The Storyteller

  For a while, people disappeared from the ghetto like fingerprints on a pane of glass--ghosting into vision one moment, and the next, gone as if they'd never been there. Death walked next to me as I trudged down the street, whispered into my ear as I washed my face, embraced me as I shivered in bed. Herr Fassbinder was no longer my boss; instead of working in an office, I was reassigned to a factory that made leather boots. My hands shook even when I wasn't sewing; that's how hard it was to force the needle through the tough hides. We lived expecting to be deported at any minute. Some ladies in the factory had the diamonds from their wedding rings implanted as fillings by the dentist. Others smuggled small pouches of coins in their vaginas, and came to work this way, in case the roundups happened there. And still, we went on living. We worked and we ate and we celebrated birthdays and gossiped and read and wrote and prayed and we woke up each morning to do it all over again.

  One day in July 1944 when I went to collect Darija to stand in line for rations, she was gone. I hardly had time to grieve, though. By then, it was almost expected to lose the people who meant the most to you. And besides, three days later, my father and I found ourselves on the list for deportation.

  It was hot, the kind of heat that made it impossible to believe that months ago we could not get warm no matter how hard we tried. The Fabrik had been blistering, windows closed, the air so thick it felt like a sponge in your throat. Walking outside for the first time in twelve hours, I was grateful for the fresh air, and in no great hurry to go home, where my father and I would sit up the whole night wondering what would happen the next morning, when we were to assemble in the town square.

  Instead, I found myself picking a convoluted path through the narrow streets and twisted alleys of the ghetto. I knew Aron lived somewhere around here, but I had not seen him in several weeks. It was possible that he, like Darija, had already been deported.

  I stopped a man on the street and asked if he knew Aron, but the man just shook his head and moved on. I was doing the unthinkable. We didn't talk of those who had been taken from us; it was like those cultures who don't name the dead, for fear that they will haunt us forever. "Aron," I asked an old woman. "Aron Sendyk. Have you seen him?"

  She looked at me. I realized, with a shock, that she was not much older than I was, but her hair was white and there were bare patches on her scalp; her skin draped from her bones like fabric too heavy for its hanger. "He lives there," she said, and she pointed to a door further down the street.

  Aron answered the door with terror on his face, and why wouldn't he? When we heard a knock, it usually was followed by a soldier barging in. Upon his seeing me, though, his features softened. "Minka." He reached out his hand to me, to pull me inside. It was like an oven in there.

  "Is anyone here?"

  He shook his head. He was wearing an undershirt and trousers, which had been pinned to keep from falling off his skinny hips. His shoulders were slick with sweat, shiny, like the knobs of a brass flagpole.

  I reached up on my tiptoes and kissed him.

  He tasted of cigarettes, and the hair at the nape of his neck was damp. I pressed my body along the length of his and kissed him even harder, as if I had been dreaming of this moment for years. I suppose I had been, too. Just not with Aron.

  Eventually Aron must have realized he was not hallucinating, because his arms caught me around the waist and he started to kiss me back, tentatively at first, and then wildly, like a starving man given access to a banquet.

  I stepped away from him, and looking him straight in the eye, unbuttoned my blouse. Let it hang open.

  I was nothing to look at. My ribs were more prominent than my breasts. There were circles under my eyes that never went away. My hair was dull and tangled, but it was still long at least.

  It took me a moment to recognize the look in Aron's eyes. Pity. "Minka, what are you doing?" he whispered.

  Suddenly embarrassed, I pulled the edges of my blouse together to cover myself. I was too ugly, even, to get this boy who had once been interested in me to take the bait. "If you can't figure that out, I'm doing a very bad job," I said. "I'm sorry I disturbed you--"

  I turned my back, hurrying to the door as I fastened my buttons, but was stopped by Aron's hand on my arm. "Don't go," he said quietly. "Please."

  When he kissed me again, I thought that if I'd had the time, and maybe a different life, I could have fallen in love with him after all.

