But which house? What alley? And how could he explain the dead girl to anyone? He could hardly explain anything to his own family.
The soldier on the corner was watching. Chaim could see that out of the corner of his eye, though he was careful not to swivel his head to look.
He stared grimly down at his feet, realizing that he knew neither the dead girl’s name nor where she lived. She could be Irena or Hannah, Chaya, Rachael. All he knew about the girl was her death. And her doll. Not much of an obituary.
Still walking, he thought, People in Łódź often simply disappear. For no reason. For any reason.
He’d overheard Papa tell Mama once that there were folks here who’d turn in a neighbor for a loaf of bread.
He knew that the Zamdmer family, who’d lived in their building, had been hauled out of their apartment by the Nazis for hoarding and had disappeared that very same day. Josef Zamdmer had been the closest thing to a friend he’d had in the early days of primary school because Josef was nearly as silent as he. Their friendship had been made up of nods, winks, understanding glances out of the corners of their eyes. Maybe, he thought, though he didn’t really believe it, maybe Josef and his parents are safe in America or France or England or . . .
He thought again about the dead girl. Probably her parents were already dead themselves of starvation, or she wouldn’t have been out begging in the street all alone.
And then he remembered something Gittel had told him: Some mothers sew coins into the hems of a daughter’s skirts, a kind of legacy, should they die before the girl does.
He bit his lip again. Maybe I should go back. Extra coins could be helpful. I might not have to sell Mama’s ring.
He began a silent argument with himself. The rabbi might know who the dead girl is. Or King Chaim the First. That’s what they called Chaim Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Łódź Jews, the one the Nazis came to when they had information to be sent around to the ghettoniks. Like what transports were coming up. Like cuts in the food supply. Like the closing of the schools. Much as he hated sharing that name, Chaim had to admit that King Chaim might know who this girl had been.
Chaim couldn’t stop his whirling brain from jumping from one subject to another. It’s what happens, he told himself, when you can’t rid yourself of your thoughts by passing them as words through your mouth!
He didn’t try to turn and look back at the dead girl, it would be too dangerous. Besides, a long line of men was now between him and her small body. He just kept walking, but he shivered as if the cold he’d felt before had now taken root in every crack and crevice of his body.
He thought about things that had happened at their apartment house. People there one day, gone the next. Like Jakob, the fifteen-year-old with the mind of a toddler who lived with his mother in three rooms—the smallest apartment in the building. One day he just disappeared. Where he’d gone no one seemed to know, and his mother wept herself into the hospital. There she, too, disappeared. Three elderly women lived there now, once librarians at schools in Lublin.
And that family of five, the Abramses—grandparents, parents, and a grown-up unmarried daughter—in a slightly larger three rooms. Sometimes Chaim could hear them yelling at one another through the thin walls. Mama said that Mr. Abrams, the grandfather, was hard of hearing. But Chaim thought they’d just all gone crazy in the tiny space. Then the daughter accepted a large box from her fiancé and was arrested. Unbeknownst to her, he was a partisan, an underground fighter, who was smuggling pistols into the city. Neither was seen again. And the old grandfather still shouted at everyone as if the apartment was full.
Chaim looked around. Another two blocks to his turnoff. No soldiers in sight.
He thought again about the dead girl.
Gittel might know her. Gittel seemed to know everyone, made friends easily. Though she was careful not to say much more than a modest hello, even when it had still seemed safe for girls out on the streets of Łódź ghetto, back when Papa let them walk around, when they still went to school.
Unlike Gittel, Chaim was happiest alone.
* * *
• • •
The line of men had thinned out, some turning left, some crossing the street. Chaim knew he had to be careful now. Be invisible. Be . . .
I suppose it’s hard for some people to believe we’re twins, he thought. Though get to know us, and it’s easy to tell. Also, we both have short, sharp noses, are both left-handed. But Gittel’s eyes are almost turquoise, while mine are closer to gray.
Chaim suddenly realized he’d walked past Towiansk Street and hauled himself back from daydreaming.
How could I let my mind wander like that? Papa’s counting on me. The family’s counting on me.
He turned at the far corner and then, after checking both ways, crossed the street, leaving the line of walking men and heading down Towiansk Street before taking a quick right onto the little street—more of an alleyway—that housed the pawnbroker’s shop. His first duty was to get to Motl’s and see how much Mama’s engagement ring would fetch. He would check on the dead girl on his way home.
She won’t be walking away on her own, he thought, a grim and awful joke, which was surprising. He rarely made jokes. And he didn’t often laugh.
6
The only shop on the block was the pawnbroker’s. For a moment, Chaim wondered how the man could feel safe here all by himself. Wondered why the soldiers hadn’t closed him down, broken into the store looking for money, gold.
The thought of soldiers made Chaim glance over his shoulder in case there were any about. Upon realizing the street was empty, he suddenly recalled his father’s warnings and stared straight ahead.
There was the pawnshop. He walked up to the glass door, then carefully tried to peer into the dark recesses of the shop. He could make nothing out and didn’t dare stand there a moment longer. So he took a deep breath, opened the door, and, on slightly shaky legs, walked in.
