by Jurek Becker
Father cuts his chunk off the loaf as he does every evening after work. I am the real sufferer but no one takes any notice of me. Father says: “I’ve said it all along, he has a screw loose. To be taken away for the sake of a flower—of all the ridiculous reasons!”
My Mother has stopped crying but says: “Perhaps he loved that flower very much. Perhaps it reminded him of someone, how do we know?”
Father with his bread says loudly: “That’s no reason to put a pot of flowers in one’s room. If someone insists on living dangerously he can plant tomatoes in a pot. You can remember a person a thousand times better with tomatoes.”
I can’t contain myself any longer. I don’t like my father very much at this moment. I shout: “It wasn’t a flower, it was a cactus!” Then I run outside and remember nothing more.
Father wakes me in the middle of the night; the curtain in front of my bed has been pulled aside. He says: “Come along, my son.” He bends over me and strokes me. My mother is also fully dressed. There is movement in the house, footsteps and clattering sounds through the walls. He lifts me out of the bed and sets me on my feet. To keep me from falling over with sleepiness, he supports my back with his hand. It’s a good thing he’s not hurrying the least bit. My Mother brings me my shirt, but I sit down on the bucket that is our toilet. The moon rests on the crossbar of the window; suddenly there are two bulging carryalls in the room. If you look long enough at the moon its face doesn’t stay still: it winks at you. Then my Mother pulls my shirt down over my head. “Come along, my son,” says Father. They both try to think of what they might have forgotten; Father finds a pack of cards and stuffs it in my bag. I also have something to take along: I place the cloth ball my Mother made for me beside the bags, but I am told there’s no more room. Then we walk down the pitch-dark stairs, across the whispering courtyard, out onto the street.
Many people are there already, but none of my friends. “Where are the others?” I ask Father.
He lets go of my Mother’s arm and says: “It’s only our side of the street. Don’t ask what it all means, those are the orders.” This is a disaster, since my friends all live on the other side.
I ask: “When are we coming back?” They stroke my head again but explain nothing. Then we tramp off in response to a command given by someone I can’t see. The way becomes more boring with every step; we must be crossing the invisible boundary ten times over, but when you’re given orders of course the ban is lifted.
A small section of the ghetto—and this has nothing to do with memory, it’s the truth—a small section of the ghetto is like a camp. A few long barrack-like brick huts standing at random are surrounded by a wall. It’s not so terribly high; from day to day its height seems to me to vary. Certainly, if one man stood on the shoulders of another he could look over it. And if you stand back far enough you can see broken glass glinting on the top. But why have a camp in the middle of the ghetto, which is camp enough, you wonder? To which I can reply, though no one explained it to me at the time: people are assembled in this camp before being taken to a different one, or to a place where there is more need for them than in the ghetto. In other words: the idea is to be in readiness in the camp. Is it a good sign to be here, is it a bad one? This is debated day and night in the long brick huts. I’m sick of hearing it.
The three of us are allotted one bed, a hard affair made of wood. Though it is a bit wider than my former one, we are miserably cramped. There are also some empty beds in the hut. Right after the first night I lie down on one of them and announce that from now on this is where I’m going to sleep. Father shakes his head. I shake my head in reply and ask for his reasons, at which he swings his arm back again. I have to yield—it is a victory of unreason. We experiment with various positions: myself on the left, then on the right, then with my head between my parents’ feet. “That gives us the most room,” says Father, but my Mother is afraid that one of the four feet might hurt me. “Sometimes a person kicks out violently while dreaming. You don’t realize it, but you do.”
Father can’t deny this. “All the same, it’s a pity,” he says. I end up lying in the middle, not consulted, and must promise to move as little as possible.
Every morning there is “inspection”—that’s the first word I learn in the foreign language. We line up in a long row outside the hut. It all has to be done very quickly because a German is already standing there waiting. The tips of our toes mustn’t be too far forward or too far back. Father straightens me out a bit. The first person in the row has to call out “One,” then we number off to the end of the row. The numbers roll along and pass over my head. My Mother calls out her number, then Father calls first his and then mine, and already it’s the next person’s turn. This annoys me—I ask: “Why can’t I call out my number myself?”
Father answers: “Because you don’t know how to count.”
“Then you can just whisper my number to me,” I say, “and I’ll call it out.”
He says: “First of all there’s no time for that, and second—we’re not allowed to whisper.”
I say: “Why don’t we stand at the same spot every morning? That way we would always have the same number and I could learn it.”
He says: “Listen, my son, this is not a game.”
There are two in my row who aren’t much older than I am, one of them calls out his own number, the other one’s number is called by his father. I ask one of them: “How old are you?” He spits past my head and walks away. He must come from the upper end of our street—I rarely got that far. After the numbering the German shouts: “Dismissed!” That’s an inspection.
By the second day I’m already bored to death. There are a few smaller kids around, but when I approach them their leader tells me: “Beat it, but pronto.” They all look at me angrily, those idiots, just because their leader wants to show off with that word. I ask my Mother what pronto means, she doesn’t know. I say: “It must mean something like quickly.”
Father says: “Who cares?”
