by Jane Yolen
“That’s the trouble,” said Hannah. “I can’t.”
Just then Rivka came out of the kitchen and shook her finger at Hannah. “No tears,” she said. “If the blokova sees you crying . . .”
“That three-fingered bi . . .” Hannah stopped herself in time. It was a dangerous habit to fall into, calling the blokova names. One might be Chosen for doing such a thing.
“If she loses control of her zugangi, she will be a two-fingered whatever-you-call-her,” said Rivka, smiling.
“What do you mean?” Hannah and Shifre asked together.
“How do you think she lost those other fingers?”
Hannah mused. “I thought maybe she’d been born that way.”
Holding up her own hand and wriggling the fingers, Rivka pointed to one. “She lost control and a whole group of zugangi rioted. That was right before I got here. They were sent through Lilith’s Cave and she lost one finger. Then she lost control and six zugangi hanged themselves one night, my aunt Sarah among them. Aunt Sarah had been sick for a long time and could no longer disguise it. She knew she was to be sent to the hospital. Everyone really sick in the hospital goes up the stack. So she said to my mother, ‘I will do the choosing, not them. God will understand.’” Rivka smiled. “A second finger. I wish Aunt Sarah could have seen the blokova’s face in the morning. When they took the finger.”
“Maybe we could do something to help the blokova balance her hand. Three is such an unlucky number,” Shifre said.
Rivka shook her head. “Too dangerous,” she said. “Let the grown-ups make their plans.”
“What plans?” asked Hannah.
“Oh,” Rivka said mysteriously, “there are always grown-up plans.”
“What plans?” Hannah and Shifre asked together. But before Rivka could answer, a shout from the gate end of the compound riveted them.
“Commandant!”
“But he was just through yesterday,” Hannah said in a nervous whisper. “He’s not due for at least another few days.”
Ignoring her, Rivka already had her hands to her mouth, making the clucking sound to warn the children. Shifre, too, was signaling.
“It’s not fair!” Hannah complained, her voice rising into a whine.
Shifre nudged her angrily, and Hannah began to cluck as the little ones scrambled for the midden pile.
The first two in were a brother and a sister, seven and eight years old. They left green and blue shorts and shirts at the edge of the dump. Next came a nine-year-old girl carrying a baby. She shucked off her shoes as she ran and, holding the baby under one arm, tore off its shirt. When she set the naked baby down by the side of the pile in order to get out of her own dress, the child immediately began crawling toward the midden on its own.
Like spawning fish, the children came from everywhere to dive into the pile. They waded or crept in one after another while the horrible clucking continued and overhead the swallows, alerted to a feast of insects, dipped and soared.
Hannah finally heard the commandant’s car, then saw it as it barreled toward them, down the long bare avenue between the barracks. It moved relentlessly toward the hospital, which squatted at the compound’s end.
The car had just passed the zugangi barracks when the hospital door opened and a small thin boy limped down the steps, his right knee bloody and his blue eyes ringed with dirt. He was wiping his hands on his shirt. When he looked up and saw the car bearing down on him, despite the desperate clucking from all around, he froze, staring.
“Reuven!” Hannah cried out. “Run! Run to the midden!” But the boy didn’t move and she felt a sudden coldness strike through her as if an ice dagger had been plunged into her belly.
“Gottenyu!” Rivka whispered.
Shifre, who had been looking at the midden with its bright flags of clothing, heard Hannah’s shout and turned. She grabbed Hannah’s hand, squeezing it until there was no feeling left.
The car slowed, then stopped. Commandant Breuer himself got out of the car. He walked toward Reuven and the child could not look at him, staring instead at Hannah, his hand outstretched toward her. Big tears ran down his cheeks, but he cried without a sound.
“He knows,” Hannah whispered.
“Hush!” Rivka said.
The commandant looked down at the boy. “Have you hurt yourself, my child?” he asked, his voice deadly soft.
Hannah moved forward a half-step and Rivka jerked her back.
