Two Hands Full of Sunshine (Volume 2): An Epic About Children Trapped in the Holocaust

Two Hands Full of Sunshine

An Epic about Children Trapped in the Holocaust

Volume Two

A novel by

JOHN G. DEATON, MD

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Two Hands Full Of Sunshine (Volume II)

An Epic About Children Trapped in the Holocaust

Copyright © 2009 by John G. Deaton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-0-595-46054-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-71232-8 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-595-90353-5 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009901559

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 08/11/10

Contents

Part 2.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

Part 3.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments

Also by John G. Deaton, MD

Markets for the Medical Author

New Parts For Old: The Age of Organ Transplants

Below The Belt: A Book About the Pelvic Organs

A Medical Doctor’s Guide to Youth, Health, and Longevity

Love and Sex in Marriage: A Medical Doctor’s Guide to The Sensual Union

The Woman’s Day Book of Family Medical Questions (with Elizabeth

Jean Pascoe)

Two Hands Full Of Sunshine (Volume 1) An Epic about Children Trapped

in the Holocaust

And Ya`aqov was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Ya`aqov’s thigh was put out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaks. And he said, I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me. And he said to him, What is thy name? And he said, Ya`aqov. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Ya`aqov, but Yisra’el: for thou hast contended with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

Bereshit 32:25-29

Part 2.  

DEBORAH

31. 

Thursday, 26 March, 1942

Animal life in Canaan now evolved along two widely divergent lines: stationary and mobile, with startling distinctions between the two. Stationary forms emerged rarely, if at all; to their vegetative existence the requirements were simple: a bit of water, solace from the shudder of their own respiration, and the strength to balance the splendor of the dying sun against an anguish that lodged in the throat like yesterday’s vomit.

As for the mobile life forms, these were much more varied: they lurked and leapt, howled and prowled, making the ruins of one civilization the harvest of another. The Nazis had cleaned up after themselves, of course they had. They had taken what they wanted except for the livestock, and would be back for that. Meanwhile dogs owned the shtetl. They ate carrion, fought, coupled, snapped, grew vicious. Bevies of rats scurried through the ruins in packs that cowed even the canines, rats of a dimension to threaten every other animal form including the looters who visited from the neighboring Polish villages and commenced ransacking the remains of the shtetl Wednesday night. Hesitantly at first, in twos and threes they appeared and dispensed with the other rodents to split up the carcass among themselves, until daylight shamed them into leaving.

***

Ya`aqov emerged unsteadily from Yisrael’s cellar after they had gone, emerged into a world transfigured from the green of spring to the horror of a caustic landscape. On this canvas birds floated stationary in the sky. The sky itself was frozen in place, like the faded blue scrawling of a picture by a four-year-old. Trees were tucked here and there like drapery, and black leaves rattled in a breeze that sent up wisps of dark smoke, smudges in the portraiture. Everywhere, black snow crunched underfoot. The painting smelt of singed flesh and burned hair and that searing essence that speaks not to the senses but to the heart, by way of dread and its utter fulfillment.

The art of death.

He unstuck himself from the painting, heaved his corpus against nothing, and from out his throat leapt an involuntary peal of anguish, as of all of the charioteers of all of the palaces of all of the forums of all of the hemorrhagic history of this majestic world, a roar of minions and dominions and multitudes and plenitudes and throngs and wrongs and myriads and anguish and all of the desolation of the lamented centuries.

He ducked behind a thought. Mrs. Meir …

***

The penile stump, the golden rump

Bark of the human tree

Felled in a lump in a single bump

The world would never see.

***

Stoppit!

But he could not control himself. Perhaps he never had, never less so than now. Whomper, whomper, whomper! He knew where she was and he knew his thoughts and he was frightened sick of himself.

***

He was moving. Market Street imprinted itself on him. He stood on or near it, having roared himself to death, and this is what he saw. The block with the dress shop and their apartment was volcanic rock. The mill, ruins. From the warehouses to the Square, and across the Square including the synagogue, there remained nothing but ashes and heaps of rubble, detritus of a dead world. Words disowned it, emotions would not accept it. He stood for an hour, he stood for a day, he stood for an eternity, staring made him into a simpleton because it was just that simple.

Dead worlds sink.

Dead worlds stink. Stoppit!

In front of the mikve, no longer recognizable as such, an oblong addition to the ashes of cataclysm, Esther Meir. He buried her, conveying her there being the worst of it, unable to avert his eyes from where the dogs had been at her. He stood in Old Yisrael’s garden and wept black tears for her. For the Kaddish he took the minyan in multiples that had placed him there saying not a prayer for the dead but a song to praise God: Magnified and sanctified be His great Name in the world which He created according to His will. May His kingdom … He took three steps backward through the smoldering ruins and fell into the ebb and flow of the periled waters that had brought his people to this. The waters of torment. For them, it was as though the reef were always off the starboard bow, gift of the words and syntax of the God that begot it all. He sought answers. He would know and know now! But even Mr. Jewsohn in all his prayers could not know that. And why did Esther Meir keep sending him guiltily back to Deborah? What could he have done for her? Deborah, not the lowercase debbie, who teased him incessantly in her notes, signed just that way, now flourished in his thoughts, impossible to think of her in the past tense. Esther, Katerina, Deborah.

