The Book of Aron Read online

Lutek agreed this really was the best thing about me: that I didn’t. We specialized in pantry and bathroom windows that you wouldn’t think a cat could fit through. I’d give him a boost and then wait at the end of the alley for his whistle. If all was clear I’d whistle back and he’d dump whatever he’d found down to me and off I’d go, to meet up with him later on.

  When it came to tools he had an eye for things you couldn’t find a use for at first. He lifted a thick short wire off the flatbed of a truck and it turned out to be perfect for working through a sash and casement, because once it was through it was rigid enough that you could tap the hook until it popped from the eyelet.

  He had found someone who would trade most of what we got for most of what we wanted, so some days I’d bring my mother coal and some days flour and some days something else. One night I brought home almonds, but it didn’t matter because some women in fur coats had been ordered to wash the pavement with their underwear and then to put the underwear back on again, wet, and my mother and everyone else had been forced to watch, and she was still upset.

  I told Lutek about it and he told me about having come across an old Jew atop a barrel with some German soldiers cutting his hair, with a crowd gathered around laughing. He said all they were doing was cutting his hair and he couldn’t tell how upset the old Jew was but that he’d told himself then and there he would never let himself end up on top of that barrel. So whatever else happened to him he could always say to himself, well, you’re not on top of that barrel.

  We celebrated our big talk by stealing two expensive fountain-pen sets from a shop and hid them under our shirts while we waited for the trolley. The trolley was only two blocks away but it hadn’t moved for ten minutes and men were standing around the front of it.

  We debated whether or not to just walk home. My shoes no longer fit and my blisters had broken, so I argued we should wait.

  There was a girl sitting next to us and Lutek asked her who she was looking at. She asked him who he was looking at. “What kind of hat do you call that?” she asked.

  He told her to go screw herself with an onion. An onion would be better than him, she said. Then she said those were Lamy pens we thought we were hiding. She recognized the cases.

  I buttoned my top button and Lutek rubbed his eyes.

  She suggested we take them to Siekierska’s in Wilanów. She explained when we didn’t answer that no one else would buy such expensive pens.

  “Let’s just walk,” Lutek told me and then stood up. When I hesitated he went off without me.

  I stayed beside the girl for another few minutes. “Your friend Rabbit Hat doesn’t take chances,” she said.

  I asked what she thought had happened with the trolley and she said it was a good question. I told her my name was Aron and she said she hadn’t asked. I asked what her name was and she said Zofia, then turned and looked at me and shook my hand. I asked where she’d gone to school and she said over on Third of May Avenue. She said she’d been picked on as the only Jewish girl. I said she didn’t look Jewish. She had light hair and a small nose. She thanked me and then said that I did.

  She asked if I knew Mańka Lipszyc, and I said yes. She asked if I was the one whose brother had just died and then was quiet at my answer.

  The trolley never came. She told me she had a younger brother named Leon and an older brother Jechiel and a younger sister Salcia who was only ten months old.

  She knew about the pens because her father had owned a stationery store. People came from all over the city for the quality of his paper. He supported their family, their grandmother, the unmarried Brysz girls, their Uncle Ickowicz, and Hanka Nasielska and her parents. For a while her family had so much money that she’d gone to the kind of preschool where you paid tuition. Her father had a sister in America who begged him to emigrate but he told her that he’d stay where he was in order to mind the shop.

  After the Germans arrived they beat him severely and smashed around their apartment hunting for gold. They ended up taking only five meters of dress material from her mother. Even so, her family had been luckier than friends across the street who’d been thrown out of their house and told that their kind of people had slept far too long on soft beds. But then a week after that an SS officer stopped by the shop and was so impressed that he’d instructed her father to arrange to transport the shop’s entire stock back to the officer’s hometown. Her father had been given a receipt.

  They’d lived on Żelazna Street in a big apartment but they’d since had to move and their new neighborhood was so backward that some of the streets weren’t even paved and so muddy there were wooden footbridges to the front doors. She said it was sad to watch her mother wade through the mud. She said that her mother had wept for three days and her father had assured them they’d move again soon, that he’d told them that he was starting a broom factory and that the Germans were very fond of brooms.

  She said her brother had told her that even before she was born their parents had been to the rabbi twice for a divorce, that her grandmother had insisted on the marriage and told anyone who would listen that her daughter had married an educated man.

  I told her I should get going. “Don’t let me keep you,” she said.

  But after I didn’t get up she said she remembered thinking to herself that maybe their family’s move would change everything, even her, and things wouldn’t be so bad. She said the years before school that she couldn’t remember had probably been the happiest of her life. I didn’t know what to answer. Finally she stood up and stretched and said she was late. Then she bent down with her hands on her thighs and said that if I carried the pen case under my belt in the back it might be harder to spot.

  WORK ON THE WALLS BEGAN AS SOON AS IT GOT warmer. My mother at first celebrated the news that the Judenrat had been ordered to quarantine the Jews who were sick. Then she realized we might be part of the area to be sealed off. She went with our neighbors to report there was no typhus in our building, but that only meant she spent days waiting to talk to an official who wouldn’t listen and couldn’t do anything.

