Milkweed

  I came to a garden. Some people had little gardens in their backyards. The gardens were all brown stalks and stubble and fallen leaves by now, and so was this one, except for one viny upshoot of green and red. It was a tomato plant, probably the last surviving one of the season. I knew something of seasons, but nothing of months and years—I had no use for them. I know now that this must have happened in the month of October in the year nineteen thirty-nine.

  Many green tomatoes dangled from the vine, and two plump ripe red ones. I was still hungry. I pulled off a red tomato, sat myself down cross-legged on the ground, and ate it. The juice spilled down my chin as pickle juice often did on Uri. I picked off the other tomato. As I was eating it, I turned my eyes toward the back of the house. Someone was sitting on the step. A little girl. Watching me.

  I never ate with someone watching me, unless it was Uri or the boys. Eating came after running. And yet I didn’t move. I sat there and ate the last red tomato in the city and I watched her watching me. Her elbows were on her knees and her face leaned into her cupped hands. Her hair was curly and the color of bread crust. Her eyes were brown as chestnuts. They were very big.

  When I finished eating the tomato, I stood and walked off. I didn’t run. When I looked back, she was still watching me. Her round, unblinking eyes made me feel as if I had just become visible, as if I had never been seen before. When I was far from the backyard, I kept looking back.

  When I told Uri I found two red tomatoes and ate them, he didn’t believe me.

  On the first day that the light went out, Uri said to me, “Okay, this is who you are. Your name is Misha Pilsudski.”

  And he told me the rest . . .

  I, Misha Pilsudski, was born a Gypsy somewhere in the land of Russia. My family, including two great-grandfathers and a great-great-grandmother who was one hundred and nine years old, traveled from place to place in seven wagons pulled by fourteen horses. There were nineteen more horses trailing the wagons, as my father was a horse trader. My mother told fortunes with cards. She could look at cards and tell you how you were going to die. She could look into your eyes and tell you the name of the person you would marry.

  Every night the wagons stopped in a grove of trees by a stream. The chores of us little children were to gather sticks for the fire and to feed the horses. My favorite horse was a speckled mare called Greta. Every night one of my brothers hoisted me onto Greta’s back and I pretended to ride.

  I had seven brothers and five sisters. I was not the youngest but I was the smallest. I was so small because I was once cursed by a tinker who did not like the fortune my mother gave him.

  Since we were Gypsies we belonged everywhere, so we came to the land of Poland. My father traded many horses. My mother told many fortunes. Then we were bombed by a Jackboot airplane. The war had not started yet. Jackboot airplanes were simply flying about practicing for the war. The Jackboot general told the pilots that they could practice on Jews and Gypsies. So when a Jackboot pilot saw our seven wagons full of Gypsies, he immediately dropped his bombs on us, plus his goggles and everything in his pockets.

  Fortunately, we looked up and saw everything coming down and we scattered—seven wagons in seven directions. I was with my mother and father. They were sad but I was not, because Greta, my favorite horse, was with us. Then one night, as we were camped in a grove of trees, some Polish farmers, who hated Gypsies even more than Jackboots hated Jews, came with torches and tied up my mother and father and stole me and Greta.

  For a long time Greta and I were slaves for the farmers. They fed us nothing but turnips and pig’s milk. Then one night Greta broke out of her stall and ran away. The next day I ran away too. I searched and searched for Greta and my family all over Poland. Finally, I came to the city of Warsaw, where I learned to steal food to keep from starving.

  I never saw Greta or my parents or my brothers and sisters again.

  And so, thanks to Uri, in a cellar beneath a barbershop somewhere in Warsaw, Poland, in autumn of the year nineteen thirty-nine, I was born, you might say. With one detail missing. I waggled my yellow stone in Uri’s face. “What about this?”

  He stared. “Yes . . . it was your father’s. He gave it to you.”

  I was greedy. “What else?”

  “Before you were kidnapped,” he said. “That’s all.”

  I loved my story. No sooner did I hear the words than I became my story. I loved myself. For days afterward, I did little else but stare into the barbershop mirror, fascinated by the face that stared back.

  “Misha Pilsudski . . . ,” I kept saying. “Misha Pilsudski . . . Misha Pilsudski . . .”