How people so alive die? How people die so alive?

Was God where?

Old Yisrael’s shack was gone, though the shed at the corner of his goat pen stood upright, if charred, which meant he was moving. He was in mind of the time when he was a boy and would run, just take off running and continue running, it was so much fun. He’d go up the Warsaw road or toward the river, just run. He had imagined himself a small person tucked carefully inside his own chest, steering this big flapping body with its heaving parts and its whistling promontories and having a heck of a time driving it full speed. All he wished now was to hide himself like that, to ferry himself across a volume equivalent to his own float.

Limping for a reason he did not understand, descending the hill, he found himself jammed inside another sensation, that he was being watched. Oh. He had felt that from the first, especially at the thought of uppercase Deborah. Aligned at the edge of his eye, a glaring, motionless silence. Who goes? The indifferent creek? As he neared it he cringed as one will approaching disaster. It was the creek that had taught him to fly and it was the shore that had taught him to land. Did no good to watch the dark currents. He had a fleeting thought of Warsaw, Paula Patowski. Christian girls not so bad, not so bad at all. Rather sweet. She’d tutor his oar, they’d paddle that lolling gondola up the canals of Forever, that frightful place.

The goat was moaning.

He went at the flies with both hands, but a flyswatter he was not. He tucked his head and scratched them from his person and retreated. From somewhere, a dead lizard flung itself at him, a tool of invisible demons. Its querulous eye glinted menacingly, its tail implicating a tangle of wire and charred posts, the last of Old Yisrael’s enclosure, which was sticking out of the creek at a rakish angle, like oarsmen in a warped world. Jacob did something and the lizard was swept away in the sooty liquid. The thirsty goat lapped eagerly the water from his cupped hands. He made several trips back and forth, then returned to the potato cellar. Mitska still asleep.

I just buried your mother.

Leaning against the ladder, enmeshed in his own self-pity, he nodded off and had a strange dream about angels climbing this very ladder, which went on up forever to touch and yet to see, brighter than any sun and dizzying as …

The goat was crying.

He had walked in a circle, having left the cellar without realizing it, having awakened from a dream he did not recall, and he knelt to see. The flies were gone but the goat could not move. It slurped the water he brought. Already loosening its hold on him, a dream he could not recall.

Mrs. Meir again. Who understood him. And liked him, he could tell by the way she spoke his name, the way she met his eye. She was wont to flirt with him in a daring way, their mischievous affair concealed in playful secrecy. Sometimes for no reason that he knew, she would touch him and the hot splash of warm water went surging straight up inside his arm and into his soul, as if she had read his every secret thought of being with her and consecrated it unreservedly. Once, during a Passover Seder at the cheder cafeteria, he had watched her with the wine, saw the way she tucked her chin beneath a belch, the silent kind that you think you can sneak out. She caught him before he could look away but instead of any embarrassment, winked mischievously at him. Outright, Mrs. Meir said that she was saving Deborah for him.

Debbie who?

Ya`aqov found a pan and took the goat more water. The nanny’s feet were trapped in a bloody snarl of wire, its dead kid lying a few feet away. Ya`aqov tried again but could not free the goat.

He buried the kid.

What if Yanek and those other two came back? Wait, had they been killed? Warsaw. Thousands of lives might be saved, his father an important man. He decided on impulse to do what Esther might have expected him to do, take care of Mittie. But was that fair to him? Sure, he had stayed the night with her and Mrs. Meir would thank him for that. She would not expect the impossible. Adults make decisions.

Get your pack and go! He had walked in another circle, found himself trying again to free the goat. The shed by the gate was still there, hadn’t he already noticed that? He climbed up there learning how steep this hill really was, remembering that this was where he had found the shovel for his various chores. Wedging the door open enough to let in light, he spotted on a shelf a corked bottle of raisins and a bigger one of dried corn. The corn was in a bottle for preserves, with the rubber ring still around its neck. Without spilling it, he poured corn into his pockets for the goat and took a double handful of raisins for himself. Nice. Taste was a pleasure. Where pleasure exists, does not existence also exist? Do sunken worlds exist? Carrying raisins and the shovel, Ya`aqov hand-fed the nanny. He returned to the potato cellar for his canteen. Mittie was still asleep under the tow sacks but had shifted to his spot reminding him of how she had rolled from side to side last night. He filled the canteen at the creek, brushing embers away and taking the water from the trickling part, and limped back to the cellar. The ladder had exactly six steps down. The same number up. Ya`aqov dragged the wooden covering over their grotto and leaned against the ladder in the slender light, kneading his sore places.

