The Storyteller (36 page)

“No,” Basia whispered, her eyes full of tears. “I won’t let him be taken.”

She hugged Majer so close that he started to cry. The chairman was saying, now, that this was the only way to appease the Germans. That he understood the horror of his request. That he had convinced the Germans to take only children who were under ten years old, because they would not know what was happening to them.

Basia leaned over and vomited on the ground. Then she pushed through the crowd, away from the chairman’s podium, still holding Majer. “I understand what it means to tear a limb from the body,” Rumkowski was saying, trying to plead his case.

So did I.

It meant that you bled out.

 • • • 

At the end of the workday, Herr Fassbinder did not let us leave the factory, not even to go home and tell our parents we would be staying late. He told the officers who demanded an explanation that he had emergency deadlines and was requiring all of us to sew through the night. He barricaded the doors, and he stood at the entrance with a gun I had never seen him carry before. I think that if a soldier had come to take away the little ones he employed, he would have fought his own country. This was, I knew, for our own protection. A curfew had been imposed keeping everyone in their homes, as the SS and the police searched house by house to select the children who would be deported.

When we started hearing shots and screams, Herr Fassbinder told everyone to remain quiet. The young mothers, on the knife edge of hysteria, rocked their children. Herr Fassbinder handed out candy for them to suck on and let them play with empty spools, stacking them like blocks.

By the next morning, I was frantic. I couldn’t bear thinking of Basia and Majer, wondering who would protect them with my father still an empty shell. “Herr Fassbinder,” I begged. “Please let me go home. I am eighteen. Too old to be considered a child.”

“You are
meine Kleine,
” Herr Fassbinder replied.

I did something incredibly bold then. I touched his hand. As nice as Herr Fassbinder had been to me, I never allowed myself to think that I was his equal. “If I go home tomorrow, or the next day, and find that someone else has been taken away from me while I was gone, I don’t think I’ll be able to live with myself.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and then directed me to the door. Walking outside the factory with me, he flagged a young German policeman. “This girl must get to her apartment safely,” he said. “This is a priority and I will hold you responsible if it does not happen. Do you understand?”

The policeman could not have been much older than I was. He nodded, terrified by Herr Fassbinder’s promise of retribution. He walked
briskly with me to my apartment, stopping when we reached the front steps of the building.

I thanked him under my breath in German and flew inside. The lights were off, but I knew that wouldn’t stop the German soldiers from coming inside and looking for Majer. My father was on his feet the moment he heard me enter. He folded me into his arms, stroking my hair. “Minusia,” he said. “I thought you were lost to me.”

“Where’s Basia?” I asked, and he led me to the pantry, the one whose flooring my poor cousin Rivka had ripped up over two years ago. A small mat made of newspapers was covering the hole that revealed the crawl space beneath. I pulled it aside and saw the gleam of Basia’s eyes looking up at me in panic. I heard the soft pop of Majer’s thumb in his mouth.

“Good,” I said. “This is very good. Let’s make it better.” Searching frantically around the apartment, I laid eyes on the barrel that my father had brought home from the bakery. Once full of flour, it now served as our kitchen table, since we had burned the original one for fuel. I hauled it onto its side and rolled it into the pantry, then balanced it over the hole in the floor. It would not look strange to keep a flour barrel in the pantry, and it was one more obstacle to any soldier realizing there was a hidey-hole beneath it.

We knew they were getting closer because we could hear people in apartments nearby—both those who were taken from their families and those who were left behind—screaming. It was another three hours, though, before they came into our home, slamming the door back on its hinges and demanding to know where Majer was. “I don’t know,” my father said. “My daughter hasn’t been home since the curfew started.”

One of the SS men turned to me. “Tell us the truth.”

“My father
is
telling the truth,” I said.

Then I heard it. The cough; and a tiny wail.

Immediately I covered my mouth with my hand. “You are ill?” the soldier asked.

I couldn’t say yes, because that qualified me as one of the sick to be transported. “Just a sip of water that went down the wrong pipe,” I said,
beating my chest with my fist to prove a point, until the noise disappeared.