  And then it was no longer enough to stare at myself and repeat my name to myself. I needed to tell someone else.

  8

  I returned to the backyard with the tomato patch and the little girl of the eyes. She was not there. Neither were the tomatoes. Even the smallest green ones were gone. But arrows were there. They were painted on pieces of paper, and the papers were pierced by twigs and the twigs were poked into the ground.

  I followed the arrows. They led to a far corner of the garden. The last arrow pointed down. I dug with my fingers. I came to something. I pulled it from the dirt and brushed it off. It was the size of a walnut and it was wrapped in thin golden foil. I peeled off the foil. It was a piece of chocolate-covered candy. I broke it open. It was a cherry. Red juice spilled onto the ground. I ate it. I licked my fingers. It was no hazelnut buttercream, but it was close.

  When I looked up, the little girl was on the step.

  “Did you like it?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But my favorites are buttercreams. With hazelnuts.”

  “I planted it in the spring,” she said. “I planted a potato seed. It was supposed to be a potato. But nobody picked it when it was time to dig potatoes. Everybody missed it.” She threw her arms out and shrugged to show that everybody missed it. “So it became candy. That’s what happens when a potato stays in the ground too long. Did you know that?”

  “No,” I said. “My name is Misha Pilsudski. I’m a Gypsy from the land of Russia. . . .” I held out my yellow stone. “My father gave me this before I was kidnapped.” And I told her all about myself and my family.

  She listened with her big eyes and her chin cupped in her hands. When I finished, she said, “It’s not nice to steal. What are you looking at?”

  “Your shoes,” I said. I loved to look at them. They were black and as shiny as her eyes.

  She held her leg out, turned her ankle this way and that. She held her foot in front of my face. “Look,” she said. “See yourself.”

  I looked. There I was, as clearly as in the barbershop mirror. I looked . . . and looked . . . and then she was laughing. I was so intent on seeing myself that I hadn’t noticed she was slowly lowering her foot; now it rested on the step and I was on my hands and knees, still looking.

  We both laughed.

  Then I said, “Are you a Jew?”

  She made her mouth like a fish and drew in her breath. She put her finger to her lips and shook her head. She cupped her hands about my ear and whispered into it. “Yes. But I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”

  I said, “Does your father scrub the sidewalk with his beard?”

  She frowned. “My father doesn’t have a beard.”

  “Do you boil babies?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “What a stupid question.”

  “I’m a stupid boy,” I said.

  She cocked her head and stared at me. “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.” Uri had not told me that.

  “I’m six,” she said, “but I’ll be seven tomorrow. I’m having a birthday party. Do you want to come?”

  I said yes.

  She jumped up from the step. She came and stood in front of me. She came very close until we were touching. “Stand straight,” she said. I stood straight. I was looking at the back of her house through the brown curls on the top of her head. br />
  Her hand appeared atop her head, mashing down the curls, moving forward until it touched the tip of my nose. She backed away.

  “I come up to your nose,” she said. “So you must be”—she stared at me, thinking; her finger pulled down her lower lip, showing her bottom teeth, one missing—“eight!”

  She ran to the back door. She turned and pointed to me and said in a tiny, birdy voice, “Don’t forget . . . party tomorrow.” She went inside.

  When I came the next day, she was standing on the step with her hands on her hips, glaring. Beneath a black velvety wrap peeked a pink dress that came to her knees. A red bow perched on her head like a little hat. She bent toward me, and I saw the red bow reflected in her shiny black shoes. “You’re late.”

  “What’s late?” I said.

  “The party was supposed to start, but I told them it couldn’t begin until you were here. Two of my friends already left.”

  With an angry grunt, she pulled me up the steps and into the house. She called out, “He’s here!”

  Footsteps from all directions, some running, some walking. We were in a room with a large table. On the table was food. There were glass bowls of cookies and candies, but I could not take my eyes off the cake in the middle. I had never seen such a beautiful cake. It was a rectangle in shape, and it was a garden of frosting. There were frosting flowers of blue and yellow and green, and there was a little red frosting house with blue frosting smoke coming out of the chimney, and there was even a little frosting animal that looked somewhat like a dog but could have been a cat. Across the middle of the cake, in yellow frosting, something was written.

