Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “Yes.”

  “Any good?”

  “Better than the last one we sent away. But not by much. Can you take the measurements?”

  “Matilda . . . is that your name?”

  I nod.

  “What do you think, Nurse? Should she keep it?”

  “It is German enough.”

  What do they mean, “keep it”? Who would they give it away to?

  “Your parents both spoke German—is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Frau Haus,” says Nurse.

  “Your father was from Germany, yes?”

  “Yes, Frau Haus.”

  “And your mother? Gypsy?”

  Nurse is smiling at her pencil.

  “No, Frau Haus. She is Romanian.”

  I don’t know about my mother. Tata used to call her a gypsy as a joke, and sometimes she liked it and other times she didn’t.

  “Never mind. Apparently she has some German blood, too.”

  From on top of Frau Haus’s desk, Nurse picks up a long metal ruler with a bar at the end and a bar across the middle that slides up and down. She moves the bar up and down as she measures the distance from the top of my forehead to my nose and then to my chin, then the distance between my eyes. She takes the sewing measure from around her neck to measure the width of my head. I want to laugh at this. Dragos would find this very funny. But this is not a room for laughs. I keep my face still because theirs are so severe.

  Then the distance from shoulder to elbow, and knee to ankle. Then across my shoulder, then from the top of my spine to my tailbone.

  Frau Haus writes down all the measurements. The nurse makes some observations that are quite strange, and again Frau Haus writes these down.

  “Fine white hairs on limbs.”

  “Skin is unflawed, pale olive.”

  “Hair, yellow blonde.”

  “Eyes are . . . blue . . . pale aqua . . . detect a slight blemish near the centers.”

  “Hips very narrow.”

  “Hmm,” says the older lady, but the nurse continues.

  “Small for age, sinewy.”

  “She passes,” says Frau, “but not by much.”

  “What have I passed?” I ask.

  “A special test to see how big your meals will be,” says Frau.

  The other one laughs into her hand. It is a private joke, like the ones I sometimes share with my brothers.

  “I understand that you can speak German—is this correct?” Frau turns to the other woman. “Extraordinary for a Gypsy. That will be helpful at least.”

  “I’m not a Gypsy,” I say.

  Gypsies get burned to death.

  “Do you speak German, Gypsy?” asks Frau, and Nurse laughs behind her hand again.

  “Not very well,” I say in a mixture of German and Romanian.

  “Not very well, Frau Haus,” corrects the nurse.

  “So what German do you speak?”

  I pretend that I don’t understand the question she has asked in German. In Romanian, I ask her to repeat it. When she asks again, I say some words in German, mispronounced on purpose.

  “That’s odd. You answered several questions I asked in German, and now you can’t answer anything. I’ve heard that you speak it very well.” She looks at a piece of paper in front of her.

  I do not say anything. Again I pretend that I don’t understand.

  Frau stares at me silently. She has hatred in her bones like the German child thief, Herr Lehmann.

  “Take her to the shower; then show her to a room.”

  I am led up some stairs that creak and grind. I am already looking at possible escape routes and decide the stairs could be a problem, that people will hear me. We enter a room with a bath and a shower and small basin and toilet. There is just enough room for two.

  “Take your clothes off,” says Nurse, pulling at my clothes. She has a tight bun pulled to the back of her neck, a long narrow nose, and a chin that juts too far forward. There are deep lines down the sides of her cheeks. Her eyes are blue with patches of brown, like bird droppings.

  “You will need to leave first,” I say in German, forgetting that I am pretending I don’t speak German.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m not getting undressed in front of you.” This time louder, in Romanian.

  I do not see the slap coming. It is done with such force that it jolts my head sideways and steals from me a loud breath. I touch the side of my face. I am deciding whether to slap her back, but her eyes are inflamed and her hand is raised to strike again.

  “You want to do that again? Do you, really? How dare you, you little hellcat! You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”

  “Hure,” I say. It is a hateful German word toward women, but I do not know exactly what it means.

  She grabs my shoulders and shakes me hard, and I scratch her neck with jagged nails.

  She slaps me again, and I fall back into the bath. This time it hurts.

  “You have a lot to learn.”

  She puts out her hand to help me up, but I ignore it.

  I get up slowly by myself. My side hurts from where I hit the edge of the bath. Frau Haus stands in the doorway.

  “What is going on?”

  “She did this to me!”

  Frau looks at the marks on Nurse’s neck, then bends over me. “Get up!” she shouts in my face. She turns to Nurse. “You may have bruised her. Always the back or the skull, where the marks can’t be seen. I have told you before!”

  “What was I to do? She came at me like a wild animal!”

  “Don’t ever do that to a superior again—do you understand?” Frau says to me. She does not raise her hand, but there is something in her tone that suggests there are worse things to be concerned with than a slap from Nurse. Then I remember what the guard said, and I believe that Frau could be my enemy here.

  “Look in the mirror!” She turns my head forcibly toward my reflection.

  There are finger marks on my cheek. Nurse has left the bathroom.