Motl sat on a leather-cushioned desk chair like a large toad in a small pond, his swarthy face covered with moles. He was wearing a hideous olive-colored shirt, which cast a greenish shadow on his chin so that he looked like a large sick toad. The yellow star pinned to his shirt made the olive the tone of vomit. His left hand held a cigarette, his right hovered over a chessboard. Both his thumbs were oddly shaped, thick and almost round. As Chaim came in, shutting the door softly but firmly behind, Motl finished the move, then turned the chessboard around.
Chaim suddenly realized that the ugly old pawnbroker was playing against himself. He wondered if the Nazis had killed the old man’s chess partner or if he’d always played alone.
“Got you now, you mamzer!” Motl said with a chuckle, as if he could actually see his invisible opponent. His face no longer a sick toad, but something fiercer.
Chaim knew that mamzer was a Yiddish swear. It meant “bastard,” or “trickster.” What a strange thing to say, he thought.
Motl stubbed the cigarette out with care in an ashtray filled with other stubs. Only then did he look up at Chaim without surprise.
“Well?”
Drawing himself up, Chaim knew now was the time he had to speak. He couldn’t let the family down. But the words, all so carefully rehearsed in his bedroom with Papa and then afterward in his own head, didn’t want to come out.
Silently, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring, wrapped in the crumpled handkerchief, and slid it across the desk. It made a small sound, like a mouse scampering over a wooden floor. Almost reluctantly, he let it go.
Motl waited, as if he expected the handkerchief and its precious contents to finish the journey across the desk on their own. After what seemed to Chaim to be an agonizing week of waiting, the old pawnbroker put out a hand. That hand was far bigger than the handkerchief and ring. The thumbs looked monstrous.
Slowly, Motl unfolded the lacy covering and then
brought it up close to his face, as if he were ready to devour it, as if it were some kind of strange candy. He picked out the ring and dropped it into the very middle of his right palm. The ring looked so much smaller and less imposing than when Papa had taken it out to show Chaim.
“Not much,” Motl said. It sounded like a death sentence.
“Mama’s . . .” Chaim began. It was all he could manage.
“Yes, yes, your mother’s engagement ring,” the pawnbroker croaked. “An insignificant diamond in an uninteresting setting. I never forget a ring.” He winked. “I wasn’t always a pawnbroker, you know. I had a big jewelry store in the middle of Łódź before the mamzers came. He smiled again, which didn’t improve his looks, and named a sum.
It was much smaller than Papa had hoped for.
Chaim set his shoulders. “Not enough,” he said, as if pulling the words up from the bottoms of his feet.
“You think money grows on trees here in the ghetto?” Motl asked. “You think there are more pawnbrokers on Towiansk Street?”
“More.”
Motl sighed, named a slightly higher price.
Surprised, buoyed by that small success, Chaim was about to say he accepted. But then he realized the sum named was still far from Papa’s price. So instead he did what Papa had told him to do. He shrugged, turned, started to walk toward the door.
Motl laughed, called out, “It would be a more effective gesture, bubbeleh, if you took the ring first.” He held it out in his massive hand.
Chaim stood there, back toward the desk, till his face stopped burning from shame. Only then did he turn and walk to the desk, where he held out his own hand.
The pawnbroker closed his meaty fist over the ring. “You are Avram’s boy, yes? I went to your bris. Must have been, what, fourteen years ago? Maybe fifteen?”
Dumbstruck, Chaim nodded.
“I will give you more, but just because you look so much like your mother and so little like your father, and I still love her, even though she turned down my proposal of marriage in order to marry your papa. I am an extraordinary man, and he is only an ordinary one. But all she could see was his handsome face and my thick thumbs. I will give you what you want for it, even though she broke my heart.”
This ugly toad of a man extraordinary? He had loved Mama? He might have been my papa? Those thoughts made Chaim squirm. He felt hot and cold and even a bit sick just thinking about Motl courting Mama.
Motl reached under the desk and took out a metal money box, opened it, and drew out some bills.
Chaim put his hand in his pocket, touched the letter that would tell the old toad man what Papa wanted for the ring. But before he could bring it out, Motl had counted exactly the number of zlotys that Papa had written there.
How does he know? Silently counting along with each zloty, Chaim bit his lip. Maybe Motl is extraordinary!
“Be careful,” Motl warned, breaking through Chaim’s reverie. The old man’s eyes were shining, as if with tears.
Chaim reached for the money.
“Take care,” Motl said again, and the next instant his face had its old cunning back. “Spend wisely. And use it for that food you need.”
“Food,” Chaim whispered, stuffing the notes into the pocket of his father’s coat. Then he spoke, not the words he’d rehearsed, but three others—“I play chess”—before turning, and practically running out of the pawn store.
“Then come back and challenge me,” shouted Motl after him with a laugh.
But not an unkind laugh, Chaim thought.
