by Jim Shepard
“Enough about the Germans,” he said, once we started walking again. He blew on his hands. He talked about how some of the orphanage girls had surprised him with a movie they made with a waxed paper box and electric bulb.
I asked where we were going and he asked if it mattered. He said that given one circumstance or another we were all tied up like dogs on a chain.
After I didn’t answer he apologized for saying something so unhelpful.
His apology made him quiet. In the darkness we passed Przejazd Street and the Immortal Hole and the building with the slanted roof and the dormers.
He said that in one house the previous week he found six children on a wet and rotting mattress. And when I still didn’t say anything he asked who wasn’t sad? He said the world was one great sadness. He said what we needed to do was tell ourselves that we weren’t living in the worst place in the world but instead were surrounded by grasshoppers and glowworms.
From his expression it didn’t look like he was being ironic. I told him again that I didn’t want to be out on the street and when he didn’t answer I said I didn’t want to be at the orphanage either. He said I was free to leave and I hated him for making me feel the way I did and hated myself even more for not just being dead somewhere.
The sun came up and he asked if I was at least happy to be out in the sunshine. I rubbed my arms and face and he asked if I’d heard him. I told him that whether I was happy or unhappy, I took things as I found them. He said his mother used to say when it was sunny and he was particularly gloomy that not even a Jew could suffer on a day like today.
Every few steps now someone was begging or selling or had come out of a hole and was trying to keep warm. One was wrapped in a quilt that was losing feathers in the wind. Someone was selling milk out of their house and we got in line for some. “Wherever there’s a line I stand in it, no matter what they’re selling, because I know I’m going to get something,” he joked.
We began our begging at a rich man’s house. He rang the bell. The man when he answered the door said, “Oh, Pan Doctor, you’re killing me here,” instead of hello, and Korczak asked him what was worse than being an old man and then answered being an old Jew. And what was worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless. And worse than that? An old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful. And worse than that, an old Jew who was penniless and unresourceful and who bore the burden of a large family. And worse than that, someone whose large family were all children. And worse than that, children who were starving.
The man disappeared from the door and returned with some money and dumped it into a sack Korczak held out. Then he excused himself and said good morning and shut the door while Korczak looked into the sack.
He led me to the next house. He said he himself had been well-to-do until his father had to be put into a mental hospital. And that’s when he learned what it meant to have to turn to adults for help. Adulthood was a privileged position against which he’d had to struggle. He’d heard a lot about the proletariat as a teenager, but the world’s oldest proletariat was the child. The child was hounded even by those who loved him. He’d decided then and there that he’d become the father of orphans and would always work for those who should come first but always came last.
“Like you, I was always slow doing everything,” he said. “When my grandmother would watch me at a chore she’d always say, ‘You. Philosopher.’ ”
“When my father called for my help he always said, ‘Hey! Bungler!’ ” I told him.
“And you always helped him,” he said.
“I didn’t like to work,” I told him.
“The laziest person I ever knew was a man named Krylov who spent the entirety of his adult years on his couch, with all of his books beneath it,” he said. “He would just reach down and read whatever came to his hand.”
We walked to other houses and when the people who answered the door said no he wouldn’t go away. He just repeated, “But my children. My children.” I thought about my mother. “Stay still while I’m talking,” he told me between houses.
At lunchtime we stood inside the door of a café and he shouted, “Is there someone here who can get my children through the winter?” And a man called him over and he approached some others, thanking those who gave and saying about what went into the sack, “Not enough, not enough.” In the afternoon we stopped at the post office to go through the packages that were undeliverable after the German soldiers had opened them.
Walking back to the orphanage we passed Mrs. Melecówna’s parlor. The sidewalk was blocked by kids standing with their hands out and weeping. He gave something to each.
After we’d gone a few blocks I asked if he wanted to rest because he looked so tired. He said we’d gotten to the point where dead children no longer impressed us. He said that if a man couldn’t look on calmly at the death of another then his own life was worth a hundred times more. He was having enough trouble walking that he leaned on each house railing we passed. He said it was like how some people still went to visit relatives who’d been taken to the hospital.
A pack of kids ran by us and almost knocked him down. He half-sat against a post. His breathing sounded like my mother’s and I thought I would have to run away and leave him on the street if he kept making those sounds. He said to himself that the smugglers lived a little longer and the unenterprising died in silence.
Then he didn’t speak again until we turned onto Sienna and could see the orphanage. I thought if he died on the street, where would I be then? He took my hand to stop me and looked at where we were going like the building itself could kill him.
Jerzyk and some other boy were playing in the street with some rope, taking turns whipping each other. We could hear their laughter. “You know what I dream of?” Korczak said. “A room in Jerusalem with a table and something to write on. Transparent walls so I wouldn’t miss a single sunrise or sunset. And I’m just the silent Jew from who knows where.”
