Racing to the end of the third-floor hallway, Chaim melted into the shadows, crouching down against the wall at the far end to make himself even smaller, and waited. It didn’t take long.
He heard the soldiers dragging someone down the stairs.
Heard a woman sobbing behind them.
“You have the wrong—”
And then the sound of a slap.
And another.
It was hard not to react, not to jump up, run toward the voice he was now certain he knew. He thought he could offer evidence of innocence, or mitigation.
But then he remembered the dead girl in the street. The crowd of trudging men who never stopped for her. He remembered his friend Josef, who disappeared, and Jakob, who was hauled away in broad daylight. And all the women and children who were sent for resettlement and were never heard from again.
He stayed hidden, invisible, squatting there in the shadows, hardly breathing, until the soldiers and their prisoner went the rest of the way down the stairs. He waited until the sobbing woman on the fifth floor went back into her apartment. Until she shut the door behind her and he heard the soft snick of the door. Until the hallway resonated with silence and its whispered promise of safety. Until his stuttering heart began beating properly again.
Then he started back up the stairway that minutes before had seemed so sturdy and now appeared on the verge of collapse.
He made his way along the corridor, wondering what he could say to his family. The money in his fist, which had been the promise of their freedom, was now fairy gold, turned to dried leaves. He shook his head. No!—not dried leaves. It’s now more important than ever.
Reaching the apartment door, he knocked tentatively, more like the scratchings of a little mouse. He forgot all about boasting, all about the whistle signal, the four notes of the symphony signaling everything was all right. Forgot about everything except getting inside.
He heard the peephole cover move.
Then the door creaked open.
We should oil that, he thought. I could oil that. He wondered if they had any oil.
Papa! he mouthed as he flung himself into his father’s arms.
Trembling, he said softly, “Where are they taking Mr. Abrams?” He didn’t even realize he’d gotten out six words in a row without a stutter.
“We don’t know,” his father said, pulling him inside and locking the door again. “We know nothing at all.”
“I will go to them,” said Mama. “See what I can do to help.”
“Not yet,” Papa said. “Not till it’s safe.”
“If we wait till it’s safe, we’ll all be dead,” Mama said. She unlocked the door and went out into the hall, heading toward the Abramses’ tiny three-room apartment, Gittel in her wake, a cygnet after the swan.
Neither Chaim nor his father followed.
* * *
• • •
When they came into the living room, Bruno and Sophie were there.
The elder Norenbergs were nowhere to be seen. Chaim assumed they were both still in bed, though it was nearly ten in the morning.
Sophie was reading a book. By her side, Bruno played a game of solitaire with the bridge cards, and cheated, peeking under the cards till he found the one he wanted. Obviously his father wasn’t around.
Why would anyone cheat at solitaire? Chaim wondered, but saved his words for Papa.
Bruno looked up. A funny expression passed across his face, like the shadow of a frown. “You called my father a Cyclops, a monster, a spy.”
“I . . . did-did-did—” Still tense from the trip, the soldiers, the disappearance of Mr. Abrams, Chaim began to stutter uncontrollably.
Triumphantly, Bruno turned to Papa, the only grown-up in the room.
“See—he admits it.”
“Didn’t!” Chaim finished. And then understanding dawned on him.
“You read my journal!” Anger trumped fear, and he didn’t stutter at all.
“A liar’s journal, not to be trusted,” Bruno said.
“You stole his journal?” Sophie spoke softly, but her horror was clear.
“Not stole, took!” said Bruno, falling back on his previous parole.
Papa’s face got that angry, wrinkled look he usually reserved when talking about Nazis. “A private journal is for private thoughts,” he said to Bruno. “Bring it to me now. At once.”
The authority in Papa’s voice caused Bruno to jump up without argument. He fled the room. Looking stricken, Sophie watched him go.
Chaim had rarely heard Papa sound so angry. But before he could smile about the victory, Papa turned to him. “Did you write such a thing?”
“A . . . a . . . poem, Papa,” was all Chaim could manage.
Bruno came back and thrust the journal at Chaim as if it were a sword.
“Here! Take your stupid journal.”
Papa intercepted the book and handed it firmly to Chaim. “Show me,” he said.
Chaim found the page and read the three lines out loud, never stuttering once.
It should be called a spec, singular,
perfect for a Cyclops spying
Odysseus under the sheep’s belly.
Papa did not quite smile. “You are speaking about Dr. Norenberg’s monocle and not his character, I presume.”
Chaim nodded carefully—to say yes would have been telling a half lie. Poems were a way of getting to the truth by misdirection and metaphor, that was what his teacher always said. And the word spying and the name Cyclops, that Greek monster, were both certainly in the fragment of his poem.
He knew that, and he suspected Papa knew that, too.
“You’re a pretty good writer,” Sophie said, throwing herself squarely in Chaim’s corner. And then, as if to back away, she said, “For a fourteen-year-old.”
“Enough about poetry,” Papa said. “Chaim and I will speak in our living room. Sophie, I would appreciate if you and Bruno went into your room for a bit.”
“To keep an eye on him?”
