These days, no one would question that kind of response.
When I left school that afternoon, headed directly to the bakery as usual, I thought I was seeing an apparition. Leaning on a lamppost across the street was Josek Szapiro. I gasped, and ran to him. When I got closer, I could see the skin around his eyes was yellow and purple, all the jewel tones of a fading bruise; that he had a healing cut through the middle of his left eyebrow. I reached up to touch his face, but he caught my hand. One of his fingers was splinted. “Careful,” he said. “It’s still tender.”
“What did they do to you?”
He pulled my hand down. “Not here,” he warned, looking around at the busy pedestrians.
Still holding my hand, he tugged me away from the school. To anyone passing by, we might have looked like an ordinary couple. But I knew from the way Josek was holding on to me—tightly, as if he were drowning in quicksand and needed to be rescued—that this wasn’t the case.
I followed him blindly through a street market, past the fishmonger and the vegetable cart, into a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. When I slipped on cabbage rinds, he anchored me to his side. I could feel the heat of his arm around me. It felt like hope.
He didn’t stop until we had navigated a rabbit warren of cobbled pathways, until we were behind the service entrance of a building I did not even recognize. Whatever Josek wanted to say to me, I hoped that it didn’t involve leaving me here alone to find my way back.
“I was so worried about you,” he said finally. “I didn’t know if you’d gotten away.”
“I’m much tougher than I look,” I replied, raising my chin.
“And as it turns out,” Josek said quietly, “I’m not. They beat me, Minka. They broke my finger to get me to tell them who my father was. I didn’t want them to know. I thought they would go after him, and hurt him, too. But instead they took his money.”
“Why?” I asked. “What did you ever do to them?”
Josek looked down at me. “I exist,” he said softly.
I bit my lip. I felt like crying again, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Josek. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”
“I came to give you something,” Josek said. “My family leaves for St. Petersburg next week. My mother has an aunt who lives there.”
“But . . .” I said stupidly, wanting only to unhear the words he had just spoken. “What about your job?”
“There are newspapers in Russia.” He smiled, just a little bit. “Maybe one day I will even be reading your upiór story in one.” He reached into his pocket. “Things are going to get worse here before they get better. My father, he has business acquaintances. Friends who are willing to do favors for him. We are traveling to St. Petersburg with Christian papers.”
My eyes flew to his face. If you had Christian papers, you could go anywhere. You had the so-called proper documents to prove that you were Aryan. This meant a free pass from all restrictions, roundups, deportations.
If Josek had had those papers a week ago, he would never have been beaten by the SS. Then again, he would never have been at Astoria Café, either.
“My father wanted to make sure that what happened to me never will happen again.” Solemnly, Josek unfolded the documents. They were, I realized, not for a boy his age. They were instead for a teenage girl. “You saved my life. Now it’s my turn to save yours.”
I backed away from the papers, as if they might burst into flame.
“He couldn’t get enough for your whole family,” Josek explained. “But, Minka . . . you could come with us. We would say you’re my cousin. My parents will take care of you.”
I shook my head. “How could I become part of your family, knowing I had left mine behind?”
Josek nodded. “I thought you would say that. But take them. One day, you may change your mind.”
He pressed the papers into my hand, and closed my fingers around them. Then he pulled me into his arms. The papers were caught between our bodies, a wedge to drive us apart, like any other lie. “Be well, Minka,” Josek said, and he kissed me again. This time, his mouth was angry against mine, as if he were communicating in a language I hadn’t learned.
• • •
An hour later, I was in the steamy belly of my father’s bakery, eating the roll he made for me every day, with the special twisted crown on the top and a center of chocolate and cinnamon. At this time of day, we were alone; his employees came in before dawn to bake and left at midday. My legs were hooked around the stool where I sat, watching my father shape loaves. He set them to proof inside the floured folds of a baker’s couche, patting the round, dimpled rise of each one, supple as a baby’s bottom. Inside my brassiere, the edges of my Christian papers seared my skin. I imagined getting undressed that night, finding the name of some goyishe girl tattooed over my breast.
“Josek’s family is leaving,” I announced.
My father’s hands, which were always moving, stilled over the dough. “When did you see him?”
“Today. After school. He wanted to say good-bye.”
My father nodded and pulled another clot of dough into a small rectangle.
“Are we going to leave town?” I asked.
“If we did, Minusia,” my father said, “who would feed everyone else?”
“It’s more important that we’re safe. Especially with Basia having a baby.”
My father slammed his hand down on the butcher block, creating a small storm of flour. “Do you think I cannot keep my own family safe?” he bellowed. “Do you think that’s not important to me?”
“No, Papa,” I whispered.
He walked around the counter and gripped my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “Family is everything to me. You are everything to me. I would tear this bakery down brick by brick with my own hands if it meant you wouldn’t be harmed.”