Mittie’s expensive dress had been ruined by the fire in the mikve and now reeked of urine. At least she had not been burned. (Ya`aqov’s hair had been singed and it still had that smell, as did the hair on his arms.) The burlap bags were soaked. Mittie’s face was bruised and puffy, as from a beating, and Ya`aqov blamed that on the old woman from the mikve. But why? And how come she was dead in the pool like that? The girl still thought her parents alive; he had given up claiming otherwise. Instantly, as though reading his mind, she sat up babbling something in her sleep and reached out her hand. It was a spade of a hand, creased singly across the palm, and it tugged at his offered thumb like a small furry animal and then she was snoring again. Or was there more? That puffball of light, in the dooryard of the synagogue, reminded him of something: what will become of her?

Last night she had evolved a line of questioning by way of establishing her claim to what was not yet the new reality, not until she had whittled it into shape.

My name Mit-kah. Who you?

Jacob.

Who dat?

Me! Jacob.

She had attempted his name, garbled it, returned to the main item.

My name Mit-kah, who you?

Also: What you do my ma? Where put my da-pa? Kay-tina? Der-rah?

I just told you.

What? What you just told? Don’t say that! What you do them?

I didn’t do anything! I don’t know where they are.

"I know my Der-rah: she her room. See her? See?"

Jacob said nothing. Did nothing.

"See her? See?"

Finally he was persuaded to look, and sure enough.

Yes, he admitted. She her room.

See? Mittie said triumphantly. "See?"

After a moment Mittie said, You say ‘Hi’ her.

Jacob was silent.

You say ‘Hi’ her!

Jacob said, Hi.

See? She say ‘Hi’ you back!

This craziness was all very well, were Deborah really there, even in spirit. But Mittie seemed intent on sharing her makeshift world, whether or not. She had insisted on learning his name while he withdrew into silence, whereupon, shutting her eyes, blind girl, she shifted and ran her sticky stubby fingers over his face, upon the contours of his nose and brow, the basic chin geometry required to place him on her tongue. All at once she had giggled, from deep down in her unfettered soul, paean of a notion that spirited her away. He had looked at her. Truth comes quietly, when it comes, but never when it doesn’t. That din. Is it the resonance of the brassy mouth organ or merely the deafening squabble of those who own the world? Puffballs come in funny shapes.

Now, returned and seated beside her in the darkness, his pack at his feet, Jacob glanced at Mittie and drifted to last autumn when he had begun to sneak over to watch the rabbi’s family on Shabbat. Mittie was always in the middle of things, helping to set the table, the pet who was let to have her own glass of kosher juice in lieu of wine, her pick of challah and butter and jam, Mittie who coveted, and received, the blessing. Debbie was always there, beautiful Debbie so full of life, who’d say, Oh, Jesus wept! in her consternation at something he had done to displease her, and Katerina was there and Mrs. Meir, wonderful Mrs. Meir, the diamond in that tiara.

The scream came jarring through the hatch door and Mittie blinked instantly awake, startled.

Somepin’ hurt! she cried.

Goat, he said.

She straightened. Opening her purse, she officiously drew out her broken glasses, which didn’t fit very well. Swung around in the choppy waters of another scream.

Somepin’ very hurt!

Yes, a goat down there. That I was letting loose, he added.

Go see! she told him, pushing him toward the ladder.

The idea was there. He made sure she was listening.

Would you like to go to Warsaw?

He lifted the pack. She blinked but said nothing.

Would you?

She took in a breath, a sigh.

Go see my da-pa, she said firmly. Ma. Der-rah. Kay-tina.

So I’m leaving you this canteen, okay?

Immediately everything reverted and she pointed at him.

You come back? she asked.

I’m going to see about the goat, he said.

You come back?

I’m leaving this right here, okay?

You come back?

I’m just going right down there, see?

You come back, Jack-hub?

***

Zeelig Wolomin burst awake in the thunderstorm, but was the throbbing of gunfire. He rolled over twice and grabbed his nuts. He and she were camped in a tear-shaped clearing, nestled in waist-high weeds behind a couple of headboard saplings. Gripped in darkness, the woods around them struck at them like a two-assed chicken snake. Shooting … shotguns … farmers!

He rolled onto his back and swilled the wet dew. He gave himself the adventure of being right here exactly here where he himself was. Very deliberately, as she sat watching him, he crawled back to the bed they had made in the grass and found the towel and used it.

Trembling uncontrollably.

Definitely two or three shotgun blasts, spiked by a frenzy of barking and screaming. Then a single blast. Then a droning silence because silence is not the absence of sound so much as it is the faint echo of what is left after sound leaves, a kind of ornament draped over all of the things that are in the woods and that make your ears get bigger with everything that isn’t.

