by Jim Shepard
He had his knees up and his shoulders hunched and a German gave him one more kick that spun him around. Then he just lay there. I thought a son would go to him or scream at the Germans himself. They exchanged a few more comments with some curious Germans on the other side of the street. Then they all started shoving and haranguing one another and left.
A few people approached him, including me. The sleeves and back of his coat were soaked in mud. “Don’t,” he said when I reached to help him up. He got onto his hands and knees and then his feet, tipping around a little, and then headed off away from our door.
I followed him. His walk got more like his old walk. At the first corner we came to, he turned and I caught up with him. Every so often I looked up at his face. He turned again at the next corner, and then again. When the fourth turn brought us back to our block, he stopped to make sure the Germans were gone. At our door he had me go up the front steps ahead of him.
My mother asked what had happened and he told her he’d been knocked down by a wagon. She got upset and boiled some water to help him clean himself up and said he could’ve been killed. He told her to sew some patches on my coat’s elbows, and that everything was sticking out on me. He washed his face at the sink for a long time. My mother was also upset about his coat, which was not only muddy but also had lost one of its pockets. She moaned and carried on about the lining and finally my father shouted at her to stop going on and on about the coat, and she was scared and hurt enough that she didn’t say anything else.
Boris’s father poked his head in to ask if everything was okay. When no one answered, Boris called from the hallway, “He got hit by a wagon.” My father went back to washing his face.
For a time afterwards whenever I closed my eyes I saw him on the street. I couldn’t sleep at night, such strange thoughts kept coming into my head. I woke with blood in my mouth and my mother said it looked like I’d bitten my tongue.
He was different after that and didn’t go back to work for a few days. He sat at the kitchen table by the window with his back to everyone holding a wet cloth to his head and nursing a cup of tea my mother made him. She said it was all right and that we just needed to give him some room. He looked at me sometimes as if the Germans had kicked the courage out of both of us. When Boris and I left the apartment and I said goodbye, he gave a little wave.
IN JUNE IT GOT SO HOT NO ONE COULD SLEEP. THEN on the one night it got cooler the Germans decided to move their whole army past our apartment.
All night tanks ground through the streets and over the Vistula bridge. Trucks thundered along behind them. We all went to the window to watch; you couldn’t rest anyway. The whole apartment shook and anything that was loose jingled and rattled. We had to take our teacups down from the shelf. Every few hours my mother exclaimed about how long it was going on. At first my father tried to stay in bed but even he had to get up after a while. Once the sun came up all of us except my mother went down to the sidewalk to get a better view.
The procession went on until noon. All the Germans in Germany were being trucked through to somewhere. Boris’s father said that never in his life had he seen such machines as the Germans had, but I could barely hear him because of the noise. Soldiers hung off everything everywhere. No one could cross the street. A stray dog tried it at a run and almost lost its tail.
All sorts of German slogans were painted in white on the tanks’ sides. The one we saw most often was STALIN, WIR KOMMEN.
Some of the smaller kids got excited by the huge trucks that were pulling gigantic cannons. The diesel exhaust was dark brown and gave us all headaches, so we went back inside.
That night we heard explosions in the city and the next morning were told that the Russians had bombed Warsaw. Bombs had fallen on Okęcie, Teatralny Square, and a trolley near the Kierbedź Bridge, killing everyone on board.
“Why do you keep going on about your mother?” Boris asked later that morning. “Do you think we all want to hear about your mother? Don’t we all have mothers to worry about?”
“I certainly have to worry about mine,” Adina agreed.
The streets were full of sick people and everyone said the typhus was still spreading. My father had told my mother that God drowned the mangy to save the rest of the flock and my mother had slapped him. I’d told the gang about it. “And your father just let her slap him?” Boris asked. He thought even the typhus might bring us some business and again he turned out to be right when Lejkin came to my apartment and said the Service was recruiting a special unit that would hang disinfection and quarantine signs for extra ration cards. He let me bring along the whole group and we hung signs for three days. “How did he come to find you?” Zofia wanted to know while we were hanging one over a disinfection station.
“Maybe he likes me,” I told her.
“No one likes you,” Boris said.
“He makes a good point,” Adina said.
I used my extra cards to buy rye flour, kasha, and potatoes. Boris brought a plateful of meat soup home for each member of his family.
My mother checked us all for rashes. She rubbed my hand raw to recheck a spot she was anxious about. “The Germans threw us all on top of one another and turned loose the epidemic they were trying to prevent,” she said.
“Won’t they be shocked to hear that,” my father told her.
Zofia’s mother brought Salcia to the hospital for a blood infection and was told that none of the hospitals had room any longer for other kinds of sick people. All four were now only epidemic hospitals. She said that her father was heartbroken because both of the Brysz girls had died in the Stawki hospital.
“Who are the Brysz girls?” I asked, and she reminded me. “Now I remember,” I told her.
