The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  For a while, things were almost tolerable. A skinny German named Falkenberg ran a land drainage operation, a handsome German named Selinger collected the artisans. They paid their workers bupkis, but they seemed like decent men. Doctors, professors, musicians, businessmen went to work in the woods, draining swamps and felling trees, or to nearby towns to build roads and bridges.

  This was how she found out that Skip had a mistress. Her brother Yechezkel watched him walk by with his Polish girlfriend as he worked laying bricks in a nearby village. Skip barely gave the slave laborers a glance. At that point, Sofia had been pregnant for six months.

  Her father wrote angrily to the connections in New York who had suggested the match in the first place. Now the truth was revealed. Skip had been involved with all sorts of strange women back in Toledo; girls who sold cigarettes in nightclubs, girls he met at seedy bars in the seamier parts of town. A stripper, once. His father had threatened to write him out of the will unless he married a Jew. He agreed to a girl they found for him in Poland. A beautiful girl. An educated girl. A girl who knew nothing about him.

  The Wizotskys accepted this news with grim stoicism. There were just too many other things going on, matters of survival.

  With no jobs and no income, tradesmen who lived from hand to mouth began to starve. Seven months pregnant, Sofia stood on line in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, for half a loaf of bread, or sometimes, rotten, blackened potatoes. Sofia, who had never had to so much as boil a pot of water, learned to haul buckets of water from the pump at the corner, to peel potatoes, to wash her own clothing.

  Six weeks early, she went into labor. On February 14, 1940, Yeshaya Refuel Weiss was welcomed into the covenant of Israel. He had a shock of black hair and eyes the color of a river at midnight. As if he knew they were in danger, he gave one cry and was still. For a moment, he regarded his mother with his wise baby eyes, and then he yawned and went to sleep.

  As infants do, Shaya went from sleeping to sitting to crawling to walking to talking in the blink of an eye. He was the sunniest of children, with shining eyes and a sweet disposition, a laughing smile for everyone. Sofia never knew she was capable of feeling so much love. When he turned his gaze on her, those midnight eyes with those long feathery lashes, when he took her finger and gurgled out giggles, she could feel her heart expand with joy.

  Splashing her as she bathed him in the tin tub, he would let loose strings of silvery laughter, like sleigh bells jingling on the horses harnesses in winter. Holding his little hand in hers, she traced circles around his soft baby palm with her finger and chanted a children’s rhyme about a crow feeding kasha to her chicks. On the last line, her fingers would skip up his arm and tickle him under his delicious little neck, all wrinkles and folds, and he would squirm and burst into giggles. Ah faygala, faygala, faygala, kitch kitch kitch keree!

  Rafe was standing by the fireplace, with his back to her. Darkness clung to him, a darkness that had nothing to do with the rumors they whispered about him at school.

  “What’s the matter?” said Tessa.

  “Nothing,” he muttered. “A little tired, is all. It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this.”

  He swung his head up to look at her, the sad, colorless eyes searching through her as if she were completely transparent, and hidden inside her were the answers he sought. He looked as he always did, trousers pressed to knife-edge perfection, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his hair falling in a soft peak at his forehead just so, but under his eyes there were gray shadows that hadn’t been there before. Something was changing inside of him, she realized, and she wasn’t sure it was for the good.

  “Let’s stop this,” she said abruptly. “It’s hurting you.”

  The strange eyes coalesced into an ordinary gray. “I’m fine,” he said brightly. “Really I am. Let’s go on.”

  He was lying, she knew it, and he knew she knew it. Plainly, this was disturbing him more than he’d expected. As the flames churned and danced, a rhythm of light and shadow chased each other across his face. It was so quiet that she could hear the tick of the grandfather clock upstairs.

  “By the time you found her,” she began tentatively, groping for the right words.

  Restless, he roved over to the window. He could hear the thoughts in her head as clearly as if she was shouting them. “By the time I found her, she was alone.”

  “Where were her parents?”

  “Gone. Transported in the first wave. May, 1942.”

