The Storyteller (46 page)

He made her his queen.

I only wanted the Allies to show up before I ran out of plot twists.

“You no longer work here,” the
Hauptscharführer
said flatly. “You will report immediately to the hospital.”

I blanched. The hospital was an anteroom for the gas chamber. We all knew it; it was why, no matter how sick a girl was, she resisted being taken there.

“I am not ill,” I said.

He flicked his glance toward me. “This is not a negotiation.”

Mentally I recounted my work from yesterday: the requisition forms I had filled out, the messages I had taken. I could find nothing that had been done in error. We had talked for a half hour about my book, too, as usual, and it had spurred the
Hauptscharführer
to tell me of his brief time at university, when he had won an award for his poetry. “Herr
Hauptscharführer,
” I begged. “Please, give me another chance. Whatever I did wrong I will fix . . .”

He looked past me toward the open doorway and waved in a young officer, who was to escort me out.

I do not remember much about my arrival at Block 30. My number was entered into the records by a Jewish prisoner who was manning the front desk. I was brought to a room that was small, crowded, and filthy. Patients lay on top of each other on paper pads, their uniforms stained with bloody diarrhea or vomit. Some had long scars that had been rudimentarily stitched. Rats ran over the bodies of those too exhausted to move. Another prisoner, who must have been assigned here as a worker,
carried a stack of linen dressing, and followed a nurse as she changed bandages. I tried to get her attention, but she refused to meet my gaze.

Probably out of the fear that she was replaceable, like me.

The girl beside me was missing an eye. She kept clawing at my arm. “So thirsty,” she said, over and over in Yiddish.

My temperature was taken and recorded. “I want to see a doctor,” I cried, my voice rising above the moans of the others. “I am healthy!”

I would tell the doctor that I was fine. That I could go back to work, any kind of work. My worst fear was having to stay here, with these women who looked like broken toys.

A woman shoved aside the skeletal body of the girl with the missing eye and sat down on the pad beside me. “Shut up,” she hissed. “Are you an idiot?”

“No, but I need to tell them—”

“If you make enough of a fuss about not being ill, one of the doctors will hear.”

Clearly, this woman was mad. Because wasn’t that exactly what I wanted?

“They want the healthy ones,” she continued.

I shook my head, completely confused.

“I came here because I had a rash on my leg. The doctor who saw me decided the rest of me was sound enough.” She pulled up her dress so that I could see the blistered red burns on her abdomen. “He did this to me with X-rays.”

Shuddering, I started to understand. I had to act ill, at least ill enough to escape the notice of the doctors. But not ill enough to be selected by the guards.

It seemed like an impossible tightrope to walk.

“Some bigwig is coming in from Oranienburg today,” she continued. “That’s what the rumor is. If you know what’s good for you, you will not draw attention to yourself. They want to look good for their superiors, if you know what I mean.”

I did. It meant that they needed scapegoats.

I wondered if word would get to Darija that I had been taken here. If
she would try to bribe someone with a treasure from Kanada to get me released. If that were even possible.

After a while I lay down on the pad. The girl with the missing eye had a fever; her body was throwing off waves of heat. “Thirsty?” she kept whispering.

I turned away from her, curling into myself. I slipped the leather journal from my dress and started to read my story, from the beginning. I used this as an anesthetic, trying to see nothing but the words on the page and the world they created.

I was aware of a stir in the ward as the nurses raced in, tidying up the room and moving prisoners so that we were not lying on top of each other. I slipped my journal inside my dress again, wondering if the doctor was coming.

Instead, a small phalanx of soldiers arrived. They flanked an older man I had never seen before—a highly decorated officer. Judging from the number of underlings surrounding the man and the way the camp officers were practically kissing his boots, he had to be someone very important.

A man in a white coat—the infamous doctor?—was leading what seemed to be a tour. “We continue to make progress on methods of mass sterilization through radiation,” I translated from the German, as he spoke. I thought of the girl who had warned me to keep my mouth shut, of the burns on her belly.

As the others filed into the small room, I saw the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
standing among them, his hands clasped behind his back.

The high-ranking officer lifted his hand and beckoned him.

“Herr
Oberführer
? You have a question?”

He pointed to the Jew who had been carrying the bandages for the nurse. “That one.”

The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
in turn jerked his head at one of the guards accompanying the little battalion. The prisoner was taken from the room.

“It is . . .” the
Oberführer
intoned, “. . . adequate.”

The other officers all relaxed infinitesimally.

“Adequate is not impressive,” the
Oberführer
added.

He swept out of the room, and the others followed.

At lunch, I took the broth that I was given. It had a button floating in it, instead of any visible vegetable or meat. I closed my eyes and imagined what the
Hauptscharführer
was eating. Pork roast, I knew, because I had been the one to fetch him the menu earlier this week from the officers’ mess. I had eaten pork only once, at the home of the Szymanskis.

I wondered if the Szymanskis were still living in Łód
. If they ever thought of their Jewish friends and what had become of them.

Pork roast, with green beans, and cherry demi-glace; that’s what the menu had promised. I did not know what
demi-glace
meant, but I could taste the cherries bursting on my tongue. I remembered taking a wagon out to the country where Darija’s father’s factory had been, with Josek and the other boys. We had spread a picnic on a checked tablecloth and Josek had played a game, tossing a cherry into the air and then catching it in his mouth. I showed him how I could tie the stem into a knot with my tongue.

