Milkweed

  The word “ resettlement” took the place of the word“ deportation.”

  “Still,” said Uncle Shepsel, “it is better not to be a Jew in the first place.”

  And the Jackboots came in the day and the night, and the whistles blew. One block, one street, at a time.

  Sliska Street.

  Panska Street.

  Twarda Street.

  Every day, every night, the slow gray parades shuffled toward Stawki Station.

  The people on the stairway muttered: “Resettlement . . . resettlement . . .”

  “We will be free!”

  “I will mend shoes again!”

  “We will eat!”

  The people looked into each other’s eyes and nodded and said, “Yes . . .yes . . .” Still, they did not go outside. The streets remained empty. Except for the piper.

  Sometimes when Janina and I climbed down through the people on the stairway at night, a voice would say, “Don’t go. You’ll miss the resettlement.”

  Ceglana Street.

  Chlodna Street.

  One day Mr. Milgrom said to me, “Stay close to Janina, wherever you go. Every second. Day and night.” His hand was on my shoulder.

  I was shocked. Not that he knew she went out with me at night but that he was allowing her to do so.

  There was one thing Mr. Milgrom did not know: how much his daughter loved the trains. Every night when we crawled back through the hole to the ghetto, she ran for the courtyard. She dumped her food under a porch where she could get it later and ran off to the hole in the wall near the Stawki Street gate and squirted herself back to the other side. I remembered Mr. Milgrom’s orders. I had no choice but to follow.

  Night after night we did this. We stood at the end of the fallen smokestack and stared at the trains coming and going. The parades of people climbing into the boxcars. The screech of wheels. The clack of dogs’ teeth. The locomotives coughing like dying Jews.

  In the days I went to the butcher shop ruins. But the boys were disappearing one by one. “Where’s Ferdi?” I asked. “Where’s Kuba?” No answer. Had they taken Uri’s advice? Did they run away? Were they on the other side of the wall, running? Were they hanging from lampposts with signs around their necks? Were they in the sewers? Had Buffo found them?

  Ferdi.

  Kuba.

  Enos.

  One by one.

  Until only Big Henryk was left, clumping after the piper. I saw Jackboots pointing at them.

  No one came to take pictures anymore.

  All day. All night. Parades of people.

  One day I was dozing in the milkweed alley when Janina came calling: “Misha! . . . Misha!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me out to the street. The orphans were going by. They were marching. Their heads were high and they were singing the song I had learned. I sang along with them. Not one was dressed in rags. Everyone wore shoes. Doctor Korczak led the way. He marched as straight as a Jackboot. He wore a hat with a little red feather. We stood there until I could no longer see them, no longer hear them.

  Libelta Street.

  Walowa Street.

  Gesia Street.

  38

  And then the old man was there.

  It was strange. He was not there, and then suddenly he was. He did not even have rags on his feet. One eye was the color of milk. It never blinked.

  “I have come back,” he said. We were gathered around him in the courtyard. “I am here to tell you. I escaped. I saw. There is no resettlement.”

  Someone called: “Of course there is resettlement. We go to villages in the East. They are waiting for us.”

  The man repeated, “There is no resettlement. It is a lie.”

  “ You lie!” another someone called.

  “Look!” someone else called, waving a piece of paper. “This is a postcard from my brother. He says he is doing fine. Listen. ‘We are doing fine. We are happy in our new village. We hope to see you soon.’”

  “Lies,” said the old man. He did not shout. We had to strain to hear him. He looked and he sounded as if he wanted to sleep. “It is a trick. Your brother is dead.”

  There was a shriek.

  Many shouted at once at the old man.

  “Go away!”

  “Go away!”

  Only when the shouting died down did we know that the old man was saying more: “. . . fences that fry . . . prison coops . . . ovens . . . never stop . . . ashes fall like snow . . .”

  There was silence.

  Someone said, “Ovens? Are they baking pies for us?”

  Laughter.

  “Ovens for what?” came another voice.