  All day long outside our window we heard wheelbarrows squeaking and trowels scraping and the clink of bricks. It started and stopped, so for days there might be just a few rows and then suddenly something you couldn’t see over. As far as Lutek was concerned, for the time being it was another opportunity. After the workers quit for the day at a dead end near Niska, we carried off two big bags of cement.

  In the evenings my brothers argued about what was happening. I had other things to worry about. Whenever there was big news our neighbors with the radio knocked on our door. Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg had all been invaded. I asked Lutek if he thought Belgium would surrender and he said that it didn’t matter, since the way things went for us either one bad thing or another would happen.

  No one wanted linens or floors washed anymore, so what I brought home was more important than ever.

  In May it got warm and we worked later. Lutek and I got into a scrape, so I ducked into an entryway and waited and was about to leave it when Zofia took my sleeve. She gestured with her head and we stood there quietly as the shopkeeper and his sons passed by. One had a mallet and the other two had nightsticks. Lutek was somewhere on the other side of the street and might have been long gone. The shopkeeper stopped on the corner in a dry spot and his sons started searching door by door.

  “I think you’d better come to dinner,” Zofia whispered into my ear. She was watching through the entryway’s frosted glass with me, her cheek close to mine. “We’re right upstairs. You can bring what you have there as your gift.”

  Her parents were polite and pleased by the honey, and her mother told their baby it was rare and expensive. They introduced me to her older brother Jechiel, a yeshiva student. He seemed to think I was standing too close to his sister. He said that for looking too often at a woman one was hung by the eyebrows in Hell. Zofia laughed and told me that because his morning prayer, “Let our days be multip
lied,” sounded like “cheap fish,” it had become his family nickname.

  She introduced me to her younger brother, Leon, who seemed unhappy and had little to say. His brother talked about him as if he wasn’t in the room, then said that while their parents had hopes for him he’d turned out to be a real dunce, already kept back a grade twice before school had been suspended. Now getting his certificate was going to be like making it to the North Pole at a snail’s pace.

  Zofia’s mother made what she said was a hometown dish, a pudding of buckwheat meal sautéed with onions. She fed it in spoonfuls to the baby, Salcia, who was wedged into a high chair beside her.

  Someone rang the bell and Zofia answered the door and stepped out into the hall and talked in a low voice before returning to the table. When her father asked about it she said that the shopkeeper Lebyl was looking for a thief.

  They asked about my family and since I had nothing to say I told them about Lutek. I told them that he liked to climb utility poles just to look down on people. I told them that on crowded trolleys he liked to recite details about what happened between a man and a woman. Zofia’s brother was appalled but her father found it funny. She asked if Lutek had ever had a girlfriend and I told her there’d been a girl he admired and that he’d waited every evening for an entire month beside her gate with a letter explaining his feelings but that whenever she came out he’d panic and walk away.

  Her father talked about the broom factory and where the money for it would come from. He talked about Zofia’s grandfather, who had never heard a kind word from anyone and at the age of ten had been sent away every night to eat his evening meal at another family’s house, and once he had his own children he always preferred scrimping on the family’s food to working harder. He said he thought that Zofia took after him. She said she agreed and that as a rule she disliked everyone. He told about how he’d had to throw her out of his shop when she was six years old and had ventured the opinion in front of one of his biggest customers that the price he’d quoted was far too high.

  Salcia didn’t like the pudding, so her mother cleaned it from her face with a spoon and then offered it to her again and asked if this Lutek I was describing was despite all of that a good boy. I said yes and Zofia said no. Her father laughed and her mother made a face. They never looked at each other but still the family seemed to get by.

  It got quiet. Jechiel looked at me as though I was missing something. Zofia’s father reminded me about the curfew and her mother thanked me again for the honey, which she hadn’t served. Zofia showed me to the door and I didn’t know what to make of her look before she closed it and left me in the hall. I told myself as I went down the stairs that there was nothing wrong with having friends, but that there’d be no butting in where I wasn’t wanted.

  EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY WAS EXCITED ABOUT THE news that the Germans were fighting in France, and then miserable about the news that the Germans had taken Paris. One of my brothers said it was because they had an airplane that converted to a tank when it set down on the battlefield. My other brother said it was because they had something called a heavy-air bomb that surrounded their parachutists with a shield that no bullet could penetrate. My mother said that one believed this and the other believed that but what was fated to happen always will. My father said that one way or another the joke he’d heard at his cousin’s factory was that thousands of hammers had arrived from America to pound dreams of salvation out of our heads.

  When it was finished the wall was three meters high with another meter of barbed wire on top. I still helped my mother with her chores and each morning she went out to look at it. I asked if she was hoping to find it taken down. They built a wooden bridge across Chłodna Street near St. Karol’s Church to connect the two ghettos that were separated by the street and trolley line. Farther down a gate sealed off Żelazna and all the traffic stopped so the trolley could run through.

  And now there was typhus in the building across the street. Packages were left on the sidewalk outside the front entrance because the porters refused to carry them inside.