The soldiers ignored me after that. They began to open cabinets and drawers, places small enough to hide a child. They ripped their bayonets into the straw mattresses we slept on, in case Majer was tucked inside. They looked inside the belly of the woodstove. When they reached the pantry, I stood very still while the soldier swept his gun along the shelves, tumbling our meager rations to the floor, and into the empty barrel. He looked down into its gaping mouth.

The SS man turned around and stared at me without emotion. “If we find her hiding with the child, we will kill her,” he said, and he kicked the barrel.

It did not tip over. It didn’t wobble. It just shifted the tiniest bit to the right, pulling the newspaper along with it, and revealing the tiniest black crack along the edge that was a hint of the gaping hole it covered.

I held my breath, certain he would see this, but the soldier was already calling the others to move on to the next apartment.

My father and I watched the SS men leave. “Not yet,” my father whispered, when I made a move toward the pantry. He pointed furtively to the window, from which we could still see our neighbors being dragged onto the street, marched away, shot. After ten minutes, when the soldiers had left the street and the only sounds were the wails of other mothers, my father ran to the kitchen and pulled the barrel aside.

“Basia,” I cried. “It’s over.” She was sobbing and smiling through her tears. She sat up, still clutching Majer as my father helped her out of the narrow space. “I thought they would hear the coughing,” I said, hugging her tightly.

“I thought so, too,” Basia confessed. “But he was such a good boy. Weren’t you, my little man?”

We both looked down, to where Majer’s face was pressed tightly against his mother’s neck, the only way she had been able to quiet him. Majer wasn’t coughing anymore. He wasn’t screaming.

But my sister, looking down at her son’s blue lips and empty eyes, was.

 • • • 

The children were driven in wagons through the ghetto gate. Some of them were dressed in their fanciest clothing, whatever was left of it at this point. They were crying at the tops of their lungs, calling for their mothers. These mothers were expected to go to their factories to work as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The ghetto was a ghost town. We were a beaten, gray stream of workers who did not want to remember our past and did not think we had a future. There was no laughter, no hopscotch remaining. No hair ribbons or giggles. No color or beauty left behind.

Which is why, they said, her death was so lovely. Like a bird, she flew from the bridge across Lutomierska Street into the road where Jews were not allowed. They said Basia’s unbound hair fluttered behind her, like wings; and her skirts became the fan of a tail. They said that the bullets, as they hit her in midair, gave her bright crimson plumage, like a phoenix that was meant to rise again.

In the dark, there was a soft growl, almost a purr. The rasp of a match. A scent of sulfur. The torch blazed to life again. Crouched before me in a pool of blood was a man with wild eyes and knotted hair. More blood dripped from his mouth and covered his hands, which held a haunch of meat. I fell back, struggling to find air. This was the cave in the side of the cliff where Aleks had told me he made his modest home; I had come here hoping to find him, after he escaped from the village square. But this—this was not Aleks.

The man—could I even call him such?—took a step closer. That haunch of meat he was devouring had a hand, fingers. They were still clutching the top of a gilded cane I could not have forgotten if I tried. Baruch Beiler was no longer missing.

I felt my vision fading, my head spinning. “It wasn’t a wild animal,” I forced out. “It was you.”

The cannibal smiled, his teeth slick and stained crimson. “Wild animal
 . . . upiór.
Why split hairs?”

“You killed Baruch Beiler.”

“Hypocrite. Can you honestly say you didn’t wish him dead?”

I considered all the times the man had come to the cottage, demanding tax money we did not have, extorting deals from my father that only dragged us deeper and deeper into debt. I looked at this beast, and suddenly felt like I was going to be sick. “My father,” I whispered. “You killed him, too?” When the
upiór
did not answer, I flew at him, using my nails and my fury as weapons. I raked at his flesh and kicked and swung. Either I would avenge my father’s death or I would die trying.

Suddenly, I felt an arm around my waist, yanking me backward.