  The old man raised his head. His milky eye turned to the speaker. “For you.”

  Silence again, and then a louder burst of laughter and jeers.

  “You are crazy, old man!”

  “We have postcards!”

  The old man wobbled. I leaned my shoulder into his hip to hold him up. Above me I heard his ragged breathing. The people waited for him to say more, but he only turned and walked away.

  A voice, Uncle Shepsel’s, cried out: “Jews! Repent! It is not too late!”

  A day after the old man spoke in the courtyard, Mr. Milgrom whispered to me in a corner of the room. “When you and Janina go out tonight, I want you to stay on the other side. I want you to run away. Don’t come back. Keep Janina with you. Take her hand.”

  First Uri, now my father.

  “Janina wants to go on the train,” I told him. “She wants to go to the candy mountain.”

  Mr. Milgrom’s eyes slowly closed. Like Janina’s, they had become enormous, as if to hold his sadness. “There is no candy mountain,” he said.

  At that moment I knew. The old man in the courtyard had been telling the truth. And I understood why Mr. Milgrom had not forbidden Janina to go out. He knew that when the parade to the trains came by, a child might be safer away from home.

  He stared into my eyes. He gripped my forearm. “Take her hand. Keep her with you. Make her go. Take off your armbands and run. Run until daylight. Then hide. Run at night.” He squeezed my arm so hard I would have thought he was trying to hurt me if I hadn’t known better. “Do not bring back food tonight. Do not return. Run. Run. ”

  That night Mr. Milgrom was not sleeping when we got up to go. He pressed us into himself for a long time. I think he was crying. He whispered words in our ears that I did not understand and let us go.

  When we got to the other side that night, I took Janina’s hand as Mr. Milgrom had told me. At first she said nothing. When she saw we were not stopping at garbage cans, she planted her feet and said, “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re just going.”

  She yanked her hand out of mine and stomped off.

  I went after her and grabbed her hand back. “Tata said to come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Away. Now run.”

  I started to run, pulling her along. She jammed her heels into the sidewalk and screamed and kicked me. Just when I thought she was finished with me, she spat on my shirt and stomped on my foot. I screamed. She ran off.

  We did not go to the trains that night. We returned to the room with brown cabbages and fat. Mr. Milgrom was still awake. He squeezed my arm and shook me. “What did I tell you?” I could not see his face in the darkness, but his voice was furious. I think he wanted to smack me. Then he pressed us again into himself.

  This is how it went for a number of nights. Mr. Milgrom told me—and then the both of us—not to return, Janina refused to obey; we returned to the furious voice and the smack that never came.

  Zamenhof Street.

  Mila Street.

  Lubecki Street.

  And then one night we could not come back.

  39

  Our pockets were stuffed with dried herring. Janina smelled like salt and fish. When we came near our two-brick hole, we saw lights and people. We hid in the shadows and waited. Finally, the lights went o
ut and the people left. We ran to the hole. It wasn’t there. Only an unbroken flatness of brick.

  We crept along the wall. We went into Stawki Station. Boxcar doors were clanking, swallowing whole parades of people. Aching to get back to the ghetto, we looked for the Stawki Station hole that we had been coming through to see the trains. It too was gone.

  “There’s other holes,” I said. All night long we darted from shadow to shadow along the never-ending wall, dodging Jackboot guards, searching for a way into the ghetto. There were guards and lights and flat brick wall, but no holes. We heard gunshots and screams coming from the ghetto. Dogs barking. Glow of flamethrowers. Janina became more and more agitated. Whenever she heard a gunshot, she piped, “Tata!” She kicked at the wall.

  “He’s all right,” I told her. I hugged her.

  The sky was gray, the stars were fading, when we got back to where we started. Daylight was coming, and we were stuck in Heaven.

  I found white dust at the base of the wall. I washed my face and hands in it. Janina laughed. She smacked me with a dried fish, then we ate it. We slept on the ground in the merry-go-round park. We woke at noon and walked about the city. I remembered Uri’s words. I told Janina, “Don’t look guilty.”