I was thinking of this, and of pork roast, and of the picnics we used to have in the summers that were packed by Darija’s housekeeper with so much food that we fed the extra to the ducks in the pond—can you
imagine
having extra? I was thinking of this, and trying so hard to remember the flavor of a walnut, and how it differed from a peanut, and considering whether you could lose your sense of taste the way you lost the function of a limb from disuse. I was thinking of this, which was why I did not hear, at first, what was happening at the entrance to the ward.

The
Hauptscharführer
was yelling at one of the nurses. “Do you think I have time for this incompetence?” he asked. “Do I need to approach the
Schutzhaftlagerführer
to solve a problem that should be so far beneath him?”

“No, Herr
Hauptscharführer
. I am sure we can locate—”

“Never mind.” Spying me, he strode to the pad where I was lying and grabbed me roughly by the wrist. “You will report to work immediately. You are no longer sick,” he pronounced, and he pulled me out of the ward, down the front steps of the hospital, and across the courtyard to the administration buildings. I had to run to keep up with him.

When I arrived, my chair and table and typewriter had been set up again in the same spot. The
Hauptscharführer
sat down at his desk. His face was red, and he was sweating, although the outside temperature was below freezing. We did not speak of what had happened until the end of the day. “Herr
Hauptscharführer,
” I asked hesitantly, “should I report back here tomorrow morning?”

“Where else would you go?” he asked, and he did not look up from the list of numbers he was adding.

Darija had her own news for me that night. The Beast was dead. The man I’d seen at Block 30 had been the SS
-Oberführer
—Gluecks’s deputy at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps—and he had also come through the barracks to do an inspection. According to one of the women in our block, who was part of the underground resistance movement at the camp, this deputy had a reputation for plucking Jews out of cushy jobs and sending them to the gas chamber. We had a new
Blockälteste,
who attempted to prove herself to the
Aufseherin
by making us do jumping jacks for over an hour, and beating anyone who tripped or fell in exhaustion. But it was not until a week later, when I was running an errand for the
Hauptscharführer,
that I realized it was not just the
Blockälteste
who had been shot. Nearly every other Jew in a job of privilege—from those who worked like me as secretaries to those who served officers’ meals at the mess hall to the cellist who played at the theater to the nurse assistant at the hospital—was gone.

The
Hauptscharführer
had not been punishing me by firing me and sending me to the hospital. He had been saving my life.

 • • • 

Two days later, when the camp was thick with snow, we were gathered in the courtyard between the blocks to watch a hanging. Months ago, there had been a revolt by prisoners who worked as
Sonderkommandos
—disposing of the bodies that came out of the gas chambers. We did not see them, as they were kept separate from the rest of us. From what I
heard, the men attacked the guards and blew up one of the crematoria. Prisoners escaped, too—though most of them were recaptured and shot. But at the time, it had created quite a buzz. Three officers were killed, including one who had been pushed alive into one of the ovens—which meant that the prisoners had not died in vain.

That had been a bad week for everyone else, as the SS officers took their anger out on every prisoner in the camp. But then it had passed, and we had assumed it was over, until we huddled in the cold with our breath frosting before us and saw the women being led to the gallows.

The gunpowder for the explosions had been traced to four girls who worked at a munitions factory. They would smuggle tiny amounts of powder, wrapped in cloth or paper, and hide it somewhere on their persons. Then it got passed to a girl who worked in the clothing division of our camp, who in turn smuggled it to prisoners who were part of the resistance movement, who got it to the
Sonderkommando
leaders in time for the uprising. The girl who worked in the clothing division lived in my block. She was a small, mousy thing who did not give any appearance of being a rebel.
That’s why she is a good one,
Darija had pointed out. One day the girl had been dragged away from morning
Appell.
We knew she had been put in the prison cells for a while, and badly tortured, and eventually sent back to live with us—but by then, she was completely broken. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at us. She pulled long strips of skin from her fingers and chewed her nails till they bled. Every night without fail she would scream in her sleep.

Today, she had been left behind in the block, and even now, I could hear her shrieks. Her sister was one of the two girls being hanged.

They were led to the gallows wearing their normal work dresses but no coats. They looked at us, clear-eyed, their heads held high. I could see the family resemblance between one of them and the girl from my block.

The
Schutzhaftlagerführer
stood at the base of the gallows. At his command, another officer tied the girls’ hands behind their backs. The first one was pulled up onto the table that stood beneath the gallows, and a noose was slipped around her neck. One moment she was standing, and
the next she was pulled upward. The second girl followed. They twisted, fish caught on the line.

All that day, working in the office, I imagined I could hear the screams of the younger sister, whose execution had been delayed. It was impossible, at this distance, but they were etched in my mind, an endless radio loop. It made me think of my own sister. For the first time, I thought that maybe Basia was right, since she had been spared the horrors of a place like this. If you knew you were going to die, wasn’t it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil? What if Basia’s act wasn’t one of desperation but a final moment of self-control? The
Hauptscharführer
had chosen to save me last week, but that did not mean the next time he would be as generous. The only person I could truly depend on was myself.

I imagined this was how the younger sister in my block felt when she began routing the gunpowder to the resistance. She wasn’t any different from Basia. They both were just looking for a way out.