  Her body reacted as if she’d been punched in the gut. The family she’d never known had taken on flesh, come alive. “What about my grandfather? Sarah Tessa? His children?”

  “They went in the next Aktzia,” he said to the windowpane. Outside, a plastic grocery bag went skipping down the middle of the street, carried by the wind. “The SS found their hiding place. Sofia never saw them again.”

  The last Aktzia, the big one, came in the middle of October.

  A man ran past the house cursing, then two more, running in the opposite direction. She pushed open the front door, recognizing Yosha Grinstein, the pharmacist. “Haven’t you heard?” he shouted to her, barely breaking his stride. “The Lords and Masters want us to assemble in the sports field by the high school. They say they’re going to distribute new work papers.” He seemed startled to see Shaya playing, building a house out of matchsticks. “Why are you still here?” he called back incredulously.

  The screams of women, the barking of dogs, and the tread of marching boots assaulted her ears. Soldiers and SS men were blockading one end of Seminowa Street, flushing people out of their homes, beating them with sticks and truncheons, herding them through the market square in the direction of the school. German Shepherds lunged at screaming children, ripping their clothes, as officers in leather trench coats chuckled. Sofia slammed the door shut and ran to the back room, gathered Shaya up in her arms. Now she knew real terror, the cold knot of dread at the pit of her stomach.

  Holding her breath, she opened the door that led to the yard behind the buildings. Surely the soldiers would already be there. Sofia imagined the feel of bullets slamming into her body, the darkness that would swell and overtake her.

  Where there is no choice, there is no fear, she thought. A Yiddish proverb. She ducked through an archway that let out on Blotna Street. Miraculously, it was deserted. She scurried the three blocks to Kozia Street, her head down, Shaya wrapped in her shawl, fighting the flow of the citizens of Wlodawa being driven towards the sports field, where Sofia used to watch her brother and his friends play soccer.

  She rounded the corner past the shoemaker’s shop and came to a dead stop. A corpse lay across the narrow road, one side of his head a bloody pulp, blocking her path. His shoes were missing; some desperate soul had taken them.

  There was no way around it, she would have to step over him. To her everlasting horror, he stirred and clutched her ankle. “Oh, mein Gott,” he whispered. “Meine shicher, meine shicher.”

  She pulled her leg free, and ran the rest of the way to Wishniak Street. With each step she prayed, asking only for a miracle. Since August, Wishniak was in the Jew-free zone, where she could be killed for the unforgivable crime of being a Jew on a sidewalk. Three years living under Nazi rule had changed her. She no longer stopped to consider the lunacy of this decree.

  It was raining, a cold, steady bone-chilling drizzle. Shaya was wet, he wanted to walk, he wanted bread and butter. Holding his little hand as she dragged herself along, Sofia broke down and began to sob.

  Then, the miracle happened.

  A man with a walrus mustache and a checked workman’s cap was leaning against a wall, smoking. He followed her with his eyes as she passed by. “Wizotsky?” he inquired in Polish. “Family Wizotsky?”

  Brushing at tears with the back of her hand, she nodded.

  “Stefan Zukowski,” he said, introducing himself. “I was the foreman in the tea warehouse. I remember you. You’re the artist.” He shifted his cigare
tte to the other side of his mouth. “My brother is also an artist. He studied at the Art Institute in Krakow.” The sound of soldiers breaking doors open was getting closer, the wailing louder. “Damned Germans fired me when they took over, gave my job to a Ukrainian. Now I’m a porter.” He crushed out his cigarette. “You shouldn’t be on the streets. Do you have a place to hide?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Come with me,” he said. Taking a key from a circle of keys he wore on his belt, he inserted it into the door of the rundown house behind him and led them into a dingy ground floor apartment. In the kitchen, he threw back a trapdoor that concealed a root cellar, gesturing at the darkness below. “In here,” he said. “I’ll roll the rug over the opening and put the table on the rug.”

  Sofia hesitated. She had never seen this man before, and now she was placing her life in his hands. Seeing her doubt, he smiled. His blue eyes crinkled, but his great mustache looked sad. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I have children, too. We will only get through these times if we help one other.”