  “Hopefully that will not have to occur again, because the new commander will not like to see anyone marked. Marked ones are sent elsewhere. If you value your life, you will not do anything to incite punishment. Now, clothes off and get in the shower.” But she is already pulling at my clothes.

  “I need to use the toilet.”

  “After the shower.”

  I don’t think I can wait that long, but she is pulling my dress over my head and pushing me toward the shower.

  Catarina said that I am not to let anyone look at my naked body. I try to cover my nakedness with my hands. Lukewarm water drizzles down on some but not all of me, and my teeth chatter. I cannot hold my bladder any longer, and urine runs down my leg and into the water hole. I think perhaps Frau hasn’t seen, but she has and she tells me that it is disgusting what I have done. I feel ashamed that she has seen and angry that I am being watched.

  I have never had a shower before, and I hate that water falls on my face. Next time I will ask if I can use the bath instead. Once I am finished, I wrap a towel around me and follow Frau to a room at the end of the hall.

  “Now get changed into your nightwear,” she says, pointing to my suitcase.

  When I open the suitcase, I discover that none of my old clothes are there. Square-Face must have taken them when I was in the bathroom at the hotel. I no longer have the nightwear that carries the smells from home.

  “Where are my clothes?” I ask in Romanian.

  The woman leaves the room, and I hear her turn the key in the lock on the outside of the door. I check the distance from the window to the ground. There are no window ledges to climb onto, but perhaps I can tie sheets and clothes together. Outside there is a barbed fence and the woods beyond it. There is nothing in the room except a bed.

  It is dark by the time the door is unlocked by a girl who looks the same age as Theo. She is beautiful. She has long, muscled legs, and her hair is fair and pulled ba
ck from her face with a silver-colored tie.

  “Follow me,” she says. Her tone is rude.

  I follow her toward the smells of cooking. My stomach rumbles.

  “What is your name?” I ask her in German.

  “None of your business,” she says.

  In the kitchen there is a dining table laden with bread and bowls of soup, beans, and potatoes. Several children sit around the table. I am about to take a seat when the girl pushes me toward a door at the other side of the kitchen.

  “Not there! Follow me!”

  She opens the door into darkness, and the wind is so strong it pushes us back toward the house. Once we are outside, the door slams in the wind. The girl carries a torch to light our way across the back garden. The ground is cold on my bare feet. Wind whips under my nightgown, which becomes full of air like a balloon, and I fear that I might float up into the sky. I want to hold on to the girl in case this happens, but she is walking fast ahead. I follow her farther away from the house. I follow the light from the torch until we reach a small unpainted house.

  The girl opens the door, but she does not step in.

  “Inside,” she orders.

  “No,” I say.

  “If you don’t, Frau Haus will beat you to death with a shovel.”

  I am shocked by the viciousness of the words coming from such a pretty face. But I still don’t move. Half her face is illuminated by the lights from the house. The other half is in complete darkness. She looks like a monster now, no longer beautiful.

  “Inside is a plate of food and a warm bed. There is a light beside the bed. You can turn it on when you get in.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “It is where all the new children spend their first night. It is a very special room in which to think about your new life ahead.”

  The wind tears a hole through my back, and I imagine a warm bed with covers, soft with duck feathers.

  “Hurry up. It’s cold out here.” She is wearing a short coat. I have only my nightgown. I don’t move inside the doorway, a black opening into nothing.

  “I was only kidding about Frau Haus. It was just a joke. In the morning I will come and get you, and you can play with the other children in the sun. Would you like that?” Her voice has become softer, kinder.

  “Yes,” I say, though there has not been any sun for days.

  “Very well,” she says in her kind voice. “Be a good girl. Here, I will shine the flashlight in so you can see where you are going.”

  “Do you mean it? Will you come back?”

  “Of course! What am I? A liar?”

  The light shows a piece of floor just inside the door. I imagine the bed and the food and the light are on the far side of the house.

  She shines the torch on her face briefly to show that she is smiling. She is beautiful again. Then she shines it back through the doorway.

  I step into the house and stop. I cannot smell any food. It is very dark, and I cannot see where I am walking. I am about to turn around again, but her hand shoves me in the back, so hard that I fall forward onto the floor.

  She slams the door behind me, and I hear the bolt in the lock. I hit at the door and shout at her and call her names, but she is gone and I am alone. There is no sound except the howling wind. I am afraid to walk because I don’t know what I am walking into. There is no light and no windows. I listen to sounds like heavy breathing, perhaps coming from inside this house, but it is just the wind. I crouch down and crawl around slowly, feeling my way across the floor. My hands find only scratchy, loose dirt on a rough, hard floor, until I reach a corner where they touch a mattress and a blanket. The house, I think, is the size of a small room.

  I crawl under the blanket and pull it over my face. It is not big enough to keep my feet warm, which might fall off during the night. This upsets me because I need my feet to escape.

  The wind is too noisy for sleeping. My brothers would say that it is not the wind; it is the moaning of spirits searching for Gypsy souls to burn. I pray that there is no Gypsy blood inside me, and then I weep into the darkness, where no one can see my tears, and hope the death spirits don’t come to take my soul.