He derived from her: silence. Sari gave him the creeps, she never said nothing, she never did nothing, but it was like she could read his danged mind. She was sitting up, a middling baby bird, its beak testing the air, the way somebody perks up from a reverie when they are shouted at. His take: armed Christians were about, never good news for a Jew, and that quickly he decided what to do. Walk to the sawmill, see my daddy. See whether pancakes or maybe an egg this morning. Check behind the deli where they sometimes threw out the tastiest victuals. Have a good pee and enjoy the shivers of it. Why should they want to kill him? And why don’t Sari say nothing?

***

Stalwart Sari, maid-in-waiting, had nothing to say. He was so much bigger than Elek, and clumsier, and everything their family was not. He looked like he could break his arm brushing his teeth and fall to his death combing his hair, neither of which he did, for the obvious reasons. She didn’t want anything to do with anything he touched, the places he put his hands, a monkey in a gorilla suit.

More shooting! A scream!

She fell and he threw himself to cover her and missed.

Last night, grass perfectly dry. Now wet, as was Zee—for that was what she called him—and the towel he had used as a pillow was soaked. She was fortunately dry in the sleeping bag she had brought and she shrugged and he felt it and rolled away from her. She wished to look for Elek, but doubted Zee would agree.

He signaled to her and set out crawling toward the woods. He had been good helping her last night to bury Elek near the creek. They had found a pan and used that, taking turns, to dig. Anyway Elek would only be dead for a little while. Then he would rejoin them. Wake up, find her! But it was sad and her face felt that way. She bled her nose in her palm and wiped it off with the diligence of a canary adjusting its bright beak. Cried some more. What would she do without Elek? She hoped it would not be too long before he returned to life. Meantime, cry.

She lifted herself enough to find Zee and looked past him to where Nazis were coming out of the woods with spears and knives and cleavers. Grinning at her. She ducked out of sight but was still visible to herself. Tomorrow build a house of gingerbread.

If they were in danger, it was her fault. (She didn’t mind things being her fault, Elek had always agreed that they were and she didn’t want to sleep close to him by the creek with him dead because he might not come back to life with her watching him.) So now the Nazis would get them for sure. Praise God, Lord Jesus, Amen!

Elek knew what to do. Zee would not. Shook her off when she whispered retreat, was that yesterday or today, or was this yesterday? She and Zee had this in common: they could become fawns. She peeped the peaceful morning and dripped the slowly day, quietly, and the blades of grass said, Shhhhhh, shhhhhh! and Sari was. Zee had found the trail he said he remembered from when he used to be a man. When she used to be a man, she decided to be a woman. Hunched like that, he crept into the woods. He said last night that was where that family went, five or six of them clinking along, grunting under the load of things packed too hastily in the middle of the night. Now, shotgun blasts. Shudder!

Surrender! Be a prisoner, go to the dungeon!

A bird lit in a tree and tweeted, I’m so happy, are you you you?

Sari generally answered birds who were nice, but not this morning, the Nazis may have sent them. Instead, she wiped her eyes, eyes that took their color from the brown thatch and the green shoots of grass and the lavender of the dripping berries beside a nearby log, and the blue of the sky and the umber of the trees in their skeletons beside the frogs. She hopped a modest couple of steps and did it in the tickling grass, down low so they couldn’t see, her water voluminous and hot and hissing. Back, him still gone, she hid and felt safe. This required a modicum of courage: she reacted Sari: mock shock, new tears, smile. (In a jam, smile always, Elek said.)

The baying of a farm dog, two or three dogs, rang through the woods.

She was going to die very soon and they would pitch her into the hole in the cemetery with everyone else. Dogs barking was your mother-in-law howling, Daddy said. Dogs farting was a man making supper, Mommy said.

Time paid for itself, except when it passed the hat.

Zee returned, flopped on his back so that she could hear the chattering of his teeth, and scratched himself. He did that too much! He itched all the time. Sari tapped him and revolved her wrist in the shape of a cone, mimicking the wrapping of oneself in a blanket. Zee answered with his you-tend-yours sign and she rephrased the question with a smile. It made him frown and he was totally unlike Elek, she had a mind to cry for her brother. Who would protect her? Zee left their lodging, walked a few steps, urinated, shivered as if it were a hundred-degrees below freezing, and she decided he didn’t have pneumonia after all. Grinned at her. That was close! She reached to touch him, who had returned to his seat, but he shook her off like Elek did. Helped none thinking about it. She cried.

Impatiently Zee sprang up.

Reading his mind, she snagged one leg and held him. Be night?

What a dumb question, was his expression. Then his face changed and he explained. Calmly Zee told her there was a castle around here somewhere that he had visited many times; going back to look for his princess, his betrothed, Griselda Gretchen Goldenflower. Her father had all the money in Poland and hated Nazis. He might just give them a loan or let them have a team of horses from their stables. It was the first time Zee had made any sense and she welcomed it. She was thrilled. He’s no different than I, she decided.

