Death in Twilight
Page 8
There were no beds, per se. Seven cots took up what space there was. Some were neatly made, others had bedclothes tussled together with other personal objects all in a stew. There were no closets, no armoire, no dresser or shelves. Apart from the radiator, the room would have made a perfect closet. The only amenity that Aaron could see was an electric hotplate resting on top of the radiator. A slice of bread sat on the hotplate, which appeared to be on, surprisingly.
Cohen shrugged apologetically and pointed to one of the neat bunks in an invitation for Aaron to sit.
“I know it doesn’t make much of a chair, but at least I can promise that it’s clean,” he said. “It’s mine.”
Cohen wrinkled his nose as he looked around at the other cots.
Aaron sat.
“I’m happy to get off my feet, actually, so thank you.” Aaron was doing his best to mimic the Cohen’s smooth and educated tone. Clearly, it would not do to appear a savage in front of this young man.
“So, how can I help you?” Cohen asked.
“Well, I was hoping you might be able to give me an idea of where I to find Lev when he’s not at work,” Aaron said truthfully. “The Judenrat and the Jewish Police weren’t any help, really.”
“Oh, I know! When the Germans took my family’s home — it was outside the ghetto, unfortunately — the best the Judenrat said they could do for me was to put me up here, in this rat hole,” Cohen said, his voice bleak. “The Germans wouldn’t let me take anything from the old place. All the furniture, my mother’s jewelry, my father’s paintings … ”
Cohen stopped himself, with an effort.
“I mean, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve certainly seen many people who have it worse.”
“I’m in much the same situation,” Aaron said, nodding. “I was forced here from Serca. Lev’s family knew mine. It’s not easy getting along here, and I figured a friend with hooked into the authorities could only help.”
“You can probably tell that Lev doesn’t have much sway,” Cohen said, looking around. “You’re catching me at a rare moment. There’s almost always someone else here. There are seven men assigned to this tiny little space.”
The smell of burning bread began to fill the room.
“Oh God!”
Cohen rushed to turn off the hotplate, grabbing up the bread and bouncing it from hand to hand to avoid getting scorched. Finally, the toast was cool enough for him to hold. He gave a slight smile.
“Well, not too badly singed,” Cohen said and lifted it to take a bite. Again, his better angels intervened. “Would you like some?” he offered with a certain noblesse oblige.
Aaron returned the smile and said thank you, adding one of the polite lies commonly told in the ghetto, “I’ve already eaten.”
No one had ever eaten enough.
The words were barely out of Aaron’s mouth before the toast was gone. Cohen then turned his attention to his fingers, looking for crumbs.
“How do you all get along, cramped in a place like this?” Aaron asked.
“Well, people have things to do that take them outside,” Cohen said. “I know that a couple of the other men work in the shops. Of course, I’m still looking for work myself.”
“How do people get along with Lev, do you think?”
“He’s not here very much. That makes any roommate more attractive,” Cohen said. “He doesn’t snore, he doesn’t smell — more than the rest of us anyway. Other than with religion, he’s quite private.”
“Religion?”
“He’s always trying to get us to come with him to that synagogue of his.” Cohen looked annoyed.
“Which synagogue is that?”
Cohen looked toward another neat cot.
“Actually, I think he might have some sort of flyers here. He has fits of giving them out.”
“Do you mind if I check?” Aaron asked.
“I probably should, but frankly, there’s so little privacy in here anyway, I’m not sure what difference it could make.”
Under Berson’s cot, Aaron found a small stack of prayer cards and nothing else. The paper the cards were printed on was so thin that a breath of wind would carry them to Moscow.
“I have to tell you, the stack used to be larger,” Cohen said. “But everyone takes a few with them when they go down the hall.”
Aaron quirked his eyebrows.
“You know. To use the facilities? It’s impossible to get tissue paper, you know.”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Aaron said with a smile, making Cohen laugh out loud.
“I’d thought that myself,” he said.
Aaron looked at the sheet he was holding. He had expected some tout or overt plea for money. Instead, what he saw was in Hebrew, not Yiddish or Polish. As he slowly worked his way through the words — it had been years since his bar mitzvah and he wasn’t a religious person — he began to see that it was the Shema, the fundamental words of Jewish faith.
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohainu, Adonai Ehad!
“Hear, O Israel! Adonai is our God! Adonai is One!”
Below the poorly printed words was an address. Nothing else.
“Do you mind if I keep this?” Aaron asked.
Cohen laughed again.
“I think I can say with complete assurance that Lev would very much want you to have it.”
Aaron thanked the young man, said his good-byes and did what he could to prepare for the cold that waited for him outside.
Chapter 8
Aaron could see the light fading through the windows of the stairwell, so he picked up his pace. Curfew was coming and he didn’t have much time to get where he was going.
He smelled boiled cabbage as he swept down the stairs to the fourth floor. It reminded him immediately of his mother’s best dish, stuffed cabbage, which he’d enjoyed regularly as a kid. The sauce had been both sour and sweet, and the aroma filled the house for the entire afternoon, as it was prepared.
