6
The story of Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski was soon to come to an end. Two weeks after arriving in Krakow, Yakov and Sofia ran out of money and that killed off their fictitious, grand-sounding surname. They were back to being merely Mr. and Mrs. Pawlicka. They had to leave the Merkur Hotel on Krakowska Street and were welcomed in the ghetto by cousin Frankie’s family. Life had started to become difficult for everyone, since, because of their race, they were unable to return to Rzeszów or leave the city. When someone in a restaurant identified them as Jews, they had had to leave their table and present themselves to the police in the street, who told them they were lucky because they’d already done in several Jewish pigs that morning (“Each got three bullets,” grunted or laughed one of the policemen) and didn’t feel like expending anymore sweat. They would simply leave them at the entrance to the ghetto, which is what they did, while on the way they several times tried to take off Sofia’s clothes to a chorus of obscenities. “On other occasion they’d simply have shot you between your tits,” cousin Frankie, not one to beat about the bush, later commented.
Initially their life in the ghetto wasn’t so different from the life they’d been leading up to then in Krakow, even in a house in the worst possible state, lacking space, running water and light, because they were granted certain privileges as newlyweds. That meant they didn’t have to contribute to daily domestic life, whether with money, of which they had none, or by helping with the most minor domestic chores. They even roamed the streets of Podgórze as if they were still on holiday. Although in that they were only imitating the vast majority of the ghetto’s inhabitants, who packed the streets, huddled in tight little groups, and walked along with no particular purpose. Several times on their daily wanderings they met brother-in-law Artur and his daughters trying to find something to eat, sometimes even stealing food, as he would finally confess. Sofia and Yakov breathed a different kind of air: they made love when they went to bed and got up. After a frugal breakfast, they walked the streets casually trying to sell Frankie’s family’s candelabra though with no success. On the other hand, Sofia got into debt buying on a whim a stringbag for hats that she didn’t need, and even Yakov borrowed money to buy cocoa sweets (from Jamaica, according to the wrapper!) that were on sale by a doorway where one night three violinists played a selection of the gloomiest music they could ever remember to a most miserable audience. That night Sofia longed for the cheerful waltzes and polkas in the Klub Camelot on Bracka Street that had intoxicated her a year ago as if she’d entered a new paradise. That word “paradise” was never to come to her lips again after listening to those searingly sad violins.
From then on, Sofia became aware of the relentless passage of time. Within a few weeks she realized people lumbering up and down the same street in a state of despair, and she kept bumping into the strangest of street hawkers: some sold orthopedic arms; others, potties; others, spools of colored thread; others, fishing rods; others, half-filled packets of cigarettes, pocket watches that had stopped, rusty knives, foil bracelets, turnips, and different sizes of stale bread. Others even set up a stall with magazines emblazoned with the effigy of Hitler and heroic scenes of the glorious German army in action.
Soon after, Sofia’s eyes saw a growing number of beggars and every day more and more poor people who no one could help huddled on street corners. As the weeks passed by, starved corpses began to appear on the sidewalks.
One morning in July Sofia began to see dead children being strewn out on the streets. They looked like recently hunted animals. That same day she realized she’d been three months in the ghetto and was pregnant.
