Jakob the Liar

by Jurek Becker

  In the shop Mischa is the only customer; normally after work there’s never less than a half-hour wait.

  “So early?” asks Rosenek the well nourished. His scales are suspected of inaccuracy, always in the same direction, only they could have provided him with that potbelly. Although he tries to hide the little monster with an outsize overall, overall and Rosenek cannot deceive: no overall, no matter how big, can hide those pudgy cheeks.

  “They’ve given us the day off,” says Mischa.

  “Day off? What does that mean?”

  “A day off.”

  Mischa puts his food coupons down on the counter in front of Rosenek, all of them.

  “It’s only Tuesday,” says Rosenek in surprise, as a reminder.

  “Never mind.”

  “Well, it’s up to you.”

  From a floury drawer behind him Rosenek takes out a round loaf that doesn’t smell of bread like in the old days, puts it on the counter, groans as he cuts it in two with a serrated knife, then places one half on the famous scales, the deceitful brass weights ranged like organ pipes.

  “Please weigh properly,” Mischa says.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I always weigh properly!” Mischa is not about to engage in hairsplitting, which will lead nowhere, so he says: “Be sure to weigh properly. I have a guest.”

  “A guest? What does that mean?”

  “A guest.”

  Rosenek discovers his heart and gives Mischa the other half of the loaf, the alleged half, without placing it on the scales. Two pocketfuls of potatoes come next, Mischa having nothing else to carry them in, then a small bag of ground dried peas, some sausage, more so in appearance than in essence, and a little package of malt coffee.

  “The coupons also say something about fat,” Mischa says.

  “So they do! Do they also say where I’m supposed to get it from?”

  “Mr. Rosenek,” says Mischa.

  Rosenek looks at him as if faced with the most difficult decision of his life, You’ll be the death of me yet, my boy. “Do you need the coffee?” Rosenek asks.

  “Not that badly.”

  Rosenek persists for a while longer in his long-suffering pose, finally picks up the little package of coffee from the counter, and goes off into an adjoining room. He returns bearing a piece of waxed paper. At first sight it appears to be nothing but a folded piece of paper, but then it is clear that there is something wrapped in it. Fat. To judge by his expression, Rosenek has cut it out of his own belly.

  “Because it’s you,” says Rosenek. “But for heaven’s sake don’t tell anyone!”

  “What do you take me for?”

  Mischa arrives upstairs with his spoils. Rosa marvels at what he has brought; she has opened the window wide.

  “Otherwise the sun will think no one’s home and will go away again, Mother says,” she says.

  Mischa puts Rosenek’s largesse away in the cupboard and empties his pockets of the earth from the potatoes. Rosa calls him to the window: he doesn’t like the sound of her voice. Leaning out beside her, he sees a gray procession approaching, still too distant to make out details. So far the only sound is of the dogs barking, intermittently and unnecessarily since no one is getting out of line.

  “Which street is it today?” Rosa asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  He pulls her away from the window and shuts it, but he can’t prevent her remaining behind the windowpane and waiting for the procession to pass by. “Let me look,” Rosa says. “Maybe there’ll be people we know.”

  “Are you hungry?” he asks. “Shall we make ourselves something?”

  “Not now.”

  He saves himself the trouble of further offers, knowing that her answer to any suggestion from him would be “Not now.” Only force could separate her from the window — quite silly, really, because she has no idea whom she will see in the procession, but she fancies that in such situations she mustn’t hide her head in the sand. A kind of rule of the game for Rosa: that’s how she is. The simplest would be to grab her, throw her on the bed, and start kissing her as if obeying an uncontrollable impulse. Mischa takes his first step in this direction, but at the second his courage deserts him; Rosa knows him too well and would immediately see through his ruse. He has no choice but to leave her standing there until the terrible sight: there is no way she can be spared that.