  He laid me down on the mat where he slept, which was in the center of the one-room apartment. There was no need to ask why now, why him. I didn't want to give the answer and he wouldn't have wanted to hear it. Instead, he just sat down beside me and held my hand. "You're sure about this?" Aron asked.

  When I nodded, he peeled the clothes from my body and let the sweat dry on my skin. Then he pulled off his undershirt and shucked off his pants and covered me.

  It hurt, when he moved between my legs. When he pushed inside of me. I didn't understand what all the fuss was about, why the poets wrote sonnets about this moment, why Penelope had waited for Odysseus, why knights rode off to battle with ribbons from their lovers wrapped around the hilts of their swords. And then, I understood. My heart, batting like a moth under my rib cage, slowed to match the beat of his. I could sense the blood in his veins moving with mine, like the inevitable chorus of a song. I was different, with him, transformed from ugly duckling to snowy swan. I was, for a minute, the girl of someone's dreams. I was a reason to stay alive.

  Afterward, when I was dressed again, Aron insisted on walking me back home, as if he were a real boyfriend. We stopped outside my apartment. My father was in there, I knew, packing for our deportation in the single suitcase each of us was allowed. He would wonder where I'd been. Aron leaned down, right there in public, with neighbors passing on the street, and kissed me. He seemed so happy that I thought I owed him a grain of truth. "I wanted to know what it was like," I whispered. Because this may be my last chance.

  "And?"

  I looked up at him. "Thank you very much."

  Aron laughed. "That seems a little formal." He bowed, an exaggeration of manners. "Miss Lewin, may I call for you tomorrow?"

  If I had any love for him, I owed him more than that grain of truth. I owed him the comfort of a lie.

  I curtsied and forced a smile, as if I would be here tomorrow to be courted. "Of course, kind sir," I said.

  That was the last time we ever spoke.

  *

  If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase--not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been--what would you take? The last photograph you had of your mother? A birthday gift from your best friend--a bookmark embroidered by her? A ticket stub from the traveling circus that had come through town two years ago, where you and your father held your breath as jeweled ladies flew through the air, and a brave man stuck his head in the mouth of a lion? Would you take them to make wherever you were going feel like home, or because you needed to remember where you had come from?

  In the end I took all of these things, and the copy of The Diary of a Lost Girl, and Majer's baby shoes, and Basia's wedding veil. And, of course, my writing. It filled four notebooks now. I tucked three of them inside my case and carried the other in a satchel. Into my boots, I wedged my Christian papers, beside the gold coins. My father was silent as he held the door to the apartment that was not ours open for the last time.

  It was summertime, but we were wearing our heavy coats. This is how you know that even then, even in spite of the rumors we had heard, we were still hopeful. Or stupid. Because we continued to imagine a future.

  We were not put into wagons. Maybe there were too many of us--it seemed like hundreds. As we marched, soldiers rode alongside on horseback, their guns glinting in the sunlight.

  My father moved slowly. He had never gone back to being himself after my mother was taken, and losing Majer and Basia left its mark as well. He could not follow a wh
ole conversation without his eyes going distant; his muscles had atrophied; he shuffled instead of striding from place to place. It was as if he had been bleached of color by some chronic harsh exposure, and although you could discern the outline of the man he'd been, he was no more substantial than a ghost.

  The soldiers wanted us to walk at a steady clip, and I worried that my father would not make it. I was weak and dehydrated, and the road we were traveling on seemed to ripple before my eyes--but I was stronger than my father. "The train station isn't too far," I urged him. "You can make it, Papa." I reached over and took his suitcase in my free hand, so that he wouldn't have to carry the weight.

  When the girl in front of me tripped and fell, I stopped. My father stopped, too. It caused a swell, like a tide butting up against a dam. " Was ist los? " the soldier closest to us asked. He kicked at the girl, who was lying on her side. Then he bent down and picked up a stick from the side of the road. He poked her and told her to get up.

  When she didn't, he took the stick and tangled it into her hair. He tugged, then harder. He yelled at her to get up, and when she didn't he started to twist, until she began to scream and her scalp tore like a hem.

  Another soldier approached, leveled his pistol, and shot the girl in the head.