7
Then Sofia remembered something else. She recalled how in 1940, on their previous visit to the city, she and Yakov had visited the zoo, though they never actually went in, because a strange incident headed them off. Trumpet music was blasting next to a few fairground caravans and a man disguised from head to toe as a bear stood by the zoo fence. It was an ugly, much mended disguise. He was advertising a drink, as they gathered from the large poster by the fence next to the pile of the man’s clothes. He was a gypsy, Yakov observed when the man removed his bear’s head and passed round a tray for small change for the pirouettes and roars he’d been performing. When he was level with Sofia, he stared at her and clasped one of her hands between his fake bear paws, whose touch made Sofia feel slightly nauseous. “Get off your high horse, little princess, your children will end up like me,” he told her. Then the man funneled his head back into the bear’s and continued gesturing ferociously and frightening passers-by, until, another man, another gypsy, disguised as a hunter, rushed upon the scene from nowhere and started shooting the bear. After whimpering in a dying vein, he collapsed at Sofia’s feet. The salvoes from the fake hunter scared away the zebras and gnus, and the condors in an adjacent cage flew off and crashed against the roof bars as did the pelicans and red-backed hawks. Wolves prowled around their sandy precinct and a climate of unnerving violence was suddenly unleashed in the zoo by the fence where the man disguised as a bear lay motionless on the ground. His colleague, who had acted the part of a hunter, saw his friend was taking far too long to get back on his feet and removed his bear’s head. The gypsy had died from a heart attack. All that made a vivid impression on Sofia, who refused to go into the zoo and, very edgy, forced Yakov to accompany her back to their Miodowa Street boarding house. Alone in the ghetto, Sofia now remembered that event and that strange prophecy about her offspring and didn’t know why but something terrible within her still led her to be afraid of her pregnancy, and she again became intensely aware of time and the little life she had left, as if she’d suddenly had an intuition that she would die young and would die soon: “Get off your high horse, little princess,” the words uttered by that enigmatic man echoed round her head. And soon after, her dreams were rent with horror, “Abort . . . the Nazis will devour it . . . ” or “He will never get out of the ghetto alive . . . ” words the man disguised as a bear said in the middle of a nightmare she had every night for a week. She decided right away to speak to her cousin Frankie and find out where, and how, and how much money it would cost her to prevent that baby, their baby, from being born. That’s why she said nothing to Yakov, because first she had to speak to Frankie, then act, take a decision and avoid adding more problems to the ones she already had. And all by herself.
8
In 1973 Federico Silla Accati made a present to his dear friend and partner Primo Levi of a book in Yiddish that had some chapters in Polish. It was a huge tome on chemistry in a fairly bad state of repair, with damp and mildew stains, missing its presumably colored illustrations. Its cardboard covers were battered at the corners. It was an elementary chemistry textbook, that bore no author’s name, and simply said on the front Chemistry Lessons. Publisher Yoel Huppert. Krakow 1937. Accati had bought it by chance from a stall in the Jewish quarter of Turin. The fact it was written in Yiddish caught his attention, although he was even more surprised when he read inside, carefully written in Chinese ink, “This book belonged to Artur Sugar, Podgórze ghetto, 1941.” Primo Levi thanked him for the present, was very moved, and thought it would be a way to keep the memory alive of at least one inhabitant of that ghetto that it was later discovered was entirely eliminated between the Plaszów and Auschwitz camps. But he could never have imagined that that copy was sold by Yakov Pawlicka, Hurbinek’s father who never knew he was Hurbinek’s father, on a July day in 1941, when he went into the only bookshop in the ghetto, sold his cousin Artur’s book, asked if they had any books or postcards from Jamaica and if by chance they knew bookseller Simon Azvel. They had no books about Jamaica, and as for Azvel, he had been shot in the head in the ghetto and died.
9
How far away were her mother and her home! thought Sofia as she tortured herself with doubts about the life beginning to grow inside her. Because she wanted to have that child, wanted it more than anything else in the world. And yet over a few mo
nths her hopes had given way to the brutal reality that had trapped her and made her feel painfully defenceless, far from her mother Raca’s loving affections.
The scenes she saw daily in the streets of the ghetto were a perfect enactment of her fear and sense of living on the precipice. That couldn’t be the life she would give her son. And then there were the lists prepared by the Jewish police, who hunted out people for the SS and sent entire families to the camp in Plaszów. What happened to them there? Sofia wondered. Had any member of any family ever returned to tell their story? What newly born child could survive the conditions in a camp? But Sofia couldn’t imagine how removed from reality were the scenes going through her mind, because she had next to no idea, when she tried to think through her fears, of what a real concentration camp was like. No, she wouldn’t have her child, she convinced herself, then immediately changed her mind: yes, yes, she would have it. Frankie her cousin never found out because Sofia never got to ask her advice and ask her to help her abort.