  He sits down on the bed and tries to look composed, a total waste of time since Rosa continues to look fixedly out of the window. Her forehead leans against the glass so she can obtain the earliest possible view of the transport. A little patch of mist forms on the pane; she is breathing through her mouth, as excited people do.

  “Come on over here!” he says.

  Why did those idiots have to pick his street of all streets? There are enough others. Mischa feels an urge to get up and go out into the corridor, or at least into Fayngold’s half of the room, which, needless to say, had resumed its former appearance the day after Rosa’s intervention. What in the world will she do? The yapping of the dogs becomes louder; when it subsides for a moment they can hear the sound of the people’s feet on the pavement, even a single voice calling out: “Step lively now, step lively!”

  “Mischa,” Rosa says softly.

  “Mischa!” she screams seconds later. “Mischa, Mischa, Mischa, it’s our street!”

  He is standing behind her now; the thought that her parents must be in that transport doesn’t seem to have occurred to her yet. In a whisper she counts off the names of neighbors whom she recognizes; each of them is carrying something, a bag, a suitcase, a bundle of whatever was worth taking along. Mischa has time to look for her parents; he discovers them before she does, Felix Frankfurter with his inevitable scarf wound about his neck. His walk somehow expresses confidence; his wife, a head shorter, is walking beside him. She looks up at their window; Mischa had never been a secret.

  Rosa is still counting off names; her mother’s upward glances give Mischa the push he needs. He grips Rosa tightly in his arms and carries her away from the window, intending to put her down on the bed and keep her there by force. But nothing comes of that; on the way they fall to the floor because Rosa is struggling. He lets her hit him and scratch him and pull his hair while he just keeps his arms gripped tightly around her waist; they lie on the floor for an eternity. She screams for him to let her go, maybe twenty times she screams nothing but the words “Let me go!” Until they can hear no more barking, no more footsteps; her blows become weaker and finally cease. Cautiously he lets go of her, ready to grab her again the next instant. But she lies there without moving, with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, as if after some great exertion. There is a knock at the door, and a woman from the building asks whether she can help; she thought she heard someone screaming.

  “No, no, it’s quite all right,” says Mischa through the closed door. “Thank you.”

  He gets up and opens the window, otherwise the sun will think no one’s home and will go away again, so we’ve been told. The street is silent and empty. He looks out for a long time, and when he turns around Rosa is still lying on the floor, her position unchanged.

  “Come on, get up.”

  She gets up — not, it seems to him, because he has told her to. So far not a tear has been shed. She sits down on the bed; he dare not speak to her.

  “Your neck is bleeding,” she says.

  He goes over to her, squats down in front of her, and tries to look into her eyes, but she looks past him.

  “That’s why you came to fetch me,” she says. “You knew.”

  He is shocked at the reproach in her words. He wishes he could explain that there was no time to warn her parents, but at the moment she won’t accept any reasons.

  “Did you actually see them?” he asks.

  “You wouldn’t let me,” she says, and at last begins to cry.

  He says he didn’t see them either, not even right at the end of the transport, maybe they sensed the danger in time an
d found a safe place to go. He knows how ridiculous this is; after three words he realizes the futility of lying, but he finishes his sentences like an automaton.

  “I’m sure you’ll see them again,” he adds. “Jacob said —”

  “You’re lying!” she screams. “You’re all lying! You talk and talk and nothing ever changes!”

  She jumps up and tries to run out of the room, but Mischa manages to catch her just as she flings open the door. In the corridor the woman straightens up, from keyhole level. “Are you sure I can’t help?” she asks.

  “For God’s sake, no!” Mischa screams; now he is screaming too.

  Offended, the woman withdraws; most likely her desire to help has been quenched forever, at least as far as this screaming maniac is concerned. However, the appearance of a third person has brought Rosa to her senses again, it seems; she goes back into the room without Mischa having to force her. He closes the door. Dreading her silence, he sets to work immediately to take renewed possession of Fayngold’s fallow half of the room: the cupboard against the wall, precisely covering the big square of still-clean wallpaper, the curtain down from the ceiling and in front of the window again. For Rosa is going to be living here now; that much at least is clear.

