by Jane Yolen
He shook his head, his mouth formed the words: “Not yet.” Then he turned and left, slipping sideways through eternity.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“No,” Nonny contradicted, shaking her head, the blue hair a helmet that never moved. “Elijah is never gone. He is always here.” But she looked at me strangely, her black-button eyes shining.
I took another sip of the watered wine.
The next time I saw Elijah was in shul. It’s the only temple on the island so everyone Jewish goes there, even though it’s a Reform temple. I was sitting snuggled up next to Shanna, more for the warmth than friendship. Shanna’s okay, when she’s quiet and cuddly. But little sisters can be a pain. Especially when they’re ten years younger, an embarrassment, and a sign that your parents—your parents, for G-d’s sake—are still having sex.
We were in the middle of one of Rabbi Shiller’s long, rambling book reports. He rarely says anything religious. My mother likes that. Thinks it’s important. “Keeps us in touch with the greater world,” she says. Meaning non-Jews. I get enough book reports in school in my AP classes, where we call them essays but they are really only high school book reports, though with bigger words. Besides, the rabbi was talking about Maus, which I’d just done an AP report on, and got an A, and my insights were better than his. So I snuggled close to Shanna and closed my eyes.
Or I almost closed my eyes.
And there, standing on the bima, finger on his lips, was Elijah, same black eyes, same black wavy beard, same pink tongue. I was not sure if he was shushing me or the rabbi but he was definitely shushing someone.
I sat up, pushed Shanna off me, looked around to see if anyone else had noticed him.
But the congregation was intent on the rabbi, who had just announced that in Maus, “The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure . . .” which I recognized immediately as a quote from Friedlander. The rabbi had been doing his research online. And he was not giving credit where credit was due, as my AP English teacher, V. Louise, always reminds us. She would have had him gutted for breakfast.
I glanced back at Elijah, who was shaking his head, as if he, too, knew the rabbi was a plagiarist. But maybe if you had to give a sermon every Friday night for your entire life, plagiarism becomes a necessity.
To be certain I wasn’t the only kid seeing things, I checked on my friends. Barry Goldblatt was picking boogers from his nose. Nothing new there. Marcia Damashek was whispering to her mother. They even dress alike. Carol Tropp had leaned forward, not to listen to the rabbi but to tap Gordon Berliner on the shoulder. She has a thing for him, though I can’t imagine why. He may be funny—like a stand-up comic—but he’s short and he smells.
I kept checking around. Every single one of the kids I knew was distracted. No one seemed to have seen Elijah but me. And this time I had no watered wine to blame.
Clearly, I thought, clearly I’m having a psychotic break. We studied psychotic breaks in our psychology class. They aren’t pretty. Either that, or Elijah, that consummate time traveler, that tricky wizard of forever, was really standing behind the rabbi and snorting into a rather dirty handkerchief, the color of leaf mold. Couldn’t he take some time out of his travels to go to a Laundromat? We’ve got several downtown I could tell him about.
I shook my head and Elijah looked up again, winked at me, and slipped sideways into some sort of time stream, and was gone. He didn’t even disturb the motes of sunlight dusting the front of the ark.
Standing, I pushed past my sister and mother and father and walked out of the hall. I know they thought I had to pee, but that’s not what I was doing. I went downstairs to wait in the religious center till the service was over. The door to the middle students’ classroom was open and I went in. Turning on the light, I sighed, feeling safe. Here was where I’d studied Hebrew lessons with Mrs. Goldin for so many years. Where I’d learned about being Jewish. Where no one had ever said Elijah was real. I mean, we’re Reform Jews, after all. We leave that sort of thing to the Chassids. Leaping in the air, having visions, wearing bad hats and worse wigs. Real nineteenth-century stuff.
I idled my way over to the kids’ bookcase. Lots of books there. We Jews are big on books. The People of the Book and all. My father being a professor of literature at the university, we have a house filled with books. Even the bathrooms have bookshelves. We joke about the difference between litter-ature and literature. One to be used in the bathroom, the other to be read. Those sort of jokes.