  “What’s guilty?” she said.

  “I forget,” I said. “Just don’t look it.”

  I reached into her pocket and pushed her crumpled armband deeper out of sight.

  We wandered the streets, among the people and bomb craters, chewing dried fish. We made a game—who could look less guilty? We laughed. We said hello to people. We ran back to the merry-go-round to ride the horses, but the horses were still. I kept listening for the tootling music, but all I heard were gunshots from the other side of the wall.

  When night returned, we approached the wall. And I realized how stupid I was. What had I been thinking? Were the holes going to come back? Was the wall going to be lower than last night? I wished we had Big Henryk’s shoulders to climb on. I tried to think, tried to think. Suddenly Janina ran to the wall and cupped her hands about her mouth and yelled with all her might: “Tataaaa!” I tackled her and rolled us into the shadows as a Jackboot down the wall turned.

  Just to be doing something, we began another tour around the wall. When we came to Stawki Station, where it was always daytime, with the lights and trodding people and clanking boxcars, I suddenly knew what to do. The Stawki Street gate in the wall was open. People were parading through. I grabbed her hand, pulled her along. We crouched behind a shed near the gate.

  Jackboots with dogs guarded both sides of the gate. The people slumped along with their suitcases, heads hung low, as if they did not know the teeth of the dogs were snapping into their faces.

  I did not bother to give Janina instructions. Why should I? She copied everything I did. I dashed for the parade of people. I plunged into them. I lost myself among their legs. While they headed for the trains, I groped and shouldered in the opposite direction. They paid no more attention to me than to the dogs. When I sensed I had passed through the gate to the ghetto side, I broke sharply to my right, popped out of the parade, and bolted. There were dogs and shouts behind me, then gunshots—my first prayer plucked at my lips: No flamethrowers, please —but by then there were shadows and rubble and I was tucked into a pocket of blackness like a rat.

  I did not know if she was with me until my own heart and lungs calmed down. Then I could hear her panting beside me. When no one seemed about, we ran for home.

  I knew the news was bad as we raced up the steps. There were no bodies to hurdle: the squatters were gone. Our door was open. Moonlight misted from the window like winter breath. The room was empty. The table and chair were overturned. The pill cabinet was smashed. Janina cried out. She flung herself onto the floor and into the corners. She scrubbed the shadows with her body, hoping he was only hiding, not gone. She whimpered along the walls. “Tata . . . Tata . . .” She ran to the window. “Tataaaa!”

  Where was Uncle Shepsel? I expected him to arise any moment in the middle of the room and declare: “I tried to warn them! The Jews! They would not listen!”

  Then I saw it, in the moonlight on the floor: the book of Lutherans.

  Janina knocked me aside as she ran from the room and down the steps. I ran after her, across the courtyard, down the middle of the moonlit streets to Stawki Station.

  The endless parade was still shuffling through the gate into the yellow light. I lost her as she plunged into the people. I did likewise. The dogs gasped on their leashes, but no one tried to stop us. On the other side of the wall, I made my way from side to side of the parade, bouncing off suitcases, searching for her. Whistles shrieked. Boxcar doors screamed. Dogs yapped and snarled. Jackboots and dogs and bayonets threw gigantic, jerking shadows on the ground.

  I kept working my way backward through the parade so I would not be carried to the boxcars. I peeked out from the people, searching, keeping myself hidden among the shuffling legs and suitcases.

  Then I saw her. Or did I? Was it really her? How could I be sure? It was four or five boxcars down the line. Everything—the people’s heads, the straining dogs, the roofs of the boxcars—was in black silhouette against the sickly light. She was a shadow cut loose, held above the other shadows by a pair of Jackboot arms. She was thrashing and screaming above the silent masses. I could not make out her words, but the sound of the voice was hers, and I was running, breaking from the parade and running toward her. And then the arms came forward and she was flying, Janina was flying over the shadow heads and the dogs and soldiers, her arms and legs turning slowly. She seemed so light, so right for the air—I thought: She’s happy! I thought she would sail forever like a milkweed puff on an endless breeze, and I was running and wishing I could fly with her, and then she was gone, swallowed by the black maw of the boxcar, and even as I felt the hot breath of the dog, I could hear the rumble and the boxcar door clanking shut.

