by Jane Yolen
* * *
• • •
Mama was already up and waiting with a single hard-boiled egg and weak tea to wash it down.
“Goodness knows,” she said, “how many times those poor leaves have been used. Perhaps it’s time now to retire them.” She smiled at him and unconsciously rubbed her finger where the ring had been.
“I’m all right, Mama,” Chaim told her, smiling back, though his middle three fingers waggled his fears without him even thinking about it. He was glad Gittel wasn’t around to see.
“Motl will open at eight thirty. He’s very prompt,” Papa said.
Chaim didn’t ask how Papa knew about Motl’s hours. He and Gittel had long ago guessed Papa and Mama were selling things to help them survive.
He looked out the kitchen window to check on the weather. Though it was the middle of May, a time two or three years ago when there would have been blue skies and laughter in the Łódź streets, when the little cafés did a great business and men rode bicycles along the pathways, now the skies were leaden, the streets gray and quiet.
Once boys his age kicked balls on the sidewalks on their way to school, while the girls jumped rope or walked arm in arm, gossiping. But here in the ghetto there were very few children in sight except for the beggars. Everyone was ashen with hunger or bent over with the load of the latest resettlements. Laughter could not even be given away at the market, and no one sang as they walked along.
He made quick work of the egg, wishing he had time to savor every bit.
Chaim nodded to Papa to show he was ready, needing to save his words for Motl. He was pleased that the Norenbergs weren’t awake yet, though he could hear the sounds of Gittel getting dressed.
Papa had his own coat and hat in hand. Before Chaim could ask if he was going out as well, Papa spoke. “You’ll wear this. If I need to go out, I have another, lighter one. You’re not quite as tall as me yet,” Papa said, “but to be walking in a crowd of men without arousing suspicion, you have to look like one of them. Even without a beard, it should be enough of a disguise.”
Chaim slipped into the coat, the hat. He was unused to the weight of them, but they smelled like his father, which gave him a bit more courage. He placed the hat at a jaunty angle, but Papa pulled it straight down over his ears.
“Do nothing to single yourself out, Chaim. Nothing that will make a soldier look at you twice.” He handed Chaim some coins, enough to buy a few cheap things at the market.
Chaim dropped the coins into the right-hand pocket of his pants, alongside the letter.
Looking him over carefully, Papa nodded. “It will do.” Then he smiled thinly. “You will do.”
“He will do indeed,” Mama said, but her face told a different story. Worry was scripted all over it.
Chaim smiled back. Even he knew the false message in his smile.
“Now,” his father said, as they walked to the front door, “you have the ring?”
Chaim nodded, patting his left pocket.
“Good. And the letter?”
Chaim slid the paper partway out of his right pocket.
“Excellent!” Uncharacteristically, as Papa opened the door, he said a Hebrew prayer: “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, she’hekhiyanu v’kiy’manu v’higi’anu la’z’man ha’ze.” He didn’t cough once through it.
“Papa?”
Papa said in a voice so low Chaim could barely hear him, “I know, I know, we aren’t much on prayers in our family. Too old-fashioned. But Zaide used to say them, and I guess what you learn as a child you don’t forget. This one is called she’hekhiyanu. It means ‘Blessed art thou, Lord, our God, king of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, enabled us to reach this time.’”
“This time?”
“This season, this place, this dangerous mission, my son.” Papa gave him a swift hug.
Dangerous mission. Chaim squared his shoulders and suddenly felt much older than his years. And a little like a hero.
Just then Gittel came into the hallway. She saw Chaim in the coat and Papa giving him a hug.
“Chaim?” Her left fingers pulled on the right forefinger, signing: Trouble?
Chaim turned and smiled, trying to put all his courage into the smile. He touched the palm of his left hand with the right pointer finger.
She mouthed, Luck, back, then looked at her father. “Papa, it’s early morning. And he’s wearing—”
“He’s doing a mitzvah for the family,” Papa managed, before beginning to cough.
“Shopping?” She walked swiftly to the door as if to stop Chaim.
Papa never hesitated. “Shopping he can do without having to talk.” It was not exactly a lie, Chaim knew. An evasion. A sidestep. But he could see Gittel knew. They could never keep secrets from one another.
“No!” she said, her voice firm. “Papa, let me do it.”
Papa straightened up. “You know how dangerous it has become out there for unescorted girls, Gittel. We’ve talked about that many times. He will be fine. And it’s too far and too—” Despite the medicine, he began coughing again.
“Too dangerous?” Gittel bit her lower lip. “You can’t send him out. You can’t.”
Voice rough, Papa said raggedly, “Be quiet! Come away from the door, Gittel, now!” It was rare that Papa issued an order. Gittel looked as shocked as Chaim felt.
He took this as his exit line and went out into the hall. But just as the door was closing, he whispered, “Will you teach me?”
“The prayer?” Papa asked.
Chaim nodded.