“To do whatever you wish,” Papa said. “Only give us fifteen or twenty minutes to conclude this business.”
“I will, sir,” she said, standing. “But don’t be too hard on him.”
“On Bruno?”
“Or on Chaim,” she said as she left the room.
Gittel Remembers
Mama was always there to help. First to come out of the house and pick up the fallen child, bandage the bloody knee, kiss the tears. She was the one who held the new widow’s hand, brought kugel or knishes to those sitting shiva, washed their dishes, helped fold away the dead man’s clothes.
She was the teacher who sat with a frightened child, who comforted a little girl whose mother left her at school too long or a boy whose father was too rough with his hands.
She was the one who packed everything up when we were to be resettled in the ghetto, who chose which things we could safely leave behind. Who made sure that even the meager food we ate tasted good, that there was always something on a plate, even if it was only potato soup so thin you could read the newspaper through it. Who grew a window box of seedlings for fresh vegetables. Who brought seedlings to our new neighbors.
She was the one who held her husband’s hand as he coughed, rubbed his back into the night. Who shared her hot soup with a sick child in the apartment building. Comforted a boy wakened by a nightmare. Found lost socks, lost dolls, lost hope.
She was the one who gave and gave of herself till she was all but given away.
8
Chaim and Papa sat for a moment in silence, not a prayerful silence but one that held many traps and pitfalls for them both.
On the one hand, Chaim wanted to tell his father what he’d seen from the shadows, what he’d heard. He wanted to explain his journal and talk about his poetry. Well, lines of poems. He
couldn’t bring himself to call it poetry, or himself a poet. Pushkin was a poet. Shakespeare was a poet. Even the Irish revolutionary Yeats was a poet. Chaim knew he was just a boy with an ear for language—well, written language, at least.
There was so much to say to Papa. Oh—except for Motl’s musings about Mama. That he’d never say.
But all he did was hold out his fist wordlessly to hand over the money from the sale of the ring.
Papa ignored Chaim’s fist and began to talk. He spoke about courage under pressure, about letting anger go, about finding new doors opening when old doors were closing. He coughed a bit; his eyes teared up.
“I want to see you grown up,” he said. “Married. With children. I want to hold them and kiss them and tell them about how brave you were here, where Jews are thought to have no courage in them. I want . . .” He stood up, took a step toward the front door, turned back.
“Never mind what I want.” He sighed. “It will be as God wills.”
Papa never spoke about God. So why now? Chaim wondered if God really meant to test the Jews this way or if He’d forgotten about them, concentrating on rivers and oceans and light and . . . Even he lost the thread of what he was thinking.
“Papa . . .”
They both looked over at the doorway. Gittel was back, the key in her hand, though Mama was still down the hall with the Abramses.
And suddenly the room was filled. Mrs. Norenberg was coming out of the room like a cautious doe to a river, to find something for breakfast, trailed by Bruno looking defensive, his chin thrust forward. And behind, Sophie waving her hands as if to say, I tried to stop them.
“It’s all right, Sophie,” Papa said, running his hand across his eyes as if his head hurt. Or his heart.
Once more, before everyone could see, Chaim held out his fist to Papa, and this time Papa closed his own fist around the money in a move that seemed rehearsed, though they both knew it wasn’t. Only Bruno noticed and tried every which way to get a look.
He kept at it for some time, even when Papa put the hand holding the money into his pocket.
His actions became the focus of everyone’s attention, actions so transparent they were funny. First Gittel, then Chaim, and finally Sophie began to giggle.
Unexpectedly, Sophie said, “Don’t get all twisted up there, Bruno!” which set them into gales of giggles all over again. Even Mrs. Norenberg and Papa began to chuckle.
Furious at being mocked, Bruno stomped back into the bedroom.
As soon as the door slammed behind Bruno, everyone stopped laughing, and there was a hush in the apartment, as if they’d all become as tongue-tied as Chaim. It wasn’t a pleasant silence, either, and they remained that way for a long time, no one able to look at anyone else.
To break the awful silence, Papa put his arm around Chaim, saying in an overloud voice, “Chaim went to do some shopping for us, but when he returned, he saw the soldiers near our building and came in quickly. What he didn’t know was that some of them were already upstairs. But . . .”
As if to prove Papa was telling the truth, Chaim took the three potatoes and the onion out of his pocket and set them on the table.
Sophie’s mouth opened, and she leaned forward, toward Chaim.
“Soldiers?” she whispered.
Gittel just shook her head and signed a small, private sorrow to Chaim, letting her weeping willow of a right hand bend down at the wrist.
As if to make a further point, Papa said, “If you see any soldiers, make yourself invisible. It’s what we all must do when the Nasties are about.”
Nasties was the word the family used when they spoke out loud about the Nazis, but only in the apartment. If Papa was using that word, he was signaling that they all had to treat the Norenbergs as family now.
Chaim’s mouth twisted with all its unspoken words. But he nodded. If Papa says so, I’ll have to try.
Bruno must have been listening at the bedroom door, for he came out into the hallway and snorted, a sound much like a horse blowing through its nose.
