In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  There was an uncharacteristic halt in Toby’s voice when he answered. “My mother.”

  Max surveyed the drawing for a time before he spoke. “She looks very intelligent,” he said. “And yet like she is a woman who enjoys life.”

  Toby’s face took on a healthy color when he smiled. “That’s her, exactly. She was a dress designer up until the war. I must have inherited her artistic sensibilities. My father was an academic, a physicist. He was obsessed with the study of time. Can we go back in time. Forward in time. Are there universes parallel to our own. Is it possible to exist in a time other than the present. It could get very abstract.”

  “Where are your parents now? Are they in the ghetto with you?”

  “They were taken away in April,” said Toby. The afflicted look that lifted when he talked about the past returned, drew a curtain over the conversation. “I should go,” he said, unmolding himself from the chair. “It’s late.”

  “Are you kidding?” Max objected. “It’s past curfew. You’ll be shot.”

  Toby shrugged his thin shoulders and smiled his cynical smile, as if to say, At least it will be quick. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  So this was his regular routine. “Yes, well, they’re trigger-happy tonight. There was an Aktzia at the hospital, another one at the orphanage. You’re not going anywhere.”

  He sank slowly into the chair. “Is that what all the shooting was about?”

  “Yes.”

  Toby looked like he might faint. Max leaned forward, gripped his arm. “Come on, Toby. Have some courage. Better them than you,” he said.

  When the artist opened his eyes again, he looked ill. “Lie down,” Max instructed him gruffly, getting off the bed. “You look terrible. I’ll bring you a blanket. You’re sleeping here tonight.”

  * * *

  “She’s here,” said his secretary.

  “Oh, good,” said Max. He hurried to his office, careful to close the door behind him. “So glad that you could come, Fräulein Rozycki,” he said enthusiastically, turning to the woman seated in the chair. “Did my secretary offer you something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. She was struggling with her composure, as any woman would when called upon to visit the offices of the Gestapo on Staromiejska Street. “And it’s Lipowa now. I’m married. What have I done? I have a right to know why I’m here.”

  He was relieved to hear that she spoke a good German. So few Poles did. Without the need for a translator, their conversation could be kept private. “It’s nothing like that. This is a social visit. It turns out we have a mutual friend.” Her expression showed that she found that difficult to believe. Max was struck by the feeling that he had seen her somewhere before. “The artist, Tobias Rey.”

  Few words could have had a greater impact, he was sure. Her face blanched as white as her pearls. Spots of color burned high on her cheeks, contrasting attractively with her milky skin.

  “So he’s alive,” she said with a rush of emotion. “Thank God.” Then, reacting with despair, “I had hoped he might have escaped by now.” She put a gloved hand to her forehead, an eloquent gesture of grief.

  He hastened to reassure her. “Don’t worry, he’s safe. You could say I am his protector.”

  She needed a moment to take in the information. Clearly, hearing his name had been an enormous shock. Emotions collided across the even surface of her flawless face. “How is he?” she said, feigning something like normalcy.

  “Oh, he’s fine now that I’m looking after him. He’s painting for me, some scenes from In the Land of Armadillos.”

  A light came into her eyes. “I worked with him on that one.”

  “You were his translator.”

  “Yes, on that one and two others, The Thief of Yesterday and Tomorrow, also The Town Inside the Hourglass. How did you know?”

  Max was very proud of his detective work. “Bianca Rozycki. He wouldn’t tell me your name. I had to call the publisher to find you. Were those also for children?”

  “None of them were for children.” She turned her lovely head toward him, surprised. “Have you ever read any of his books, Sturmbannführer?”

  He was insulted. “Of course. In the Land of Armadillos is my son’s favorite storybook. I’ve read it many times.”

  “You’ll know this, then. In the story, the armadillos live alongside the cockatoos for years, peacefully sharing the savannah, until an armadillo named Lazarus comes along and tells the others that cockatoos are bad, greedy creatures. The armadillos trample the blue cockatoos’ favorite food, the indigo plant, and then they drink up all the water. In town, they don’t let them rest in the trees, and they close down all the birdseed stores. The cockatoos fly away, never to return. On his way home after the celebration, an armadillo named Aramis comes across a cockatoo hiding in the roots of a baobab tree. Because of a broken wing, she is unable to leave with the others.”

