The Book of Aron (7 page)

“How does one know where to find anything?” he answered. “Look around. Say hello to your father for me.” Then he flicked my nose with his finger, pushed himself off, and rode away.

G
IVEN THE NEWS THAT APARTMENTS WERE GOING TO
be requisitioned anyway, my father said he’d gone looking for boarders who could pay a little something, that it’d be nice if a Jew saw a herring on his table even once a week. My mother said she would only agree to it if whoever he found first went through the disinfection units and then presented her with their delousing certificates. She thought this would be the end of that problem, since the lines at those stations made you wait all day and night, but a family of four showed up the next morning and handed her their certificates one by one as they passed into our apartment carrying what they had. They were each wearing many layers, both for the cold and to make it easier to carry other things. They didn’t look clean, but as my father told
her, they weren’t any dirtier than anyone else, either. “They probably bought their certificates, instead of waiting in line,” my mother said, which was what my father and I assumed, though we only shrugged.

They brought as an offering overcooked kasha with rutabaga preserves, some stuffed cabbage that was much more appetizing, and a tiny jar of honey that the father said we might want to use as barter.

He was a tall man who made jokes and his wife was short and had angry eyes and looked disappointed by everything in our apartment. She looked at our kitchen and said, “Ice in the pot, frozen faucets, and not a drop of water.” Their daughter said she was nineteen and their son said he was hungry. He was about my age. Once he was eating he told us his name was Boris.

His parents and sister took the kitchen and my mother and father were in the bedroom so the rest of us slept in the hall. It was even colder there. His feet were in my face. In the middle of the night he seemed to know that I was still awake and started talking in a low voice. He said his family had taken over the previous apartment they’d been in, that they’d just stormed the place with another family. Then it had been taken away from them by the Germans. He said in the shelter at the synagogue all of the boys stole bread from
one another’s families, and what they didn’t eat they traded for horseshoe spikes they used in games. He said he’d gotten the honey outside the ghetto when an O.D. man had turned his back and pretended not to see him coming or going. I asked what an O.D. man was and it turned out that’s what he called the yellow police, because of the German name for them, Ordnungsdienst, the Order Service. After we listened to my brothers snore he asked if I thought he looked strong.

“Are you talking to me?” I asked. He said he was. He asked again if I thought he looked strong. I told him I guessed so.

He said that that was because he was. “Smugglers eat more than other people because they work harder,” he said. His cheeks had the pockmarks from chicken pox and he had an expression like he was sharing the floor with a sick person.

I told him smugglers didn’t usually tell everyone that they were smugglers, and he snorted. “I don’t think you’re Gestapo,” he said.

“You never know,” I told him.

He asked how long we’d lived there. He said he’d hated his village and that when he and his friends trampled their neighbor’s vegetable garden the neighbor had come out of his house and tried to beat them
with a leather strap. Then he turned loose his dog, who bit them. Dogs hate the poor, he added, thinking about it further. He talked with his hands, like a Jew.

He said he’d been thrown out of the Polish Scouting Association after being told that as a Jew he couldn’t be sworn in on a Christian Bible and he suggested to his troop leader that they use a spare-parts catalog instead. He said his only real friend hadn’t shown up to say goodbye on the day he left. He said all of this gave him an advantage because he never felt homesick. And it was better to have no one to miss.

He said his father had a weakness for the bottle and I’d probably already noticed that he never refused a toast. “And why should he?” he asked.

If he was waiting for an argument, he didn’t get one from me. “You’re soon going to have trouble with my mother, too,” he told me. He said it was never long before she was sure she was being cheated and that’s why she was always shouting at someone. I asked if we were going to have trouble with his sister, too, and he said she was so shy she’d told him that if she ever got married she wanted it to be in a cellar where no one would see.

I asked what happened to his sister’s hand and he said that on the way to Warsaw his father had let him
take the reins of the wagon and that he had steered the thing so badly when crossing a bridge that he’d turned them over in a ditch.

I asked how they’d managed to get the wagon back on its wheels and he said he told people stories like that because he thought it was important to be clear in your own head on what you could and couldn’t do and this was how he’d grown up to be someone with open eyes. Inasmuch as he’d grown up at all, I said, and he told me he’d show me how much he’d grown up the next chance he got.

I told our group about him and repeated some of his stories and Lutek said I should bring him along tomorrow. Adina wanted to know why and he said she shouldn’t worry about it, since Sh’maya’s friend Boris probably wasn’t going to survive long anyway, given what we were up to.

“Why’re you calling me that?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what your brothers call you?” he said.

When everyone was asleep that night, I told Boris he should come meet the group. He said he looked forward to becoming our leader. I told him that as far as he was concerned school was starting once the sun came up the next morning, so he should get some rest.

M
Y MOTHER AND FATHER WERE UPSET BY THE NEWS
that the three trolley lines for the Jews were going to be shut down and in the worst part of the winter. My mother asked why she had to live to see such awful years and my father told her there were probably worse years to come. The trolley lines were to be replaced with just one that was given no number but only a shield with the Star of David. Lutek said our bigger worry was that they would stop running the Aryan trolleys through the ghetto, and a month later they did.

There was no announcement so we waited for three days before figuring that out for ourselves. Then Zofia asked what we would do now and Boris said we could start by not playing so nice. To show us what he meant he went along when Lutek delivered our last sack from off the trolley and told the men who’d ordered it that they couldn’t have it until we got more money.

“We agreed to what we agreed to,” one of them told him.

