by Jane Yolen
“But, Papa . . .” Chaim left the rest unsaid.
Papa shook his head. “We have already strained our luck, my good boy. This is a man’s job now.”
“I’m a . . .” Chaim was going to say man, but suddenly knew Bruno would mock him and said instead, “All done.”
Mrs. Norenberg ran a hand down the front of her skirt and straightened her shoulders as if gathering courage around her like a shawl. Without a word more, she went into the bedroom and quietly shut the door.
Bruno ate his mother’s portion of dinner as well as his own and, afterward, her share of the chocolate, smacking his lips loudly.
The others ate in silence. In the end, only the doctor’s food remained uneaten. Even Bruno didn’t dare swallow it down, so it sat on the plate like a burnt offering to a silent God.
* * *
• • •
In the morning Dr. Norenberg had still not returned. Sophie was sitting by the window, eyes red as if she’d been crying. Bruno was raging in the bedroom, and no one tried to quiet him. Chaim could hear him, though he couldn’t make out the words.
He whispered to Sophie, “Not back?”
She didn’t turn to look at him, but said to the window, “Mutti wept all night through.”
Chaim thought he should comfort her, but he didn’t have enough words for it. Still, he was about to step toward her when Gittel came out of the kitchen carrying a pitcher of watered milk.
“Sophie,” she said brightly, “Papa has already gone out to talk to the rabbi. He will find your father, you will see. Come and help me set the table.”
Sophie turned, brightening a little. “I would like to help,” she said, meaning—Chaim guessed—that keeping busy was better than doing nothing. “I’m certain everything will be all right.”
“Me too,” Chaim said, half smiling.
Gittel laughed. “Boys are no use in the kitchen, silly Chaim. Sophie and I have everything under control.”
He had meant that he, too, was certain. Meant to be kind to Sophie, who seemed to be a nice enough girl. Bruno wasn’t her fault. But he wasn’t certain her father was going to return. Not at all. People in the ghetto who stayed out all night never came home again. That knowledge sat like a stone in his belly. If everything had been all right, Dr. Norenberg would have been home long before dawn. Staying out after curfew was not just dangerous, it was . . . he searched for he word. Found it:
Suicidal.
“Where’s Mama?” Chaim asked, though he guessed. She would be comforting Mrs. Norenberg and shushing Bruno.
But then the front door opened and Mama walked in.
That was when Chaim knew she’d been downstairs on the fourth floor, cooking what breakfast she could find for the Abramses, something she always did for bereaved neighbors in their building. Now she was back, ready to cook another scant meal, this one for her own extended family.
And our bereavement, Chaim thought, which—looking at his mother’s solemn face—she, too, expected.
* * *
• • •
For breakfast, Mama served up two potatoes boiled, sliced, and then fried in the tiniest bit of butter. The last bit of butter, as it turned out. She also served the old bread, dipped in a mixture of one egg and a few tablespoons of the watered milk and then fried on both sides. Then Mama shaved down the very last piece of the chocolate that Dr. Norenberg hadn’t been there to eat. She heated it in the milk to make a kind of weak cocoa.
“We have,” she told them, “only one more day’s worth of wood for the stove.”
Chaim nodded, looking concerned.
“A feast!” Gittel pronounced brightly.
Sophie tried to agree, though Bruno spent a good five minutes pushing his potatoes and fried bread together as if they were worthless.
I bet it doesn’t stop him from eating every bit, Chaim observed, though only to himself. He was proved right moments later. Bruno gulped the food down and looked around for more before returning to his own plate and the crumbs that were left.
Sophie offered a mild protest, saying, “Bruno, you’ll scrape the color off the plate that way.”
Her brother ignored her, looking longingly at his mother’s plate and the meal that sat sulking there.
* * *
• • •
Mrs. Norenberg, prematurely in mourning, didn’t leave the bedroom till Papa came home with news, and then she rushed out to greet him with her arms opened wide.
