by Jim Shepard
I couldn’t even do that right, I thought later. I sat on the sidewalk with my back to the wall. People stepped over my legs.
At curfew someone lifted me off the pavement. I was dozing and shaking from the chill. I was carried many blocks and then down some steps to the basement of a bombed-out house. The room where I was laid down onto a cot was very bright and all around me was noise and confusion. There were bunk beds made from rough boards against the walls. The place was filled with kids on the floor and on the bunks and all of them were dirty and all of them were making noise. Some were playing cards and others were playing with knives. No one seemed to be supervising them.
I couldn’t feel my feet. “This one’s in a bad way,” the man who’d been carrying me told someone else, and I recognized his voice. “This is a satellite shelter,” he told me when he saw that I was awake. “A place people can go who need to get off the streets for curfew. You can have a little soup and warm up and then tomorrow you can go home.”
“I don’t have a home,” I told him, and Korczak looked at me like he’d already known that was what I was going to say.
“Well, then, we’ll have to think about adding you to our little group,” he said. And the kids on the bunks made loud sounds of protest, to make it clear that was the last thing they needed.
THE REAL ORPHANAGE WAS NICER THAN THE shelter but the kids were the same. It was on Sienna Street facing the wall, as far south as you could go. One of the kids said they’d had to move again in October when the ghetto had gotten even smaller. Korczak and the heavy woman Stefa washed me. He said while they were doing it that he’d never seen such a dirty chest and armpits.
Everyone slept on the first floor in one big room and in the morning wooden chests and cupboards were dragged around, mostly by the heavy woman, to make areas where we could eat and study and play. She told the kids to help and some would and some wouldn’t. All of this went on while I stayed in bed, watching. “Who is he, the Prince?” another kid asked, and Korczak told him I was recovering from frostbite.
My feet were burning and while she was sliding a cupboard over near me the woman said I should set them in a pan of cold water, but she didn’t make me so I didn’t. I only got up for lunch and dinner and when I did it made my feet burn even more. Lunch was a wheat porridge ground up in a meat grinder and then steeped in boiling water and dinner was potato skins mushed into patties and pigweed with turnips. While the kids at my table ate they sang Julek and Mańka went out of town and kissed so hard the trees fell down.
“Who weeps at turnips?” a kid said when he saw what I was doing. But I was seeing Lutek still hanging onto his sack in the back of the blue policeman’s car.
“My eyes do this,” I told everyone at the table. “I don’t know why.”
After lunch there’d been a class in Hebrew in a corner of the room near my bed. I pulled the covers over my face. Korczak asked questions in Polish and the kids answered in gibberish. Sometimes he corrected them. His last question was “Are you happy here in Palestine?” and it sounded like everyone had the right answer. The woman said it was time for chores and I could hear everyone getting to their feet and when I pulled the covers down kids were sweeping the floors and washing the walls and wiping the windows. Everyone was calling for something and banging around and knocking into things. When that was finished they all came back near my bed again, and Korczak said it was time to read his column in the orphanage newspaper. This week’s column was called “Take Care with the Machine.” “The machine doesn’t understand; the machine is indifferent,” he read. He had his glasses on the end of his nose and used his finger to follow the print. “Put your finger in, it’ll cut it off; put your head in, it’ll cut that off too.” I got up to pee. My feet weren’t burning so much.
The toilet was in the back behind the kitchen. There were eleven kids in line for it. “Is this the only toilet?” I asked.
“This is the only toilet,” the kid ahead of me said without turning around.
Going back to bed I stopped at the window. It was bright outside. The sun had dried dead flies on the windowsills. The bricks under the sills moved like loose teeth where the mortar was gone. Magazine photographs tacked below were so speckled with holes they must have been targets for wall games.
The kid who’d been in front of me in line spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping the top step of the landing. I watched him. He kept his eyes on me while he worked. When he wasn’t sweeping he waved a hand around his face like a horse shoos flies away with its tail.
He had the cot next to me and shook me awake for breakfast the next morning. We had hot water and saccharine and bread. You could eat three pieces if you wanted. We got in line to be weighed and measured afterwards. While I waited a cripple in front of me waved his stump at me like a fin.
I was back on my bed looking at my feet when the kid with the broom carried over a pan of water filled to the brim and spilled some of it setting it on the floor next to me.
“Madame Stefa says to soak your feet in this,” he said.
“What’s floating in it?” I asked.
“How would I know?” he said.
I asked his name and he said Zygmuś. He said he’d banged his hand. While I soaked my feet he watched the blood swell along his fingernail and wiped it off on the floor, leaving red smears.
The heavy woman asked from across the room if there wasn’t something he was supposed to be doing and he told her he was helping me.
He introduced me to the kid two beds over. The kid was Mietek from the Chłodna Street gate but he acted like he’d never seen me. Zygmuś said they were best friends but the kid didn’t look up and just sat on his bed staring at his rotten boots.
I asked what was wrong with him and Zygmuś said the kid’s mother had been sick but had promised him she wouldn’t die until he was safe in the orphanage. Then she died as soon as he got there.