The camp is dead, and I can’t bring it to life. I start to cry, but it doesn’t help. In one corner of the camp I find a little grass. I mustn’t go too far away, my Mother says; Father says; “Where can he possibly go to here?” I discover the gate, the only place where there is movement—sometimes a German comes in, sometimes one goes out. A soldier who is a sentry walks up and down until he sees me standing there. He raises his chin quickly. I can’t say why I have so little fear of him. I take a few steps back, but when he starts walking up and down again I retrace my steps. Once more he moves his head like that—once more I do him the favor—then he ignores me.
That afternoon a different soldier is standing at the gate. He calls out something that sounds dangerous. I go into a hut that is not ours. Though I’m afraid, there’s nothing else for me to do. The same beds are there, and there’s a stench that isn’t like anything I’ve ever smelled. I see a rat running by—it gets away from me—I crawl on my hands and knees and can’t find its hiding place. Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck. He asks me: “What are you doing here?” He has one blind eye.
I say: “I’m not doing anything.”
He stands with me in such a way that the others can see us. Then he says: “Tell me the truth.”
I repeat: “I am not doing anything. I’m just looking.”
But he says in a loud voice: “He wanted to steal, the little bastard, but I caught him.”
I shout: “That’s not true!”
He says: “It’s true all right! I’ve been watching him all morning. He’s been waiting for hours for a chance.”
One of them asks: “What are you going to do with him?”
The liar says: “Shall I beat him up?”
One man says: “It would be better to boil him.”
I scream: “I wasn’t going to steal, really I wasn’t!”
I can’t get free of his grip, and the liar squeezes harder and harder. Luckily, someone calls out: “Let him go, he’s the ki
d of someone I know.” But he holds onto me a bit longer and tells me not to let him catch me again. I don’t tell Father anything about it; most likely he would punish the disgusting fellow—but then I’d have to stay in our own hut. It’s not worth it.
Next day all is well again: early in the morning the other side of the street moves into the camp. I’ve hardly taken five steps outside when someone sounding like Julian calls me and hides. I needn’t look very far. He’s around the next corner, pressing himself against the wall and waiting for me to find him. Julian is my good friend. We haven’t seen each other for a long time, maybe a week. His father was a doctor, that’s why he’s always well dressed, even now.
He says: “Well, I’ll be damned!”
I say: “Julian.” I show him around the camp—there’s not much to show—his hut is the farthest away from ours. We look for a spot that from now on is to be our special place: in the end he picks it, even though he has been here only a few minutes and I have probably been here for as long as a week.
He asks: “D’you know Itzek is here too?”
He takes me over to Itzek’s hut—Itzek is my good friend too. He is sitting on the bed and has to stay with his parents, so he can’t be glad about me. We ask his father: “May he at least go outside with us for a bit?”
His father says: “No chance.” But when Itzek begins to cry he gets permission from his mother, who is normally very strict. We show Itzek our special place; we sit down on the stones. The wonderful thing about Itzek is his turnip watch—I look at his trouser pocket where it is always ticking away. Twice so far I’ve been allowed to hold it to my ear, and once he let me wind it, after I had won a bet. His grandfather gave it to him because he loved him, and told him to keep it well hidden or else it would get pinched by the first thief to come along. Julian also has something wonderful, a wonderfully beautiful girlfriend. No one has ever seen her except him. She has fair hair and green eyes and loves him madly. Once he told us that they sometimes kiss. We didn’t believe him so he showed us how she purses her lips. Only I own nothing wonderful. Father has a flashlight with a dynamo that has a handle you have to squeeze to make it light up. But if one day he can’t find it we all know who’ll be suspected first.
I say to Itzek: “Show me your watch.” But his rotten parents found it and swapped it for potatoes. Julian still has his girlfriend. Itzek is crying over the loss of his watch. I don’t make fun of him. I would try to comfort him if I weren’t too shy. Julian says: “Stop crying, kid.” So Itzek runs away, and Julian says: “Never mind him.” And the splendid turnip watch has been swapped for potatoes—it defies comprehension. I tell Julian what a day in this camp is like so he won’t expect too much. Until Itzek comes back Julian tells me about his girlfriend—her name is Marianka.
Since I left our street, nothing much has happened there. Only Muntek the cobbler has committed suicide. Whenever we sat on his steps he used to come out of his dirty shop and kick us. Now he’s dead. It’s a funny feeling because only the other day he was still alive.
I ask: “How did he do it?”
Julian says he slashed his wrists with glass and bled to death. Itzek, on the other hand, who lived three houses nearer to the cobbler than Julian, knows that Muntek plunged his cobbler’s knife into his heart and twisted it three times.
Julian says: “I never heard such nonsense!”
They argue for a while until I say: “What’s the difference?” But the story also has a sad ending because Itzek’s mother had left a pair of shoes with Muntek for repair. When she heard of his death she hurried over there, but the shoes were gone—the shop had already been stripped.
Still sitting down, Julian pees between me and Itzek in a beautiful arc. He can do that better than anybody. Then he has a plan and makes a solemn face. He wants us to put our heads together. He whispers: “We have to go back to our street—at night would be best.” Julian has never made such a crazy suggestion before.