My mom is a painter but even she reads. Not that I mind. I’m a big bookie myself, though I don’t take bets on it. That’s another family joke!
Finding a piece of gray poster paper, I began to doodle on it with a Magic Marker. Mom says that doodling concentrates the mind. I didn’t draw my usual—horses. Instead I drew Elijah’s head: the wavy hair, the dark beard, the tongue lolling out, like a dog’s. A few more quick lines, and I turned him into a retriever.
“And what do you retrieve?” I asked my drawing. The drawing was silent. I guess the psychotic didn’t break that far. Yeah—I have the family sense of humor.
I thought maybe there’d be a book or two in the classroom on Elijah. Squatting, I quickly scanned down the spines. I was right. Not one book but a whole bunch. A regular Jewish pop star.
Settling down to read the first one, I felt a tap on my shoulder that didn’t make me jump as much as it set off a series of tremors running down my backbone
I turned slowly and looked up into Elijah’s long face. Close, he was younger than I’d thought, the beard disguising the fact that he was probably in his twenties. A Jewish Captain Jack Sparrow with a yarmulke instead of a tricornered hat.
He crooked his finger at me; held out his hand.
Years of stranger-danger conversations flashed through my head. But who could be afraid of a figment of her imagination? Besides, he was cool-looking in a Goth beatnik kind of way.
I put my hand in his and stood. His hand seemed real enough.
We turned some sort of corner in the middle of the room, slid sideways, and found ourselves in a long gray corridor.
Was I afraid?
I was fascinated. It was like being in a sci-fi movie. The corridor flickered with flashes of starlight. Meteors rushed by. And a strange wandering sun seemed to be moving counterclockwise.
“Where are we go . . .?” I began, the words floating out of my mouth like the balloons in a comic strip.
He put a finger of his free hand on his lips and I ate the rest of my question. What did it matter? We were science-fictional wanderers on a metaphysical road.
The sound of wind got wilder and wilder until it felt as if we were in a tunnel with trains racing by us on all sides. And then suddenly everything went quiet. The gray lifted, the flashes were gone, and we stepped out of the corridor into . . . into an even grayer world, full of mud.
I craned my neck trying to see where we were.
Elijah put his hands on both sides of my head and drew me around till we were facing.
“Do not look yet, Rebecca,” he said to me, his voice made soft by his accent.
Was I surprised that he knew my name? I was beyond surprise.
“Is this place . . . bad?” I asked.
“Very bad.”
“Am I dead and in Hell?”
“No, though this is a kind of hell.” His face, always long, grew longer with sadness. Or anger. It was hard to tell.
“Why are we here?” I trembled as I spoke.
“Ah, Rebecca—that is always the most important question.” His r’s rattled like a teakettle left too long on the stove. “The question we all need to ask of the universe.” He smiled at me. “You are here because I need you.”
For a moment, the grayness around us seemed to lighten.
Then he added, “You are here because you saw me.” He dropped his hands to my shoulders.
>
“I saw you?”
He smiled, and, for the first time, I realized there was a gap between his top front teeth. And that the teeth were very white. Okay, he might not hit the Laundromat often enough, but he knew a thing or three about brushing.
“I saw you? So why is that such a big deal?” I think I knew even before he told me.
Shrugging, he said, “Few see me, Rebecca. Fewer still can slip sideways through time with me.”
“Through time?” Now I looked around. The place was a flat treeless plain, not so much gray as hopeless. “Where are we?” I asked again.
He laughed into my hair. “‘When are we?’ is the question you should be asking.”
I gulped, trying to swallow down something awful-tasting that seemed to have lodged in my throat. “Am I crazy?”
“No more than any great artist.”
He knew I did art?
“You are a really fine artist. Remember, Rebecca, I travel through time. Past and future, they are all as one to me.”