  She climbed down a creaky wooden ladder into the darkness. It smelled of damp, mold and earth. He handed Shaya into her arms and closed the trapdoor, returning a few minutes later with a loaf of bread and a glass of butter. “Here,” he whispered. “For the little one.”

  He closed the door for the last time. Dirt rained down on their heads as he arranged the carpet over their hiding place. She heard the table scraping across the floor, thumping into place. Finally she heard the squeak of the floorboards as he crossed to the door, the ratcheting sound of the key turning the tumblers in the lock, leaving her in utter blackness.

  The pounding of soldiers’ fists on doors drew closer, house by house, until it was right on top of them. The sound of many boots booming up the stairs, the crunch of breaking glass and splintering wood, the high-pitched shrieks of frightened children and screaming women grew louder, louder still, until it was over their heads and all around them.

  The ground shook, the lock rattled. Now she could hear the steady tramp tramp tramp of hundreds of feet, walking, running, shuffling past the front door, towards the marketplace.

  She heard the soft pleading of an old woman, and the sound of blows landing on unprotected flesh. She heard the sound of bodies being dragged across the pavement and the sound of wagon wheels on cobblestones. She could hear the curses of the SS men, the crazed barking of the dogs, the frantic cries of mothers calling for lost children. She recognized the laughing babble of poor Mendel the barber’s son, who had never been right in the head. She could hear Gittel Danielsohn, who’d lost her mind after her husband was killed and her children taken in the first Aktzia, singing the beautiful Danube Waltz and begging the soldiers to dance with her, and the laughter of the soldiers as they encouraged her.

  The sounds multiplied, echoing and ricocheting and resounding off the walls of the buildings surrounding the quaint old market square, roiling together into a thunderous whirlwind of noise that rose like one long mourner’s prayer for the Jews of the city of Wlodawa, ascending into the leaden sky.

  At the close of the second day, the dim light grew dimmer, slouching toward evening. And in that blue hour when it is dark but not yet night, Sofia heard someone fiddle with the lock, then smash it open.

  Heavy footsteps entered the room, leather squeaking. A soldier’s boots. Sofia hardly dared to breathe. Though she couldn’t see Shaya, she could feel him, a warm bundle in her lap, and she shut her eyes and prayed that he wouldn’t choose this moment to speak up in his adorable singsong.

  The boots circled the room, opening and closing cupboards, banging on walls to search for concealed openings. They stopped not two feet from her head, stomped on the floor to listen for the echo of hollow spaces. Dust sifted down onto her face. She could feel Shaya stir against her, and her fingers crept across his cheeks and covered his mouth.

  Whatever her visitor heard, or didn’t hear, must have satisfied him, because suddenly the boots squeaked purposefully towards the door. She heard it bang shut.

  Gradually the babel of noises sounded like it was coming from farther away, then ceased altogether. An unnatural silence fell over the town, a sound more terrible than all the sounds that had preceded it.

  That night, she heard the door creak open, heard footsteps enter the apartment, stealthily this time. The table was moved, the carpet rolled away, and there was Zukowski, extending a hand to help her up out of the hole in the ground.

  It was horrible, horrible, he said, wiping the corners of his eyes. Soldiers tearing children from the arms of mothers who fought like wild animals. Policemen beating old men over the head to move them along at a smart pace. Fresh bursts of grief as people recognized brothers, sisters, parents, children they thought had been hidden away.

  Trains came and went for two days. In the end, there were not enough cars for all the people assembled; and so the last remnant of the Jews of Wlodawa were shot and beaten to death at the train plaza, the pretense of civility at an end. Their bodies were carted off into the forest by a few strong men reserved for this purpose, who performed their duties while whispering the prayer for the dead, slipping in puddles of mud and blood, before taking their turn in front of the guns.

  Zukowski had visited the site himself. He knew the little children were in the lap of the Holy Mother, he told her. He took off his hat and wiped his face on his sleeve. “The ground,” he whispered unsteadily. “I was there today. The ground is moving.”

