The Book of Aron

by Jim Shepard

  “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.

  MY 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.

  We were all quiet. Outside we could hear the street vendor calling out his coke and carbide for sale. “Well, that helped the party along,” Boris’s father said.

  My mother had recovered enough by then to smile. “At first I liked the idea of Jewish police,” she finally said. “If you have to take orders from a Pole or a Jew, why not a Jew? And they didn’t turn over the merchants’ baskets and trample everyone’s goods.”

  “That was before they started rounding up everyone too poor to buy themselves out of a trip to the labor camps,” my father said.

  “Yes, that was before,” my mother said. And then the party really was over. Later she asked my father again if he could get me back into the factory and when he said he was lucky to still have a position there she lost her temper and asked what he was going to do on the day when I didn’t come home. He told her they weren’t rounding up children for the labor camps and reminded her that at my size I looked even younger than I was.

  “If something happens to him I will never look at you again,” my mother said.

  “You never look at me now,” my father said.

  “We’re trying to sleep out here,” one of my brothers called from where we were lying in the hallway.

  “They fight like my parents,” Boris said, and in the dark it sounded like he was waiting for me to agree.

  “I think he’s asleep,” my brother finally said.

  “He’s not asleep,” Boris told him.

  BECAUSE MY MOTHER WAS SO UNHAPPY I INTRODUCED her to Zofia and Adina, both of whom she liked more than Lutek, as I knew she would. Adina said, “Why are we meeting your mother? Are we getting engaged?” but Zofia said she understood and told Adina that doing something nice for someone wouldn’t kill her. We met in a café and my mother insisted on buying the girls tea even though I could see how upset she was at what she spent. She asked after their families and made her such a shame face when she heard their sad stories. Then when our visit was almost over she said that her friend who was Czerniaków’s sister-in-law had told her about the performances at Janusz Korczak’s orphanage and would we all like to go?

  Adina looked at me and my expression told her I’d had no idea that my mother was going to do this.

  “I don’t think the girls want to see children’s puppet shows,” I said to my mother.

  “They’re not puppet shows,” she said.

  “I saw their parade when they had to move into the ghetto,” Zofia told her. “It was quite the circus.”

  “I saw that too,” I said. “Did you see the wagons with the geraniums?”

  Zofia said that she’d heard all sorts of rumors about him: he’d been taken into the forest and shot; he’d been taken away to one of the camps; he’d been put on a boat to Palestine. The problem had been that he’d gone all the way to the Gestapo to protest the confiscation of some potatoes and showed up there having refused to wear his armband. It turned out that he’d been beaten and thrown into a cell but then after a month they’d let him go.

  “They let him go?” Adina asked, interested in that part. “Why?”

  Zofia held her hand up and rubbed her thumb against her fingertips.

  “Is he rich?” Adina asked.

  “He has rich friends,” Zofia told her. She said she’d also heard that his Polish janitor had been beaten almost to death on the same day because he’d applied in person to go into the ghetto with the rest of the orphanage but Aryans could no longer work for Jews.

  The four of us listened to the conversations at other tables. I could see my mother’s disappointment in her eyes. “Working and stealing, working and stealing, that’s what times are like now,” she said. The girls just looked at her and finished their tea. Zofia kept the sugar cube pressed between her lips and her tongue poked out only once it had completely dissolved. My mother stood up and wiped her eyes. Well, she told us, if we were interested, the new orphanage was now on Chłodna Street, in the small ghetto.

  “We’ll go,” Zofia said. “Sure. It could be fun.” Adina looked at her. “It could be fun,” Zofia repeated.

  My mother was pleased and left before we could change our minds. Adina said, “You’re not going to get Lutek and Boris to agree,” and Zofia said, “I’m not going to try.”

  That night at dinner my mother told everyone the good news and Boris’s father wanted to know why the Germans would let Korczak go.

  “Maybe they made him an informer,” Boris said.

  “Maybe he gave them a pile of gold,” my brother said.

  “The Germans know him as the greatest child specialist and educational reformer in all of Europe,” my father said. “They know him even in England and France. He’s probably the safest Jew in the ghetto.”

  “A big shot,” Boris said.

  “Was he the one with the scandal before the war?” Boris’s father asked.

  “What scandal?” my mother asked. Boris’s father held up his hands like he meant no offense.

  “He lost his radio program and his position on the juvenile court,” my father said. “He went on a trip to Palestine and then people no longer overlooked that Janusz Korczak the Pole was really Henryk Goldszmit the Jew.”

  Shots were fired outside and we all were quiet around the table, listening. The soup was beet shavings and nettle leaves with little lumps of kasha.