Itzek asks him: “Why?”
Julian turns his eyes toward me, indicating that I should explain to this idiot, but I’m at a loss myself.
Julian says: “The whole street is empty now, right?”
We answer: “Yes.”
He asks: “And what about the houses?”
We answer: “They’re empty too now.”
“The houses aren’t empty at all,” he says, and all of a sudden he knows something we don’t know.
We ask: “Why aren’t the houses empty?”
He says: “Because they’re full, stupid.” He despises us for a little while, then he has to explain, otherwise we would leave. So: the street was emptied, house by house, but as we know better than anybody, the people weren’t allowed to take much with them, at most half their possessions. The other half is still inside the houses—by Julian’s estimate there must be great piles of stuff still lying there. He tells us, for example, that he hadn’t been able to take along his big toy motorcar because his fool of a mother had trampled on it and instead had given him a bag full of underwear to carry. I remember my gray cloth ball. Only Itzek didn’t have to leave anything behind—he had nothing.
“You’ll never get over the wall,” I say. Julian throws a stone at the wall—the stone passes so close to my head I can feel the wind.
He asks me: “Over that one?”
I say: “Yes, over that one.”
He asks: “Why not?”
I say: “The Germans are watching night and day.”
Julian looks around with wide eyes, then says: “Where do you see any Germans here? Besides, they sleep at night. Didn’t you hear what I said? That we have to try during the night?”
Itzek says: “He’s got wax in his ears.”
I say: “Anyway, the wall’s much too high.”
Itzek says to his friend Julian: “You can tell how scared he is.”
All Julian says is: “We’ll have to look for a good place.” Julian says to me: “Coward.”
We look for a place and of course Julian is right, there is one, where metal struts have been put in like steps. “What did I tell you?” says Julian. My heart beats fast because now I have to go with them or be a coward. There is another advantage to the place: it is far away from the camp entrance and so it is also far from the sentry. Though there is another sentry who walks around and eventually passes every spot, most of the time he is in his little German guardhouse, sitting and smoking or lying down asleep.
Julian says: “I will tell you again, the Germans all sleep at night.”
I ask: “How do you know?”
He answers: “Everybody knows that.”
And Itzek points at me and says: “Only he doesn’t.”
“Shall we go tonight?” Julian asks, looking at me.
I think how easy it would be to agree to everything now, and later simply not show up. I look at the struts and test the bottom one with my hand.
I say: “The Germans must be crazy.”
“So what do you say?” Julian asks me again.
I say: “Why don’t you ask him too?”
Julian asks Itzek: “Shall we go tonight?”
Itzek is silent for a moment, then says: “Tomorrow night would be better.”
“Why wait until tomorrow night?”
Itzek says: “One shouldn’t rush matters.” This view is familiar from his father, a lawyer by profession (whatever that means).
My preparations begin that evening. If ever I am to succeed in getting out of bed at night unnoticed, I mustn’t sleep between my parents—I must sleep at the edge. I start coughing until my Father wants to know what’s the matter. My Mother places her hand on my forehead. The coughing goes on and on. I can see them whispering together. As I lie down I say: “I can’t get any air in the middle. Don’t worry, I won’t fall out.” And I cough so violently that I really do have to gasp for air so that they have to give me a place at the side.
Every night someone shouts: “Lights out!” then the light goes out; for a short whil
e whispering continues. The elves fly in the dark—they are a secret that must never be spoken about. Once when I wanted to talk about elves with my Mother she merely put her fingers to her lips, shook her head, and said nothing. The roof of the hut opens up to the elves, the walls bend down to the ground, but you don’t see anything—you just feel the waft of air. They float in and out, just as they please. Sometimes one of them brushes you with her veil or with the wind. Sometimes she even says something to you, but always in elfin language, which no human can understand; besides, elves speak incredibly softly. Everything about them is more delicate, more gentle, than with humans. They don’t come every night, but not that seldom either—then there is a hidden, joyful movement in the air until you fall asleep, and probably even longer. At the first hint of light they vanish.
Tonight I intend to practice getting up, I’ve told myself: if I manage once to get out of bed without waking them, I’ll also manage when it really matters. Only I must be sure they’ve fallen asleep.
Normally, Father falls asleep so quickly that he is already snoring before the elves arrive. Sometimes I poke him deliberately in the ribs, and it doesn’t disturb him. But tonight of all nights they whisper together and lie with their arms around each other like children and kiss, as if they hadn’t had all day to do that. I’m stuck—they’ve never kissed like that before in the hut.
I hear Father whisper: “Why are you crying?” Then I feel sleepy—I believe the first elves are already there. I roll my eyes to drive off my tiredness.
I hear my mother whisper: “He’s stopped coughing, do you hear?” Then Father wakes me and says: “Come along now, inspection won’t wait for you.”
My Mother says to Father: “Let him be, he hasn’t had enough sleep.” Such a disaster won’t happen to me again, I swear, even if I have to prop open my eyelids with matchsticks. So tonight I’ll have to leave the bed and the hut with no rehearsal; but the good thing is that I now know how easy it is to fall asleep against one’s will.