“Let me see,” Breuer said. He took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and touched it to Reuven’s bloody knee thoughtfully. “And where is your mother?”
When Reuven didn’t answer, Hannah stepped forward. “Please, sir, his mother is dead.”
Rivka gasped. Hannah heard her and added hastily, “She died years ago, when he was born.”
The commandant stood up and stared at her, his eyes gray and unreadable. “Are you his sister?”
She shook her head dumbly, afraid to say more.
“That is good. For you.” Breuer bent down and wrapped the handkerchief around the boy’s knee, knotting it gently with firm, practiced hands. Then he picked Reuven up. “A boy your age should be with his mother,” he said, smiling. “So I shall be sure you go to her.” He handed Reuven to his driver, who was waiting by the car door. Then, without another word, Breuer went up the stairs to the hospital and closed the door so quietly they could not tell when it was finally shut.
That evening, the sky was red and black with the fire and smoke. The latest arrivals in the cattle cars had not been placed in barracks. The camp was full. The newcomers had been shipped directly to processing, a change in routine that frightened even the long-termers.
Rumors swept the camp. “A shipment from Holland,” some said. “A shipment from Silesia.” No one knew for sure.
But Reuven did not come back. Not that evening. Not that night.
“Not ever,” Hannah muttered to herself as she watched the smoke curling up, writing its long numbers against the stone-colored sky. “And it’s my fault.”
“Why is it your fault?” Rivka asked.
“I should have said he was my brother.”
“Then you would not be here either. It would not have helped Reuven.”
“He is dead.” Hannah said the word aloud curiously, as if understanding it for the first time. “Dead.”
“Do not say that word.”
“Monsters!” Hannah said suddenly. “Gitl is right. We are all monsters.”
“We are the victims,” Rivka said. “They are the monsters.”
“We are all monsters,” Hannah said, “because we are letting it happen.” She said it not as if she believed it but as if she were repeating something she had heard.
“God is letting it happen,” Rivka said. “But there is a reason. We cannot see it yet. Like the binding of Isaac. My father always said that the universe is a great circle and we—we only see a small piece of the arc. God is no monster, whatever you think now. There is a reason.”
Hannah scuffed the ground with her foot. “We should fight,” she said. “We should go down fighting.”
Rivka smiled sadly. “What would we fight with?”
“With guns.”
“We have no guns.”
“With knives.”
“Where are our knives?”
“With—with something.”
Rivka put her arm around Hannah’s shoulder. “Come. There is more work to be done.”
“Work is not fighting.”
“You want to be a hero, like Joshua at Jericho, like Samson against the Philistines.” She smiled again.
“I want to be a hero like . . .” Hannah thought a minute but she could think of no one.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“My mother said, before she . . . died . . . that it is much harder to live this way and to die this way than to go out shooting. Much harder. Chaya, you are a hero. I am a hero.” Rivka stared for a moment at the sky and the curling s
moke. “We are all heroes here.”
That night Fayge began to speak, as if the words so long dammed up had risen to flood. She told a story she had heard from her father, about the great Ba’al Shem Tov. It was set in the time when he was a boy named Israel and his father warned him: “Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself. There will be times when he will surround you with walls of darkness. But remember always that your soul is secure to you, for your soul is entire, and that he cannot enter your soul, for your soul is part of God.” Fayge’s voice rose and fell as she told how young Israel led a small band of children against a werewolf whose heart was Satan’s. And in the end, when Israel walked straight into the werewolf’s body and held its awful dark heart in his hand, “shivering and jerking like a fish out of water,” Fayge said, her own hand moving in the same way, that awful heart was filled with “immeasurable pain. A pain that began before time and would endure forever.”
She whispered the story as the night enfolded them. “Then Israel took pity on the heart and gave it freedom. He placed it upon the earth and the earth opened and swallowed the black heart into itself.”