“Yes, my son, yes,” Papa said, holding Gittel in his arms so she couldn’t follow. “On your safe return. Remember, bottom two, right-hand edge. Don’t forget to use the mirror. Nine blocks to the turnoff. And whistle the Fifth when you return.”
“What does all that mean, Papa?” Gittel said breathlessly.
The door closed behind Chaim. Whatever else Gittel might have asked or Papa answered was lost to him, for—with a loud click—Chaim was propelled into the empty hall. He didn’t think about possible listeners at their own front doors straining to hear his footsteps. Didn’t stifle the sound of his sniffling back fear, or his sudden gulp of a deep breath for courage. He simply turned for a second and touched the mezuzah, feeling a spark of hope. He would manage. He’d bring back the money and whistle the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth when he got back to his own door as a signal that his mission had been accomplished.
As he was sure it would be.
* * *
• • •
Chaim headed for the basement and the side door of the building, where a small alley led to the street. A thick wooden fence fifteen feet high and ten feet inside the alley guarded that side entrance. Its gate had been closed for good by heavy slats nailed across the outside. It was clear to anyone coming into the alley—by intention or mistake—that there was no entrance to the building to be found there. Chaim and his father had built the fence that way a year ago, with hammers silenced by bits of cloth. His father was an excellent carpenter and made the fence look old, worn down, distressed by time and the elements. No soldier would give it a second look.
Papa told the other tenants that the fence would keep them all safe, and since none of the building’s windows overlooked the little space, nor did the wall of the building across from them have windows on that side, no one would see Chaim coming or going.
He remembered with a sick feeling just how scared he’d been the two times he’d gone out this way before, and then he was only going to the market to buy food for the family, less than a block away. Suddenly, the air on his face felt cold, different. He felt bile rising into his throat, then into his mouth. He almost threw up, thought better of it, and swallowed the sour stuff back down.
It was not yet half past eight, but already he could hear the
sound of many people along the street. Not the steady cadenced march of German soldiers, but the hesitant, dragging steps of ordinary folk going about their increasingly harrowed lives. Men to work—what there remained of it, plus the women and the elders who’d been sent to the straw-shoe workshop to make boots for the army. And the poorest children to beg.
Chaim listened at the fence for a moment longer. Remembered Papa’s habitual warning, If you take great care, luck will follow.
Be careful, he warned himself. If you aren’t careful, you’ll probably have one chance in three of getting this done. Two chances in three of making a mistake. So he counted out a minute. And then a second one. There was always certainty in numbers.
Only when he reached the third full minute without any alley sounds did he push on the bottom two slats of the fence over by the right-hand edge. Those slats were easy to remove and replace from either the inside or outside, though it was difficult to see how this was done unless you already knew about them.
There was the hand mirror hanging on a nail by the bottom slats where Papa always left it. He remembered how to sneak it out, then peered at the mirror through the slats, squinting into the sullen gray light.
In the mirror’s reflection, he could see that no one was sleeping in the alley, or passed out. No soldier was stopping to take a piss.
Satisfied that it was safe—or as safe as any place in Łódź could be for a Jew—he withdrew the mirror, hung it back quickly on its nail, then crawled through the slats.
Standing, he brushed his clothes off and lined up the two slats, pushing against them till they clicked into place once more. With his back to the other apartment house wall, he inched carefully toward the alley entrance.
There he waited in the shadows until a large group of silent men trudged by on Dworska Street, heads down, consciously making themselves small, invisible, not noticeable.
Quickly, he slipped into their ranks. If they saw him, they made no sign of it, but simply included him in their walk, like a school of fish flowing around one of their own.
Many of the men were his height, so he didn’t stand out. Pulling his father’s hat down to shade his face even more, he tugged on the coat so the yellow star was easy to see. That way, it was likelier no one would pull him out of the crowd for questioning.
Even though the day was warm and the coat heavy, he was suddenly cold. He tucked the collar up around his neck, partly for the warmth, partly to disguise his lack of a beard.
No one seemed to notice him as they shuffled along the busy street. Chaim did the same for them, trudging the first block without ever looking anyone in the eye. He counted the blocks as they went along, determined to make no mistakes.
He understood now why Papa had sent him out onto the street. Papa’s coughing would certainly have gotten him taken to the hospital. Everyone knew the hospital was a dangerous place. People disappeared from there.
And this wasn’t a job for Gittel, either. The Nazis were known to steal bright, pretty Jewish girls and use them cruelly, whatever their age.
He shuddered. Gritted his teeth.
Besides, Chaim thought, I’m glad to be outside, away from the apartment, even with the danger. Especially now with the Norenbergs there.
And that pig Bruno. He chuckled to himself, remembering Papa’s “not kosher.”
As he scuttled along the street, he felt a bit of a breeze on his face.
At least out here, he thought, the sky speaks of possibilities. And no curtains can be drawn.
That sounded—he thought almost happily—like something to write in his journal.
But suddenly, he pulled himself out of this daydream. Now wasn’t a time to lose his focus or to think of writing. He had to remain as invisible as possible. He had to watch his steps—and the steps of others. He had to make his way to the pawnbroker’s unremarked and unseen.