But he only went to the pillowcase from last night, that was wet, and the stuff they had found: a candelabra, a container of candles, a tin of coffee, pictures, books, letters, a soot-covered pot, a skillet, and a half-eaten loaf of challah in wax paper. Also part of a box of wheat cereal and some wooden spoons. He took out the bread, smelled it, and smiled. Aware of his every move, Sari made a happy face and clapped her hands noiselessly. He let her get him out of the wet jacket and wet shirt and dry him with the towel, still wet! Naturally he resisted everything with surly cooperation, fussing at her for packing him into a thick cotton shirt, dry and warm but a bit too small, which she brought out now. She helped him button it, too, feigned to the accompaniment of his swatting hands a blow to the heavens, and he did not fuss at all when she brought out their last peanut butter sandwich and gave it to him to eat.

***

Things not so bad. That challah they could make them some more sandwiches, tip in peanut butter every other page, Jew he always had him his peanut butter, think how the mouth races the tongue to get to the site of a swallow, that forked trail leading in so many directions. Decorum, my hind ass! Formality, my upper gum! He decided he knew the reason the apple stuck: before giving it to him, Eve filled the danged thing with peanut butter. Original Sin might so easily have been avoided by a glass of sweet milk. Make that two. Food the best ever, them okay. Shivering stopped. Hell! He definitely himself felt better. He clenched his fists and she burst into tears.

In a way, he liked the double-ugly prettiness of a person that plain, who would apparently do anything, he had already decided to die fighting for her, women were more purpose than reason. He had already watched her grasshoppering around upon the ground when he figured she could just as well walk, and she had also taken out her game of jacks with her spindly legs splayed to either side, trying to see whether that hard red ball would bounce on soft tall weeds; odd moments she would open up her thin wide mouth sufficient to release a piercing giggle of the kind that could shatter glass. So? Yeah, they’d be safe—if they wasn’t killed. Build a castle.

She tried to stop him, poking his arms back into that wet jacket. He grinned, wiped his teeth with his tongue, belched peanut butter, urinated again while she watched, then touched a finger to Sari’s chin and crawled away. Stopped to look back.

***

Her rictus pleaded silently with his trismus: he came back.

I love you, she said.

He swallowed hard and said, Shut up.

But she couldn’t just have him leave her like that. Leave her like that and what was she to do out here all by herself?

You hear them from last night? she asked, because asking something you know the answer to is often the best way to make sure you know the answer to what you may have only thought you knew, unless it really did happen, as sometimes occurred.

He stared at her. Exactly like Elek.

Going find them?

No.

She looked down, where the sun had turned the earth into a question mark.

You don’t think we ought run?

No.

You think they shoot them?

He looked exactly like the way he did when they shot and wounded Elek. He had put things inside his pockets that clanked like a mop bucket, Nazis hear him in Berlin, and was digging for something, probably his head, no, it was a fork they had found in the pillowcase, so totally unlike Elek but he grinned at her. Put a finger to his lips.

What about somebody come?

He just stood there grinning, sun for a head and earth for feet, and she rushed to him through the grass with their fruit jar of water for him to take, but after swigging from it he returned it to her.

Stay here, he said.

Moments later he looked back into the clearing and she waved, thinking that was what he wanted. After he was out of sight Sari repeated to herself what he had said, then trembled in misery and hunkered into the sleeping bag as the men closed in. She could hear them humming their Nazi anthems about how they would bury her alive. She was sure they had climbed those trees to watch her. Her tinkus was awful but it was all she had. She raised and looked; the trees blinked, pretending not to notice. Tongue out. At them. And saw, over there, a rotten log, black with crawling things. (Maybe they’d force her to eat maggots.) She spotted a lizard with a nose like a stinger waiting to bite her. Other side of the log a slithery family of snakes dared her to come any nearer. What did it feel like? Jackbooted trees plotted her place in the cemetery.

Did it still hurt after you were dead?

Or was it all forgotten just like that?

She and Elek had many times discussed it. Elek used to take her to a place by the creek just up from the old goatherd’s pen. She would always ask Elek and he would always let her step off the dimensions of their castle, then while he was hunting for game she would lay out each room, and the doors, so that he would have to be very careful where he stepped or risk a scolding, and maybe she would do the same here. Were they that near to Old Yisrael’s pen? She scooted free of the bag, hopped two steps through the wet, and relieved herself again. Jumped ten kilometers back to her bedroll laughing at the deliciousness of fright. Buried herself from sight.

Let the Nazis sing, she burrowed until there was only a tunnel left to breathe through and no one in the world would ever find her. She did not think of her mother or father, she did not think of them at all. Zee said. She was also not to think of Elek, but she did, and cried. Then she spent a lot of time not thinking of them at all, Zee said.