“No one can make themselves invisible,” he said, inching back into the living room. None of the anger had disappeared from his face. If anything, it was recharged with a kind of unspoken fear. But still he put as much sarcasm into his next sentence as he could. “There’s no such thing as real magic.”
Papa smiled, his voice finally returned to normal. “But there is such a thing as being careful and smart. If you take great care”—he swallowed a cough down—“luck will follow. And that’s as good as magic any day of the week.”
“Even Thursday, sir?” Sophie asked with a small mischievous smile, though her brother gave her such a look it could have curdled milk—that was something Chaim’s Great-Aunt Aviva used to say, and seeing Bruno’s sneering face, Chaim finally understood what she meant.
Sophie’s attempt at lightness must have pleased Gittel, because she made a delicate smile. But before she could say anything to Sophie, Papa spoke.
“Especially Thursday,” said Papa. “But now that I think about it . . .” He drew out the last word till it seemed to hang in the air, sparkling with possibilities.
The children all strained to hear the next bit. As did Mrs. Norenberg.
Chaim thought, Papa is a real storyteller when he wants to be. When his cough lets him.
“Now that I really think about it,” Papa continued, “there’s a tiny bit of chocolate left that we can share. Any day one of us manages to escape the notice of the Nasties is a chocolate day.”
Mrs. Norenberg clapped her hands. “Schokolade!” she said in German. “I have not had a piece in . . . well, I can’t remember since when.”
Chaim knew the word Schokolade from his studies. He’d taken German in school before . . . He didn’t want to say the N word. At least he didn’t want to say it aloud in case it called their attention to him.
But then his thoughts turned to the chocolate. The bar Papa mentioned was the next-to-last square of Belgian chocolate they had. It had been squirreled away on the topmost pantry shelf in a tin that said COFFEE on the outside, which was probably why Bruno hadn’t discovered it when he’d raided the kitchen for sweets.
Papa had managed to buy half a bar months ago on the black market, when he was still a member of the council and knew the safe days to purchase such things.
“For some outrageous sum,” Mama had said then, but as it had been for her birthday, she hadn’t kept up the scolding. Though the chocolate really belonged to her, she’d insisted that the family share a single square every few weeks ever since. She’d made a big performance of cutting a square off each time with her largest meat knife. Gittel had immediately dubbed the knife Chocolate Bane, as if it were a sword belonging to some medieval knight out after dragons.
Papa usually said the chocolate made his cough worse and didn’t take his share, and Mama often put hers back as well. “For when I’m really needing a piece,” she’d mutter.
Neither Chaim nor Gittel believed their excuses, of course. In their old house, they’d all eaten chocolate at least once a month. Mama had often remarked that it kept the family sweet. Papa used to say it was good for the heart. “A known medical fact,” he’d always add.
However, in the ghetto, neither Mama nor Papa would eat the chocolate at all. Instead, they had let Gittel and Chaim share a small piece every now and then, which made chocolate days quite the occasion.
But with only two small pieces of chocolate left, Chaim couldn’t imagine how they might cut one square into five pieces. Possibly six. He was pretty sure the dentist wouldn’t turn down his own piece, wouldn’t haul out the old dental excuse that it rotted the teeth.
Thinking about Dr. Norenberg, he turned and mouthed the dentist’s name at Gittel, and made a questioning gesture with his outspread hands.
“He’s gone out for a walk,” she whispered.
; “Just a walk?” Chaim whispered back. But even as he said that, his mind conjured up a dozen different reasons why the dentist might have left. None of them—except for grocery shopping—made any sense. He decided to believe that Dr. Norenberg was buying food to share with both families. Maybe the dentist wasn’t all bad.
* * *
• • •
No one seemed worried until dinnertime came and went, and still Dr. Norenberg hadn’t returned.
Mrs. Norenberg sat down at the table and got up again almost immediately. She looked—Chaim thought—as if she had been through a clothes wringer, her face flattened, drawn, pale. Her hands flapping about like the wings of a dying bird. He’d seen a dove die that way. But that was years ago. He suspected that any doves in Łódź had long ago disappeared into the cook pots of starving Jews.
Walking to the door, then addressing herself, Mrs. Norenberg whispered hoarsely, “Why is he not back?” She turned, stared at Papa as if he had all the answers, and repeated, “Why is my husband not back yet?”
Papa shook his head but said nothing.
After all, Chaim thought, what can he say?
“Mutti,” Bruno said, the only time Chaim had heard him address his mother with some tenderness, “sit down. Standing will not bring Father back sooner.”
Sophie stood, walked silently to the door, and put a hand on her mother’s arm to lead her back to her place at the table.
Papa still said nothing.
“Papa”—Mama’s voice was both gentle and stern—“get the rabbi.”
Chaim, hands on the table, half stood. “Let me go, Papa.” He’d proven his worth today. He was prepared to go out again.
Papa glanced at his watch, an old one, and inexpensive. The good watch, his grandfather’s, remained in a drawer. It had only ever been brought out for special occasions and wound carefully so as not to break the springs.
“Too close to curfew,” Papa said. “If the doctor’s not back by morning, I will go myself.”