  It was suddenly quiet again.

  I started to cry. I couldn't catch my breath. This girl whose name I did not know, her brains were on my boot.

  I had seen dozens of people shot in front of me, to the point where it was hardly shocking anymore. The ones who were shot in the chest, they dropped like stones, cleanly. The ones who were shot in the head left behind a mess, runnels of gray matter and foamy pink tissue, and now it was on my boot, caught in the treads, and I wondered what part of her mind that was--the power of language? Of movement? The memory of her first kiss or her favorite pet or the day she moved to the ghetto?

  I felt my father's hand close around my arm with a strength I did not realize he still possessed. "Minusia," he whispered, "look at me." He waited until I was staring into his eyes, until my panicked breathing slowed. "If you die, it will be with a bullet to the heart, not the head. I promise."

  It was, I realized, a macabre version of the game we had once played, planning for his death. Except this time, he was planning for mine.

  My father did not speak again until we had boarded the trains. Our suitcases had been taken elsewhere, and we were packed into the freight cars like cattle. My father sat down and put his arm around me, the way he had done when I was little. "You and I," he said softly, "will have another bakery, where we're going. And people will come from miles around to eat the bread we bake. And every day, I'll bake you your own roll, with the cinnamon and chocolate inside, the way you like. Oh, it will smell like heaven, when it comes out of the oven . . ."

  I realized that the car had gone quiet, that everyone was listening to my father's fantasies.

  "They can take away my home," he said. "And my money, and my wife and my child. They can take away my livelihood and my food and"--here his voice hitched--"my grandson. But they can't take away my dreams."

  His words were a net, drawing everyone into a chorus of agreement. "I dream," said a man across the railcar. "Of doing to them what they've done to us."

  There was a smack on the wooden wall of the railway car, startling us.

  Us, them.

  But not all Jews were victims--look at Chairman Rumkowski, who sat safe with his new wife in his cushy home making lists, with the blood of my family on his hands. And not all Germans were murderers. Look at Herr Fassbinder, who had saved so many children on the night that children were taken away.

  Another sharp rap on the car, this right behind where my head rested on the splintered wood. "Get out," a voice whispered, through the narrow slats, from the outside. "Escape if you can. Your train is going to Auschwitz."

  *

  It was chaos.

  The ramp where we disembarked was a sea of humanity. We were numb, stiff, suffocating from the heat, gasping for fresh air. Everyone was screaming--attempting to locate family members, trying to be heard over the soldiers who were stationed every few feet with guns pointed at us, and who yelled for the men to go to one side, and the women to go to the other. In the distance was a long line of people who had arrived before us. I could see a brick building with chimneys.

  Several men in striped clothing were trying to sort us. They looked like the pods of a milkweed, plants that might have once had color and animation but that now had dried up, and were waiting to blow away on a breath. They told us, in Polish, to leave our belongings on the ramp. I grabbed the sleeve of one man. "Is this a factory?" I asked, pointing toward the building with the smokestacks.

  "Yes," he said, his lips pulling away from his yellow teeth. "It's a factory where they kill people."

  In that instant I remembered the boy who had told me what happened to my mother, how I had thought he was lying or crazy.

  My father began to move to the left, with the other men. "Papa!" I screamed, running toward him.

  As the butt of a gun crashed down on my temple, I saw stars. Everything went white, and when I blinked again, my father was moving further down the men's line of the ramp. I was, to my surprise, being dragged forward by a woman who had worked with me at Herr Fassbinder's embroidery Fabrik. I turned around and craned my neck just in time to see my father standing in front of the soldier at the head of the line, who stood with his finger on his pursed lips, assessing each man as he stepped forward. Links, he would mutter. Rechts.

  I saw my father heading to the left, moving with the longer line of people. "Where are they taking him?" I asked wildly.

  But no one answered my question.

  I was pushed and shuffled and yanked forward until I stood in front of one of the guards. He was standing beside a man in a white coat, who was the one directing us. The soldier was tall and had blond hair; he was holding a pistol. I looked away, trying to find my father in the moving mass of people. The man in the white coat grasped my chin in his hand, and it was all I could do not to spit at him. He looked at the bruise already forming on my head and murmured, " Links, " then gestured to the left.