The minute he went through the door, he forced himself to slow down. To become invisible again. To walk the trudging walk along Towiansk, then turn left onto Dworska.
Yet even as he did so, his heart careened in his chest, bouncing from side to side, making drumrolls, as if calling the Nazi soldiers to attention. Ta-ta-ta-tum!
He wondered if he was having a heart attack.
And then he thought, I did it! I did it! All the while he refused to let the rest of the thought intrude: Actually, Motl did it.
He looked down at his shoes as if defeated, though really he couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome.
Best not to let joy show, though. The Nazis extinguish any joy they find—or so Papa warned.
Buoyed by his success at the pawnbroker’s, Chaim didn’t even think about the little dead girl lying in the street. Only later did he realize he hadn’t seen her body again because it had disappeared. Found by her grieving parents? Scavenged by grown men faster than me? Thrown away by the authorities, just another piece of drek—garbage?
He’d likely never know. Certainly he would never ask.
Better, he thought, to forget her altogether. But the poetry in his head returned: Dance on the streets of Heaven, for you shall never dance here again.
* * *
• • •
He made his way to the little hole-in-the-wall market near the house, where he managed to find three potatoes and an onion at an exorbitant price. He had just enough money from Papa to pay for them. Buying them quickly, he stuffed them in the coat pocket and kept one hand on them as he headed for home.
The streets were less crowded than before, so he kept his head down and tried to look defeated, though inside all he could think about was how well he’d performed. No one stopped him, and while he didn’t speed up, he never slowed down.
When he reached the alley beside the apartment house, he stood on one foot and lifted the other as if inspecting his shoe. But actually he was making sure no one was in the alley or watching him.
Finally certain the way was clear, he slipped in, then spent several more minutes watching the street for walkers and shadows of walkers, ready to pretend he’d come into the alley either to rest or to pee.
At last, he removed the two slats on the fence, slid through, closed them back up, and went quickly into the building, no one the wiser.
* * *
• • •
As he walked up the first of the four flights of stairs, he thought how much richer he was for his day’s adventure, and not just because of the zlotys in his pocket. He wished he could tell Gittel all that had happened—about the trudging men, the dead girl, the lines of poetry. It would take him hours to get it all out, five words at a time, maybe six. Hand signals would help. Though Gittel knew how to listen. Plus they had lots of time.
However, he knew he couldn’t say anything to anyone about Motl the Toad’s proposing to Mama.
Not even to Papa.
Especially not to him.
Gittel Remembers
“What does it take to become one of the ghettocracy?” Mama had asked Papa when we first got resettled in the ghetto.
“You mean become one of King Chaim’s favorites?” He’d laughed without a bit of humor. “So you can have the best jobs and some actual food on the plate?” He coughed slightly. It was a time before that cough had became a constant, bitter companion.
“Yes,” she said.
I burrowed my nose farther into the book I was reading but listened even more intently. Living in a small place, we often overheard things we weren’t meant to.
Mostly I listened because Chaim hated that he and King Chaim had the same name. Of course, when Mama and Papa had named him, it was after Papa’s father who’d just died, long before we knew about the ghetto, long before King Chaim was made the Jewish head by the Nazis.
So I was listening because of the name and learned more than I really wanted to know.
“I would have to be willing to lie and cheat and do the bidding of those mamzers,” said Papa. “I would have to turn my back on my parents’ upbringing, on my personal morality.”
“And if it was the difference between life and death for our children?” Mama had asked.
“I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said.
I knew that was true and felt tears well up in my eyes.
That’s why Papa became a member of the ruling council of Jews, seeing it as the difference between the life and death of his family. Why he became “the voice of reason in an unreasoning world,” as he called it, meaning he would speak the truth, even if the council didn’t want to listen. Because it put more food on our table.
He lasted there less than a year.
Those months on the council took something from him, something precious that never got returned. I could see it in his eyes. I could hear it in his cough. I could feel it in my heart. When he left the council, our food rations were slashed, his jobs became fewer. Mama started giving Chaim and me half of her portions, though we weren’t supposed to know. Papa’s hair fell out. Mama’s began to turn gray.
And yet, somehow, we managed. We made do. And though I didn’t know it then, I know it now. Our parents gave us life. Just not the kind of life we expected.
7
By the third floor, Chaim knew that all he’d say would be Got it, Papa. That would be enough, especially once he took the money from his pocket.
He was feeling good about how he’d handled Motl. How he’d gotten a better deal. About how he’d stayed invisible on the street. How he’d rectified his misstep, going past Towiansk Street, then crossing back as if nothing bad had happened.
But as he started to turn the corner of the fourth floor and head toward the next flight of stairs, he heard a door on the top floor burst open and the sound of soldiers’ boots on the floor.
“Schnell! Schnell!” someone cried out. The command was loud and yelled with great authority.
Of course he knew what to do. Every Jew in Łódź knew what to do: become invisible.
He slid down the banister to the landing. Ran down the next set of stairs to the third floor. He didn’t worry too much about being heard. The soldiers were making enough noise of their own. And now even the fourth floor shook with their violence.