Buffo was there, smiling, waiting for me. I could smell the mint.
The blue man rode the merry-go-round to the tootling music.
I saw bodies wrapped in newspaper floating above the sidewalks.
I felt Uri smack me in the head and call me stupid.
I saw Himmler’s car stop and Himmler himself get out and march right up to me and snap his heels together and salute me and say, “Hanukkah!”
I saw the orphans. They were marching down the tracks, led by Doctor Korczak. The orphans were marching and singing, their shoes all hitting the ground at once, and the oven door opened, and into the oven they went, heads held high, marching and singing.
Every day Mr. Milgrom stroked my hair.
Every day I heard Kuba laughing.
Every day I looked for Janina and every day she was not there. I was used to her constant presence, to her mimicking everything I did. I kept glancing around to see myself repeated, but there was only me.
One day when I opened my eyes, a man was standing over me.
42
The man placed his foot on my chest. “You’re a Jew,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered. I pointed to my armband. “See?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m following the train. Janina. I’m going to the ovens.”
“What ovens?”
“The ovens for the Jews. I’m a filthy son of Abraham. They forgot me. Can you take me to the ovens?”
The man spit in the weeds. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You make no sense. Are you insane?”
That word was new to me. “I don’t know. But I’m stupid. And tiny. And fast.”
He jerked me to my feet. “Tiny is right.” He tore the armband away. “What happened to your ear?”
“Uri did it. He tried to kill me, but he missed.”
“Come with me,” he said.
I took a step and fell back to the ground. When I awoke, I was bouncing in a cart pulled by a donkey. When it stopped, the man slung me over his shoulder and dumped me into a heap of hay in a barn. The farmer’s wife came and gave me water and a carrot to eat. With water and rags she cleaned my wounded ear. Then she tied a rag around my head that covered the ear and one eye.
“Do you know Uri?” I said.
She tied another rag around my crusty arm.
“Did you see Janina?”
She touched my forehead. “You’re burning. And you stink.”
The farmer’s wife put me in a wooden tub and scrubbed me until I screamed. She brought me clothes. She burned my old ones, with the shoe in the pocket.
The wife came every day and cleaned my ear and my arm and felt my forehead and gave me water and carrots and boiled turnips. I slept in the hay and played with the mice in the barn. One was my favorite. I shared my turnips with it. I called it Janina. I taught it to run up my arm and stand on my head. Then a cat ate it.
One day I awoke and the ringing was gone. I walked out of the barn and through the fields until I came to the tracks. A spot of white caught my eye—the armband, snagged on a thornbush. I stuffed it into my pocket.
I had been walking the tracks for a long time when the farmer stopped me.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“To the ovens.”
The farmer knocked me down with a swat of his hand, and I was back in the donkey cart with a rope around my neck. I was tied to a stable post in the barn. I remembered Uri’s story of my beginnings, of becoming a slave to farmers. Maybe the story wasn’t made up after all. Maybe I was catching up with my life.
After some days the farmer’s wife came to the barn and said, “You must not run away. There is a new law. All children must work on the farms.”
“Then to the ovens?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Then.”
43
I slept in the barn, ate in the barn, worked in the barn. When I wasn’t working in the barn, I worked in the fields. I hauled rocks to the donkey cart. I picked bugs from the vegetables (when I wasn’t picking them from myself). I learned to milk the cow. One day the cow kicked me. I told it what happened to the cow in the ghetto. The farmer’s wife—her name was Elzbieta—fed me with the pigs. The pigs’ toilet was my toilet.
Every night I was tied to the stable post. Sometimes in the night, on the far side of the fields, I heard the huffing of locomotives and the clack of iron wheels. Many times I asked Elzbieta the wife, “When will the law be over? When can I go to the ovens?” “Soon,” she always said. “But you must not run away. If you do, the Nazis will burn down the farm and feed us to the pigs.”