We stood where he’d stopped us. He held the lamppost to keep himself steady. Then he made an after-you gesture with a bow and cleared his throat behind me all the way down the block.
“DID YOU THINK YOU WERE GOING TO HIDE IN THAT orphanage until the war was over?” Lejkin asked. I hadn’t realized he was behind me on the street. I’d been sent out with Zygmuś and a handcart to pick up a barrel of pickles someone had told Korczak he’d donate.
“Let’s have a talk,” Lejkin said. “Your friend can handle the stolen goods.”
I stopped and Zygmuś kept pulling. He rattled the cart over the trolley tracks and around the corner and out of sight.
“They’re not stolen,” I said.
“Our friend Obersturmführer Witossek thought I should remind you that you’re still a member of the anti-crime unit,” Lejkin said. “It’s not as though our problems have gone away while you’ve been settling in at your new home.”
I shoved him as hard as I could. “You said they weren’t hunting smugglers,” I said.
He straightened his collar and stuck out his chin. “The Germans do what the Germans do,” he said. “What you want to remember is how to keep them from doing it to you.”
He said I should let him buy me a hot chocolate and pulled me to a café down the street.
The café was full and warm enough from its stove that its windows ran with condensation. Outside of it a boy sat cross-legged with a baby next to him on a spread handkerchief, the baby on its side and panting like a pigeon. Inside we sat there looking at each other and he handed me a napkin for my eyes. “You cry more than any other person I know,” he said. A woman approached our table and he said, “Watch: this one carries a photograph of herself from happier days to show what a wreck she’s become.”
When the waiter came he ordered for me. He asked if I’d heard about Lübeck and when I said no he told me, after making certain no Germans were near, that the British had bombed it flat. When I didn’t say anything he said that everyone in the Order Service, optimists and pess
imists alike, believed Germany would lose in the end, but the pessimists claimed that before that happened Germany would gain control of the world. The optimists said Germany had waged total war in Poland, lightning war in France, an installment war in England, and a fatal war in Russia. He said people had started writing 1812, the year of Napoleon’s defeat, on the walls.
He said he’d asked Witossek when he thought the war would end and Witossek had answered when Germans were eating once a day and Jews once a month.
When the hot chocolates arrived he toasted to good fortune and when I asked what good fortune he said he was moving up in the Order Service and was now Szeryński’s deputy. So you could say he was second in command of the entire yellow police.
He was just making conversation, he said finally, when I still hadn’t answered.
I told him I needed to get back.
He said they would like me to tour certain areas with them in case I might have some hard-won knowledge that would come in handy.
“You want me to help you kill someone else?” I said.
He asked if I wanted my hot chocolate and when I didn’t answer he drank it. “The requisitioning is about to get more extreme,” he said. “No potatoes. No bread. No coal for the orphanages but plenty for the coffeehouses.”
What could any of us do, I told him. None of us had any luck.
“Think of it like this,” he said. “Are we to dole out spoonfuls to everyone, with the result that no one will survive? Or give a fuller measure to the few?”
“I need to get back,” I said.
“I’m going to talk to you as though you can understand,” he said. “Shyster to shyster, as it were. Those with no talent for swindling always suffer.” He gestured outside. “You and I both know that no compassion can be expected from the Germans. Whether we live or die depends on how long they’re in power. If they have enough time, they’ll kill us all. If not, some can be saved.”
I stood up and he didn’t try to stop me. “We won’t need you until the end of the week,” he said.
“Why do you need me?” I said. “Why can’t you get someone else?”
He ran his finger around the inside of my cup. “It’ll help to think about others the way my boss Szeryński does,” he said, then stood up himself and made an after-you gesture like Korczak’s. “He says that refugees are like autumn leaves.”
He followed me out onto the sidewalk. It had begun to snow and he pulled up his collar and then pulled up mine. Then he cleaned off his seat and got on his bicycle and rode away. Because of the snow it slipped and slid all over on the cobblestones and he had to put his foot out every so often for balance.
THE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS SLEPT IN A BUILDING next door but Korczak had his office and bed on the floor above us in what everyone called the isolation ward for the kids who were the sickest. His bed and night table were in the middle of the room with the kids’ beds arranged around them. Each bed had a pail next to it on the floor and all the kids had compresses on their heads. Korczak looked to be asleep, even though his lamp was lit and his clothes were still on. The kids were asleep. It was after four in the morning.
There was a heel of black bread on the table and another piece in his hand, as if he’d fallen asleep eating.
I had crept up the stairs to talk to him. I heard a noise and hid behind his desk and then Madame Stefa appeared in the doorway and watched him sleep before moving over to the side of his bed.
“I always try to nap for an hour before the beehive starts to buzz,” he told her, and I realized he was awake though his eyes were still closed. “When I was a child, I pretended to be asleep and then opened my eyes suddenly so I could see my guardian angel before he could hide.”
