“How would I know,” she said. “I wasn’t there when they made it.”

On Twarda the road was blocked by Lejkin and a line of yellow police. He called to us and left his spot in the front to come over to talk.

“I understand you’ve been given new responsibilities,” Korczak told him. Lejkin bowed, and Korczak turned to me. “Mr. Szeryński was arrested for black marketing in furs.” I told him I didn’t care and he explained that it meant my friend was now in command of the Order Service. I said he wasn’t my friend and Lejkin said, speaking of that, one of the new imperatives was a daily quota for deportation and Service members who failed to fill their quotas would be departing themselves. And some of his men would prefer not to select their neighbors and maybe they could use the rest of my old gang since smugglers were always a good place to start.

“Leave the boy alone,” Korczak told him.

“I’m giving him fair warning,” Lejkin said. “About business we’ll be transacting in the future.” Korczak pulled me away.

“You needn’t hide behind him,” Lejkin called. “I can see you.”

But then he left us alone and Korczak told me after a few days that I could stop hiding. “Mr. Lejkin has other things to worry about,” he said.

It got hot again on Shavuot, the Feast of First Fruits, and the fly problem got so bad that Korczak finally set up a toilet-fee scale: you had to kill five flies to piss and fifteen to shit. Whoever was next in line was the one who checked. Mietek asked me one morning if he could kill them later because he couldn’t hold it and I told him I’d do it for him.

Then at the beginning of June everyone had diarrhea and the chamber pots boiled over. Korczak and Madame Stefa figured it was something that had been in the bread. The Children’s Home was now a home for the aged, he told her one night, and the whole group was worn down and mutinous and resentful. You could hear kids moaning on the chamber pots and on the toilet.

She said maybe the Germans would stop and he told her the Germans were running the world’s largest enterprise and its name was war and they weren’t playing at it and it wasn’t clean or pleasant or sweet-smelling. He said that We are the Germans meant We are the steel roller . And then when she started to cry he said without sounding sorry that this was how he felt as well.

THE NIGHT THE YELLOW POLICE CAME FOR ME I WAS able to hide. There was shooting all night and Madame Stefa was weeping the next morning and wouldn’t stop until Korczak had two of the staff members take her upstairs. He gathered the kids around him and told them that Madame was distraught because one of her favorite boys had been killed. He named the boy and no one knew him and he explained that he’d already graduated. One kid asked what was happening and he said no one knew but that night I overheard him tell Madame Stefa the Germans were exterminating all of the smugglers. Soldiers with dogs broke down doors and dragged people out of houses. The Order Service now patrolled the ghetto wall. They’d painted white numbers every fifty meters, with every policeman responsible for his own numbered area. The plan was apparently to use those Jews to starve all the other ones to death.

Madame Stefa remembered when the boy who’d been killed had helped bring in half a cow in six valises over the roof of a building that had been emptied by typhus and how much the beef had thrilled all the children. She remembered that after the city surrendered he broke into a warehouse of army stores and came away with two pillowcases filled with rice and sugar.

She asked Korczak if he wanted tea and he told her that if she wanted to make tea she should make some for Jerzyk, whose fever was worse. She asked if he wanted saccharine water and he said that if she wanted to make some saccharine water she should make it for a staff member who’d given his portion at dinner to one of the weeping little girls.

The next morning I was assigned the coal chute in the cellar and while I was down there Zygmuś came down the stairs with a carbide lamp. The carbide hissed. He said first that I looked like a chimney sweep and second that a boy had come to the door with a message for me and said that I’d know who he was. The boy said to tell me that Adina had come out of hiding because the Germans had called to her and told her they would kill her friends if she didn’t. And that once she did, the Germans hung her in her apartment in front of her mother. And the boy wanted me to know he was going to find me and kill me. When he finished, Zygmuś made a face as if to say that was that, then kicked at some loose coal and took his lamp back up the stairs.

“YOU KNOW ABOUT MY OTHER LATE-NIGHT COMPANION, I assume,” Korczak told Madame Stefa when she appeared in his doorway and saw me sitting on Mietek’s bed. Mietek had the fever now as well.

“You can’t sleep?” she asked, and gave me a sympathetic look. The whole house was quiet. Only a few kids were having noisy trouble breathing.

“There was so much wind and dust yesterday,” Korczak said, once she sat at the foot of Jerzyk’s bed.

“For a while I thought the storm had cleared the air and it would make breathing easier,” she told him. It was so hot that kids had pitched their sheets onto the floor. Everyone who could walk had spent two days washing and washing the floor and it still smelled everywhere of the diarrhea.

I was with him because now each time the lights went out I remembered my mother when she woke and couldn’t find me in the hospital and then her surprise at her inability to make a fist. I saw Lutek’s face when his rabbit-skin cap flew off.

“While I was lying here I invented a machine,” Korczak said from on his back. “It was like a microscope that could look into you. It had a scale that ran from one to one hundred and if I set the micrometer screw for ninety-nine, then everyone who hadn’t hung on to at least one percent of his humanity would die. And when I ran the machine the only people left were mostly beasts. Everyone else had perished.”

“You’ve had a hard week,” Madame Stefa said.

“And after I set the screw to ninety-eight I was gone too,” he said.

“Yes, well, that would be terrible,” she said, and he let it go. Mietek flailed his arms in his sleep.

“The children now say even birds won’t fly over us,” Korczak said, and she rubbed her face, tired or impatient. He said reading had begun to fail him and that this was a very dangerous sign.

“I saw Bula yesterday,” she told him. He smiled at the name and she went on. “Can you imagine he’s forty now? Not long ago he was ten. He asked me in for cabbage soup. He’s still smuggling. He said each morning he gives his boy a half a pint of milk and a roll. I asked why he never visited and he said when he was well off there was never time and when he wasn’t how could he come by looking so ragged and dirty?”

“Bula,” Korczak said, and they were quiet.

“Did you tell him that now he has to stop?” he finally asked.

“You know Bula,” she said.