A sigh ran around the barrack and Hannah’s was the deepest of all. A werewolf, she thought. That’s where we are now. In the belly of the werewolf. But where, where is its dark pain-filled heart? She was still sighing when she slipped into sleep.
17
“THERE IS A PLAN,” GITL WHISPERED. “AND YITZCHAK AND Shmuel are part of it.” She had crept onto the sleeping shelf, putting her arms around Hannah and speaking very softly into her ear. “You must not be afraid, but you must not tell anyone. I am a part of it, too.”
Hannah didn’t move.
Gitl’s voice tickled her ear. “The reason I am telling you this is that you are our only flesh and blood. Our only link with the past. If something happens to us, you must remember. Promise me, Chaya, you will remember.”
Hannah’s lips moved but no sound came out.
“Promise.”
“I will remember.” The words forced themselves out through her stiffened lips.
“Good.”
“What plan?” Hannah managed to ask.
“If I tell you, you might say.”
“Never.”
“You would not mean to, but it could slip out.”
“Not even if afile . . .”
“Afile brenen un brutn . . . even if you should be burned and roasted. Here that is not a proverb to be spoken aloud.”
Horrified at what she’d said, Hannah felt herself begin to giggle. It was a hysterical reaction, but she couldn’t seem to control herself.
“Nevertheless,” Gitl ended, “I will not tell you.”
“When?” Hannah whispered.
“You will know.”
The horn signaled morning roll call and Gitl rolled off the shelf. Hannah followed, stood, and stared at her.
“Is it . . . is it because of Reuven?” she asked quietly.
“For Yitzchak it is. Who else does he have left, poor man? He adored those children,” Gitl said.
“But why you? Why Shmuel?”
“If not us, who? If not now, when?” Gitl smiled.
“I think I’ve heard those words before,” Hannah said slowly.
“You will hear them again,” Gitl promised. “Now we must not talk about this anymore.”
And yet for all of Gitl’s promises, nothing seemed to happen. The days’ routines were as before, the only change being the constant redness of the sky as train-loads of nameless zugangi were shipped along the rails of death. Still the camp seemed curiously lightened because of it, as if everyone knew that as long as others were processed, they would not be. A simple bit of mathematics, like subtraction, where one taken away from the top line becomes one added on to the bottom. The Devil’s arithmetic.
“When?” she whispered at night to Gitl.
“You will know,” Gitl always answered. “You will know.”
And yet, when it finally happened, Hannah was surprised that she hadn’t known, hadn’t even suspected. There had been no signs or portents, no secret signals. Just an ordinary day in the camp and at night she went to bed on the hard, coverless shelf trying to remember sheets and pillows and quilts while all around her in the black barrack she heard the breathy sounds of sleeping women.
A hand on her back and over her mouth startled her so, she was too surprised to protest.
“Chaya, it is now,” Gitl’s voice whispered in her ear. “Nod if you understand.”
She nodded, opening her eyes wide though it was too dark to see anything. “The plan,” she said, her words hot on Gitl’s palm. She sat up abruptly and just missed smacking her head on the upper shelf.
Gitl took her hand away. “Follow me,” she whispered.
“Am I part of the plan?”
“Of course, child. Did you think we would leave you in this hell?”
They crept to the door and Hannah could feel her heart thudding madly. It was warm in the barrack, yet she felt cold.
“Here,” Gitl whispered, shoving something into her hands.
Hannah looked down. She could see nothing in the dark, but she realized she was holding a pair of shoes.
“We’ll put them on outside.”
They paused at the door, then Gitl eased it open slowly. It protested mildly.
“It’s not locked!” Hannah said, shocked.
“Some guards can be bribed,” Gitl whispered. “Give me your hand.”
Slipping her hand into Gitl’s, Hannah held back for a moment. “What about Fayge? Shmuel wouldn’t go without Fayge.”
Gitl’s hand on hers tightened. “Fayge says she prefers the dark wolf she knows to the dark one she does not.”
“Even with Shmuel going? But she loves him.”