Most of the ingredients for that homely meal were either absent entirely from Miasto, or were well beyond the means of a middle-class family, such as Aaron’s had been. Aaron was hardly a good enough smuggler to assemble the whole recipe.
The third floor’s stench held no pleasant memories. The pleasure tent that he had noticed on his way up was still and quiet now, its occupants sated or elsewhere. Below that, he passed through the men who gambled and shouted over the marble game on the ground floor, then out to the sidewalk and fresh, cold air.
Snow had begun to fall, but it was a pretty drift of flakes rather than a blizzard. Aaron was glad to see it and hoped that it would get worse, keeping German night patrols gathered by heaters rather than looking for Jews who might have missed curfew.
He was headed for a building that was only a few streets away, but he could now see that he’d misjudged the sun in the overcast. He had very little time. Again he pulled up his collar, buried his face in it and tried to walk quickly, though not conspicuously.
But it’s hard to be in a subtle hurry.
Even as he kept his head down, he heard a voice calling to him from the curb.
“I hope you’re close to home. Otherwise there’s no way you’re going to make it,” a black-haired man in a gray uniform said. “Actually, I don’t hope that. I hope you’ve got a long way ahead of you. Shall we, perhaps, walk together, untermenschen?”
Aaron didn’t understand every word. His German wasn’t very strong, leaving him to translate it into Yiddish in his head. But he gathered that he had not actually been stopped, since he had not heard the word “Halt!”
So, he made a mistake. He kept his eyes down and continued to walk, saying nothing
“Halt!”
There was no choice. Aaron stopped and waited as the German caught up the few steps he’d fallen behind.
“Do you not speak German or are you just stupid?” the scharfuhrer, troop leader, asked.
Aaron could understand that.
“I speak only a little German,” he re
plied. His accent held a world of Yiddish inflection.
“Well, I’m sure you know what curfew means,” the SS man said.
Aaron nodded.
“I’ll put this in small words. When it is dark, I will shoot you. You understand that, right?”
Aaron nodded again.
“Say it out loud. It’s very funny when you people try to talk.”
“Ja.”
“No, no. You forgot to say ‘sir.’ We can’t allow that, can we? Let’s try again.” There was a delighted malice in the man’s eyes and a hint of alcohol on his breath. “Say, ‘I understand that when it is dark, you will shoot me, sir.’”
Aaron was easily insulted. He’d been in many fights because of it. He liked fighting. He suspected that if the urge to fight hadn’t been born into him, his life would have followed a very different path. Perhaps he would have studied the Torah and God’s laws, or been a baker or a bureaucrat. But he hadn’t and he wasn’t.
He was a Jew, however, and had spent enough time in shul to know that life was sacred above all. The scholars agreed that virtually all of God’s laws to could be put aside if a life was at stake. A man can set aside the rules of kashrut if starvation is the other choice. A man must not steal, unless not stealing would mean death.
Bend, do not break.
Aaron kept his head down, perhaps even dropped it a little lower than before, doing his best to mumble out the words.
The German bellowed with laughter.
“Excellent!” the man said. He gave Aaron a friendly, though forceful, slap in the face and said, “You’ve been a good sport. I tell you what, why don’t you run, and if you make it home, good for you. If you don’t, well, I’ve already told you what will happen.”
Aaron began to walk swiftly, but he refused run, which made the German laugh.
“So proud! Well, use your time the way you want. It won’t make much difference, really. I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”
A turn at the corner, another turn. The laughter faded and Aaron’s sense of purpose returned. He broke into a trot when he was sure there was no patrol to see him.
Two more blocks; two more turns; another block; the light fading all the time; his sense of danger growing with the darkness.
Aaron reached a street that looked no different from the others he’d passed. A few shop fronts, mostly closed up — either for the night or forever, who could say? — apartment buildings of three to six floors, composed of brick and stone, indistinguishable in the dimness but for the street numbers. The building he was looking for had a number that he knew well. Over the last few weeks he had been a constant visitor.
An engine growled not far away. Aaron couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from, but it sounded like it was getting closer. He began to run, each footfall sounding like thunder in his ears.
The door he needed was just in front of him, perhaps twenty meters away. He closed the distance at a pace that he couldn’t have kept up for a second longer, reaching the doorway, entering and gasping, coughing, choking all at once. Lights from a car filtered though the glass in the top half of the door above Aaron. He lay on the floor unmoving.
The car passed.
Aaron’s heart restarted.
He slowly rose to his feet and stepped down the building’s unlit corridor, feeling for a door that led to darkened stairs and the basement.
He turned, closed the door behind him, and walked down toward a glow. After a few steps, he heard the bolt of a rifle snick.
“It’s me,” he said. “Put the gun away.”
In lieu of an answer, the gun’s barrel was pointed in a different direction.
Teitel was waiting there for him with three other men and lanterns. Behind the men was a ragged hole that had been ripped into the Aryan world.
Or more precisely, a short tunnel dug through brick and dirt that led into a small space below a warehouse that had been closed to prevent smuggling. Now, unbeknownst to the authorities, the warehouse was back in business, under new management.
“Things look good?” Aaron asked Teitel, who was smiling.
“You can see for yourself,” he said proudly. “Everything’s clear, thanks to the help from your friends on the other side.”