  “Bianca,” he said helpfully. He was listening with rapt attention. It was thrilling to hear the story told by someone involved in its creation.

  She continued. “He takes pity on her, brings her home and fixes up her wing, tells her she can stay until she heals. Though she is a bird and he is an armadillo, they fall in love. In the meantime, things aren’t going well in town. No one knows how to make the armadillos’ favorite poppy-seed cookies. The cafés close down because the cockatoos were the only waiters. And finally, no one can purchase new shoes when their old ones wear out, because the cockatoos were the cobblers, too.

  “Aramis realizes that if he and Bianca want to be together, they must leave. They move to Paris, where they open a café, the Blue Cockatoo. It’s a smashing success, welcoming all kinds of animals, two-legged, four-legged, and flying. They live happily ever after.” She cocked her eyebrows at him. “What does that sound like to you, Herr Sturmbannführer?”

  “It’s about an armadillo and a cockatoo,” he replied, thinking of himself and Gerda. “They are very different from each other in many ways. Maybe their families don’t approve of the match. But they love each other above all. So they move away.”

  She regarded him as if he were an interesting exhibit at a museum.

  “The cockatoo,” he said suddenly. “Her name is Bianca.” The meaning of the coincidence dawned on him. “He named her after you.” She bowed her head graciously, permitted him a small smile. “You left him when the war started,” he went on, trying to work it all out. “Because of the anti-Jewish laws, I presume.”

  “I left him?” she repeated in disbelief, her eyes narrowing. “Is that what he said? Let me enlighten you, Sturmbannführer. After he came back from the United States, he was afraid. Things had deteriorated. He thought I’d be harassed, beaten, maybe worse. So he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  Max was astounded. He tried to imagine having the strength to leave Gerda, faced with a similar situation, and he realized he would never do it. He couldn’t survive without her. “That was very noble of him.”

  “Oh, yes. Very noble. My hero. Of course, he didn’t ask me what I wanted. He made the decision for both of us. I would have been happy to face those pigs together with him.”

  Max was surprised at her vehemence, at the hurt Toby’s betrayal still inspired. “But how can that be? He came back from New York, where he would have been safe, to be with his family, his girlfriend . . . I don’t understand.”

  She stared past him, out the window at the market square, giving him the opportunity to observe her in profile. The almond-shaped eyes—blue? gray? hazel?—were spaced widely apart and set into high, chiseled cheekbones. There was a straight, regal nose and a domed forehead that gave way to hair the color of a wheat field in autumn. She was like a poster advertising Aryan perfection.

  “He didn’t come back for me,” she said, biting off the words. “He broke it off with me a week after he returned. I don’t think it was for his family, either—they begged him to stay. No, I have another theory about wh
y he came back to Poland. I think that, for him, it was too easy over there in America. Too easy to be a Jew, too easy to be an artist, too easy to be alive. Celebrated not for his work, but for his status as a refugee. ‘Look, there goes Tobias Rey, he escaped from the Nazis’ clutches.’ And then they patted him on the head and invited him to dinner, and they gave him a job in one of their nice, safe schools, where there were a hundred wealthy girls who all wanted to be titillated by his terrible stories before they fell into his bed. He could say anything he pleased, do anything he liked. It cost him nothing, and it gave him nothing. It was too easy to forget the real world out there beyond Coney Island, where knowing the wrong people or being born to the wrong parents could mark the difference between life and death. Here, each tiny gesture matters. Every breath of a condemned man is an act of defiance. That’s why he came back.”

