The Book of Aron

by Jim Shepard

  “I have no idea what we’re going to do with Balbina,” he told her instead. “If you want to measure your resistance to going crazy, try helping a shlemiel.”

  “She’s still getting her bearings,” she said. “She didn’t have as much responsibility at the other orphanage.”

  “You put the paper in her hand. She has to deliver it today; here is the address and the hour,” he said. “But she’s lost the paper or forgotten to take it with her or got frightened or the porter told her to go somewhere else. She’ll go tomorrow. She’ll go the next day. She’ll go when she finishes the cleaning. And was it so important anyway?” He put his hand over his eyes and Madame Stefa told him that he was being unkind.

  “I am unkind,” he said. “To work here you have to be unkind. You have to be smeared with crap, you have to stink, you have to be crafty.”

  “You seem presentable enough when you make your calls,” she said.

  “I don’t make calls,” he said. “I go to beg for money and food. It’s hard and degrading.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “You,” he said to me. “You never read. Do you want to sink into idiocy?”

  “Leave him alone,” Madame Stefa said. “He’s making progress in his schooling.”

  “His schooling?” he said. “This is a prison. A plague ship. An asylum. A casino. A sprung trap. Bodies you clear from the street in the morning have piled up again by the evening.”

  “That’s no reason to frighten children,” she told him.

  “Everyone’s been tainted by this,” he said.

  “You have a lot to do tomorrow,” she told him. “You need to rest.” She filled his glass from the pitcher beside it. He took it and had a long swallow.

  “Do you know how Jerzyk got here?” he asked. She took a deep breath and told him no. He said Jerzyk’s whole family had died in quarantine and he’d dug up his father’s body to get a golden dental bridge to sell for food but then had to use the money to buy his way out of the Umschlagplatz. “Do you understand what I mean?” he said. “He had to dig his father’s head out of the dirt and then pull the bridge out of his father’s mouth. And then he didn’t get the food he needed anyway.”

  Someone cried out downstairs and Madame Stefa left to investigate. Korczak was so still afterwards that I thought he’d fallen asleep.

  He didn’t open his eyes when she came back. “I always think that the relief we feel after the roundups tells us something,” she said. “Why are we relieved to be left here? And why are they starting with old people and children? Why would you begin by resettling those who’d have the most trouble in a strange place?”

  Korczak sat up and poured himself another glass from the pitcher. Then he lay back down and closed his eyes without drinking it.

  Dora had been rounded up twice and made it back each time, Madame Stefa told him. Dora said if they were ever taken to the Umschlagplatz to hang behind at the tail end of the march because when the trains got filled up they sometimes let the other people go.

  Korczak said that was good advice.

  “We shouldn’t be speaking like this in front of the boy,” she said tiredly. Korczak agreed.

  “Are you ever going to go to bed?” he asked me. I shook my head.

  He seemed unsurprised. He said Korczak the dreamer was already far away. Outside of the city. Already in a desert and walking all by himself. He sees an unfamiliar country, he said. He sees a river and a bridge. He sees boats. And over there: small houses, cows and horses. He hadn’t realized everything in Palestine was so small. He keeps walking, he said, until he can’t walk anymore. He keeps walking, until the moment before he just falls down.

  THE NEXT NIGHT MADAME STEFA WAS TOO exhausted to stay awake so it was just the two of us. Then I fell asleep on Mietek’s bed and when I woke it was almost light and Madame Stefa was getting the day’s report. Korczak pulled the paper from one window but otherwise let everyone sleep. He told her Reginka had the rheumatic rash and that during the night he had administered salicylate until she’d heard ringing in her ears and seen yellow. She’d vomited twice and the lumps on her legs were turning pale and no longer hurt. He said Mietek was still having trouble breathing.

  “Your cigarettes are probably not helping,” Madame Stefa said.