“
They
agreed to it.
I
didn’t agree to it,” he said and Lutek told us they went back and forth about it and the men made some threats but eventually got scared by all the patrols coming and going. He said Boris held everyone up like he didn’t even notice the police until he got what he wanted: not only an extra bag of
potatoes but also some raisin wine. He shared both with the rest of us.

A
T DINNER MY FATHER TOLD US IT SEEMED LIKE NO
matter where he went, German soldiers followed. My mother got alarmed and asked why and he said he had no idea.

Boris’s family was in the back room talking in low voices, and my father said, “Maybe they’re planning a coup.”

My mother again brought up the idea of getting Aryan papers and told us Czerniaków’s sister-in-law had assured her it could be done and for not much money, but when she said how much it was, my father asked, “For each person?” so loud that she had to shush him. She told him that was what a birth certificate and an identity card cost. She said there were cheaper ones but they looked suspicious even at a glance.

My father asked how she thought we would eat while we saved that much money and who we would contact on the other side to help us, or would we be all alone. He pointed at me and said, “And do you think this one can pass?” He reminded her she’d said about me that the minute I opened my mouth you could hear the Jew in me.

My mother looked at me sadly and said, “Aron, what do you think?”

“I think we’re doing all right here,” I told her. I could feel my ears burning.

“There,” my father said. “Even he thinks we should stay.”

My mother said she would ask my brothers when they got home but I could tell by her voice that she’d already given up.

But they never got home because they were picked up on the street outside our apartment by soldiers and the yellow police for the work battalions. We heard the shouting but didn’t understand what it was. My mother pulled me from the window and then our neighbor rushed in to tell us. She said that another man had pulled money from his pocket and handed some to each of the soldiers and policemen and they’d let him go.

She thought they were taking them to Józefów. At least that was what one of the police had told her. My father pulled all the money we had from our hiding places and rushed off to try to catch them before they got to the police station. I ran after him. It was almost curfew.

The column was being marched double-time and the yellow police were in the back, shouting and
thumping with fat sticks the ones who didn’t keep up. The Germans at the front every so often looked back and then there was more shouting and thumping.

“Listen,” my father called when he got close enough to the last yellow policeman.

“Go away or you’ll end up with them,” the man warned him. My father lagged back but I took the money from his hand and passed him because I’d noticed Lejkin up ahead.

“Look who it is,” Lejkin said when I fell into step alongside him. “Do you want to go to a labor camp? Where’s my bootjack?”

“I found a beautiful one,” I told him. “But I also have a deal for you.” I showed him the money I held inside my coat.

“Who’s being saved?” he asked. I pointed out my brothers a few rows up. In their misery they still hadn’t seen us. “And what’s in it for me?” he added.

“More where this came from,” I told him. Though as far as I knew we didn’t have any more.

He let us march another half block just to let me suffer and then said something to the trailing policeman and they both went forward and pulled my brothers from the line and dragged them back to my father, who made such a cry of happiness and relief that he almost gave the whole thing away.

“I
NEED A BOOTJACK,” I TOLD LUTEK
.

“A bootjack?” he said. “What do you need with a bootjack?” We were standing next to each other to get warm back at our old Leszno Street gate. It was snowing. Lutek was trying to get our old arrangement going again, but his father’s friend had more business than he knew what to do with so he was making us wait. Lutek kept bringing up phlegm and spitting it onto the pavement to watch it freeze. Our shoes were soaked through and coming apart and we were stamping our feet.

“I have a contact that maybe we can use,” I told him.

“Who would that be?” he asked.

“Someone I met. You don’t have to know everything,” I told him.

“Going into business for yourself?” he said.

“You don’t tell me about everyone you meet,” I said. I didn’t know why I wasn’t telling him.

“That’s true,” he said.

“So are you going to help me or not?” I asked.

He blew on his hands and rubbed his cheeks and then gave me the address of a shop on Niska. “Bring something to trade,” he told me. Then something
caught his eye across the square. “He’s ready for us,” he said.

M
Y PARENTS HAD BEEN SO HAPPY AT MY BROTHERS’
return that they celebrated even with Boris’s family. My father suggested we open the honey, but Boris’s father said that we should save it for a bigger occasion. Like maybe the end of the war, my brother said, then added that he’d heard there’d been a recent bombardment of Berlin. He was always talking about new peace proposals he’d heard had been offered through the Swedes or the Swiss or the pope. Everyone sat around the table smoking their cigarettes and telling everyone else what they’d heard. My father always said that if you gave Jews a minute to themselves they produced rumors. Boris’s mother said the rabbi in their village had predicted a year earlier that the war would end this month because his cabalistic calculations had proved the cup of Jewish suffering was now entirely full. Her husband cheered ironically and proposed a toast to the news. He poured a little bit of vodka for himself and my father.

When their toast was drunk he said, “So Hitler asks the governor-general what’s being done to oppress the Jews. The governor-general talks about
all the rights and privileges that have been taken away but Hitler’s unsatisfied. The governor-general talks about everything that’s been stolen from the Jews and Hitler’s still unsatisfied. He talks about the ghetto and all the disease and filth and Hitler’s still unsatisfied. Finally the governor-general says, ‘Oh, and I’ve also set up a Jewish Self-Aid Organization,’ and Hitler exclaims, ‘
Now
you’ve got it!’ ”

My brothers laughed with him. “Here’s to the Jewish police as well,” my father said grimly when they stopped.