  Shaya was asleep. Sofia laid the baby in the strange, abandoned bed, tucked him under the covers, then did a curious thing; she opened and closed drawers until she found a pen and paper. Relief flooded through her body. She sat at the table, smoothed her fingers over the sheet of paper, snowy white. “Can we stay here?” she said, her eyes on the paper as she began to sketch him, his kind eyes.

  Now he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “My wife,” he murmured uneasily. “My children. If they find you…” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. If she was caught, they would all die.

  And then, just like that, his shoulders straightened with resolve. “Of course you can stay here,” he said firmly. “But you can’t leave these rooms, you understand. I’ll bring you food.”

  She gave him her engagement ring. From her apartment, she asked him to bring clothes, some family pictures, her books, her pens and paper, her silver Shabbos candlesticks. Within a month, she had to tell him that she had nothing left to trade. He lifted his hands, palms up, and shrugged. “So it goes with my family, so it will go with yours,” he said. “Don’t worry about the money.”

  A week ago, he’d disappeared. Knowing that his wife wasn’t pleased with the arrangement, she wondered if he’d finally given in to her pleading. Or worse, that he’d been arrested, tortured, killed.

  This morning, the cupboard had been completely empty. As the day waned into twilight, she took a chance. She threw a shawl over her head and left the apartment, locking Shaya in with a warning to stay quiet. Keeping her head down, she hugged the corners of the marketplace, coming at last to the booth where she knew the woman behind the mound of potatoes.

  “Please,” she whispered to her husband’s lover. “Please.”

  The pretty mouth dropped open, as if she had seen a ghost. “You should not be here,” she hissed, but she let Sofia take two potatoes. “Now, go.” she said, her eyes darting around to see if anybody was watching, “and don’t ever come back.” And then her voice turned low, vicious. “Or I’ll tell on you.”

  By the time she reached her apartment, it was almost dark. Sofia boiled the potatoes and they had a feast. When the knock on the door finally came, she was almost relieved. Whatever happened next, at least her baby had a full stomach.

  She was done. In all her words there had been not a trace of self-pity.

  We were sitting on the couch now, turned towards one other, our hips barely touching through all our clothing. She was resting her head on the palm of her h
and and gazing up at me through half-closed lids. The white curve of her neck called to me.

  I reached out and stroked her hair, dark and smooth like a rook’s wing. “Sleep, my darling girl,” I told her. “You’ve been so brave, for so long. Your angel of healing is here. I’ll take care of everything. Go to sleep now.”

  I could spend the whole night detailing the pageant of horror, tragedy and missed opportunities that has been my life. It’s the parts that are happy for which there are too few words.

  Mostly, I remember little things. Sofia stealing glances at me from under long black lashes when she thought I wasn’t looking. The feel of her hip against my hand as she brushed past me between the table and the cupboard. Her hands tracing circles in the air as she lit her Shabbos candles. The accidental touch of her fingertips when we both reached for a game of Exquisite Corpse at the same time.

  Isaiah’s tinkling laugh, like the sound of sleighbells. His small pink foot in the washtub during a bath. Down on my knees, crawling around the carpet with him on my back, pretending to be his brave steed. The sweet sound of his voice laughing with delight as I whizzed him around my head spitting out propeller sounds. His hand sliding into mine.

  Isaiah cuddled in Sofia’s lap, his head against her shoulder as she drew him a fish, a horse, a rocket ship, the moon and stars, the letters of his name. Sofia’s pointed chin resting on the top of his head, moving to give him a soft kiss, her red lips lost in the black curls.

  Sofia drawing me again and again, her hands flying over the paper, her eyes darting back and forth from her sketch back to me. Sofia directing me, with all the authority of a general in the field. Hands in my pockets. Smoking a cigarette. Hat on. Hat off. Standing. Sitting. Reclining on the couch. Looking off in this direction. With my legs apart. With my legs crossed just so. With my jacket off. With my shirtsleeves rolled up. With my shirt open. In my undershirt. No shirt at all, my braces hanging down to my knees. A slight smile playing across her pillowy lips as she squinted to reduce me down to big lights and big shadows, to shut out unnecessary details, getting the large relationships down first.