  Have you been hearing anything recently about the deportations?” Mischa asks.

  “No, I haven’t,” Jacob replies.

  “They’ve not only evacuated Franziskaner-Strasse. They’re in Sagorsker-Strasse too and —”

  “I know,” says Jacob.

  They walk on for a bit without speaking, on their way home from the freight yard, having shaken Kowalski at the last corner. He had held back with his questions in Mischa’s presence.

  Since that day, five men have failed to show up at the yard, maybe even more; one only misses the five one knows personally. Jacob had thought there were six, having included Mischa among them because he didn’t show up for work that day. Luckily that was a mistake.

  “How are things going with Rosa?” Jacob asks.

  “How should they go?”

  “Are you managing with food?”

  “Splendidly!”

  “But she can’t go and get any more ration cards, can she?”

  “Don’t I know it!”

  “Couldn’t someone in the building help out? I have the same problem with Lina. Kirschbaum always used to let me have something for her.”

  “I can no longer believe this will end well,” says Mischa. “They’re combing street after street now.”

  Jacob seems to hear a veiled reproach in his voice.

  “Maybe,” says Jacob. “But think for yourself. The Germans are in a state of panic. The transports are the best proof that the Russians must already be really close! Seen in that light, they’re actually a good sign.”

  “Some good sign! Try explaining that to Rosa.”

  On one of her deadly boring and tear-filled afternoons, Rosa leaves the room, although Mischa has strictly forbidden her to do so. Actually he would have liked to lock her in, regardless of her protests; the only reason he hasn’t is that the toilet is in the courtyard.

  She has no fixed destination; all she wants to do is stretch her legs after a whole week of prison. The dangers Mischa is always talking about seem to her exaggerated. In his room she is no safer than anywhere else, it can be this building’s turn any day. And who is there to recognize her? There is hardly anyone left whom she knows, and the street patrols don’t show up until the evening, about curfew time. None of that really matters to her anyway, and besides, Mischa needn’t find out about the walk she’s taking, she won’t stay away long.

  Later when, as it happens, he arrives home long before her, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the truth when she tells him that she happened to have the key to her old home with her, and that, without really intending to, she found herself in Franziskaner-Strasse, her feet having taken that route by force of habit, she says.

  The street seems eerily empty to her; people also avoid walking through it, as if it had been smitten by the plague. Rosa looks into deserted ground-floor rooms, into rooms of people she had spoken to only the other day. Through one window she notices a boy, about fourteen years old. He is kneeling in front of an open cupboard and hurriedly stuffing whatever he can lay hands on into a rucksack — dishes, bed linen, trousers, a wooden box without checking its contents for usefulness. Rosa stands stock-still as she watches him, the sole living creature apart from herself. The cupboard appears to be completely empty, but the rucksack is not yet full; the boy straightens up and carefully surveys the room. Then he sees the wide eyes outside the window; at first he gets a shock, then he also sees the yellow star on Rosa’s chest, and a conspiratorial grin spreads over his face. He probably takes her for a harmless competitor.

  Rosa hurries on, wondering whether someone like that has meanwhile been in her home too: she can’t think of any other word, a looter. While she feels no rage, mere tolerance is not enough. What bothers her is the thought that behind the walls there exists a second, secret life, at first sight not discernible, slowly wiping out all traces.