“Friends might be a little strong. They didn’t do it out of good will. They’re hoping for a little return on their investment,” Aaron said, lighting a cigarette, breathing the smoke deeply. “Do we have enough to pay for the shipment?”
Teitel pointed to two steamer trunks and a small satchel that sat in the dirt of the unfinished space. The lack of dust on them betrayed their recent arrival.
Aaron walked over, reached down and undid one of the clasps on a trunk, and then another, releasing the lid and allowing some of the lantern light to penetrate the box. The contents glittered in reply.
It was a strange collection of wealth. A kind of wealth only available to the poor. It was everything that could be stripped from a person while leaving the owner alive. Silk from a mother’s wedding dress, a candelabrum that had passed generations in the same family, a necklace that had adorned the throat of a woman on a forgotten evening at the opera. A trunkful of such things.
“And the other trunk?” Aaron asked.
“Furs,” one of the other men replied, “and the special package.”
“And cash in the satchel?”
“What there is. And a little gold, mostly in coins, but a tooth filling or two, also,” said the same man, whom Aaron knew only as Boris.
“Let’s hope it’s not a biblical trade,” laughed a squat man with an unintended beard. His name was Dov.
When nobody else laughed he added, “You know, from the Torah. An eye for an eye? A tooth for a tooth?”
Thin smiles all around.
Aaron looked directly at Teitel.
“And the special items?”
“At the bottom of the second trunk. When are we expecting your friends?” Teitel asked Aaron.
“They don’t have the same curfew. They may want to wait a while longer, until it’s been dark for a while and people have settled in for the night.”
“Well, it’s okay, I brought cards,” Teitel said. “And this.”
He pulled out a bottle of slivovitz that had been hit hard already. Probably the one he’d shared earlier with Aaron.
The group gathered around one of the trunks, using it as a table, and Teitel dealt cards as the bottle passed from hand to hand, mouth to mouth. The air in the little space grew stale as they played and drank, its only escape through the hole in the wall.
A sound of something scraping on brick or rock caught Aaron’s attention and his gaze snapped toward the wall. Another scrape was followed immediately by a metallic click that Aaron knew was the sound of a gun safety snapping off. That sound came from his side of the hole, so Aaron kept his eyes locked in front of him, poised to leap forward or fall to the floor depending on what he saw or heard next.
Dust settled down into the lanterns’ light. A boot, a leg and then a second boot followed it quickly. Next came a voice.
“May I come in?” the woman in the boots asked.
The voice filled Aaron with relief and a joy that he kept entirely from his face and his voice.
“Please do,” Aaron said evenly.
The woman who was revealed when she ducked under the ledge belonged on a propaganda poster drawn to Goebbels’ personal specifications. Her eyes were Arctic blue, but more sympathetic than that. Her cheekbones were high, but not so high as to give her a Slavic look. Her lips pouted just a bit, sensuous. Her brow was high and clear, her hair edged toward the platinum side of golden, drawn back in a businesslike fashion.
Goebbels’ only quibble? Perhaps she was a little short of his ideals, standing 5-feet 3-inches tall. It was a fault that most men forgave her easily.
“Good to see you, Yelena,” Teitel said, walking over and kissing both of her cheeks.
“You, too, Lech,” she said, putting down the messenger’
s bag she carried.
The other men nodded their hellos but said nothing. They continued to stare.
“Where’s everyone else?” Teitel asked.
“They’re being careful, taking different routes. Something has the Germans stirred up,” Yelena said. “But I doubt it’ll be too much longer. It’s fine, though. Gives me time to work out some details with Aaron.”
She turned to face him.
“And I have a message to pass on, as well.”
She picked up her bag again.
“We can use one of the rooms upstairs,” Aaron responded levelly, though his pulse picked up a beat or two. “I’ve got a few things stored there. The rest of you can stay down here in case Yelena’s crew shows up with the supplies.”
Teitel nodded. The right corner of his mouth twitched slightly. Aaron chose to ignore it and led Yelena out of the basement, leaving behind the smell of rotting cement.
The building they stood in was less crowded than most and, perhaps because of the darkness of the halls, everyone had retreated behind their doors for the night.
Aaron felt ahead for the door he wanted. A hand snaked its way into his other palm. He gripped it tightly, its slight warmth enough to thaw out the part of him that remained frozen between Yelena’s visits.
He found the metal door and opened it smoothly and quickly with a key from his pocket. He had to drop Yelena’s hand for a few moments while he did it. Once they were inside, he replaced that fingers’ touch with his arms, his lips, his body. She pressed back against him and their combined weight shut the door more loudly than they would have liked, startling them and forcing them apart for a moment.
Yelena recovered first.
“Damn. My nerves didn’t need that.”
“Don’t worry too much, everyone here is used to our banging by now. It’s hard to take down a wall quietly, even if it’s in a basement,” Aaron said, and now he smiled. He was pretty sure the last time he’d done so was more than a month before, when he’d last seen his wife.
“I hope you’re right. Every time we do this, I’m scared from the minute the planning starts until … Actually, I’m not sure when I’m not scared anymore.”