“The rabbi has sent out feelers,” Papa said, in a voice like doom. None of the family missed its meaning, and Gittel immediately put an arm around Sophie.
Papa explained the rest so quietly, they all had to lean in to hear what he had to say. It seemed Dr. Norenberg had been caught buying drugs on the black market for his patients. The rabbi had told Papa which man had witnessed the event and what it meant. He might have been put on the resettlement transport of German Jews from Hamburg and Dusseldorf that had just left. They’d been overnighted in the Central Prison.
“The one on Czarnieckiego Street, Papa?” Gittel asked.
He nodded. “And then off under guard to Radogoszcz sidetrack station.”
“But we are not from Hamburg,” Bruno said, jutting his chin forward.
“Not Dusseldorf either,” Sophie added, “though we have cousins there.”
“What patients?” Mrs. Norenberg looked puzzled. “We just arrived. He had no patient but you.” She looked meaningfully at Papa.
Sophie blanched. “But, Mutti, your condition is . . .”
Mrs. Norenberg stared daggers at her daughter, then muttered, “You are always God’s test.”
No one dared to ask what condition Sophie meant. They were as closemouthed as Chaim, who sat thoughtfully in his chair.
“More likely the doctor has been taken for questioning,” Papa said softly, though nothing could soften this news. Questioning was a word that had many meanings. None of them good. “They will want to know where he heard about the black market.”
Mama looked meaningfully at Papa, who said immediately, “I would have never discussed that with him. Never!”
Chaim knew that hardly anyone ever returned from questioning. And those who did . . . It didn’t bear thinking about. Even if he disliked the dentist, he wouldn’t wish questioning on him. Besides, he thought, what if he points a finger at Papa anyway? Or Mama? Or Gittel?
“Is that bad?” asked Sophie when her mother was silent. “Helping patients, even other people’s patients? Isn’t that a good thing?”
She’s right, Chaim thought. Buying black market drugs for his patients had to be a good thing. A mitzvah. Hadn’t Mama always emphasized the need for tzedakah, charity? That someone should be questioned for doing such a thing was beyond his understanding. But then everything about the Nasties was beyond his understanding.
And yet . . . and yet. And then Chaim thought about the “patients” that Papa mentioned. The ones Mrs. Norenberg wondered about. When had Dr. Norenberg found time to get patients?
It was a puzzle. Chaim loved math problems, but he hated life puzzles. He wanted life to be simple again, as it had been before the Nasties had come to Łódź.
“Perhaps,” he said, “the other doctors . . .” And then words failed him, as they always did.
Mama interrupted the silence, saying, “It’s too soon to sew a shroud.” Meaning, Chaim supposed, too soon to worry about the worst.
But, he thought, what if it isn’t too soon? What if we do need to worry now?
Gittel Remembers
Our hearts were minefields in those days. Befriend someone, get to know someone, even dislike someone, it didn’t matter, for they might well be gone forever in an hour, a day, overnight.
And worse—the Nasties weren’t the only enemy. Even fellow Jews could be.
Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch
wrote:
No one is afraid of Death
Who raps familiarly on every door.
Every door.
People were dying around us, of starvation, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, typhoid, deportation, influenza, heartbreak. Their lungs were filling up because of the cold.
They were being shot for walking too quickly, staring too hard, not answering questions fast enough or answering too fast, or just because they wore the yellow star.
To die was easy.
To live was harder.
Papa said to us, “We have chosen the more difficult path, that of life. Now we must walk it.”
We walked.
He didn’t say it would be easy or smooth. He didn’t say we had to like the walk. But he tried in every way to smooth the path where we stepped.
Oh, Papa. You tried.
9
A week, two, three went by, then a month, and still there was no news about the dentist. The Norenberg family, like Papa’s cough, seemed to have moved in to stay without bringing anything with them but grief.