“Stop,” Aleksander cried, his full weight pinning me to the ground. From this angle, I could see the chains that encircled the
upiór
’s bare, filthy feet, the pile of bleached bones beside him. I could see, too, the ragged cuffs of Aleksander’s shirt, drenched with blood. Whatever he’d done to free himself from the ropes Damian had trapped him in, it must have been painful.

“Leave me alone,” I shouted. I did not want Aleks to save me, not this time, not if it meant I could not avenge my father’s death.

“Stop,” Aleks begged, and I realized I was not the one he was trying to protect. “Please. He is my brother.”

I stopped fighting.
This
was Casimir? The feebleminded boy Aleks had to stay with during the day, and lock up at night, so that he would not eat what he shouldn’t? True, I had never seen his face without the leather mask. And Aleks had said he consumed things like stones and twigs and dirt, not humans. If that had been a lie, how could I trust anything Aleks had told me?

I shook my head, trying to understand. Aleks had protected me. He had saved my life when I was hurt—by his own brother. And yet, he had the same unearthly amber eyes as this creature beside me; he had the same blood beating through his veins. “He is your
brother,
” I repeated, my voice breaking. “But I no longer have a
father
.” I tore away from Aleks and faced Casimir. “Because you killed him! Say it!” I was shaking so hard I could barely stand upright. But Casimir wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t give me the satisfaction.

I began to run blindly in the direction from which I’d come, striking against sharp corners, tripping over rocks and ruts in the cavern floor, landing hard on my hands and knees. As I struggled to my feet, Aleksander’s arms closed around me. I stiffened, remembering that indirectly, he was the cause of all my pain. “You could have stopped him,” I sobbed. “He murdered the only person who ever loved me.”

“Your father is not the only person to ever love you,” Aleks confessed. “And you cannot blame Casimir for his death.” He turned away so that his face was in shadow. “Because I am the one who killed him.”

MINKA

For a while, people disappeared from the ghetto like fingerprints on a pane of glass—ghosting into vision one moment, and the next, gone as if they’d never been there. Death walked next to me as I trudged down the street, whispered into my ear as I washed my face, embraced me as I shivered in bed. Herr Fassbinder was no longer my boss; instead of working in an office, I was reassigned to a factory that made leather boots. My hands shook even when I wasn’t sewing; that’s how hard it was to force the needle through the tough hides. We lived expecting to be deported at any minute. Some ladies in the factory had the diamonds from their wedding rings implanted as fillings by the dentist. Others smuggled small pouches of coins in their vaginas, and came to work this way, in case the roundups happened there. And still, we went on living. We worked and we ate and we celebrated birthdays and gossiped and read and wrote and prayed and we woke up each morning to do it all over again.

One day in July 1944 when I went to collect Darija to stand in line for rations, she was gone. I hardly had time to grieve, though. By then, it was almost expected to lose the people who meant the most to you. And besides, three days later, my father and I found ourselves on the list for deportation.

It was hot, the kind of heat that made it impossible to believe that months ago we could not get warm no matter how hard we tried. The
Fabrik
had been blistering, windows closed, the air so thick it felt like a
sponge in your throat. Walking outside for the first time in twelve hours, I was grateful for the fresh air, and in no great hurry to go home, where my father and I would sit up the whole night wondering what would happen the next morning, when we were to assemble in the town square.

Instead, I found myself picking a convoluted path through the narrow streets and twisted alleys of the ghetto. I knew Aron lived somewhere around here, but I had not seen him in several weeks. It was possible that he, like Darija, had already been deported.

I stopped a man on the street and asked if he knew Aron, but the man just shook his head and moved on. I was doing the unthinkable. We didn’t talk of those who had been taken from us; it was like those cultures who don’t name the dead, for fear that they will haunt us forever. “Aron,” I asked an old woman. “Aron Sendyk. Have you seen him?”

She looked at me. I realized, with a shock, that she was not much older than I was, but her hair was white and there were bare patches on her scalp; her skin draped from her bones like fabric too heavy for its hanger. “He lives there,” she said, and she pointed to a door further down the street.