  He told her that smoke was a good expectorant for the children and she answered that this was his theory. She said that sometimes when she came up to see him the air was so bad that she couldn’t breathe. He said she reminded him of that entire stern regiment of women—wife, grannie, cook—to which his father had always given in for the sake of peace.

  “Is he asleep?” she asked, and I didn’t hear his response but I didn’t move. My head was turned away.

  She said two of the girls no longer claimed to be hungry and seemed to be hibernating. Others were no longer sleeping because of hunger insomnia. She kept them covered but they were always thirsty and cold. Their stools were semi-liquid and muddled. When she pressed their skin the dimples lasted nearly two minutes. One was so clumsy with weakness she couldn’t fasten a button. The hungriest were always appearing and disappearing around the kitchen. They all had scabies and crusted ringworm.

  Death by famine lacked drama, Korczak told her. It was slow and dispiriting. At least until the crows or the rats or the dogs came along.

  “Oh, stop it,” she told him.

  “Am I being heartless?” he asked her.

  “You’re being unhelpful,” she told him.

  “I find it helps if I tell myself that children can die or recover here,” he said, “just as they do in a hospital.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Something strange happened today. When I emptied the chamber pots this morning I found a street boy outside our door.”

  “I can smell the ammonia,” he said. “And that’s not strange. Did you let him in?”

  “He didn’t want to come in,” she told him. “He wanted to see into the main hall. I even stepped aside so he could look all he wanted. When I asked him his business he went on his way.”

  “I know how he feels,” Korczak said.

  I stayed by the window and watched the street that day and the next but saw no sign of Boris. One kid in a blue cap watched the orphanage both days but it wasn’t him. I didn’t go outside. Everyone claimed I was selfish because I took too long on the toilet. Everyone argued over who had had the worse night. Everyone was preoccupied with his morning temperature. “What is it?” kids asked staff members who were still trying to read their thermometers. “What was yours?” they asked one another.

  At dinner Korczak announced the orphanage would be putting on a play called The Post Office by an Indian poet. It would be mounted on the third floor in the former ballroom, which would need to be cleaned and cleared for the event. The text was available to read for the next day or two and auditions would be held after that. One of the staff members, Esterka, would direct it. He asked her to stand to receive our thanks and she gave a wave.

  There was a new girl whose brother had left her at the orphanage who kept everyone up with her nightmares and her crying. Her name was Gieńa and she was nine and during the day she didn’t bother anyone though she didn’t work either. Her father had died of tuberculosis and her mother and older sisters of typhus and before dropping her off her older brother had dressed her in so many ribbons and beads and colored crepe streamers that I made her laugh by asking if she was a Hottentot. She ate shielding her plate with her hand. In the dark she screamed so much that for a few nights since I was awake anyway I took her up to the third floor so everyone else could sleep. I sat with her while she wailed and she told me about her brother Samuel, who was seventeen and worked in one of the shops, and showed me how she stood on his feet and put her arms around his waist and was carried around the room when he marched. Her aunt had been unhappy because she said Gieńa ate all the bread and in no time it would all be gone and she told Samuel to put his sister in the orphanage so she didn’t have to live wi
th someone who was stealing from her. Telling her story calmed Gieńa down but the spiders on the third floor upset her. I said she could only go back down if she stopped screaming, so she promised she would and the next night when I checked she was awake and weeping but doing it quietly. She showed me a shell in her palm and chanted, “Snail, snail, show me your horns,” and after we both watched for a minute it did.

  OF COURSE THERE WASN’T ENOUGH FOR EVEN THE makeshift sets and costumes that Esterka had planned, Korczak told me early the next morning, standing over my bed, so it was time for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to go back out on their rounds. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said he was used to that. When I told him I didn’t want to go he said he was used to that too.

  “Can’t someone else go?” I asked him. I was afraid of Boris.

  “Madame Wilczyńska asked recently why I was so taken with you,” he said, while he waited for me to find my shoes. “I don’t see what’s so puzzling about it.”