  I tried to run to her, but the dog wouldn’t let me go, and then the dog was gone and a boot came swinging and I was kicked so hard I popped off the ground. When I landed, a club pounded my shoulders and I was kicked again and the Jackboot was dragging me by the hair and there was laughing and clacking of Jackdog teeth. The Jackboot flung me against a wall. I saw his hand go to his holster. I saw the gun come out and point between my eyes. “Die, piglet!” The voice. I looked up. The red hair. The face. “Uri!” I cried, and the gun went off.

  40

  THEN

  My nose tickled. My cheek. I brushed away the tickles. They came back. Snips of buzzing. I opened my eyes. White clouds sailing across a blue sky. Darting spots. Flies.

  Something was ringing. My ear hurt. My arm hurt. Everything hurt.

  I was wet. I was in water. I sat up. I was in a puddle of water in a ditch. I started to climb out of the ditch and fell back. The ringing would not stop. I looked at my arm, where the teeth of the dog had shaken me. The gash was crusty, like dark red bread. Flies danced over it. I stared at them. They were busy.

  I put my hand to my ear, the one with the missing earlobe. I felt a crusty lump but not much more. I sat back and closed my eyes and listened to the ringing.

  Janina!

  I scrambled up from the ditch. Stawki Station was empty. No Jackboots. No Jews. The trains were gone. The gate was closed.

  I headed for the empty tracks. I felt dizzy. Then I was waking up on the ground. I tried again. The world wobbled. I saw something in the hard dirt. I reached to pick it up and got dizzy and fell on my head. I cried out and went to sleep. When I opened my eyes, it was right there. A black shredded scrap. Her shoe. That I had seen my face in. I would have known it anywhere. I ran my fingertips over it. I smiled. I picked it up and picked myself up and wobbled on.

  I came to the edge of the platform. I sat down, my feet dangling toward the tracks below. The ringing was loud. I felt dizzy again. When I woke up, I was on the tracks, the shoe in my fist.

  The tracks curved out of the station. I started to
walk. I walked out of the station yard, out of the world. The tracks came to a point in the sky.

  41

  I came to a boy. He was throwing stones down the track. A black-and-white dog was with him. When the dog saw me it came running. I was afraid, but the dog wagged its tail and licked the crusty gash on my arm.

  “Who are you?” said the boy. He wore shoes, clothes. No boils.

  “Misha,” I said. “Do you have water?”

  The sun flashed off the steel rail.

  “Where is your ear?” said the boy.

  “Stawki Station.”

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “To the ovens.”

  “What ovens?”

  “Where the trains go.”

  “Why are you going to the ovens?”

  “That’s where Janina is,” I said. “Do you know her?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know Uri? Do you know Doctor Korczak? Do you have water?”

  “Can I touch your ear?”

  I said yes. He reached out. I think he touched it, but I could not feel.

  He looked at me. “Are you a Jew?”

  “Yes.” I pulled the armband from my pocket. I slipped it onto my good arm. “See?”

  “Yes.”

  He disappeared into the weeds with the dog. He returned with a pan of water. I drank it.

  I walked on.

  Day. Night. Day. Night.

  I ate blackberries from thorny whips that reminded me of barbed wire. I pulled scallions from the earth. I drank from ditches, and when I bent to cup my hands in the water, the ringing pulsed in my eyes.

  The steel rails flashed in the sun. I shivered as if it were winter. My wounded ear would not dry out. I awoke in the weeds. I awoke on the tracks. The steel rails wobbled away from me like silvery snakes. I was in many places, and I was not alone.