  My mother and father fought more about what I was doing. He said having a macher at a time like this wasn’t such a bad thing and she said the big macher was dragging the little macher around on a string. He said she didn’t complain when the soup was hot in front of her and she said I was going to get killed or bring the typhus home.

  Every morning she searched my clothes for lice and doused my head over the sink with kerosene. She rubbed my neck and behind my ears with a kerosene-soaked rag and scrubbed at my scalp like my hair was the problem. She reminded me she had thought we were partners. I told her that hadn’t changed. So where was her partner, she wanted to know. Her partner was off at his own business, I told her.

  She rinsed and toweled my head and I got my satchel. Later I felt guilty and told her we could work together all day tomorrow, but she told me she’d already learned not to get attached to anything. She asked if I missed my younger brother. She said that if she hadn’t been self-centered she wouldn’t have survived either. I repeated that we could spend the whole next day together and she said that the day after that we could visit the Promised Land, where everyone ate figs and honey and fish with noodle soup.

  NOTICES WERE HUNG OVER THE GATES TO THE ghetto warning that it was threatened by an epidemic. My mother and father stopped visiting neighborhoods outside the walls and asked me to do the same. I told them I would and went on doing whatever I wanted wherever I wanted to. My mother said that seven people had died across the street, including Mrs. Lederman and the Globus twins, and wondered if we were just going to be walled in with all the sick people until everyone was dead. My brother said he’d heard that after the peace the Jews would all be sent to Madagascar, and my mother asked what we would all do in Madagascar. “Let’s get there, first, and then we’ll find out,” my father told her.

  A week later she heard from the woman who sold her soap that all Jews were to be expelled from the streets crossing Ujazdowskie Avenue and the area adjoining the Vistula. My father asked why we should believe her and my mother reminded him that the woman was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law. Two days later he read the same news aloud to us from the paper, as though we’d been arguing with him. Jewish residents in the German quarter had to move out immediately; those in the Polish district could remain for the time being; and all new Jews arriving in the city had to go straight to the walled Jewish district.

  Where were they going to put everyone, my brother wanted to know.

  “I think they believe that’s our problem,” my father told him.

  Lutek reported the next day that his father and the rest of the porters had been told it would soon be forbidden in our district to rent to Aryans, and that Christian families were already negotiating to exchange apartments with Jews from other parts of the city. “So?” I said, and Lutek said, “You’re an idiot,” and that we would have a field day what with all the carts and wagons going back and forth, and he was right.

  Proclamations kept appearing in the newspapers and my father kept reading them to the family, always first announcing, “And under the heading of Things Get Worse …” Each proclamation listed new streets that were to be cleansed of Jews. Pages advertised Aryan-owned apartments inside the walls to be traded for Jewish-owned ones on the outside. Finally in October all Jews were given two weeks to move into the district and told that it had been shrunk by an additional six streets, which meant that those who had already exchanged apartments to get onto those streets now had to exchange apartments again. This was necessary to protect the health and well-being of the soldiers and the general population.

  The result was like the worst street bazaar of all time combined with an evacuation. Every road we looked down was a sea of heads and all we heard was a terrible clamor and shouting. Lutek and I spent most of our time at the Leszno Street gate. Jews were hauling overloaded pushcarts and wagons in while Poles tried to haul the same out and the arguments about who could p
roceed and who had to wait meant that it took hours to get anywhere. Collisions spilled tables and chairs and stoves and pans onto the cobblestones, and half a family’s load got snatched away before they could reassemble the other half. Lutek and I rode the crowds up to the wagons and carried off whatever we could. Sometimes kids or old people on the wagons saw what we were doing and shouted to those in front, but in the crush the fathers or older kids could never get to us in time. I got a mantel clock and Lutek pulled away a whole Oriental rug. The German and Polish police ignored the Polish carts but grabbed anything they wanted off the Jewish ones. One of the Jews complained, so they overturned his.

  On some of the narrower streets pushcart owners who hadn’t found apartments went from house to house calling up to the windows to ask if there were any spare rooms. Anyone who had a cart charged whatever he liked, and everyone was a porter, so Lutek’s father and the others made money by taking over the sidewalks in front of their buildings. People moving in unloaded feather beds and laundry baskets but the porters threw them over the fences into the courtyards and the families had to pay to get them back. On every street, children were lost and crying and milling around. Everything Lutek and I carried off we stored in the cellar of his father’s building, alongside what his father had collected.

  We were separated the day before the deadline and I was knocked to the pavement trying to get closer to a cart. I crawled to the entryway of a building and tried to get my breath back. A kid jerked at my satchel while I was crawling and I kicked at him and drove him away. I lost my balance getting back on my feet and almost put my hand on an SS officer. He and three of his men were watching a Polish policeman whose papers had fallen out of his leather pouch. The policeman was in the road shouting for the crowds to go around him but every time he crouched his pouch slid down off his shoulder and spilled more paper. The SS officer laughed with his men about it. Even I could see that they were afraid of him. His hairline under his cap stopped high on the back of his neck and there was something about the stubble that looked dangerous.