Even in that gray world, I felt a flutter in my breast. My cheeks grew hot with pleasure. A great artist. A fine artist. In the future. Then I shook my head. Now I knew I was dreaming. Too much watered wine at the seder. I was probably asleep with my cheek on Nonny’s white tablecloth. Yet in my dream I painted a picture of Elijah brooding in that open door, dark and hungry, his lips slightly moist with secrets, his mouth framing an invitation in a language both dead and alive.
“You will paint that picture,” he said, as if reading my mind. “And it will make the world notice you. It will make me notice you. But not now. Now we have work to do.” He took my hand.
“What work?”
“Look closely.”
This time when I looked I saw that the flat treeless plain was not empty. There were humans walking about, women, girls, all dressed in gray. Gray skirts, gray shirts, gray scarves on their heads, gray sandals or boots. Oh, I could see that the clothes they wore had not always been such a color, but had been worn thin and made old by terror and tragedy and hopelessness.
“You must bring them away,” Elijah said. “Those who will go with you.”
“You are the time traveler, the magician,” I told him. “Why don’t you do it?”
That long face looked down at me, his dark brown eyes softening. “They do not see me.”
“Will they see me?” I asked. But I already knew. They were coming toward me, hands out.
“Elijah,” I asked him, “how will I talk to them?”
He reached out a hand and touched my lips. “You will find a way, Rebecca. Now go. I can tell you no more.” Then he disappeared, like the Cheshire cat, until there was only his mouth, and it wasn’t smiling. Then he was gone entirely.
I turned to the women and let them gather me in.
They told me where we were, how they were there. I had read their stories in books so I had no reason to disbelieve them. We were in a camp.
Oh, not a summer camp with square dances and macramé projects and water sports. I’d been to those. Girl Scout camp, art camp, music camp. My parents, like all their friends, saw the summer as a time to ship-the-kids-off-to-camp. Some were like boot camp and some were like spas.
This was a Camp.
I asked the question that Elijah told me was the one I should be asking. “When are we?”
And when they told me—1943—I couldn’t find the wherewithal to be surprised. I’d already seen a ghost out of time, traveled with him across a sci-fi landscape, been told about the future. Why not be landed in the past?
“Thanks for nothing, Elijah,” I whispered.
Something—someone—whispered in my ear, the accent softening what he had to say. “Thanks for everything, Rebecca.”
“I’ve done nothing,” I whined.
“You will,” he said.
And the women, hearing only me, answered, “None of us have done anything to put us in this place.”
So my time in the Camp began. It was not Auschwitz or Dachau or Sobibor or Buchenwald or Treblinka, names I would have recognized at once.
“Where are we?”
“Near Lublin,” one woman told me, her eyes a startling blue in that gray face.
I knew that name. Squinting my eyes, I tried to remember. And then I did. My great-grandmother had been born in Lublin.
“Do you know a . . .” I stopped. I only knew my greatgrandmother’s married name. Morewitz. What good would that do? Besides, she’d come over to America as a child anyway, and was dead long before I was born. I changed the sentence. “Do you know a good way to escape?”
They laughed, a gray kind of laugh. “And would we still be here if we did?” said the woman with the blue eyes. Her hand described a circle that took in the gray place.
I followed that circle with my eyes and saw a gray building, gray with settled ash. Ash. Something had been burned there. A lot of somethings. It was then I really understood what place Elijah had brought me to.
“So this a concentration camp?” I asked, though of course I already knew.
“There is nothing to concentrate on here, except putting one foot in front of the other,” said the blue-eyed woman.
“And putting one bit of potato into your open mouth,” said another.
“Not a concentration camp,” said a third, “but a death camp.”
“Hush,” said the blue-eyed woman, looking over her shoulder.
I looked where she was looking but there was no one there to hear us.
“I have to get out of here,” I said. Then bit my lip. “We all have to get out of here.”
A gray child with eyes as black as buttons peeked from behind the skirts of the blue-eyed woman. She pointed to one of the buildings, which had an ominous metal door that was standing open. Like an open mouth waiting for those potatoes, I thought.