  Max tried to get the visit back on track. “Excuse me, Frau Lipowa. I apologize if I am bringing up sad memories. But the reason I brought you here, what I would really like to know, is if he has always been this way.” He laced his fingers together, leaned across the desk. “I know something about Jews, Fräulein,” he said. “Generally, they are cooperative, they are helpful, they beg to be given a chance to be useful. They want to live, you see. Toby doesn’t do any of those things. In fact, he does exactly the opposite. If I had to describe him, I would say he is a man who is waiting to die.”

  “Look around,” she said bitterly. “Can you blame him?”

  “The war will not last forever,” he reminded her, ignoring the provocation. “He’s an essential worker to the Reich. He’s safe. He has plenty to eat. You would think he’d cheer up a bit.”

  She looked closely at the man behind the desk. In his thirties, not thin but not heavy, either, just now an earnest expression on his blunt bully’s face. She noticed, too, the black uniform trimmed with silver braid; the SS eagle on the cuff, the twin lightning slashes on the collar; the red swastika armband, the gun in the smooth leather holster on his belt.

  “Why is this so important to you, Sturmbannführer?” she asked curiously.

  Years later, at the trial, she would recount this part of the conversation, and his response would save him from the gallows. “I don’t know,” Max admitted, his voice dropping a notch lower as he probed himself for an answer. “It’s not like me at all. I’ve seen many people die, Frau Lipowa. I won’t get into the specifics. And usually, what I feel is nothing. The way I see it is, today it’s them, tomorrow it’s me, it’s a throw of the dice who gets the bullet. But with Toby . . . there’s something about him, I can’t explain it. I don’t care whether he is a Jew, a Catholic, or a Buddhist. I want to help him if I can.”

  She regarded him with an expression he could not read; and then there was a little sigh, a drop of the shoulders, and she gave in.

  “He was always very sensitive,” she offered reluctantly. “He tried not to show it. A man beating an animal, a mother screaming at her child in the street, these things would bring tears to his eyes. He pretended it was all very funny, the world, a great big cosmic joke, but it would find its way into his drawings or another one of his stories. But waiting to die? No . . . you wouldn’t use that phrase to describe Tobias Rey. He loved clubs, the theater, restaurants, women. All of it. He had a tremendous appetite for living.”

  Interesting, though ultimately not very useful. Still, she had given him some ideas. “Thank you, Frau Lipowa,” he said. “You may go now.”

  Slowly, she rose to her feet, took a few steps, not yet believing that she was being allowed to leave Gestapo headquarters. At the door, she turned. “Where’s Aliza?” she asked.

  “Aliza?” he repeated, puzzled.

  “His sister,” she said, fastening a stole made from some ferrety animal around her neck. “He adores her. He was always sending her little gifts from wherever he was, postcards with funny drawings. She must be fourteen or fifteen by now. Try her first.”

  “Thank you, Frau Lipowa,” he said, pleased. “You’ve been a great help. I’ll send Toby your good wishes.”

  “No,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Don’t say anything at all.”

  He watched her walk out the door, tall and long-limbed and desirable, and suddenly he knew why she looked so familiar. She was the naked woman in the drawing titled Paris, 1938.

  * * *

  Circumstances conspired to keep Max from putting his plan into action for the next few days. First there was the matter of the stonecutting crew who refused to show up for work. As a solution, he had the striking workers lined up in the market square, where he whipped them, then shot them himself.

  But that was a tea party compared to the next item of business that landed on his plate. Now his superiors wanted him to deliver twenty-five hundred Jews for resettlement. Max was at the end of his rope. It would take an enormous amount of time to select and train new laborers to replace them, to the extent that it might actually harm the war effort. What was Berlin thinking?

  He was in this frame of mind when he clomped upstairs to Peter’s room. Toby was there, of course, working. Max unbuckled his jacket and undid the first buttons, throwing himself onto the bed.

  “What a day,” he grumbled. “You can’t imagine the stupidity I have to deal with.”

  Toby didn’t answer right away; he was just finishing the last stroke on one of the patrons in the café. Max was seething from the way Reinhart had gone behind his back. A week ago, he had informed the commandant of the work camp at Adampol that he required a list of his nonessential workers. Today he had received a heated tongue-lashing, by telephone, from an unknown brigadier general calling all the way from the General Government in Kraków, telling him to keep his fat fucking hooks off of Reinhart’s precious Jews. His ears were still ringing.