  “No one wanted a Jew in charge of Poland’s juvenile offenders,” my father added. But I was still thinking about why the Germans would let Korczak go and everyone else had gone on to thinking about other things.

  AT THE ORPHANAGE A LINE HAD BEEN PAINTED through the sign for the Roesler Commercial Secondary School and a handmade wooden sign that said The Children’s Republic hung below it from twine. We were escorted into the building and to wooden folding chairs in front of the stage by little girls in costumes
made of bits of paper and other scraps. “What are you supposed to be?” I asked the girl leading me in. Her paper was mostly colored green and she said, “I’m a dragon.”

  The stage was a platform at the end of the main room on the first floor. Once all of the chairs were filled and people lined the back wall, the heavy woman I’d seen the Old Doctor pulling down the street came through a door in the back and everyone applauded. She was carrying a cactus that she set down on the front of the stage. She welcomed everyone to the Orphans’ Home and said her name was Stefania Wilczyńska and that she was the senior teacher. She introduced the cactus as her favorite orphan and the home’s good-luck charm, and everyone laughed as though they knew what she was talking about. Then she said it was her pleasure to introduce the greatest humanist and intellectual in Poland.

  Everyone applauded again and Korczak came through the same door. He was wearing a paper crown, and people laughed at that. The heavy woman took a seat in the front row.

  “Someone should give that fat man in the back a chair,” Korczak said. “He looks much too well-to-do to stand.” The smaller children in the audience thought he was hilarious.

  “Everyone loves my rude remarks,” he said once they quieted down. “Even the dressed-up ladies and elegant gentlemen. Though they keep their distance and I never hear from them until their children are sick. Then it’s: ‘Please, please, you have to come,’ even if it’s the middle of the night.”

  “So he’s a doctor?” Adina whispered to my mother.

  My mother told her he was a famous doctor and he’d been an army doctor in the war between Russia and Japan and in the world war, and in the civil war in Russia.

  He apologized to what he called the better society in the crowd for his occasional use of Yiddish. He said he would like to present one of his radio talks, called The Loneliness of the Child, before standing aside for the main event of the evening, the home’s production that would showcase the most talented undersized citizens who had been gathered from Warsaw’s attics and basements. “That’s where you find some of the city’s most interesting people,” he said. “Forgotten, in someone’s basement.” He cleared his throat and cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief, taking his time. Then he put his glasses back on and began.

  It was funny at first but then got sadder. I stopped listening.

  When it was over everyone applauded again and the children set up the stage for the play.

  “I liked when he said that loneliness was the port from which he always sets out,” Zofia said.

  “I liked when he asked, ‘Do you steer the course or are you just carried along?’ ” my mother said.

  “I’m not just carried along,” Adina said.

  “You sound like Boris,” Zofia said.

  The play was called The Three Journeys of Hershkele. The hero, who wore a headdress he could barely keep on his head and that was never explained, hid on a plane bound for England, where he talked the English king into allowing all the Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Then he hid on a plane to Egypt, where he found a whole roomful of the pharoah’s gold to pay for everyone’s trip. Then he hid on a plane to Germany, where he met with Hitler. The boy who played Hitler was very good. When he saw all the gold Hitler was sorry for what he’d done and invited the Jews back, and the hero told him no thanks but said he’d use the leftover gold to buy milk and butter for the starving German children. At the end just the hero and Hitler remained onstage and Hitler thanked him and asked if there was anything he could do in return for the milk and butter and the hero said yes, that Hitler could make a law that all adults who pass children on the street must bend their heads in shame, and Hitler said that he would. Then the hero sang a song about the Ten Commandments and the whole cast did a dance and the thing was over.

  My mother applauded even after everyone else had stopped. She was weeping again. “You liked it too,” she said to me. Korczak came back out to thank the cast of the play and everyone applauded again. He thanked everyone for coming, and congratulated them all on being twice orphaned themselves, since they were stateless and Jewish. He told the adults to remember to approach children with affection for what they already were and with respect for what they could become. He told the children to remember that we couldn’t leave the world the way we found it. And to remember to wash our hands. And to drink boiled water. And to open the windows to get fresh air. He looked out the window closest to him and finished by saying that we should wait until it was warmer, though.

  EVEN ADINA THOUGHT THE OLD DOCTOR HAD BEEN worthwhile, even if part of the reason for that had been the cookies afterwards. Later she said she hadn’t seen cookies in she didn’t know how long and Boris got angry that we hadn’t swiped some for him and Lutek. When Zofia told him they weren’t really cookies, Adina said maybe they weren’t cookies but they’d been close enough.