“Pan Doctor says he’s suffering from pangs of conscience,” Zygmuś said. The kid didn’t seem to hear.
The joke around the orphanage was that no one had ever seen the kid smile, Zygmuś said. The kid said without smiling, “That’s not true. I smile all the time.” Then he turned away from us.
“What’s he holding on to?” I asked.
“That’s his dead brother’s prayer book,” Zygmuś said.
The heavy woman finally got him working and I sat there soaking my feet. I was happy I was warm and not on the street. Later Korczak stood over me and gestured at the pan and asked to take a look. He had this expression like he knew what needed to be done but was being prevented from doing it. His glasses had thumbprints on the lenses. A kid who was six or seven kicked down some girls’ toy city in the play area and they all started yelling and crying.
“Is that Jerzyk?” the heavy woman asked him from across the room.
“That’s Jerzyk,” he said to me like we were sharing a secret. He lifted my foot out of the pan and squeezed my toes. He said, “For two years he’s been making my life miserable. He made everyone miserable in kindergarten. I wrote an article about him that advocated penal colonies. And he’s so young, yet! Imagine what’ll happen when he’s grown.”
Two of the older kids took Jerzyk by the arms and pulled him away from the girls. Korczak decided my feet had healed enough for me to work and told the heavy woman so and she came over and gave me the job of the chamber pots, which she said had to be rinsed with ammonia. She called it starting at the bottom. I asked why they needed chamber pots when they had a toilet and she said that one toilet served a hundred and fifty children and twenty staff members. She also said that if I was finished asking questions, then this might be a good time to start earning my keep.
AFTER THE LIGHTS WERE SWITCHED OFF THAT NIGHT and we were settled on our cots Korczak appeared out of the darkness and sat on mine. “I saw you at the window this afternoon,” he said. He was being as quiet as he could. “It’s annoying to have to stand on tiptoe and barely see out, isn’t it? Like n
ot being able to see in a crowd.” I agreed with him. “Tomorrow is Thursday and Thursday is when the admissions committee meets to review the new applicants,” he added. “Has Madame Stefa talked to you about the application?” After I shook my head he asked, “Can you write?”
“A little,” I told him.
“Do I intrude on your business?” he asked Zygmuś. Zygmuś rolled over on his cot.
“She’ll help you with it tomorrow,” he told me. “Do you have any family at all?”
I cleared my throat and had nowhere to spit so I swallowed it. “You’ll be fine,” he said, after he put a hand on my face and felt my tears.
My weeping seemed to tire him out. “The whole thing’s become just a formality anyway,” he said. “Someone mentions the candidate, no one says anything, we all stare into space, and then after a few minutes someone else asks who it was we were talking about in the first place. Someone makes a motion to accept, someone else complains about lunch, and the discussions slide around like a drunk on an icy hill.”
A few other kids rolled over or made other noises. At the far end, one snored like a snuffling pig. “Everyone starts out with big plans,” I told him. “Then they figure out that’s not how things are going to be.”
He laughed to himself. “The Book of Aron, chapter 2, verse 2,” he said. “And mostly what they achieve is weakened eyesight and tired feet.”
His ears looked even wider and his neck even thinner in the dark. I didn’t know what he wanted. “When I think about all the strength I squandered in just blundering around,” he said.
He asked if I did a good job on the chamber pots. I told him I did. He told me their condition would often let you know the quality of an orphanage.
He stayed where he was sitting. He seemed to be listening to everyone’s breathing.
I asked if he remembered that boy he was carrying after the city surrendered. The one who needed the shoes.
“That boy,” he said. “Of course. The morning the British entered the war we joined a crowd outside their embassy. Poles and Jews rubbing shoulders like brothers again! Everyone singing ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost!’ That same afternoon seven shells hit the orphanage. One blew out the windowpanes of the dining hall and another blew my hat off. I remember telling him we had to leave the street because my bald head was too clear a target for the planes.”
“Did he ever get his shoes?” I asked. But even in the dark I could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“He used to go with me on my rounds,” he said. “After the bombing we got a storekeeper to donate her lentils by arguing that the Germans would confiscate them anyway. I always remind those I’m asking that it’s Jewish honor I’m upholding and they can either give to my orphans or the Germans. He was a lot like the boy who got into trouble today,” he said. “Wherever a bruise or a bump on the head was involved, there he was.”
“Bad luck,” I said.
“There are people who just don’t think,” he said, “just like some don’t smoke.”
I didn’t answer. I wanted someone to miss me like that.
“But you couldn’t get angry with him,” he said. “It’s like Słowacki said: God loves power the way he loves wild horses.”
He patted my leg like he thought I was the boy who was gone. “A lot of people are afraid to sleep during the day because they worry it’ll spoil their night,” he said. “It’s the reverse with me.”
I took his hand and he didn’t move it away. Something about that made me start weeping again.
“Lately I’ve been smelling schmaltz at night,” he told me. “Do you smell it?”
I shook my head.
“It drives me crazy,” he said.
“I don’t smell it,” I said.
“I think about Europe in Polish,” he said. “And I think about Palestine in Hebrew. But I think about eating in Yiddish.”