I had never seen him like this. My father, who was always so sure of himself, always ready with a joke to diffuse the most difficult situation, was barely holding himself together. “Your name, Minka. Short for Wilhelmina. You know what it means? Chosen protection. I will always choose to protect you.” He looked at me for a long moment, and then sighed. “I was going to save these for a Chanukah gift, but I’m thinking maybe now is the time for a present.”
I sat while he disappeared into the back room where he kept the records of shipments of grain and salt and butter. He returned with a burlap sack, its drawstring pulled tight as a spinster’s mouth. “ A Freilichen Chanukah, ” he said. “A couple of months early, anyway.”
With impatient hands I yanked at the knots to untie the package. The burlap pooled around a shiny pair of black boots.
They were new, which was a big deal. But they were nothing fancy, nothing that would make a girl rhapsodize over their fashionable stitching or style. “Thank you,” I said, forcing a smile and hugging my father around the neck.
“These are one of a kind. No one else has a pair like them. You must promise me to wear these boots at all times. Even when you are sleeping. You understand, Minka?” He took one from my lap and reached for the knife he used to hack off bits of dough from the massive amoeba on the counter. Inserting the tip into a groove at the heel, he twisted, and the bottom of the sole snapped off. At first, I could not understand why he was ruining my new present; then I realized that inside this hidden compartment were several gold coins. A fortune.
“No one knows they are in there,” my father said, “except you and me.”
I thought of Josek’s broken hand, of the SS soldiers demanding money from him. This was my father’s insurance policy.
He showed me how both heels opened, then fitted each back to the boot and whacked them a few times on the counter. “Good as new,” he said, and he handed the boots to me again. “And I mean it—I want you to wear them everywhere. Every day. When it’s cold, when it’s hot. When you’re going to the market or when you’re going dancing.” He grinned at me. “Minka, make a note: I want to s
ee you wearing them at my funeral.”
I smiled back, relieved to be settled on familiar ground. “That may be a little tricky for you, don’t you think?”
He laughed, then, the big belly laugh that I always thought of when I thought of my father. With my new boots cradled in my lap, I considered the secret we now shared, and the one we didn’t. I never told my father about my Christian papers; not then, not ever. Mostly because I knew he would force me to use them.
As I finished the roll my father had baked just for me, I looked down at my blue sweater. On my shoulders, there was a dusting of flour that he had left behind when he grabbed me. I tried to brush it off, but it was no use. No matter what, I could see the faint handprints, as if I had been warned by a ghost.
• • •
In November, there were changes. My father came home one day with yellow stars, which we were to wear on our clothing at all times. Łód, our town, was being called Litzmannstadt by the German soldiers who overran it. More and more Jewish families were moving into the Old Town, or Bałuty, some by choice, and some because the authorities had decided that the apartments and houses they had owned or rented for years should now be reserved for ethnic Germans. There were streets in town that we could no longer walk down but instead had to take circuitous routes or bridges. We were not allowed to use public transportation or to leave home after dark. My sister’s pregnancy became visible. Darija went on a few dates with a boy named Dawid, and all of a sudden she thought she knew everything there was to know about love stories.
“If you don’t like what I’m writing,” I said one day, “then why don’t you stop reading it?”
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” Darija replied. “I’m just trying to help you with realism.”
Realism, to Dariya, meant reliving her moments of passion with Dawid so that my character, Ania, could have just as romantic a kiss. From the way Darija talked, you’d think Dawid was a combination of the Green Fields actor Michael Goldstein and the Messiah.
“Have you heard from Josek?” she asked.
She wasn’t saying it to be mean, but Darija must have realized that the odds of me getting mail were very slim. The post did not come and go with any regularity anymore. I preferred to think that Josek had written me often, maybe even two or three times a day, and that these missives were piling up somewhere at a dead letter office.
“Well,” she said when I shook my head. “I’m sure he’s just really busy.”
We were at the studio where Darija practiced ballet three times a week. She was good—at least as proficient in her craft as I was in my writing. She used to talk about joining a dance company, but these days, no one talked about the future. I watched her pull on her jacket with its yellow star on the front shoulder and back, and wrap a scarf around her neck. “The bit you wrote about consuming an upió r’s blood,” she said. “Did you make that up?”
I shook my head. “My grandmother used to tell me that.”
Darija shuddered. “It’s creepy.”
“Good creepy or bad creepy?”
She linked her arm through mine. “Good creepy,” she said. “People-will-want-to-read-it creepy.”
I smiled. This was the Darija I knew, the Darija I missed because she was usually too busy fawning over her new boyfriend. “Maybe tonight we can stay over together at my place,” I suggested as we walked out of the building, knowing that she was probably planning to go on a date with Dawid. There was a barrage of soldiers passing as we exited, and instinctively we ducked our heads. Once, when soldiers passed, I used to feel a cold ache in the pit of my stomach. Now, it was so commonplace I didn’t even notice.
There was a buzz in the street; from a distance we could hear screams. “What’s happening?” I asked, but Darija was already moving in that direction.
In one of the squares three men were hanging from gallows so new I could still smell the sap of the trees their timber had come from. A group of people had gathered; at the front of the crowd, a woman was weeping and trying to get to one of the dead men, but the soldiers wouldn’t let her. “What did they do?” Darija asked.
