by Clinch, Jon
The idea strikes Jacob like a blow. Here he is with a straight razor in his hand, paralyzed in the manner of old dead Schuler, yearning to take the sharp edge of it to the neck of some high-ranking officer but stayed by the enormity of the consequences. For Schuler’s understanding was true: the murder of one such as Liebehenschel or Vollmer, or of some lesser functionary like Drexler or even that ridiculous officer with the bicycle, would take a thousand men and women in its wake. Ten thousand, if the SS could manage to kill that many that fast. They’re already doing their best, and it’s hard work with certain intractable realities about it—the irreducible physicality of bodies to be disposed of, for example, a business that takes time and fuel no matter how you approach it. So Jacob is dizzied, at least for a moment, by the notion that he and the rest of the prisoners may be actually holding the Nazis in a kind of reciprocal but unequal stasis. Why find another barber, when you already have the deferential Jacob Rosen? Why not offer a special kindness to Max, when it keeps his mother content behind her easel?
“We could store it there, you think?” he says.
“Until the war’s over,” says Chaim. “Or until somebody comes to tear this place down.”
“The Messiah, I suppose.”
“Sure,” says the boy. “The Messiah. Or else the Russians.”
Later, after they’ve trimmed every neck in the Administration Building and proceeded into the town and made their way to the commandant’s villa down the road and found him too drunk to sit up straight in his chair (the housekeeper, deaf as the rumors always promised she was, seemed unaware of the man’s condition in spite of the volume at which the old songs—Ab in den Süden, Fuerstenfeld, Skandal im Sperrbezirk—rang out from his study), after they’ve stolen a choice morsel of roast beef from beneath the nose of the squint-eyed U-boat cook who’s too busy having a cigar out in the ruined kitchen garden to notice, they return to Canada.
Jacob finds his son without his crutch, leaning against a table, sorting children’s clothes. Max has a tear in his eye but it’s not for the pain in his leg and it’s not even for his own lost sister. It’s for every lost child there is. Children not much younger than he but smaller and therefore less fortunate, should you consider an early exit from this place under whatever terms unfortunate. He’s beginning to wonder. Jacob gets a curt nod from Jankowski, out patrolling the margins of this place like some slow engine of destruction, and he goes to help the boy.
“What’s happened to your crutch?” he says.
Max keeps his mouth shut and tilts his head toward the fire that burns in the middle of the yard. Gray smoke rises in the afternoon air and collects like a thunderhead beneath the partial roof.
“Who did this?”
Max tilts his head toward the capo, who’s just now vanishing through the door.
“Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he know you have a protector?”
“Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he resents it like the rest of them, Papa.”
“Let them resent you. Resentment doesn’t matter.” Jacob picks up a pair of trousers suited to a child of no more than four or five years old, shakes them out, and folds them tenderly before putting them in the pile.
“It matters if I don’t have a protector after all,” says Max.
“Your mother is still painting.”
“It’s been three weeks since I left the hospital, Papa. Three or four.”
“She’s still painting.”
“Maybe Vollmer has forgotten about me. Maybe he forgot about me the minute I left the hospital. Maybe there’s nothing to this protector business.”
“I’d prefer to believe that there is.”
“We’ll see, Papa. We’ll see.”
Max
I gave up on God, as did so many.
It was easier for me than it was for a lot of them. I’d never been especially religious. I’d never been all that attached to the synagogue. I was just a boy, remember, and in the years before the camp I’d been more of an outdoor type than a religious scholar. I guess I was an Animist by nature if I was anything at all, which meant that while I was in the death camp I missed the Carpathians more than I missed the Almighty.
Blessed be He.
Old habits die hard, you see, but they’re just habits. Just habits, in the end.
I remember men who would cry out in the night, though, hammering at the wood of their bunks and hammering at their own chests, struggling to understand how their God had forsaken them. They’d have torn at their clothes if they’d been dressed in anything other than rags already and if a man couldn’t have been shot for destroying the property of the Reich. The racket was all around me some nights, lamentation on an ancient and biblical scale, and all it did was keep me awake.
I don’t remember my father going through it. I don’t think he thought about God much. He was too busy worrying about my mother and me.
Sixteen
Gretel holds off on telling Eidel’s story until she’s gotten a good look at the picture she’s inscribing into the ceiling of the bunk. So she works on other things whenever she has a spare moment. Writing down the stories other women have told her, and searching for a likely place to hide the new jar that she’s nearly filled up already. The secret place behind the block where the water drains from the roof has proven to be a problem. She passed it last week and caught from the corner of her eye a glint of the old vinegar bottle, which apparently wasn’t buried deeply enough. Snowmelt had washed away gravel and undermined some of the earth beneath it and left a bit of glass exposed. She must get to that, too. She must cover the bottle again, before it’s discovered and dug out and emptied and all of her work comes to nothing. Her testimony scattered, reduced to a thing no more credible or lasting than birdsong.