  But here in Peter’s room, time stopped, all such cares drained completely away. Red armadillos tramped up and down blue hills and paraded past cotton-candy-colored shops in the village, while blue cockatoos nested in the lofty branches of baobab trees. At the café, all kinds of creatures sat together in fantastic, whimsical combinations. A dog shared a table with a cat; a fish buttered a baguette for a canary. A bull wearing bifocals read a Journal while his friend the sea serpent stirred an espresso; a pink pig in a striped shirt and a beret-wearing poodle posed before tiny glasses of a clear cordial; a crocodile shared a kiss with a hare. Stranger yet were the humans: a blue man with a striped face; a beautiful girl with scales and a tail. “I know this one!” he exclaimed, pointing at a walrus who looked uncannily like Soroka the saddlemaker.

  Max noticed a man in a blue mackintosh and a blue bowler hat who bore a striking resemblance to himself, accompanied by a svelte red fox who looked very much like Gerda. Despite the overall shittiness of the day, he smiled. “It looks just like her,” he said, planting himself in front of the painting, his hands clasped behind his back. “Though I would have made her a rabbit.”

  “You know, I tried that,” Toby said. Without warning, the frail body convulsed in coughing; his palette clattered to the floor as he doubled up, resting his hands on his knees.

  “Are you wearing the coat I sent you?” Max demanded, concerned. Toby managed to bob his head yes. “You should see a doctor. It sounds like it’s getting worse. Maybe he’ll prescribe something for that cough.”

  Toby groped for a chair, sat down. “The only thing the doctors prescribe around here is a bullet in the back of the head.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Toby?” Max said plaintively. “One of these days you’re going to say something like that to the wrong person, and bang.” There was a soft knock at the door. “I asked the kitchen to send up some dinner,” he said to Toby, feigning casualness. “Come in and leave it on the desk, Adela.”

  The cook glided into the room in carpet slippers, set the plate on the desk. There was an apron tied around her small waist, making her look even more fetching, Max thought. “So. Have you two been introduced?” he asked slyly, taki
ng half a sandwich.

  “No, Sturmbannführer,” she replied in her provocative alto.

  “I told you, call me Haas. Adela, this is Tobias Rey. He’s doing some paintings for us.”

  It was an old house. Just then a gust of wind whistled up the stairway, blasting the door wide open. Too late, Max saw it coming: the door slamming squarely into the painted couple at the café table, obliterating the delicate brushwork, possibly cracking the plaster as well. In the blink of an eye, Adela’s small hand shot out and caught the doorknob.

  Max let out his breath. “Quick reflexes,” he said admiringly. “We could use someone with your instincts on the eastern front, Adela.”

  “I’ve read your books,” she said to Toby.

  Max thought he saw a glimmer of interest touch the gray, wasted face. “Really,” Toby said. “Which ones?”

  “My favorite was The Thief of Yesterday and Tomorrow. The use of the dolls to tell the story was hallucinatory. Like the dreams you have when you are running a high fever.”

  “I hope you didn’t find them too pretentious,” said Toby.

  “Oh, no,” she murmured, and there was a trace of amused irony in the sultry voice. “That is not a word I would use to describe them.”

  The smile was thin and fleeting, but it was there. So far, his scheme was working, Max thought gleefully. “Adela, our artist is wasting away,” he announced. “From now on, I’m holding you responsible for making sure he eats.”

  When she left the room, Max saw that Toby’s gaze followed her until the door closed behind her.

  “Not bad, hey?” said Max.

  “Not bad at all.”

  “The best cook I’ve ever had,” he added as further incentive. “What was that book she was talking about? The one with the dolls?”

  “The Thief of Yesterday and Tomorrow,” Toby said, dropping his brushes in a can of turpentine.

  “Is it also for children?” Max asked hopefully.

  “No. A short story.”

  “What’s it about?”