So I worked and waited and talked with the donkey and the mice.
Then one day a man came in a horse and cart and said something to the farmer and went away. Later I heard the farmer shouting in the house. That night I was awakened by a voice, the wife’s. “Run!” The rope around my ankle was gone. There was something under my shirt, against my skin. Bread. I ran.
The war was over. I had been on the farm for three years. I was back to walking the tracks. This time I had company. Thousands were trudging the tracks, the roads, the fields. No Jackboots guarded them.
There were carnivals. Markets. They sprang up in fields along the railroad and were gone by next day. People sold things.
“Shoes!”
“Cigarette lighter!”
“Apples!”
Anything for money. Anything for food.
I saw a tent made from bedsheets. A man was calling: “Come in! Come in! See Herr Hitler! Come right in! Only fifty zlotys!”
I did not have even one zloty. I waited until someone was paying and slid under the bedsheet. Lying on the ground was a skeleton. Its bony feet had been stuffed into long black boots. A steel helmet swallowed half the grinning skull.
Another man called: “Ten zlotys! You won’t believe your eyes!” There was no tent, only a handkerchief. A customer paid. The man stood in my way, so I could not see. He lifted the handkerchief and let it fall. The customer wanted his money back. While the two fought on the ground, I lifted the handkerchief. It was something I had never seen. Something Ferdi had said did not exist. Something Mr. Milgrom had said was like happy. It was an orange.
The hucksters fascinated me the most. I stood in front of them for hours as they ranted to the passing parades about the wonders under their tents and handkerchiefs. They never stopped. They never ran out of words. When I lay down in weeds or a barn at night, I whispered into the dark: “Come and look! You won’t believe your eyes!”
I dreamed of bodyless Jackboots tramping the earth. I dreamed of burning cows. I dreamed the stone angel looked down on me and said, “I am nobody.”
I walked the tracks and roads. I offered my services to farmers for food and a bed of straw in the barn. When there was no work, I took my food from wherever I could find it. I drank my water from bomb craters.
I rode on trains. So did many others. I rode on boxcars and cinder cars and tankers. I rode a thousand trains. None ever took me to Janina. Or to a candy mountain.
Somewhere along the way I heard the story of Hansel and Gretel, and I knew that the end was not true, that the witch did not die in the oven.
One day I found myself back in the city of Warsaw.
The bomb craters were gone. There was still rubble. Trucks and carts were hauling it away. I thought I heard a machine gun. I ducked into a doorway. It was a jackhammer. I saw people slumped in alleyways, but they were not covered in newspaper. They were sleeping for real.
I found the ghetto. The wall was gone. I walked right in. I looked for Niska Street. I could not find it. I could not find our house. Or the orphans’ house. Or Olek hanging. Or the rug we slept under. There was rubble and there was nothing. Even the flies were gone.
On the trains I had heard about the revolt. Until then, I had thought I was the last one out of the ghetto. I did not know forty thousand people were still there. The following spring, as I hauled the farmer??
?s rocks, the Jews turned on the Jackboots with stolen guns and bottle bombs. But the Jackboots were too many, with their tanks and flamethrowers, and the revolt was over by May and the people were herded to the last of the trains and the ghetto was no more.
Standing in the silent dust, I understood at last what Uri had done and what he had saved me from. I understood that the Uri I knew—the real Uri—was not the one the Nazis knew. I smiled to think of him on the last day, once again in his own clothes, shaking his fist at the oncoming tanks, his red hair flaring, invisible no more, calling all the world’s attention to himself.
After I walked out of the ghetto that was no longer there, I wandered the streets of the city. I stole my food.
One day, in a crowd on a sidewalk, I caught a whiff of mint. I stopped, looked about, ran back the other way. I stared into faces. I sniffed. There it was again: mint . A man’s mouth was working, a fleck of green on his lip. A gristly, bony man. White whiskers. Sunken eyes. Ragged clothes. Bare feet so dirty I thought at first he wore shoes or socks. No club. No fat belly.