Over the course of those days, she avoided Yakov, who was forced to sell his calendar with views of Jamaica and was very grief-stricken. Unable to hide her sorrow sufficiently not to arouse suspicions, she tried to ensure people didn’t see her looking so worried. She finally asked Frankie to send her apologies to Yakov and Artur because she was suffering from “women’s things.” That sparked off in Yakov intense, cheerful curiosity just in case those “women’s things” were a euphemism for pregnancy, which Sofia categorically denied. But Yakov’s ingenuous glee encouraged her to think yes, she would have that child, whatever the cost. Let life run its course, she finally decided to her relief, though she still tormented herself by thinking how immensely stupid she had been to get pregnant in that place at that time. She reproached herself for such an irresponsible blunder.
And all because she couldn’t stand the way life was so precarious. It annoyed her, although she knew she couldn’t do anything about it: their executioners wanted to starve them to death and were succeeding since everything was so scarce. Clothes, for example, soon wore thin and had to be patched and re-patched. Shoes, for example, broke and there was no way to get new ones. She saw so many people walking barefoot down the streets, or people who had created shoes out of strips of felt or jute! But felt and jute were also in short supply! And then there was the filth. And illness. And petty hates: people argued, came to blows, even wrought revenge and killed their own neighbors, tired of having to share every inch of ground and every minute of life in the ghetto.
Then Sofia and Yakov suffered their worst ever experience in the time they’d been there. One afternoon, when they were walking along, silently, aimlessly, they came to the cemetery; they went a few feet inside from the street and saw how carts kept coming in piled high with bodies without coffins. They saw how frightened, tearful adolescents put them in barrows that were destined for open graves splattered with quicklime. That was the moment when Jamaica ceased to exist for Yakov and the memories of Rzeszów and their happy moments, laughter, caresses and security in the family house, and their favorite smells and tastes ceased to exist for both of them. Everything sank deep into that enormous open grave they could see from the entrance to the cemetery. Goodbye as well to the future, to plans for an engineering business, or plans to study the engines of tanks, tractors, Mercedes Benz and BMW. Goodbye to any possibility. Time was no longer moving forward; time had ground to a halt.
“Now we’ll never grow old,” said Sofia, giving Yakov a hug and looking away from the grave.
“It makes no sense to talk about the future,” said Yakov grimly while he stroked Sofia’s hair.
“Yakov, all our future now is what happens tomorrow, and I can’t much believe in tomorrow,” said Sofia.
“My love, I so miss the time when we were children in Rzeszów and no one was persecuting us,” said Yakov.
They stayed silent, united in their embrace, while nearby the burial people continued their sad round of work. Yakov suddenly separated out from Sofia, looked her in the eyes and said, “I am glad you aren’t pregnant. I don’t want us to have children. Promise me we will never have children, promise!”
“I promise,” replied Sofia without hesitating. She’d decided to abort. Yakov was right. The very different words Yakov had said to her on their wedding day rushed into her head,“We will have lots of children and I will love you for a hundred years.” Reality changes everything.
10
Chaos came on August 7.
The morning when Sofia had decided to tell Yakov the truth about her pregnancy and the decision she’d finally taken, he left the house very early with Artur. Sofia got up feeling sick and saw cousin Frankie in the kitchen. She didn’t feel spirited enough to ask her right then whether she knew anyone who carried out abortions. A forlorn tension haunted her eyes, and she avoided her cousin’s gaze so as not to betray her thoughts. Instead, Frankie, who was in a good mood, rattled on and on about Artur having to get up earlier and earlier in order to try and sell the books from his chemistry teacher’s library, and how he’d discovered he could make more money if he sold them separately but he had to get up earlier, almost when it was still nighttime, to find a buyer, because everything was now being bought and sold in the ghetto. Then she spoke about a dress she’d have to sell sooner or later. Sofia’s worries were thus buried beneath a pile of trivia and she gradually relaxed.