“She has come to love her next bowl of soup more,” Gitl said. “Now hush.”
They slipped through the door, shut it, and locked it from the outside with a too-loud snick. Hannah shivered at the sound and took Gitl’s hand again, ice on ice.
“We meet behind the midden,” Gitl whispered. “No more talking now.”
Hannah looked up. There was no moon. Above them, in the cloudless sky, stars were scattered as thick as sand. A small, warm breeze blew across the compound. Night insects chirruped. Hannah took a deep breath. The air was sweet-smelling, fresh, new. A dog barked suddenly and a harsh voice quieted it with a command.
Gitl pulled Hannah back against the barrack’s wall. Hannah could feel the fear threatening to scream out of her, so she dropped the shoes and put both hands over her mouth, effectively gagging herself. There was a wetness under her arms, between her legs, down her back. She moaned.
And then there came a shout. A shot. And another. And another, rumbling, staccato. A man began to scream, high-pitched and horrible. He called a single phrase over and over and over. “Ribono shel-oylam.”
“Quickly!” Gitl whispered hoarsely. “It is ruined. Before the lights. Come.”
As she spoke, great spotlights raked the compound, missing them by inches and seeking the outer perimeter of wire fence and mine fields and the woods beyond, where Hannah thought she saw shadows chasing shadows into the dark trees.
Gitl dragged her back to the barrack’s door, slid the bolt open with one hand, and shoved Hannah inside with the other. They both sank gratefully to the floor.
“What is it?” the blokova’s voice called out from her private room.
Hannah’s mouth opened. What could they say? They would be found out. They would be Chosen.
“I went to get my bowl to relieve myself,” Gitl called, her voice incredibly calm. “And then shots began outside and I was so frightened, I fell to the floor, dropping the bowl.” She pushed Hannah away from her as she spoke.
Crawling on her hands and knees, Hannah made it back across the room to her sleeping shelf. She lifted herself onto it gratefully, tr
embling so hard she was sure she would wake everyone.
“You Jews,” the blokova’s voice drawled sleepily, “you can never do anything quietly or efficiently. That is why the Germans will finish you all off. If you have to relieve yourself, wait until the morning or do it in your bed. Or you shall have to deal with me.”
“Yes, blokova,” Gitl answered.
“And get to bed,” the blokova added unnecessarily.
Instead of going to her own shelf, Gitl crowded in with Hannah, hugging her so tightly that Hannah could hardly breathe. Yet she was glad not to have to lie there alone. Leaning back against Gitl, Hannah could feel the woman shaking with silent sobs.
Then a sudden, awful thought came to her. She couldn’t turn over with Gitl there on the shelf, so she whispered to the wall: “Gitl, Gitl, please.”
At last Gitl heard. “What is it?”
“The shoes, Gitl, I dropped the shoes outside. They’ll know it was me out there. What will I do? What will I do?”
“Do?” the breathy voice whispered into her ear. “Do? Why, you will do nothing, my darling child. Those were not your shoes. They were the blokova’s. I took them from outside her door because you deserved a better pair for such a difficult journey. They will discover her shoes in the morning.” She began to laugh, muffling it against Hannah’s back, a sound so close to sobbing that Hannah could not tell the difference.
18
THE ROLL CALL IN THE MORNING WAS HELD UNDER A brilliant sun and a sky so blue it hurt the eyes. The woods on the other side of the barbed wire fence burst with birdsong. Commandant Breuer himself stood at the front of the assembly, flanked by SS guards. Before him were six men in chains.
Hannah recognized only Shmuel and the violin player from the klezmer band. The other four men were strangers to her. They had all been badly beaten and two could not stand.
“Yitzchak . . . ,” she whispered.
Beside her Gitl was silent.
“Yitzchak . . . ,” she tried again.
“Hush.”
The commandant stared around the compound as if his mind were on other matters. Once he even looked up at the sky. At last he turned his attention to Shmuel, who stood chin thrust out defiantly.