She lowered herself to sit on the edge of one of the kids’ beds. She looked as tired as he did. “How was your day today?” she asked. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.” And I could hear in her voice what I’d heard in my mother’s when she’d asked me for news.
“Ten hours and seven calls,” he said. “Fifty złotys and another promise of five a month.”
She said no one expected him to spend ten hours tramping around in the cold and that his ailments were not going to allow it.
“Which ailments are those?” he asked. He was still on his back but his hand was now over his eyes.
“Your weakened heart muscle. Your pleurisy from pneumonia. Your bladder trouble. Your swollen legs and feet,” she said. “Your hernia.”
They were quiet. “It’s not funny,” she said.
“How did the doctor who refused to perform the hernia operation put it?” he asked. “My health is in ruins.”
Go downstairs, I thought to myself. I needed to talk to someone about Lejkin. But what would I say?
“You cough and you complain and then you go out without your sweater,” Madame Stefa said.
“What about you? One can’t give you anything,” Korczak said.
He lifted his hand from his eyes and saw her looking at the vodka and water on the table. “Have you noticed that bread and water taste better at night?” he asked.
“And what happens when someone takes you off the street?” she asked. “Where will we be then?”
Her anger made him angry too. “Who says that when I go out the Germans will be about?” he said. “And if they are, who says they’ll be on my street? And if they are, who says they’ll choose me? And if they do, who says they won’t be persuaded by what I have to tell them?”
“I’m just asking if it’s worth the risk for such a little bit of money,” she said.
He made a noise with his mouth. Then he said, “You know, when I was a child I told my teachers that I knew how to remake the world. Throw away all the money was always step one. My plan always broke down at step two.”
She closed her shawl around her neck with one hand. It was cold. The janitor’s son called up from the courtyard to complain about the light. He said it looked like Hanukkah and he didn’t want to have to tell them again. Madame Stefa went to the windowsill and refastened the blackout paper.
“I have a recurring dream in which one of my boys says about me, ‘He went to sleep when we needed him most,’ ” Korczak said.
“You can’t do everything,” she said.
“How much land have I tilled?” he said. “How much bread have I baked? How many trees have I planted? How many bricks have I laid? How many buttons have I sewn, how many garments have I patched?”
“Sssh,” she told him. “Don’t work yourself up.”
“My father called me a clod and an idiot and a crybaby and an ass,” he said. “He was right. And so were those who believed in me.”
I realized they were talking about something else completely and that I didn’t know how anyone’s mind worked, including my own.
“I know you never promised me anything,” she said. “And I lie awake telling myself, Stefa, you old fool, you got what you deserved.”
“The most splendid assumption still needs verification,” he told her.
“I just always believed that one receives in order to nourish,” she said.
“So what is love?” he asked. “Is it always given to those who deserve it? How do we know if we love enough? How do we learn to love more?”
The room smelled of cigarettes and feet. The blackout paper came loose again and outside the window it was starting to get light.
“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.
“From seven to fourteen I was permanently in love,” he said, “and always with a different girl.”
The windowpanes rattled and it looked like he was listening to the wind. He gave a big sigh.
“I always think that maybe if I hadn’t been so ugly,” she said.
“I tell everyone, ‘Stefa always reminds me that I’m a miserable human being who makes everyone else miserable,’ ” he said.
She said something so quietly as an answer that he asked her to repeat it. “It’s just hard always feeling alone,” she said.
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He didn’t answer so she looked at her hands. My legs cramped from having been in one position for so long.
“I’ve gotten back what I paid in,” he finally told her. “Loneliness isn’t the worst thing. I value memories.”
She stood up and crossed to the door and stopped. “I remind myself that it’s not my place to ask for things,” she said. “But even now my ego gets in the way.”
Even I could see her unhappiness in the lamplight, but he ignored it. “Nothing I can say or do can spare you or spare myself,” he said.
“Always you give up, you postpone, you cancel, you substitute,” she told him.
He sat up on his elbows. “I see my feelings through a telescope,” he said. “They’re a little gang huddled on a polar plain. When someone coughs, first I feel pity and then its opposite: maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s going to cause us to use up the rest of our medicine.”
She said she was sorry and that she’d let him sleep.
“I exist not to be loved but to act,” he told her.
“The saint orders and God executes,” she said.
“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Our God may not have the will to enforce the Law, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey it.”
“Whom do we sue for breach of contract?” she asked.
“Rabbi Yitzchak of Berdichov is supposed to have summoned God to a rabbinic court,” he told her.
“I suppose we were never going to find a place where we’d enjoy perfect digestion and eternal peace,” she said.
“Sometimes I think: don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Just listen for another ten minutes to their breathing. Their coughing. Their little noises.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I do.”
“We’re living tombstones,” he told her. “Israel is where they have the baby carriages and the green growing things.”