Once there, he’d have to find a way to convince Motl to give them enough money to make their plans for escape come true. Whatever those plans turned out to be.
Chaim knew he had enough courage to be outside. To walk the long blocks. To get safely home again. But it would take more than courage to get the next part of Papa’s plan to work.
It would take words.
And words are the one thing I have few of.
He touched Papa’s letter to Motl for luck, stood straighter, walked on.
Gittel Remembers
I remember the first time I saw someone dead on the street. We’d been in the ghetto only a few months then.
Mama and I were returning from tutoring a bunch of unruly boys getting ready for their bar mitzvah, though not Chaim. The ghetto was uncomfortable then, but not as dangerous as it became later on.
I was clutching a sheaf of poems by the Łódź poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch. Mama was having her turn with them and let me read the manuscript pages as long as I was careful.
For all his talent, Shayevitch and his family lived in a gloomy, run-down hut on Lotnicza Street. When he wasn’t writing, he was doorkeeper at the Vegetable Place, distributing turnips, potatoes, carrots, and other root vegetables to the worst off of Łódź families. But his poetry brought us ghettoniks a singing soul.
I was thinking about his poem about the horrible winter just past, when so many had been sent away, about his lines where he wrote:
But like abandoned trembling sheep
We teeter and—
And there to the side, against a blood-splattered wall, lay the body of a man whose head had been shattered by bullets.
Mama hissed at me, “Don’t look.” But of course I’d already seen.
That night as I tried to fall asleep, I heard Mama say to Papa, “We have failed our children. No child should have to witness such a thing.”
And he answered, “She has to be a woman now. I pray she never sees such a thing again. But the failure is not ours, my darling. It rests on the shoulders of the world.”
I fell asleep praying that Papa was right, and that the dead man wouldn’t ride on my shoulders in the night. But such prayers in wartime are rarely answered. Even poetry can’t save us from our dreams.
5
Chaim was thinking too much about the words he would have to find to convince Motl, so he wasn’t paying careful enough attention to the man in front of him, a nondescript, hunched-over, dark-coated scarecrow. A man who turned to the right to avoid a pile of rags. Chaim only saw him at the last moment.
Cursing silently at his own carelessness, Chaim checked his forward movement and only barely avoided stepping on the pile. He was deathly afraid he might get tangled in the rags. There was a soldier standing on the corner who might have noticed him then.
A soldier.
With a gun.
For a moment, he thought, Rags can be useful. Mama could always sew Gittel a new skirt with those rags. Or Papa a warmer shirt, and maybe that would help with his cough. In the ghetto it had come to this—ragpicking.
However, he didn’t dare bend over or slow down, so he just made a quick hop-step to the right. But as he glanced at the bundle from the corner of his eye, he realized why the man had stepped around it rather than simply trod on it.
The thing wasn’t actually a bundle of rags, but a small girl, maybe five or six, in a washed-out blue head scarf, threadbare blue dress, and a scruffy coat with the requisite yellow star on the sleeve. She lay curled up on the ground, one scrawny hand held out as if begging, the other clutching a doll as ragged as she. But her mouth was open, her eyes wide, unblinking. There was a bullet hole in her forehead that looked like a third eye. A dark bruise on her upturned cheek.
Gittel had such a dress once, he thought. That blue.
Even as he walked on, his eyes filled with tears. A line of a poem sledgehammered into his startled mind. Dance on the streets of Heaven, for you shall never dance here again. It was so complet
e, he wondered if he’d read it somewhere. He often had such things in his head—words that sang but were never spoken aloud. Words that he wrote down in his journal. So he wouldn’t forget. Though he doubted he could forget this little girl, that line.
And then he shook himself. Thinking of poetry when she lay dead behind him was awful. Unforgivable. For a brief moment, he wondered if he was turning into a horrible person. Yet he walked on. He had to walk on.
He’d never actually seen someone dead before, though he’d overheard people in the apartment building talking about them. Most had been shot or beaten to death and left on the street like a piece of garbage. But this was only the third time in a year that he’d been out on the street alone. Papa and Mama had insisted, and he and Gittel obeyed, of course. Though they were allowed to walk up and down the stairs in the apartment, even run along the hallways for exercise.
But who would shoot a little girl? He bit his lip. Who would beat her? It made no sense, and suddenly—for the first time since they’d been moved into the ghetto—a real, deep-rooted fear invaded him. Maybe because he was alone on the street, even in the midst of a crowd. Maybe because the girl was so young. Maybe because she could be mistaken for rags. Trod upon, kicked to the gutter, because no one had claimed her. Maybe all of those things.
That could be Gittel, he thought. Or the new girl, Sophie. She didn’t seem so bad. He was no longer worried about himself. He kept walking.
He was already almost a block away from her now, moving as quickly as was possible in the ghetto, as if her death were a disease he might catch.
And then he dared a glance back, asking himself if he should just go back and pick her up and take her to the nearest house. Or nearest alley.