  There was a boy out there who wanted to kill me, I told him. I didn’t look at him when I spoke.

  “You’ll be fine with me,” he said. At the front door he stopped outside and pretended to check his pockets until I got the courage to follow. He told me I’d be awarded a Good Care Card for looking after one of the new arrivals. The card could be exchanged for an extra portion of sweets.

  Again the only ones out that early were the beggars. Some were still in their nooks with their garbage and others were wrapped in their odds and ends and crossing from person to person and begging. A boy who looked like my older brother had printed on his armband Jew Useful for the Economy. When he caught my eye he bared black teeth at me. “And how are you?” he said. “What time is left on your clock?” He kept his horrible expression even when Korczak gave him a few groszy. An elderly couple went around the three of us with their eyes on the sidewalk as if looking for something they’d lost.

  The first house we tried gave Korczak all the money he needed after he described the play and then had a coughing fit. “Well, that’s good news,” he said, but once we started back two bodies in the street covered with sheets of paper made him stop. Where the papers weren’t weighed down with stones they lifted in the wind.

  We passed a mantelpiece clock wrapped with rope. “You know, when I was a medical student I used to sit at night in the postmortem room after hours,” he said, after we started walking again. “I paid the guard to let me stay there.”

  I was scratching at lice. Even at the end my mother begged me to use the kerosene every day. Even at the end I lied about it. In the hospital I shouted for her to leave it alone and she turned to the wall and told me to go.

  Korczak took my arm and almost tipped us over. “I just sat there and stared at the faces of the dead children,” he said. “What was I doing there? What was I looking for?”

  A yellow police column jogged by. He looked bothered by his question, so I told him I didn’t know.

  “What a strange and unsavory person I was. And am,” he said. He said he wished he’d brought a cigarette. He said he wished he’d eaten his breakfast.

  “I’m not sure I know what to do with good times,” he said. “My mother told me her father was so comfortable with being downtrodden that even when he drew the lucky number in a lottery he kept the news to himself for a week.”

  We stepped over a desk blocking the sidewalk, its drawers open and inkwell broken. He wondered if it was worth sending some boys back to retrieve it. Then he said to remind him that he still needed to talk with Kramsztyk about the poor quality of his coal. For the rest of the walk back he rolled his head from side to side as if his neck was giving him pain.

  AUDITIONS FOR THE PLAY WERE HELD ON THE THIRD floor after it had been prepared. Gieńa was cast as Sudah the flower girl, she told me that night, and I told her that she was already in costume. Jerzyk though he still had his fever was cast as the fakir and had already started working on his magic tricks. They were casting the main role last, Korczak said, and he wanted me to try out for it. I asked what it was and he wondered if I’d read the play and I said no. He said the lead was a boy who was dying and inspired everyone.

  “He’s the hero?” I said. We were all stripping beds.

  “In a way,” he said. “I think you’d be very good at it.”

  “Him?” Madame Stefa asked.

  Him, Korczak told her. I said no but was surprised by how happy it made me to have been asked. The next day Korczak announced the star would be a boy named Abrasha, who played the violin.

  I was emptying the dustbins with Zygmuś and another boy and saw Boris coming down the street with a tall woman in a straw hat. It didn’t look like he’d seen me and when I got back inside I pushed past the long line of kids waiting for the bathroom and went up to the third floor and climbed inside a painted piece of scenery that said Lord Mayor’s House. I waited and then heard footsteps and someone came in and shut the door. I could see out the crack beside me.

  The woman in the straw hat and Korczak had come in but I didn’t see Boris. They searched each other’s faces and said it was good to meet again. He told her about the play and she told him how she’d gotten into the ghetto. She said she’d brought honey cakes and vitamin B for the children and he thanked her.

  They were quiet. He asked why she had come and she told him she’d come to get him out of there and he said he thought it was something like that. He asked how she imagined she would do that and she said she belonged to the Żegota movement, which distributed newspapers calling on Poles to help Jews, and they ferried people in and out all the time. He asked if he would be going alone. She said that maybe as many as three or four others could go with him. Then she was quiet again.