  NOVEMBER

  CHAPTER NINE

  ELSI

  “Mama,” I plead. “Please . . . no.” She is about to cut off all my hair.

  “You have to trust me.”

  “Why? Because someone referred to me?”

  “Elsi,” she says quietly, crouching beside my chair. “There are men here who are not like ordinary men. They do not think like your father and the people you grew up with. They use power to hang our basic necessities in front of our faces and use them as bribes.” She stands again and starts cutting my hair, and I wonder what she had to endure so that Leah survived the deportations. Mama has given up so much since she came to the ghetto—not just possessions but also a sense of pride.

  She grew distant in the weeks of her pregnancy and worse after the night of the surgery. There have been times when she is so distant, it seems she is barely in the room with us. I think that this place can strip a person of human traits. It can make one desire nothing and hope for even less. I believe it has changed my mother this way, so much so that she finds it hard to live within her own skin. Sometimes I believe that she survives only in order to function for Leah and me. When I try to hold her, or talk, she pulls away as if she is not worthy of holding. Leah has noticed this, too, and I have had to spend more time with my sister to compensate for Mama’s distance.

  Before the ghetto, we used to have nice things. Mama used to wear fine dresses and hats and new shoes when we strolled into town, hand in hand, to buy ice creams—before I became too old to hold Mama’s hand. She walked proudly, head high—not arrogantly, more that she was in control of a life she had planned, was still planning at that time. Before she was no longer allowed to plan.

  Marta once said it was jealousy that had driven people to hate the Jews. She said that some of my friends thought our house was much better than everyone else’s, and that we had too much money and too many fine things, and that we were greedy. We had a fight, Marta and I, because I believed she thought that, too. But she had cried and apologized and promised me that she did not. I didn’t believe Marta, and I left her feeling resentful.

  If they could see our apartment now, Marta and my other friends would no longer know jealousy. If they could see what we live in. If they could see the change in Mama. If they could stand in our shoes, imprisoned behind tall barbed-wire fences.

  It was early in the morning when fists pounded on the front door of our house outside the ghetto. Papa was not home at the time. The knocking was a familiar sound. We had heard it before, during the raids by German police and by those Jews who helped the Germans. We had already endured two of these raids, and they took any precious items they could find. I knew the boy who assisted the police. We had been at school together. He smiled at me like he had at school, as if nothing had changed. Mama said later that she was curious how quickly these Jewish recruits had coated themselves with German pride to betray their former friends.

  As we were squashing our pasts into suitcases, Papa arrived and argued with the men to give us more time. But to no avail. The men in their dull-green uniforms did not want to listen; their ears were blocked with indifference.

  I helped pack food and bedding into a crate, and Papa brought a cart from the furniture store so we could carry our chairs as well. Then the men returned. They had knocked on several other doors in the meantime. They told us to hurry.

  So rushed was she, Mama did not think to turn off the gas in the kitchen. One night after we had been in the ghetto for several weeks, she woke me in the night. She was panicking. Had someone heard the whistling and turned the gas off? Had the kettle burned down? She eventually calmed down, and I hoped that the house had burned to the ground so that Germans couldn’t live in it.

  Then after we were forced from our house, there was a line of Jews as we were herded like
farm animals, toward the poorer end of the city. The poorest Poles living there were told to leave their homes, to vacate for the Jews. I do not know where they went to live. We followed a long stream of yellow stars along the roads. People carried as much as they could. Mothers cradled babies and held hands with the older children, while fathers carried small children under one arm, and bedding or furniture under the other. The elderly hobbled along; some were helped, some not.

  “Will there be a piano there?” I asked. “Will there be a school? Will I have my own room?”

  “I don’t know,” Mama said just once to all my questions.

  As we walked down the street, many non-Jews watched from the footpaths: some stony-faced, some waving—including Marta. She called to me, and I rushed to hug her and found that she was crying.

  “I’m so sorry we fought,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We will always be friends.”

  Marta’s mother was there. She handed Mama a large dish of stew.

  “Thank you, Petra,” said Mama.

  “Maybe when the war is over, everything will go back to normal,” said Petra, “and we will share many more dinners again.”

  Once we had parted, I heard Papa say to Mama, “I wonder how much she knew. I wonder how much our friends have kept from us.”

  I have since thought about that comment, after the reality of our circumstances finally set in. The idea that friendships are so fickle, so fragile, makes me angry, and I think that if I am ever freed from here, I will not live in Lodz. I will live far away and never see Marta and my other friends again.

  Arriving at the ghetto, we were ushered by guards past apartment buildings that were gray and blackened with soot and sadness, and lanes buried beneath a thick spread of mud. Despair seemed to choke these buildings. Leah grew weary, and I carried her piggyback the rest of the way.

  There was no key for the door to our new apartment on the second floor. Papa had to shove the door hard, which had swollen in its frame. In the room were three single beds without any bedding, and the smell of mold and damp.

  In one corner there was a wood heater that had no wood, and in the kitchen a gas stove that still has no gas.