“Sh’maya thinks only of himself,” she said, and Boris and Lutek laughed.
“Aron,” I said. “Aron thinks only of himself.”
“Don’t you ever think about anyone else?” she asked. “In you Moses dies of thirst and the tablets turn to sand.”
“What does that mean?” I wanted to know.
“It’s something my grandfather used to say,” she said. “When someone disappointed him.”
“What did I do?” I said.
“You disappointed her,” Boris explained.
“What does everyone understand that I don’t?” I said. I was tired of being the one that no one cared about. Especially her. I wanted to hit someone.
“You keep acting as though everything is normal,” Zofia said.
“Why do you say that about me and not the others?” I asked.
“Oh, stop pestering me,” she said.
“I’m not pestering you,” I told her.
“And go wash yourself,” she said, then took Adina’s hand and left.
SOMEONE POUNDED ON OUR DOOR THE NEXT MORNING before it was fully light. My mother had to step over me in the hallway to see who it was. When she opened the door a German said to her, “I need twenty people.” His Polish was lousy but we understood him. He looked at us on the floor and then stepped over us and searched the apartment. He switched to German in the bedrooms, saying “Raus, raus.” He took my father and brothers and Boris’s father out into the hall with him. Before they shut the door we could see a yellow policeman out there too. They talked and my mother went from the door to the stove to the door again and then my father came back in and said, “They told us we’re all going into a labor battalion for a few days and that everything’s going to be all right. We’re going to be working and we’re going to be fed.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no,” my mother said, and Boris shouted for someone to shut the door, that there was a draft.
“Stop,” my father told her. “At least with the Germans we know we’ll get a noontime meal. A little hot soup or something.” She argued with him but he told her the work detail was good news since those coming back could smuggle food with them. He kissed her and bent down and kissed me. He looked into my eyes like he was going to say something, the
n stood up and stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him.
Afterwards my mother looked at us like disaster was coming out of the walls. “Get her out of here,” Boris’s mother finally told me. “I’ll finish the cleaning. Go stand in line somewhere,” she told my mother, and pulled the rag from her hands. “Do something to feed your family.”
My mother sat at the kitchen table with her palms over her face. “Come on,” I told her. “There’s no point in waiting around with folded hands.”
This was one of her sayings and it got her to her feet. She found her hat and bag and led me out the door.
The shops on Gęsia were empty and the cartons on display in the windows were labeled EMPTY BOXES. A woman who was sweeping rubbish back and forth outside one of the shops with an old straw broom told her some meat was being brought in on Grzybowska from one of the slaughterhouses later that morning, so we walked all the way over there.
On Dzielna we passed a crowd around two women ladling out gray milk from a dirty can. My mother read their cardboard sign and then led me away, saying they were asking too much.
She talked to herself while she walked. She said that it didn’t cost us a thing to look. She said maybe they’d put the horsemeat in vinegar and water so it would soften up.
She fixed her shoe in front of a photographic studio in an arcade. The window display said WEHRMACHT SOLDATEN. A rickshaw went by and she complained that everyone who had an arm and a leg had hopped up on a bicycle and made like a Chinese coolie.
“Your poor father,” she said.
“You’re still limping,” I told her.
“They should only be taking single men. At first they were only taking single men for the work details,” she said. “So there were a lot of weddings.”
“Do you need to fix your shoe again?” I said.
“How’re yours?” she asked.
“The twine worked,” I told her.
We passed a boy violinist playing “Ba’al Shem Tov” for coins. He stopped playing until I moved farther away from his cup.
“I don’t know why the Germans always find your father,” she said. “On the Sabbath two of them beat him for not saluting.”
“I saw the marks,” I said.
“Another beat him because he did salute,” she said. “That one told him, ‘You’re not in my army.’ ”
“Almost everyone comes back from the work details in two or three days,” I finally told her.
“I thought they’d stay here a few months, make us work hard and then leave and we’d have our peace back,” she said.
“The Germans?” I said. She didn’t answer.
“Do you think your friend in the Jewish police could help us find out where they took them?” she asked. “The little pisher with the big ears?”
“He’s not my friend,” I said. “How do you know about him?”
“He said he was,” she said. “He came by looking for you.”
“What did he want?” I asked.
“I just said he wanted to find you,” she told me. “Maybe this place,” she said, and stepped into an apartment building. But the shop that had been there was gone. Instead there was a small round table in a bare room with an old man who’d tried to hide his beard by wrapping a rag around his face like he had a toothache.
“Your friend’s one of those smart policemen who don’t like having to order people around and so are always telling you why something has to be done,” she said once we were back out on the street. “You can see in their eyes that they want to show it’s not up to them.”
“He’s not my friend,” I told her. “But if I see him I’ll ask if he knows anything.”