  I could hear the kids downstairs. Someone tried the door and found it locked and went back down.

  “I ask you to accept my help,” the woman said.

  “Those of us who were here, if we ever met up after this,” he finally told her. “How could we look each other in the eye without asking, ‘How is it that you happened to survive?’ ”

  The woman studied her hands. “Why shouldn’t some, if even only a few, be saved?” she asked.

  Someone dropped dishes downstairs and kids applauded.

  What about the rest, he asked. Could she imagine the ones left behind? “ ‘Pan Doctor is gone. Wait here in the dark,’ ” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if the woman was weeping. “We put out a newspaper,” she said. “You produce plays. What good does either do? Maybe we should be learning how to handle a rifle instead.”

  Korczak laughed. “I’d love to join the underground but what weapons do they have?” he said. “One group has a revolver. They showed me.”

  “You can come out now,” he called after they sat there a while longer, and I stood up and walked around the scenery. The woman didn’t seem surprised to see me. “You can help me show Maria out,” he said. “She’s one of my most successful graduates.”

  “The boy with her is the one I was talking about,” I told him. But he didn’t answer and we followed him down the stairs. When I hung back he told me to come on and in the front hall he kissed the woman on both cheeks and then she kissed him on the mouth. Boris stood beside the door and watched them and then looked at me as though he’d never seen me before.

  “Please think about what we discussed,” the woman told Korczak.

  “I wish I could stop thinking about it,” he told her. “Please thank your friends on the children’s behalf.”

  “Have you fallen asleep?” he said to me after they’d closed the door behind them. “Are you just going to stand there and squint?”

  In the kitchen he was stopped by a little girl. “You’re the tenth person to ask me about the honey cakes,” he told her. “Do you think there are no problems to solve other than the honey cakes?” She went to Madame Stefa, who gave her a hug. “Do I need to have eyes in the back of my head to keep everyone working?” he called to the group.<
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  HE READ HIS LETTERS ALOUD TO HIMSELF IN THE early morning when he thought everyone else was asleep, so that night I stopped on the stairs and watched from the darkness. I had spent the day mystified by why Boris had acted the way he had.

  Korczak held his letter up to the light and read. “To the Editor of the Jewish Gazette: Dear Mr. Editor! Thank you for your favorable evaluation of the Orphanage’s activity. But: ‘Love Plato, yet love more the truth.’ The Orphanage was not, is not, and will never be Korczak’s Orphanage. The man is too small, too weak, too poor, and too dimwitted to gather, feed, warm, protect, and initiate into life almost two hundred children. This great task—this herculean task—”

  He stopped and cleared his throat and laid the paper down and made some marks on it. “—has been accomplished through the collective efforts of hundreds of people of goodwill and enlightened minds and insight. As well as by the children themselves.”

  He stopped again, still looking at the paper. “Not having any confidence, we are disinclined to promise. Nevertheless, we are assured that an hour of a thinker and a poet’s beautiful fairy tale will provide an experience of the highest order in the scale of feelings. Therefore, we all together invite you—” he said. “We take this occasion to invite you …”

  He stood and turned from his writing, then sat down on his bed.

  Three weeks of rehearsals were scheduled on the posting board and the performance date was listed as Saturday, July 18. Those who weren’t involved were invited to contribute their opinions when not occupied with chores. The night before everyone got food poisoning and those staff members not throwing up or huddled over chamber pots moved through the darkness with jugs of limewater and morphine for the worst off. Mietek had a nightmare about his mother that was so terrible he shrieked and screamed he was burning up and dying of thirst until Korczak shouted into his face that he would throw him down the stairs and out into the street if he didn’t quiet down.

  “That seemed to have worked,” Madame Stefa told him later, while they were soaking up the throw-up with rags.