One morning she awakens long before the three alarm bells, flat on her back, Eidel asleep beside her. It’s dark, darker than midnight, since the beams of the searchlights move more lackadaisically at this early hour of the morning. Even the guards are weary. She lets her eyes adjust, listening to the breathing of the women around her and listening to Rolak beginning to stir in her compartment and knowing that the day will begin soon. And in the few minutes that she has, she manages to get a good look at the drawing overhead. At the thing that has been occupying Eidel for the last weeks.
The figures aren’t human after all, or not entirely. They’re strange and terrifying and highly particular, creatures called up from a very specific nightmare. Two larger and two smaller, the larger pair alongside one another and one of the smaller ones fitted in between them and the other one seated on a lap. The largest of them is some kind of demon, perhaps a demon whose function is to torment lesser demons, perhaps even Satan himself, his curved teeth arrayed in a great gaping grin, his twisted horns thrust up and out like the horns of a ram, his enormous wings unfurled into black curtains. Beside him sits his bride, for this one is without question a bride, clothed in a wedding dress whose ironic whiteness would be a triumph of technique if only Gretel knew how to perceive it. The face beneath her cunningly invoked veil is a mask of bottomless hunger, and her hands where they jut from the lace of her sleeves are a pair of bony talons, bloody and made for grasping. One clutches a child, a girl, the most human of these creatures and therefore the most horrifying. She has an unfinished look about her, the look of something brought from the womb too hastily and for the wrong reasons. Gretel can’t look at her too closely. Besides, her attention is drawn to the figure in the middle, the figure that to judge by his bundhosen and his stiff white shirt must represent a boy. This one is neither a monster like its father nor a revenant like its dam nor an ill-formed atrocity like its misshapen little sister. This one is a pig. Plain and simple. It’s a young German boy incarnated as both the unthinkable and the untouchable. Trefe. And he, even more than the rest of his family, looks deeply proud of what he’s become.
Gretel has seen enough, and for a change the dawnshattering shriek of the alarm bells comes as a relief.
*
So this is how Eidel maintains her sanity: painting one truth by day, and drawing a different one by night. The truth of technique on one hand and the truth of the heart on the other, neither one of which she can hope to alter in the least.
In the apartment, Vollmer only encourages her. He slips around behind the easel at the close of each session and studies her work while she cleans up, admiring the day’s progress and praising what she’s accomplished. Over time he seems almost to forget that she’s a prisoner exactly, and to see her instead as a kind of vessel or passageway or conduit for something else, something greater than either one of them. Call it art or call it the will of God.
His daughter presses him on the point one day, just after he’s swept an indicating hand along the curve of a particular line, asking him how it is that a Jew might create something that he would praise so highly. She asks with the simplicity and innocence of any child, and with the directness that comes from knowing that the person before whom she’s asking the question doesn’t qualify as a person at all.
The answer is obvious, her father says: “God, not man, is the creator. God works in mysterious ways, and quite often He selects the least of us to perform His greatest miracles. Witness this beautiful painting. Witness this lowly Jew.”
Eidel dares to watch him from beneath her eyebrows. There’s nothing kind in what he says, nothing humane, beyond how it permits her to very nearly vanish from her own story. In the camp, invisibility may be the greatest gift of all.
Vollmer bends to tousle his daughter’s yellow hair. “Remember this lesson,” he says, “should you ever doubt the power of the Almighty.”
*
“The problem,” says Max, “isn’t just getting out. It’s getting back in again.”
“They’re both problems.”
The two are in the lineup for roll call, waiting while Wenzel flips through some papers on his clipboard. The instant he looks up they’ll have to stop whispering, but the look of consternation on his downcast face suggests that they have a moment. Other men talk, too, and Wenzel doesn’t mind. He’s the only capo in the camp who wouldn’t, no doubt about that. He tolerates a little fraternization, as he calls it, as long as the prisoners observe limits. As long as they snap to attention when the time comes.
Some of the prisoners maintain that this studied laxity of Wenzel’s is going to get him shot one day—probably sooner rather than later—but as long as the work keeps getting done he remains untouched if not untouchable. No one is untouchable.
“Right,” says Max. “They’re both problems. Getting in and getting out. That’s what’s got me thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“That you and Chaim should do it together.”
Jacob can’t help but raise his voice a little. “And send two men instead of one? And double the difficulties? Double the risk?”
“On a Friday, I mean, when you’re already in the town.”
“I see. You’d like us to go on a little shopping trip, then? While we’re at liberty.”
“Keep an open mind,” says Max. “The next time the commandant’s drunk, see, you don’t go straight to Vollmer’s. You take advantage of the change in schedule, and you go to the shop instead.”
“And we tell the antique dealer what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Chaim will think of something.”
“Fine. I’ll leave it to Chaim. But then we just snatch the painting right out from under the man’s nose? Is that what you have in mind?”
“It’s only an idea,” says Max. “It needs refinement.”
“You’re right about that,” says his father.
*
There are ginger cookies and hot tea on the dining room table, and fat little Kurt can’t seem to get enough. He keeps leaving his place in the family tableau and dashing to the table and snatching up another sweet, returning with his mouth full. His father orders him to stop, but his mother intervenes. He’s just a growing boy who needs his strength, she says, although Eidel can see that those bundhosen of his are fitting much more closely now than they did back in the wintertime.