The bedroll quivered. Her tears stung like roasted icicles. God was where? Best thing about crying was the first joyous rush of release; after that it was all downhill, the more you did it the worse it got. She would have invented a better way, maybe.

If she were God.

A tremor seized her. She clutched her place and wished to be tall and beautiful, like Katerina. She sobbed for ta-tahs like Katerina, who got married. She would have baby boys like Elek, only grown big and strong, an army to protect her. Mornings not her best time (she cried). Her mother and dear Poppa, but Zee said. It was nigh up to noon, Zee time. But she figured Zee time was off by about a day and a half. Nice lady next door, always very kind. What would it feel like when they killed her? Zee said it didn’t feel at all, but she knew better, she had seen people dead, they looked like it felt awful. Her bare feet wet were. Soaked. Two-handed salute, nose-eyes wiped, snuffle a bit laughing at yourself (not dead yet!), take that towel Zee had dried on, smell it, Oh! She tucked it away so that she could kick it to the bottom. (First she put it there, then kicked it to the bottom.) Then she threw out of the bag her shoes. (Actually, first she put it there, and wiggled a bit on it, and then kicked it down to the bottom.) Zee said don’t take shoes off but she did last night. Wearing her cheder dress and two blouses and a light jacket, which smelled of smoke, she peeled the jacket to use for a pillow, flexed her knees to locate a dry spot for her feet, and turned on her right side facing the direction the Nazis would come, closed her eyes and slept. In the palatial four-poster bed in her domed castle in Minsk, comfy-coo, she could see the streets of Byelorussia, every other store a deli. In her castle everything white and splendid, with a milk pitcher and four glasses on a silver tray beside buttered rolls and fruit upon a white linen cloth in every room. Ceilings high enough to fly flags. Servants in white dresses and white gloves and …

If there were approaching footsteps, her castle would protect her.

She listened. Nothing. Germans singing in the wind, and their song was, "We are going to kill you, we are going to kill you!"

Next, she spotted a circus carnival. She led the parade, with bears rather than horses pulling her carriage. Sounds thudded into the clearing. The ground shook, the macaroons melted. She fought a battle and risked poking her head out to see. She was startled at how bright it was.

Clover grew on the castle green, oh so sweet, oh so sweet.

Her face brushed the spear grass, brown and dry and sharp as a knife.

There was a noise, his noise.

His bloody, hairy hand reached out to her and scraped her face, and she screamed.

***

How much later it was when he freed the goat, Jacob wasn’t sure. Time loped lopsided. Or topsided. He carried water and cleaned her nose, washed the dirt out of her eyes, knocked the flies away. He let her drink, enjoyed watching her thirsty tongue lap pinkly the juice of life, happily slurping. It was Old Yisrael’s revealed secret: this special was. Finally, he freed her. She tried to stand but could not, and instead of whimpering began to squeak like a mouse for her dead kid. Jacob fed her again, milked her distended udder into a bucket from the shed, slurped some of the milk, then turned toward the cellar imagining himself in the way he was creaking along hurting in every part to be Old Yisrael bringing food to his family. Odd feeling, special sight. Released anger lets in light.

Had a change truly occurred? He eased down the ladder with the milk and stopped. Distant frenzy of gunfire! It came in two or three bursts, from the woods beyond the creek, without any other discernible sounds. Nazis gone, who was it? A loud baying of dogs was followed after a bit by more shooting, then the faint echo of raucous laughter.

He carefully sealed the entrance and only then realized that Mittie was gone.

He heard her voice, remote and strange. Careful with the milk, Jacob inched forward on his knees. Within the envelope of darkness he perceived a glimmer of light from an inner sanctum. A what? He crawled through a secret door at the back of the potato cellar and entered a room of pervading privacy. Mittie was seated at a small table before a lit candle. Three or four people were in attendance, to judge by her reactions, and she was in serious conversations with one or more of them at any given moment. Serving them a meal. Jacob asked whether she wanted some milk, but she was not ready to acknowledge his presence. It was then that he heard her explaining that the other one, the one who had gone outside, be back soon. Ba-prise! As she had done in the rabbi’s office, she caught him staring at her. Only then was he permitted to enter her domain.

A-hmm! she said, and covered her piquant mouth.

There were so many others at the table, so many others in numbers too great to be fathomed, that Mittie must first touch her lips and caution them. In a crowd, only one at a time may speak.

Shh-hhh! That Jack-hub. He very nice man.

She stared at him, waiting for a response from him. One must not be discourteous, even to people who aren’t there. Especially to people who aren’t there.

You say ‘Hi’ them, Jack-hub.

After a moment Jacob said, Hi.