An elderly lady beside her replied. “Criticized Germans here in the city.”
The soldiers began to move through the crowd, telling people to go home. Somehow, Darija got separated from me. I heard her calling my name, but I worked my way forward until I was standing at the edge of the gallows. The soldiers didn’t pay attention to me; they were too busy dragging away the family of the deceased.
This was the closest I had ever come to someone dead. At my grandmother’s funeral, I was little, and all I remember is the coffin. The man who was now twisting like a leaf on an autumn tree looked like he was asleep. His neck was snapped at a strange angle, and his eyes were closed. His tongue protruded a little. There was a dark shadow in his pants, where he must have urinated. Before or after? I wondered.
I thought of all the blood and guts in the horror story I was writing, of the upiór eating the heart of a victim, and realized that none of it mattered. The shock value was not in the gore. It was in the fact that a minute ago, this man was alive, and now, he wasn’t.
That afternoon when my father and I walked past the gallows, he tried to distract me with conversation about our neighbors, about the bakery, about the weather, as if I did not notice the stiff forms of the men behind me.
My parents argued that night. My mother said I should not be walking around town anymore. My father said that was impossible; how would I go to school? I fell asleep to their angry voices and had a nightmare. Darija and I were at the hanging, but this time, when I got closer to the body and it slowly rotated toward me so that I could see the face, it was Josek’s.
The next morning I ran to Darija’s home. When her mother let me in, I was dumbfounded—the house, which was usually neat as a pin, was in total disarray. “It’s time,” Darija’s mother told me. “We’re going to the Old Town, where it’s safer.”
I did not believe it was safer in the Old Town. I didn’t think it would be safer until the British started winning the war. After all, they’d never lost one, so I knew it would only be a matter of time before Hitler and his Third Reich were conquered. “She is very upset, Minka,” Darija’s mother confided. “Maybe you will be able to cheer her up.”
Music from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty seeped from beneath the closed door of Darija’s room. When I walked inside, I saw that her rug had been rolled up, the way she sometimes did when she danced. But she wasn’t dancing. She was sitting on the floor cross-legged, crying.
I cleared my throat. “I need your help. I’m totally stuck on page fifty-six.”
Darija didn’t even look at me.
“It’s this part where Ania goes to Aleksander’s home,” I said, frantically making it up as I went. “Something has to upset her. I just don’t know what it is.” I glanced at Darija. “At first I thought it was Aleksander with another woman, but I don’t think that’s it at all.”
I did not think Darija was listening, but then she sighed. “Read it to me.”
So I did. Although there was nothing written on the page, I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider’s web, spinning a make-believe life. That’s why we read fiction, isn’t it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we’re not the only ones?
“Death,” Darija said when I was finished, when the last sentence hovered like a cliff. “She needs to see someone die.”
“Why?”
“Because what else would scare her more?” Darija asked, and I knew she wasn’t talking about my story any longer.
I took a pencil out of my pocket and made notes. “Death,” I repeated. I smiled at my best friend. “What would I do without you?”
That, I realized too late, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Darija burst into tears. “I don’t want to leave.”
I sat down beside her and hugged her tight. “I don’t want you to leave,” I agreed.
“I’ll never get to see
Dawid,” she sobbed. “Or you.”
She was so upset, I didn’t even get jealous about being the second party in that sentence. “You’re just going across town. Not to Siberia.”
But I knew that meant nothing. Every day, a new wall appeared, a fence, a detour. Every day the buffer zone between the Germans in this city and the Jews grew thicker and thicker. Eventually, it would force us into the Old Town, like Darija’s family, or it would shove us out of Łód completely.
“This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen,” Darija said. “We were supposed to go to university and then move to London.”
“Maybe we will one day,” I replied.
“And maybe we’ll be hanged like those men.”
“Darija! Don’t say that!”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” she accused, and she was right, of course. Why them, when everyone had spoken badly of the Germans? Were they louder than the rest of us? Or were they just picked at random to make a point?
On Darija’s bed were two boxes, a ball of twine, and a knife for cutting it. I grabbed the knife and sliced the fleshy center of my palm. “Best friends forever,” I vowed, and I handed her the knife.
Without hesitation, she cut her own palm. “Best friends,” she said. We pressed our hands together, a promise sealed in blood. I knew it didn’t work this way, because I had studied biology at Gymnasium, but I liked the thought of Darija’s blood running through my veins. It made it easier to believe I was keeping a piece of her with me.
Two days later, Darija’s family joined the long line of Jewish families snaking out of this part of town toward Bałuty with as many possessions as they could haul. On that same day, the men who had been hanged were finally allowed to be cut down. This was clearly meant as an insult, since burial in our religion was meant to happen as quickly as possible. During that forty-eight-hour stretch, I passed the gallows six times—going to the bakery, to Darija’s, to school. After the first two times, I stopped noticing. It was as if death had become part of the landscape.
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