Frau Vollmer sips tea and leans over to replace the cup on the table, asking Eidel what has become of her coat. She hasn’t seen it hanging in the entryway for a long while now.
“With all respect,” Eidel says, frowning down at her palette, “I was able to pass it on to someone more needy.”
“More needy?” laughs the woman of the house.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
Kurt pipes up, his mouth full of crumbs. “I know about this,” he says. “I’ll bet she traded it for food.”
“Now, Kurt. Don’t be ridiculous. A beautiful coat like that.”
Eidel mixes paint.
“There’s a whole black market,” says Kurt, swallowing and giving his head a vehement shake. “Isn’t that so, Papa?”
Vollmer doesn’t move. He may as well be posing for a photograph as for a painting, his chin horizontal, his eyes fixed straight ahead, the faintest suggestion upon his lips of a smile withheld. “There is a black market,” he says. “No question. I don’t suppose I need to add that it’s strictly against regulations.”
Eidel adjusts herself in her chair.
Frau Vollmer leans forward. “You wouldn’t have traded that beautiful coat of mine for something as fleeting as food, would you?”
“Of course not, Madam,” says Eidel. “Never.”
“I believe you,” says the woman of the house.
“Thank you, Madam. It’s the truth. I received nothing for it.”
There are still cookies on the plate when the session is over, and the instant she’s alone Eidel takes two of them. The first she eats right off while she puts her things away, keeping her back to the room in case someone should return. The cookie is soft and thick and dusted with crystalline sugar that she licks away first, trying to pace herself but fearing to be caught. Small bites lead to larger, panic and hunger getting the best of her good intentions, and soon it’s gone. The sugar makes her lightheaded and raises her heart rate a little, and she can feel it pumping through her veins like a drug as she hides the other cookie in the pocket of her uniform. The housekeeper returns for the dishes and makes no remark, but Eidel’s heart doesn’t slow. The cookies are loaded with butter, fragile as dreams, and as she leaves the apartment and makes her way back to the camp she goes carefully lest the one in her pocket crumble to dust.
The delivery commando’s wagon is pulled up near the kitchen, and the two men—the little junkman from Witnica and Blackbeard himself, the mender of pots—are hauling a dead woman down the steps. Her legs trail behind, one shoe having come off on the doorsill, her heel scraping against the concrete and leaving a trail of blood. They grunt and toss the corpse onto the wagon—which is loaded up with coal today and not flour, thank God—and then they tip their caps in Eidel’s direction, smiling their toothless joy.
She ducks her head and goes in. The door is propped open and the room smells of fire and burned meat, and a woman unknown to Eidel is scraping the top of the stove with a blackened spatula. Whatever she is working at is stubborn as death. Standing at the table nearby is Gretel, looking smaller and more pale than usual. She grits her teeth and draws one shallow breath after another, a little tremor in her jaw, her arms and hands nearly too weak to knead the dough before her.
Eidel comes to the table and reaches into her pocket. The cookie is still nearly intact. She describes it to Gretel, whispers that she’s stolen it to appease Rolak, but perhaps—
“The capo is in a rage,” says Gretel, barely loud enough to be heard over the scraping of the other woman’s spatula. “Don’t go wasting it on me.”
“Half, then,” whispers Eidel. “Just half.”
“Rolak would know. You’d be next. Or I would.”
“But you need it.”
“We all need it.” Gretel turns a few degrees, putting her shoulder toward Eidel, a stance that shuns
any act of kindness. Through the open door they can see the deliverymen climbing back into their seats, and Gretel tilts her chin to indicate the body on the wagon bed. The face blackened on one side, the uptilted palms worse if anything could be worse. “Go on and give it to the capo,” she says. “You must.”
Max
That tattooed girl keeps me up to date on how the retrospective is coming along. Just the logistics of it are incredible. Day after day, paintings show up from all over the world. The truth is they’ve visited places I’ve never been myself. Venice, for example. I’d love to see Venice, but for some reason I’ve never made it there and I guess it’s probably too late now. Venice was where they built the first ghetto. I wonder how many people know that. How many people, even good Jews, know that the word ghetto comes straight from Italy.
Italy of all places. You’d think Germany. Poland.
At any rate there’s a gallery over there with two or three things of mine in it. If they hadn’t been kind enough to loan one of them to the National Gallery, I don’t suppose I’d have ever seen it again. That’s the way it is. You paint something and it means the whole world to you while you’re painting it and then it’s gone.
By God, this thing is turning into a big family reunion. A family reunion without a family, but still. Everything I’ve ever done is coming home to roost, thanks to that tattooed girl. The one who now spends half of her time here in New York, keeping an eye on me.
I’ll bet the Venice picture looks different over there than it will look in Washington. I say the Venice picture even though it doesn’t have anything to do with Venice other than that it’s been on a wall over there for thirty-five or forty years. I wonder if that famous Venetian light has transformed it in some way. I wonder if I’ll have trouble recognizing it.