  She quietly opens her front door and listens with a beating heart. She wishes she had Mischa with her, perhaps he could have been persuaded to come, but now she happens to be here without him. One can never be sure, but after a lengthy silence she assumes that there is no one else in the building. She walks quickly up the two flights and looks through the keyhole before unlocking the door. Then she is standing in the room, which looks very tidy. The dust hasn’t had much time to settle; the four chairs are standing neatly around the table, which is covered with a yellow cloth, a tassel at each corner. The tap is dripping. So far no one with a rucksack has been here, Rosa can see that right away, also that her parents must have left without haste. The first thing she looks for is some kind of a message: this only occurs to her when she remembers that her mother never went out for a second without leaving a message. But this time she had broken with her old habit, evidently; this time there is no scribbled note, which anyway could say no more than “I don’t know where to, I don’t know for how long.”

  Then Rosa looks again, this time no longer for a message, simply looks around. Mischa tells me she is a sentimental little thing and wanted to get some idea of what her parents had taken with them. Probably she wept buckets as she did so. The brown-and-white-checked shopping bag is missing, as is the black cardboard suitcase, nothing else in the way of containers. Since Rosa knows exactly what had been in the room, she would have been able at the end of her search to draw up a list of what her parents had taken along. Including the album of photos and reviews, the book about Felix Frankfurter’s true life.

  Her own things lie untouched, among them the ration card, part of which has already expired. Rosa puts it in her pocket; otherwise there are no objects to which she feels especially attached. She forces herself to think in practical terms. A briefcase has been left behind; into it she stuffs her other dress, underwear and stockings, finally her winter coat, wondering as she does so how she can manage to think as far ahead as next winter. With the coat in it, the briefcase won’t close. Rosa considers wearing it, but then she would have to unpick the yellow stars from her dress and sew them on the coat. So she crams it as best she can into the briefcase, which she then ties up with the belt from her coat. If she should run into that boy in the street, he will be envious of her rich booty.

  Rosa firmly turns off the tap; she is finished here. As she goes she leaves the key in the door, for the boy or anyone else, as if to draw a line under her past.

  “I’ll give you ten guesses,” Mischa says to me, “but you’ll never guess where she went next.”

  Rosa goes to see Jacob, whom she doesn’t know, except from Mischa’s accounts, though from them quite well. Since Bezanika they have never spent an evening together without talking about him, about his radio, his courage, about the Russian successes at the front. At the time, when the first rejoicing over the news reports had subsided
, Rosa had asked why this Jacob person had waited until now before beginning to pass on reports; after all, they had been living in the ghetto for three years, and if he was keeping a radio hidden he must have had it from the very beginning.

  “Most likely the Germans were advancing all the time until just recently. Was he supposed to tell us that things were getting worse and worse every day?” Mischa answered, and that sounded convincing.

  So here she is standing outside his door, not, so she tries to persuade herself, out of any desire for revenge or personal resentment. No doubt he is nice and kind and well meaning, but those reports, day by day more encouraging, and then the empty room in Franziskaner-Strasse, the whole neighborhood in fact — she’s going to ask him how one can be reconciled with the other. She’s going to put it to him, is it permissible to raise such hopes in their situation, don’t start telling me about the radio, that can report what it likes, all he had to do was take a look around.

  Rosa knocks several times, with no result. Why hadn’t it occurred to her earlier that Jacob must come home at about the same time as Mischa? The waiting saps her confidence; by the time she confronts him her head will feel hollow. There is still time for her to leave and get back to their room before Mischa and avoid the argument that is bound to arise if she doesn’t. The longer she waits, the more clearly she has to admit to herself that she has come with the vaguest of intentions. Jacob will persist in citing his radio, regardless of what she blames him for. She had hoped to survive these times intact; now things have turned out differently, and that, when one gets right down to it, is her whole reason. “She plays faster than she thinks,” her father once said after a game of checkers; her father. The thought crosses Rosa’s mind that Jacob may be spreading news other than what he hears on his radio.

  Suddenly Lina is standing at the end of the corridor, just back from the street and Rafael. She sees a young woman with a bulging briefcase outside a certain door, and she approaches, full of curiosity. They eye each other for a few moments, neither of them suspicious. Lina asks: “Are you looking for Uncle Jacob?”