I planted myself in front of him. He stopped.
“Fatman.”
His head didn’t move. His eyes sagged down to me.
I tugged on his rags. “Fatman.”
His eyes were dead.
“Fatman, it’s me. Misha. Me and Janina. Remember?”
He did not hear.
I shook him. “Fatman! Buffo! You hate me. You want to kill me. Here I am. Here”—I took his hand and put it on my head—“kill me.”
His hand slid off my head and flopped to his side.
I punched him in his bony stomach. “Fatman! Look!” I pulled from my pocket something I had been carrying all this time: the armband, once blue and white, now mostly black. I rolled it up my sleeve. “Look, Fatman! I’m a Jew. You have to kill me. Look!”
But he would not look. He shuffled into me, almost knocking me down, and shuffled away. I watched until he was lost in the crowd. I took off the armband and let it fall to the sidewalk.
44
The world was returning to normal, but for me there was no normal to return to. Normal for me was stolen bread and ditch water. Little by little I learned about forks and money and toothpaste and toilets.
Back in the countryside, I did what I did best. I stole. I snatched everything I could carry. I became my own donkey. I pulled a little cart everywhere I went, and wherever I stopped I became a carnival.
I was so good at stealing, people saw things in my cart that they found nowhere else. And I was cheap. What did I know of prices? By the end of a day my pocket was only a little less empty than my wagon.
But who cared, for I had discovered my voice. I became a huckster like the ones that had fascinated me. “Ho! Bread for sale! Apples! Shoes! Cigarettes! Ladies’ undergarments! Come and see! Amazing bargains!”
For me, it was more about talking than about selling. There had been a few word bursts during and before the ghetto, but up until the end of the war, I had probably not spoken two thousand words in my life. Now you could not shut me up. If my cart was empty, I kept on hawking just to hear myself talk. I wallowed in words. There was no end to them. They were free for the taking. No one ever chased me down a road yelling, “Stop! Thief! He stole my word!”
Time went by. I talked enough and stole enough and sold enough to buy a steamship ticket, and I joined the multitudes going to America.
The immigration officer said, “What is your name?” “Misha Milgrom,” I said. “What’s a Misha?” he said. “Your name is Jack.”
I became Jack Milgrom.
I learned English. I went on talking. In America that means I was a salesman.
No one hired me to sell the best products. The problems were my size (I had stopped growing at five feet, one inch), my accent, and my missing ear, which now looked like a clump of cauliflower. I couldn’t blame them. Who would let such a galoot in the door? “Good day, madam. Can I interest you in a nice vacuum cleaner?” Forget it.
Then I got my big break. I was hired to sell a miracle vegetable chopper on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I was given a table and a pile of cucumbers. Ten o’clock in the morning. People gathered in front of me. I began describing the wonders of the miracle chopper. Somebody called, “Wha’d ya do, chop yer ear off?” Before I was half through my spiel, the last person was walking away. I felt desperate. “Wait!” I called. My mouth took over. “There’s something I have to tell you. Doctor Korczak was right. There was a cow. And it burned like a marshmallow!”
The people stopped and turned. They were thinking: What’s he talking about? What’s that have to do with the miracle chopper?
Who cared, as long as I was talking?
“Himmler looked like my uncle Shepsel. My uncle Shepsel looked like a chicken. . . .
“You want to know what rat tastes like? Rat tastes like mouse. . . .
“I’m going to warn you one last time: Do not take the horse from the merry-go-round. . . .”
I told them everything—except for Janina—all that I had seen, all that I was. The boardwalkers streamed by in both directions. Stopped to listen: three or four. Miracle choppers sold: zero. I was fired at the end of the day.
But I had found something.