There was a pause. They say ‘Hi’ you back! Mittie said brightly, and she laughed as though being tickled were a nourishment unto itself and she would grow fat and healthy from it. On it she laughed unabashedly, as at a private joke, so tickled that she bent forward and clutched at her waist. Jacob imagined them as ruled not by God but by the trolls that govern cellars, and still her laughter spouted forth. Not knowing can be a blessing, he guessed. He had a small amount of food hidden in his pack, but he had already checked and the pack had not been touched. He had to save something for the road. Jacob poured milk from the pail into two mugs and Mittie took hers but waited.

Oops! she said, and covered with a stubby hand her giggling mouth, but pointed to the other chair while apologizing to the others for Jacob’s error.

Jacob took his seat across from her, on what turned out to be a nail keg.

Hands at her sides, very formally, Mittie said, Uh, hi.

Suppressing a giggle, she swept her gaze around the table then brought a finger to her lips in the Get Quiet! sign. Composing herself, she said, Uh, sorry.

Then, Hi, Jack-hub, and before Jacob quite registered what was happening, she offered him an item of food. Placed upon the table, as he had already seen, were baskets of fruit and a loaf of bread, nuts and raisins and peanut butter. Places were set, could there actually be wine? The smells were of ripe savory fruit, tart and wholesome and good. Old Yisrael’s best. Belatedly he grasped what they were doing: reenacting the story from the beginning of Bereshit, the classic story of the orchard, only they were not thieves. Or were they? He reached to take the forbidden item from her hand.

Now she could no longer contain herself. Her laughter spewed out helplessly as he bit into not an apple but a salty Irish potato. Mittie laughed until she fell out of her chair and he joined her in the mirth at his own expense. Tears rolled from his eyes, his emotions raw but his heart full. He could not, should not, would not ever leave this person. He had been blessed! Mrs. Meir sent him into the mikve not to save his life once, but forever, and Mittie in her inimitable way was nothing less than the consecration of that love.

***

By early afternoon Sari made her decision: she fed the creature. By now she was already dead and living in a dream on the castle green. There had been more shooting but it was way off, and Zee might not be back till night. Or ever, but she didn’t believe that, and whether or not he fussed when he came back, she would pretend ignorance. Her fault.

Me? she would say. Me? And then they would laugh.

First she had to crawl from the canopy of trees where she had sat watching him, then she had to locate the fruit jar where it had fallen into the tall grass, and then she had to work up the courage to approach him. This frightened her, she had to tinkle, but where? She went to the edge of the clearing by the trail, where Zee had dropped the things from the pillowcase. A well-worn picture book caught her eye, of Bible stories. She opened it, the drawings so pretty. Oh!

He was motioning to her. His lips were split into cracks, like parched earth.

Ruth petted him and he purred. (Sari wrinkled at the smell!) She set the jar down beside him but he was too weak to open it. Near him she bent, waving her wrist and hand in front of her nose, but he just stared at her, drifting and staring, drifting and staring. He shone with a sediment of scarlet that had congealed into the filling for a strawberry pie, the six-point star she could just make out on his coat was the icing. She touched the star and wiped her hand on the grass and frowned. Oh. It smelled like the place behind the Square where they cleaned fish, but he grew excited, whimpering with pleasure when she slaked his thirst. The quart jar had been about half and he took it all—what didn’t spill—then choked and spewed from his whale’s hole.

Spoke as she undressed him.

Yerushalayim?

So that’s your name!

Yerushalayim shook his head but smiled and Sari was thinking how Job got naked. But the pants! His were stuck to him in back and she wiped her hands on the grass and went to look for something to use to get his pants off. How lazy and nice it was in the clearing, and first she stepped off the exact rooms in her castle, leaving the man in the dungeon though surely not for long, and then she took off all of her clothing feeling an exquisite grace as she moved about on the castle green, his eyes following her thin body as it warmed in the mellow sunshine, and her hands came up to praise fully the sunlight, just like in books. Some of the weeds were so high they tickled her in the funny place! He watched her, even funnier!

She got another whiff of him and danced back, fanning her face.

An orderly person who changed undies every day, Sari was new to the stench of personal outhouse and thankful for the slight breeze. To their picnic, she decided, she would invite the bluebird she had seen jumping in the trees, the lizard from the log, the snakes whipping back and forth just there. She made them both a peanut butter but he wouldn’t eat it, so she tore off the part that had touched his mouth and propped it on the grass beside his head, ate the rest herself. Sari grew drowsy, that was what princesses did; they fell asleep on the castle green, awakened by a kiss from the prince after a hundred years in Zee time and a thousand years in Elek time. She remembered drowsily positioning herself, how hot and welcome the matted bedroll. She closed her eyes and blinked.