“I just think about eating,” I said. It made him chuckle again.
He told me the next day I should help with the coal delivery and I said I would. He started talking to himself about it. He said now you had to give the coal man twenty złotys extra to get whole pieces and not just chips. He said if the rumors about the Germans requisitioning even more were true, then we could all start burning furniture. Of course, he said, if you gave the Jews a single quiet day, each one of them would start producing rumors.
“Everyone wants to figure out what to do next,” I told him.
“We can’t even see to the bottom of the cup we hold in our hands,” he said, then blew his nose into a handkerchief and wished me a good night.
“Good night,” Zygmuś said.
“My apologies for having disturbed you,” Korczak told him.
“What was that all about?” someone else said out of the darkness after he’d left.
“Pan Doctor isn’t doing so well,” Zygmuś said. I could hear his yawn.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Go to sleep,” he answered.
I TURNED OUT TO BE GOOD AT UNLOADING COAL, which meant I was covered in coal dust from the waist down and not head to toe. I also helped with a shipment of groats that the heavy woman mixed with horse blood for our breakfast. I was invited to join the choir and told them I couldn’t sing, and invited to join the drama club and said I couldn’t act. The heavy woman talked to me about my application and seemed to think my situation was more than pathetic enough and I needn’t worry about being kicked out onto the street. And she told me to please start calling her Madame Stefa.
The Germans told Korczak the windowpanes now needed to be covered with black paper at night and so she sat me at a worktable and carried over a crate filled with paste and scissors and rolls of black paper and put me in charge of four other kids in making the shades. When they wouldn’t listen to me she told Zygmuś to help out. He asked why it was his job but she only gestured to where she wanted him to sit and then left. He gathered up his friend Mietek and two others and told them that it was the health officer’s orders and when Mietek asked why he called her the health officer, Zygmuś said that the real health officer wouldn’t speak to Jews but just pointed at the pots he wanted lifted in order to see whether the bottoms were clean.
He had me measure and the others do the cutting and pasting. The kids talked about nothing but eating. One said that when he was young he could go all day without eating but now he was an empty pot. He said that the soup was no sooner poured down into his stomach than he was hungry again. He had the same blank and accepting expression as my little brother and I had to stop looking at him. I moved a stepstool over to the windows and did arm lengths to estimate sizes.
One of the other kids asked Zygmuś if he had any brothers or sisters and he said he had three sisters. He said his parents used to have a mill that ground buckwheat flour and one day he and his sisters had gone to get milk and when they returned, people were robbing the mill and a neighbor was saying, “You people are robbing these kids and they’re orphans,” and that’s how they found out their parents had been killed. He said his older sister had then been attacked by some German soldiers and had run away over the Russian border and that really put them out of business as a family since she’d been the only one left who could cook.
Madame Stefa was in charge of the daily routine. Her scoldings always began with “Let me tell you” and when she was asked a question she didn’t want to answer she always said, “Let’s not worry about it.”
Korczak spent two days a week arranging for help for other orphanages and the rest of the time he went begging for us. On those days he left early and returned late and always took a different boy. He begged at the Jewish Community Office and the homes of the rich or the collaborators and outside the cafés. The heavy woman worried about him. She said when he was gone that he came back in the evenings worn out from having had to raise hell over a barrel of sauerkraut.
Zygmuś said the kids he picked to go along were the ones who’d been with him since they were sma
ll, that he liked the kids he’d raised more than the rest.
I watched him late at night when he got back. With only one light on, he looked ancient. His hands shook and he rationed his cigarettes and vodka with saccharine and every few minutes he cleared his throat.
“So you’re up again,” he said one night when he finally saw me watching. “Aren’t you tired? Don’t we give you enough to do?”
I was always tired, I told him. And whatever I had to do I couldn’t handle.
“So you’re not one of my fire-eaters?” he asked. “Like your friend Zygmuś? Whose mother rode stags through the forest and ate horses?”
My mother took in washing, I told him.
“I remember you from the gang at the gate,” he said. And when I apologized he told me it was all right. I hadn’t been the cruel one and everyone had to do what they needed to in order to get by. All doors opened before the hungry.
He shook me awake on my cot the next day and told me to get dressed because I was coming with him.
When we got outside it was still dark. I didn’t want to be back out on the streets, I told him. He said he understood.
He talked nonstop as he walked. He said maybe today we’d visit the Germans. He said the officer assigned to supervise the orphanage had been a pediatrician himself and always referred to Korczak as his “respected colleague” and thought that was hilarious. He said the officer called the orphanage his “republic of swindlers” and said the Jews managed to adjust to every situation but never knew how good they had it, like the man who complained he had no golden shoes but didn’t realize that he was soon to lose his legs.
It was windy and muddy and cold and everyone who was out early moved around as if fed up with his own exhaustion. Most were beggars who’d been out all night. We stopped next to a girl with bare arms squatting in front of a little wagon carrying frozen and rotted rutabagas. A younger girl was curled up under the wagon with her feet covered in newspaper wrapped and tied into the shape of shoes. Korczak knelt next to her and put something in her hand. Both girls did everything slowly.