  I was euphoric. I was headed in the same direction as my father, which meant surely we would be reunited. " Danke, " I murmured, out of habit. But the soldier, the blond one, had heard what I said under my breath. " Sprichst du deutsch? " he asked.

  "J-ja, fliessend," I stammered. I am fluent.

  The soldier leaned toward the man in the white coat and murmured something. White Coat shrugged. " Rechts, " he pronounced, and I panicked.

  My father had been sent to the left, and now I was being sent to the right, because I had been stupid enough to speak German. Maybe I had offended them; maybe I was not supposed to talk back, much less in their native tongue. But I was clearly in the minority. Other women, including the one who had worked with me at Herr Fassbinder's, were being sent to the left. I started to shake my head to protest, to beg to go left, but one of the Polish men in the stripes pushed me to the right.

  I have thought about it many times, you know. About what would have happened if I'd gone to the left, which every muscle in my body was pulling me toward. But nobody likes a story without a happy ending, and I knew that I had to do whatever they said, if I were to have any chance of seeing my father again.

  As I passed the soldier who had spoken to me, I realized his right hand--the one that was holding his pistol--was twitching. Almost like a tremor. I was afraid he'd shoot me by accident, if not on purpose. So I hurried by him and stood with a smaller group of women, until another soldier marched us to a red-brick building, shaped like the letter I. Across the road, I could see people milling in a grove, sitting quietly in front of the big building with the smokestacks. I wondered if my father was with them, if he could see me standing here.

  We were herded into the building and told to undress. Everything off--clothes, shoes, stockings, underwear, hairpins. I looked around, emba
rrassed to see strangers naked in front of me, and even more embarrassed when I realized that the male soldiers who were guarding us did not plan to leave us in privacy. But they did not even look at our bodies; they seemed indifferent. I moved slowly, as if I were peeling off layers of skin and not just fabric. With one hand, I tried to cover myself. The other held on to my boots, like my father had told me.

  One of the guards walked up to me. His eyes slid over me like a frost, settling on my boots. "These are fine boots," he said, and I tightened my arms around them.

  He reached down and plucked them from my grasp, giving me a pair of wooden clogs instead. "Too fine for you," he pronounced.

  With those boots went any chance I had of bribing my way out of here or getting information about my father. With those boots went the Christian papers that Josek had gotten me.

  We were moved to a table where Jewish women in striped clothing held electric razors. As I got closer, I saw how they were shaving women's heads. Some got away with short hair; others were not as lucky.

  I was not a vain girl. I had not grown up pretty; I was always in the shadow of Darija or even Basia. Until we moved to the ghetto, I had baby fat, a round face, thighs that rubbed when I walked. Starving had made me skinny, but it hadn't made me any prettier.

  The only saving grace I had was my hair. Yes, it was dull and matted now, but it was also every color of brown, from chestnut to mahogany to teak. It had a natural wave and a curl at the end. Even when I braided it in a rope down my back, that plait was thick as a fist.

  "Please," I said. "Don't cut off my hair."

  "Maybe you have something to persuade me to give you just a trim." She leaned closer. "You look like the kind of person who would smuggle something through."

  I thought of my boots, in that German soldier's hands. I thought of this woman, who had presumably once been in line like us. If these Germans wanted to turn us into animals, then by all accounts, they had succeeded. "Even if I did," I whispered back, "you'd be the last person on earth I'd ever give it to."

  She looked at me, raised her razor, and buzzed my hair off at the scalp.

  It was at that moment I realized I wasn't Minka anymore. I was some other creature, something inhuman. Shivering, sobbing, I followed orders and hurried blindly into the shower room. All I could think of was my mother, and the false bathhouse that the boy had told me about; those trucks full of gas that were emptied of bodies in the woods. I stared up at the showerheads, wondering if they would spray water or poison; wondering if I was the only person who had heard these rumors and whose heart was threatening to burst from her chest.