Something shivered and it was herself. Her eyelids batted open and it was wrong, light almost gone. Shivery, she drew her arms about her ribs in the cold of dusk. Disoriented: where? Zee? Her things? She was surrounded by a remotely amused stockade of trees staring discourteously at her. The woods, their camp, the castle: a rooster crowed somewhere between Minsk and Warsaw. In Warsaw, trouble, they talked. She raised up, saw that the peanut butter jar had been left open and was black with a profusion of ants. She touched it and was stung. A few moments later, dressed, she shivered her way to the man, who was surely dead by now. He was alive, still in the same position she had left him in with his pants open to his knees. The creek? For a refill? If so, she had to hurry. The man made a sound.

Mit-kah? he asked.

Yerushalayim, she corrected. How can you forget your own name, silly?

Name, he choked, you?

I’m Zee’s sister, she said.

No, you!

My name is Sari, she said, and felt her teeth chatter. But in the Bible I am Ruth.

Sari?

Yes, I’ll go get us some more water.

He nodded and coughed.

She found her coat, calculated directions, waded into the woods. Soon she was warm, for the woods held the heat of the delightful day, incubating it like an oven making warm bread, and the way to the ravine was straight. She did not let herself think of Zee. Or of Elek, except to cry. There was a crease of light flitting ahead of her through the thickest part, Elek.

In the twilight she reached the creek, crossed it, filled the water jar, dipped her feet into the shallow place where it ran fast over gravel. Cool but fun, might bathe. There was a noise, but not like that clanking they had heard last night, or the mop bucket Zee carted around on his person. The smell of smoke from the village was strong (she didn’t look), and birds were squawking as they settled in for the night, but this was different, the splashing of a mud turtle frolicking over there in the water. It was a big mud turtle playing in a deep pool just up from Sari. Or maybe a water nymph, she wasn’t sure. She was content to sit with her back to the village; in the delicious dark it was nice to sail a strange sea and let her feet swim in glimmering arcs over the iridescent, toothsome pebbles. The mud turtle was funny, too, swirling, gamboling in the moonlight, swiveling so that the water that unspooled from its gleaming white carapace glistened like silver. It gurgled and slurped, this turtle, splashed and swam. Sari became rather curious. Can you approach a turtle without frightening it away?

She rose to her knees, crawling. The turtle continued to surface and dive, surface and dive, making no effort to flee. Perfectly natural it was on this strangest of days that, finally, the turtle raised up and was a water nymph after all. It blinked, opened its eyes, and quickly closed them again, frightened that Sari might see. The dream congealed around her and in its ascendency Sari beheld not a turtle or even a nymph but a little girl coated with mud and wearing the twigs and leaves of the creek upon her person. The little girl’s hair was impossibly encrusted with grime and yet her face was totally clean and alive and intense, as though she had exactly the same idea as Sari, to hide behind the mud with only her face glowing in the sizzling water. For an eon of a mountain in the march of time, all things being relative, and strange, and of the kind that might make a child want to bark a shrill giggle at the laughing March moon, the two creatures eyed one another. Sari’s blood curdled. She knew then that she was dead and in another land. For this was a little girl, naked, coated with mud, her hair encrusted with moss and twigs and roots, her eyes held tightly closed against the reality she had shut out yesterday or two days ago or two years ago or a hundred years ago, or two chickens ago or two Zees minus an Elek ago or two slippery arcs upon a pivoted inclination ago, all things being relative, and strange, and silly enough to make a person want to bark a shrill giggle at the laughing March moon.

32. 

Einsatzkrafte

Lublin, 26.3.42.

Hans Schtick, scalp peeled, is a man who lives only in the present tense, a dare posing a warning to all others: I am. His high and tight haircut metes out a deserved fate to the rabble for the sin of not being him, he is the ein und aus (in and out) of entitlement.

0530. Thursday.

The Oberfuhrer, occupying his desk in this command room on the second floor of the three-story Gestapo Headquarters in Lublin, an abode of truncated prophecy and painstaking retribution, produces from his certitude a pen and thumps the desk before signing the Execution Order. What is needed, better construction. His eyes carom briefly over the completed form. Reichs-Sicherheitshauptant, Berlin. Einsatzgruppen Handlung, 25.3.42, Region C south of Brest-Litovsky, Pol. Dereliction in Juden Banditen attack. At bottom, in bold print: Hans Schtick, SS-und Polizeiführer im Distrikt Lublin, SS-Oberführer.

What else?

Finding a cigarette for him, the Oberfuhrer’s fingers cooperate in the surly way of workers fed up with the same old task, goading him to smoke before he begrudgingly becomes aware that he is going to smoke, taste beckoning to him by way of rank, rights, and watch fobs.

Smoking is not idyllic in a room as stale as the steam issuing from the radiator just there. It is stuffy and hot, the arched ceiling and heavy floor, the threadbare furnishings and austere setting lending themselves to the wrist of hand’s might. Hans, moreover, is tired. They have been up all night. Nearing the end of this sorry episode, time clatters by like the slapping sheets of rain on the steamed windows above the radiator and behind the wooden blinds that Schtick hates like everything else that he hates in this building. It is a different office from yesterday, one