  We were all hungry all the time. “I remember Mama fed us vegetables because she thought they were healthy,” Adina told us one morning, like she’d had a dream. We were in front of a shop for hernia belts and someone was shouting at their kids from the building’s roof. Someone behind us on the first floor kept telling his wife to add water to the carbide lamp. Someone else poured dirty oil from a windowsill higher up and it spattered on the sidewalk near our feet.

  Boris got us started trading the ration cards of people who’d died or left the ghetto, and he thought the best place was around the distribution shops when the mothers came by with their small children, and he was right. He and Lutek did the haggling because the rest of us couldn’t stand to see the kids’ faces while it went on. Lutek had gotten one boy’s wooden shoes by holding the ration cards under his mother’s nose and saying he was only asking her to throw in one extra item, and that if she wanted to trade she had to be able to imagine herself in another guy’s shoes. She’d taken the cards and used them for rutabagas and her son had gone home barefoot. But it was getting warmer. Zofia said it was already late in May though Boris thought it was still April. Lutek tried on the wooden shoes and said that just as he thought, they fit perfectly.

  “What is he contributing?” Boris said to Lutek, meaning me. But the girls told him to leave me alone.

  “My sister hated spinach,” Adina said. “But I liked it.”

  “Are you still talking about that?” Boris wanted to know.

  “My mother used to tell me I had to be so clean that my knees would shine,” Zofia said.

  I could see the lice where her hair was parted. “You’re still pretty clean,” I told her.

  Lutek told us their apartment was now cleaner because his father and some of the other porters had taken to using sawdust ovens, which were also cheaper than coal.

  “Do those keep you warm?” Adina asked.

  “Nothing keeps you warm,” he told her.

  “The ovens aren’t the problem,” Boris said. “Hello, Mother,” he said to a woman who came out of the shop with three small children, all of them weeping. “Is there any way I can be of help?”

  After they left he held up a heavy shawl. “It’s English,” he said, showing us the label. He and Lutek went back and forth over whether he might have given the mother less.

  We said goodbye an hour before curfew and I was halfway home when someone grabbed my collar. “I like my bootjack,” Lejkin said.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I told him, pulling free. “I have to get home.”

  “You always have to get home,” Lejkin said, as though this was some ongoing mystery.

  He walked along beside me, eating something that he didn’t offer to share.

  “My friends on Krochmalna Street want to keep better track of who’s doing what at the different gates,” he said. He meant the yellow police, who had moved their headquarters there in January. I knew because Lutek now took a different route through the small ghetto.

  “What’s that to me?” I asked.

  “You seem to be all over the place,” he said. “I just thought you might notice things.” />
  “I’m bad at noticing things,” I told him.

  “Well, whatever you do notice,” he said.

  I kept walking. I stopped at the trolley stop but no one was waiting there. I’d probably missed it.

  “It’s just a matter of keeping track of things,” he said. “It’s not as though anyone intends to do anything that’s bad for business.”

  I waited for a few minutes more and then started walking again. The top of one shoe had come completely loose and flapped with every step.

  “There are also opportunities I could let you know about when they arise,” he said. “There are some confiscated onions right now, for example, that haven’t yet been turned in.”

  “I think you’re the one who’s all over the place,” I told him.

  He shrugged like he was used to those kinds of compliments. “The Jewish Order Service, by the way, also has the responsibility of deciding which apartments to requisition, in terms of the further resettlement of the incoming population,” he said.

  “Well, our apartment’s already packed,” I said.

  “Oh, some apartments are fifteen and twenty to a room,” he told me. “You can’t imagine.”

  I stopped and tried to rewrap the cloth strips around my shoe. I couldn’t believe I was crying about a shoe.

  “And of course there’s always the question of what your friends might do once they hear you’re working with the Service,” he said. And when I didn’t answer that either he said, “Or have you already told them?

  “Well, think about it,” he said a block or two later, when I still hadn’t spoken. And when I looked back again after another half a block he was gone.

  THERE WAS A COMMOTION BY MY BUILDING. A GROUP of Germans were kicking at something between them and screaming in German at whatever they were kicking. I hadn’t heard men screaming like that before. People stopped on the street to watch. I didn’t want to get too close but they were in front of my door.

  It was someone on his side on the cobblestones and when he made a noise like he was in pain I knew it was my father. I stopped and then pushed closer like someone in line for the trolley. After a few more kicks the Germans stayed in a circle around him but talked with each other instead of screaming. While they inspected him he crawled around their legs. He saw me but didn’t make any sign. The feeling that I should do something lifted me onto my toes. I wanted to but when the time came to do it I lost my nerve. I stood there in the middle of the street.