Very little was said about Dr. Norenberg out loud, though Papa went each day to the rabbi’s for news and occasionally to stop at the store and buy a few things for the family to eat.
Chaim noticed Papa’s watch from his father—the good one—had gone missing. Probably to Motl. Or the black market. Since the pills had kept Papa’s coughs to a minimum, he had chosen to go out himself.
Postal deliveries had been suspended in March, both to and from the ghetto, so the only way to stay in touch was the dangerous one of going outside. It was as if the apartment held its collective breath when he left and only breathed again when he returned. Sometimes he took longer than others, spending time—he said—talking to some of his old friends. Though about what he didn’t say.
Mama tried to explain all this to Mrs. Norenberg many times. But she always responded with some variant of “Whoever thought up such nonsense? Of course if my husband has left, he will send a message. And then send for us. This was all a mistake.”
Chaim wondered what part of “postal deliveries suspended” Mrs. Norenberg refused to understand. He wondered if she was willfully stupid or just unwilling to give up hope. When he asked Gittel—by writing it down and crossing it out—she answered, “A little bit of both,” which Chaim admired for its brevity.
They decided together to invent two new signs. Willfully stupid was a scratching of the left forefinger where the neck attached to the skull. And for unwilling to give up hope, the right pointer finger underlined the corner of the right eye with a quick motion as if flipping away a tear.
* * *
• • •
Each morning and afternoon when there was no knock on the door, the Norenbergs got quieter and quieter. Sophie’s quiet seemed the deepest, as if she mourned not only her father but some kind of lost opportunity. Gittel alone seemed to understand Sophie and her dilemma; to the rest of the family, she was a mystery.
On the other hand, Bruno got angrier. The disappearance of his father had cost him the only person who would take his side forcefully in an argument.
As for Mrs. Norenberg, she talked constantly to her husband as if he were there, though she never appeared to wait for an answer.
So the dentist’s absence was felt by everyone in the apartment, for Chaim and Gittel, Mama and Papa were forced by proximity to watch the Norenbergs in their private and individual manifestations of grief.
In fact, thought Chaim, the doctor is actually more present gone than he ever was here. It was an interesting paradox, and the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to write it down, until finally four lines about the doctor’s disappearance found their way into his journal, though they weren’t at all what he expected. Poetry, he thought, can be just that slippery.
The man is erased, but his outline
still eats with us every evening,
still leaves an imprint of his body
on the bed next to his grieving wife.
* * *
• • •
On the fourth week of her husband’s disappearance, Mrs. Norenberg began staying in her room, not even venturing out to eat at the table. At first, Mama let Sophie carry food into the bedroom on a tray for her, but more often than not, the tray was returned without a bite missing.
“I know it’s not the kind of food she’s used to,” Mama said. “But it’s all we have, and we dare not waste any of it.” She apportioned the cold food out to the children, who ate it in grateful silence, except for Bruno, who said—rather too loudly and insistently, Chaim thought—“Since it’s my mother’s food and she doesn’t want it, shouldn’t it all go to me?” His face looked more like a bulldog’s than ever.
Every time Bruno uttered that phrase, Chaim scratched with his left pointer finger at the back of his neck, which made Gittel smile.
“What about Sophie?” Gittel asked, using such a sweet tone, her sarcasm went entirely over Bruno’s head. “Shouldn’t she share in your mother’s food as well?”
“I am the man of the house now,” Bruno responded. “I need the larger portion.”
It took Chaim all his self-control not to laugh in Bruno’s face. He just nodded and scratched out the willfully stupid sign again and again until a small patch on his neck was raw.
At last Mama began taking the food herself into Mrs. Norenberg’s room, sitting by her bedside until she could spoon-feed a bit of soup or a bite of chicken into the poor woman’s mouth. Mrs. Norenberg spoke of being tired, not hungry, how she ached everywhere, and maybe it was the softness of the mattress or that she couldn’t take a hot bath each night as she was used to in her old house.