“That is the only way out,” she said. Her face was a child’s but her voice was old.
I took a deep breath, breathed in ash, and said, “We will not go that way. I promise.”
The women moved away from me as one, leaving the child behind. One whispered hoarsely to me over her shoulder, “This is a place of broken promises. If you do not understand that, you will not live a moment longer.” Then she said to the child, “Masha, it’s time to go to bed. Morning comes too soon.” But she was speaking to me as well.
The child slipped her cold gray hand in mine. “I believe your promise,” she said. She looked at me with hope but did not smile, as if smiling was beyond hope, another country.
I smiled down at her and squeezed her hand. But I’d been a fool to promise her any such thing, and she was a fool to believe me.
“Elijah . . .” I began, “Elijah will help us.” But he’d helped me into this mess, then disappeared. I realized with a sinking feeling that I was on my own here. Now. Whenever.
“Elijah the magician?” She scarcely seemed to breathe, staring at me with her black-button eyes.
I nodded, wondering what kind of magic could get us away from this terrible place and time.
Following the women, like a lamb after old ewes, the girl led me into a building that was filled with wide triple bunk beds. There were no sheets or pillows or blankets on the beds, only hard slats to lie upon. The only warmth at night came from the people who slept on either side. I had read about this, seen movies. What Jewish kid hadn’t?
The cold was no worse than a bad camping trip. The slats on the boards were like lying on the ground. But the smell—there were three hundred or more women squeezed into that building, with no bathing facilities but buckets of cold water. No one had a change of clothing; some must have been living in the same dresses for months. And those were the lucky ones, for they were still alive.
Masha snuggled next to me, her body now a little furnace, a warm spot against me. On the other side was the blue-eyed woman who introduced herself as Eva. But that first night my head raced with bizarre imaginings. Either I was crazy or dreaming. Maybe I’d had some kind of
psychotic break—like my cousin Rachael, who one night after a rave party thought she was in prison and tried to escape through a window, which turned out to be on the third floor of their apartment building. I just couldn’t stop from wondering and I didn’t sleep at all. A mistake, it turned out. By morning I was exhausted. Besides, sleep was the one real escape from that place. It was why the women went to bed, side by side, as eagerly as if heading for a party. After that there was the work.
Yes, there was work. That first morning they showed me. It wasn’t difficult work—not as difficult as the work the men were doing, breaking stones on the other side of the barbed wire—but still it broke the heart and spirit. We were to take belongings from the suitcases inmates had brought with them, separating out all the shoes in one pile, clothing in another on long, wooden tables. Jewelry and money went into a third pile that was given to the blokova—the head of the sorters—at day’s end. She had to give it to the soldiers who ran the camp. Then there were family photographs and family Bibles and books of commentary and books of poetry. Piles of women’s wigs and a huge pile of medicines, enough pills and potions for an army of hypochondriacs. There were packets of letters and stacks of documents, even official-looking contracts and certificates of graduation from law schools and medical schools. And then there was the pile of personal items: toothbrushes and hairbrushes and nail files and powder puffs. Everything that someone leaving home in a hurry and for the last time would carry.
I tried to think what I would have taken away with me had someone knocked on our door and said we had just minutes to pack up and leave for a resettlement camp, which is what all these people had been told. My diary and my iPod for sure, my underwear and several boxes of Tampax, toothbrush, hairbrush, blow-dryer, the book of poems my boyfriend had given me, a box of grease pencils and a sketchbook of course, and the latest Holly Black novel, which I hadn’t had time to read yet. If that sounds pathetic, it’s a whole lot less pathetic than the actual stuff we had to sort through.
And of course the entire time we were sorting, I alone knew what it all meant. That there were these same kinds of concentration camps throughout Poland and Germany. That six million Jews and six million other people were going to die in these awful places. And my having that knowledge was not going to help a single one of them.