She led us onto the wooden bridge across Przebieg Street and stopped at the top next to other people who were looking out at the Vistula. We watched a barge float down the river. We could see a little green on the other side. She put a hand on my shoulder and I put one on her back.
Finally we came down off the bridge. “When I was a girl and I was hungry I just stood in front of pastry shops,” she told me. “As if just looking would fill me up. One time I ate pickles I stole from a barrel and got diarrhea.”
“I guess that taught you not to steal,” I said.
“Stealing is always wrong,” she said.
“Starving is always wrong,” I told her.
She asked if I knew they now said, “He sold the pot from his kitchen” instead of “He sold the shirt off his back,” since without a pot you have nothing to cook with.
“I did know that,” I told her.
“It’s hard to keep the peace at mealtimes if families have to look at other families’ fuller plates,” she said.
I was sick of everything including her. I walked with her like she was my biggest problem.
She looked at me like she knew what I was thinking. “I’m angry at the rich for not doing their duty for the poor,” she finally said.
“Why should they help us?” I asked.
“You can hear the street children, hungry all night,” she said.
“Who isn’t,” I said.
“The rich people,” she said. “And they should help more than they do.”
On Grzybowska we didn’t see anyone and then two men gestured us into an apartment where two women were already arguing with them around an open barrel.
“It’s meat,” one of the men said. “You grind it up and it’s still meat.”
“You should be ashamed,” one of the women said. “I’m not eating ground up assholes.”
“No one said you had to eat anything,” the man told her.
My mother pulled me back out onto the street. “There’s another shop on Ceglana,” she said. Her face made me ashamed of how I’d been thinking. We took turns squeezing each other’s hand as we walked. When we came to a long line I asked if this was it.
“This is the place,” she said.
Kids went up and down the line selling cigarettes and candy. A yellow policeman was there to keep the street gangs from shoving to the front. A woman my mother knew asked if she was well and how she was managing and my mother shrugged and said, “With us, nothing’s happy.”
The flour was thirty-five złotys per kilo. There was no more of the bread made from green wheat and only a few loaves made from bran and potato peelings. She bought a kilo for sixteen złotys. It was sticky but it smelled dry. She turned it over a few times in her hands. “If they mix in too much sawdust it feels like you’re eating off the street,” she said as we walked. She pressed her face to the loaf when she thought I wasn’t looking. We went a few blocks before she finally packed it away in her bag. Then she thumped it twice for good luck and took my hand again and we headed home.
OUR GANG HAD TROUBLE WITH ANOTHER GANG. They outnumbered us. We sent off two pillowcases of butter beans we stole with Zofia and Adina but outsmarted ourselves because the other gang followed them and took the beans. They also knocked Adina down when she tried to stop them. She got up and slapped their leader’s face and they kicked her.
“Aron and I are going to take care of it,” Boris told the girls.
“We are?” I said.
“You are?” Lutek said. “Why him?”
“Because three people would be too many,” Boris said.
“Why not me?” Lutek said.
“Because it’s time he did something around here,” Boris said.
“What are you going to do?” Adina asked.
“We’re going to impose a tariff,” Boris said.
“What does that mean?” she wanted to know. But he said she’d find out.
The next morning he led me back to the Chłodna Street gate. “That one’s the leader,” he said, pointing out a boy in a plaid cap and suspenders loafing beside a family that was selling something out of a box on the street.
“How do you know?” I asked, but he ignored me. He took the jar of honey his family had brought with them out of his shirt front and handed it to me.
“When I wa
s little I told myself that if I wasn’t going to be taller than anyone else I could at least be meaner,” he said. He told me to wait a half hour and then to let the boy see the honey when I passed him and to lead him to Mirów. He said to make sure I stayed on the left side of the street coming down Mirów and if more than two of them followed me then I should take off my cap once I turned onto Elektoralna. He said not to sweat it and that I wouldn’t lose a hair on my head.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Shut up and carry the honey,” he said.
“We don’t even know what he’s like,” I told him.
“He’s a bandit, like us,” he said.
I waited and then did as he said. At first I thought it hadn’t worked but on Solna when I looked back I saw the kid turn towards a shop window.
On Elektoralna there were fewer people around, and even fewer on Mirów, since it was so short and led directly to the wall. Down that far there weren’t any occupied buildings, only a doorway with half a sign over it standing in the ruins. I could see in a window across the street that the kid had gotten closer. What are you going to do when you run out of street? I wondered as I passed the doorway and saw Boris down in the rubble with a finger to his mouth and a brick in his other hand.
I turned to face the kid and he stopped but he’d already come too far and Boris swung the brick into the side of his plaid cap and knocked him to the sidewalk and then grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into where the cellar had fallen and no one could see us from the street. I followed him. Boris dumped him there and then picked up another brick and hit him again. It sounded like a shovel going into dirt.
“What did you do?” I asked. I sounded like a baby.