Next day I was back on the boardwalk. No cucumbers, no choppers, just me, standing near Steel Pier spouting off. Then one day I took the bus west to Philadelphia. To earn money for cheap beds in cheap places, I handed out circulars and swept gas stations and shucked oysters, but my real job was running my mouth. If you walked the streets of Philadelphia in those days, you probably heard me. Fifteenth and Market. Broad and Chestnut. You heard me and you turned, and as soon as you realized I was spouting nonsense, you turned away and walked on, muttering to your friend, “Another nutcake.”
It was on a corner that I met my wife. Thirteenth and Market. A cold day in November. She stopped and listened. That was rare enough. Five minutes later she was still there. That was unheard of. Then she left. But she came back with a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. She offered me one. Her name was Vivian.
She came back every day, staying longer and longer, bringing me hot chestnuts. She lured me away from the street corner—lunch at Horn & Hardart, walks in Rittenhouse Square, card games in her ground-floor apartment.
Always I went on talking, telling my stories. Vivian became my street corner. Vivian was a normal, sensible person, but I think at that time she must have gone a little cuckoo. Maybe my words dazzled her. Maybe she saw me as a needy refugee from the war or an exotic artifact of history. In any case, one day out of the blue, she blurted, “Okay, I’ll marry you,” and I thought, Did I ask?
The marriage lasted five months. Vivian quickly found out that living with me was different from playing cards with me.
When caroling children came at Christmastime, I slammed the door in their faces.
When I saw a copy of Hansel and Gretel in a bookstore window, I went in and grabbed it and ripped it to shreds, and Vivian had to pay for it.
In the shower I sometimes turned on the cold water, but I could never stand it until I became blue.
I snatched apples from fruit stands.
I did strange things at parades.
I laughed in the wrong places.
I heard flies: “Remember Warsaw? What a feast! We were so full of crap we couldn’t take off!”
I cried for no reason.
In the night the colossal black flame-throwing Jackboots tramped through my dreams.
Finally, Vivian had enough. As she was leaving, I stared at her stomach. “Are you pregnant?” I said.
“Good-bye,” she said.
She closed the door, and I went back to the street corners. Remember the day you were hurrying by with your briefcase or shopping bag? Heading for the parking lot? The one-eared, pint-size Looney Tune ranting at you? That was me, flapping day after day about Olek and Uri and Himmler the chicken and Kuba the clown and the crows and black pea
rls and my yellow stone and the food that flew over the wall and the flaming, flying cow and the orphans marching and singing and the man who scrubbed the sidewalk with his beard and Buffo’s belly and Doctor Korczak’s cozy goatee and the ladies with white gloves and cameras and Greta the horse that never was—they were all a jumble in my head. What a mess they must have been coming out of my mouth.
And you? You were the thing that gave me shape. “But I wasn’t even listening,” you say. “I don’t even remember you.” Don’t feel bad. The important thing was not that you listened, but that I talked. I can see that now. I was born into craziness. When the whole world turned crazy, I was ready for it. That’s how I survived. And when the craziness was over, where did that leave me? On the street corner, that’s where, running my mouth, spilling myself. And I needed you there. You were the bottle I poured myself into.
I branched out. I went to nearby towns that had never seen a street corner talker. Norristown. Conshohocken. Glenside.
The years, the words, went by.
Then one day in Philadelphia, in the shadow of City Hall, two women stopped and listened. They looked to be in their seventies. They wore wide hats that shaded their faces like little parasols. After a while one of them reached out her hand and cupped my ear clump. She smiled and nodded and said, “We hear you. It’s enough. It’s over.” And they walked on, and I went another way, and I never took to another street corner.
When my daughter found me, I was stocking shelves in a Bag ’n Go market.
45
TODAY
“Poppynoodle! Poppynoodle!”
My granddaughter screams from another room. I get up from my easy chair and go see what it is this time.
“Look at me!”
I’m looking. She thinks she is standing on her head, but the toes of her pink sneakers never leave the floor. And I am once again reminded of the girl whose name she carries.