At eight o’clock they heard brakes screeching down in the street, followed by loud shouting. Sofia looked out of the window and saw lots of soldiers running in every direction, including toward the entrance to their house. The sound of boots got louder and louder. Shots were suddenly being fired on the staircase. They banged on their door. Frankie’s daughters woke up frightened and Sofia and her cousin looked at each other. They said things, perhaps the most important sentences they’d ever uttered, but didn’t hear each other. They banged insistently on the door. Once, twice. The third time, Frankie, shaking all over, walked over to open the door, but a burst of submachine gunfire from the stairs hit her in the chest and she crashed to the floor. Four bleeding wounds streaked her front from her shoulders to her pelvis. She was lying on her back, her eyes open. Sofia, panic-stricken, couldn’t think what to do. However, pushed and shoved by the soldier responsible for the shooting she had the presence of mind to shield the daughters from the sight of their mother’s corpse as they left the flat. It had all happened very quickly. Two or three minutes.
In the street they were separating men from women and forcing them into trucks. Sofia walked as if through the air, dragged along by the inertia of hundreds of women who, screaming and panicking, were being pulled, like her, this way and that by the different huddles around the trucks. In one of these to-ings and fro-ings she lost the girls, who were put in another truck. She was left feeling desperate. Was that really happening?
She couldn’t bring any order to the thoughts in her head. She reacted quickly, but her brain went thick and fuzzy as she had to struggle not to fall to the ground, because they shot or rifle-butted to death anyone who fell down. She gradually became aware of the extent of the horror she was facing. In the wake of her cousin’s death, the mere thought of which made her shake in fear, she now realized she would never see Yakov again, or Artur, or the girls, that Yakov would never find her, and that idea distressed her more than any other. She started to imagine, with all the sorrow her soul held, that Yakov was already dead, that he might have been one who fell trying to escape or running off thinking he had a chance, because Yakov always thought he had a chance and was always sure of himself. Those are the brave ones. Then, when she was being shoved into a truck, she thought she spotted Yakov and Artur in another truck.
“Yakov! Yakov! Yakov!” she shouted from the truck she managed to peer out of after she’d pushed three women away with her fists, but her voice was inaudible above the screams and wailing.
Then she lost sight of the truck where she though
t she’d seen Yakov and Artur. It had left with the convoy of men. It was an illusion, a mirage of Sofia’s. Yet it was true: Yakov and Artur were in that truck, were on their way to Auschwitz where Artur would be gassed on arrival. They had been arrested two blocks from their house, still carrying the book they were hoping to sell. Yakov didn’t see Sofia’s truck, but he was certain they’d only rounded up men that day, that the women were safe. Artur, on the other hand, was more pessimistic. He knew that they’d already emptied several blocks of dwellings so they could demolish them later on. If not, where did those empty lots in the ghetto suddenly appear from? It was like eliminating animal burrows.
How quickly happiness had disappeared! thought Sofia, devastated in the back of the truck that hadn’t driven off, that was parked in the street, still as an island of grief: you only had to see the faces of the women and girls huddled next to her. Only she and her unborn son existed at the end of that tunnel that the small universe of her life had entered that morning. Sofia now saw it clearly—the child, who in her plans, despite herself, ought to die, would perhaps be the only one of them to survive. In some paradoxically cruel way the Germans had decided for her: they wanted him for themselves, fate was taking possession of that child.
Sofia stopped talking to her son as if he were someone who’d never exist, someone dead in her belly, and now began to beg he’d have what she most liked about Yakov, his good sense of humor, cheerfulness, sweet charm, nobility, innocence and courage. She wanted her son to inherit all that from his father whom she was sure he would never meet. Her firm desire to give birth to that child now gave new value to her existence. She didn’t know where she was heading, but her son would be born.
The Birthday Buyer Page 15