“Maybe it’s because that chicken died of old age,” Papa said.
Nobody laughed.
* * *
• • •
Papa and Mama began speaking about Mrs. Norenberg in worried whispers, but Chaim—an eavesdropper ever since they’d been resettled in the small apartment—heard every word.
Finally, he asked, “Why?” He didn’t need to waste another word to explain that he meant Mrs. Norenberg’s condition. He meant why to all of it.
Papa shrugged, but Mama said, “It’s time to talk to the children. All of them.” And she sat all four down at the kitchen table, Bruno complaining all the way.
“It’s time we discussed things.” Mama spoke in her quiet voice that somehow had steel at the core.
Chaim remembered Papa once saying that when Mama was at her gentlest, it was best to pay strict attention. He leaned forward.
“I’ve seen such things before,” Mama told them. “Fatigue, loss of appetite, unspecific pains in the joints. Your mother has what doctors would label depression. And what some American singers call the blues.” Then she added, “But who wouldn’t have the blues, living here?”
Back in their old house, when there was electricity, Papa used to listen to programs of blues music on the radio, and sometimes Mama had danced around the living room to it. Chaim had loved dancing with her. It was like holding the wind.
“Blues music is sad music,” Papa often said when it played, “but with a core of courage at its roots.”
They hadn’t had any music at all in the house since being resettled in the ghetto. Radios were strictly verboten, a German word that carried a sting, meaning “forbidden at the highest level.”
“The shoot-to-kill level,” Papa had warned.
“So Mutti’s a little mixed up in the head,” said Bruno, breaking into Chaim’s thoughts. “She’s got pills for it. Papa can always get them . . . could always—” He slumped suddenly into the chair as if it were the only backbone holding him up.
Sophie put a hand on his arm, and he shrugged it off angrily.
“Where does she keep those pills?” Mama asked.
“In her pink clasp bag,” Sop
hie said. And then, without a word more, she jumped up, ran into the bedroom, and a little bit later emerged with a small bottle in one hand, the pink bag in the other. Chaim guessed it had been a rather expensive bag, but it had certainly seen better days.
“It was under the sink,” Sophie said, her voice a bit ragged. “But the bottle is empty.” She shook it so everyone could hear there was nothing inside.
Mama made a tch sound. “We must be certain there are no more pills stashed away.” She nodded at Sophie. “You are a smart and caring girl. Help me search the room.”
Off they went, leaving Bruno curled even farther into the chair, now as wordless as Chaim.
This apartment has become a tomb, and we are ghosts pulling on our chains, Chaim thought.
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Papa began coughing again. He drank a bit of the watery coffee, deliberately slurping to try and make them laugh. When that didn’t work, he looked directly at Gittel as if he might find some help there.
“Mama knows what she’s doing,” Gittel said, but this time there was no force to her words.
At that very moment, Mama and Sophie came back out, and Mama said, “I don’t know what to do, Avram. She’s fading. And there are no more pills. She needs real medical help, which I cannot give. She has to be roused, for her own sake and for her children’s. You must go back to the rabbi and tell him—”
But suddenly behind her stood Mrs. Norenberg, looming like an angry dybbuk from a scary story. Her curly hair, with its mixture of blond and ash, stood out around her head like an old lion’s mane, her gaunt face almost skeletal, her eyes wild. Without her usual makeup, her pallor was frightening, as if she were already dead, just waiting to be buried. Her nightclothes were shroudlike, gray with grief, and in total disarray.
“It is a mistake,” she croaked. “It is all a mistake, a blunder. A misunderstanding.” Her voice rose and fell oddly, as if she didn’t know which syllables to land on. “My mother, father warned me. Do not marry that Jew, they said. We will find a home for the child. The little bastard. But I didn’t listen. He entranced me. It was Kabbalah, magic. I am sure of it. Jew! Jew!”