  There were grown-ups around the table and three other little girls in bright dresses, who were giggling and staring at me. And then one of the women began to plant white candles into the cake. One candle went right through the red house. And then a man was leaning over with a lit match, and he put the match to each candle until all the candles were burning. I was shocked. They were going to burn down the cake! There wasn’t a moment to spare. I blew out the fires, grabbed the cake, and ran from the house. Snow flurries swirled in my face.

  When I told Uri what had happened, he laughed so hard he fell into his bed. I liked it when Uri laughed—his red hair seemed to brighten. He told me then about birthday cakes and candles, and I laughed also.

  My running had caused the beautiful cake to crack like a bombed sidewalk. “Looks like we’ll just have to eat it all ourselves,” said Uri. Before we did, Uri read the writing across the cracks. He told me it said “Happy Birthday, Janina.” I scooped up the writing with my finger and ate that first.

  The next day I stole the best cake I could find from a bakery. I waited until dark and took it to the girl Janina’s house. I set it on the back step. I took the candles from my pocket and planted them in the cake. I lit them with a match. I knocked on the back door and ran.

  I wandered the city for the rest of the day. I did not head for home until after dark. Along the way I heard voices. I turned a corner. Fires burned in the night. My first thought was: Someone is having an amazing birthday party. But they were not candles, they were torches. Men were holding them in front of the same bakery where I had stolen the cake that day. Strudels and tortes danced in the firelight behind the glass. Someone painted a big yellow star on the window.

  A man came out of a side door. He was in his stocking feet and held a coat about himself. At first no one saw him. He said, “Hey! What are you doing?”

  The men with the torches and paintbrushes turned to him. They were glad to see him. They came to him. They took his coat from him. One of them held his arms from behind while another painted his face with the yellow paint that had made the star. The painter took great care to paint all of the man’s beard. Then they took his clothes off. The man kicked and screamed. Someone put a torch near his face and he was still. In the torchlight, his eyes were fiery like the window of the bakery.

  The painters painted the rest of him then, white and yellow from head to toe. They backed away and held the torches, the better to see him. The painted man looked like a very sad clown. The men with the torches and brushes howled with laughter. One of the painters reached out and paddled the rump of the painted man, setting off a new round of howls. Then someone snapped, “Go! Go!” and the painted man slumped back into his house.

  It was then that I noticed flocks of torches up and down the street. Glass shattered. I turned another corner. It was everywhere: torches and laughter and shattering glass and painters painting windows.

  I heard a horse coming. Greta! I thought, but it was not a speckled mare. Someone was riding the horse, but not in the usual way. He was tied to the horse stomach-down and backward. His bearded chin bobbed on the rump of the horse and his face went in and out of the horse’s tail.

  I thought: I’m glad I’m not a Jew.

  As I walked home I looked up at the windows above the shops, where the people lived. All was dark and silent. Men in the street threw stones and broke windows, but still no faces appeared, no lights went on.

  Early the next morning I dragged Uri out to see. People were still painting on the shopwindows, but this time the painters were the bearded people, the shop owners themselves.

  I asked Uri, “What does it say?”

  “It says, ‘Jew.’”

  “Don’t they already know they’re Jews?”

  “They want everybody to know.”

  “Why?”

  “So nobody will come to their shops and buy from them.”

  I thought for a minute.

  “Uri, will you have to paint ‘Jew’ on the window of the barbershop?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re a Jew.”

  “In the first place, they don’t even know I’m there. In the second place, who ever heard of a red-haired Jew?”

  I thought some more.

  “What about me? Will I have to paint ‘Gypsy’?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” I said. But really, I wouldn’t have minded so much painting “Gypsy” on the window. I even thought I might like having myself painted yellow and white from head to toe, especially if they let me keep my clothes on. What I really feared was being strapped to a horse backward with my face bouncing in and out of the horse’s tail.

  This time I said it out loud: “I’m glad I’m not a Jew.”

  Uri said, “Don’t be too glad.”

  9

  WINTER

  They came in the night. I heard them above us. Shouts. Laughter. Glass smashing. The hair tonic bottles! All the beautiful colors.

  Uri hauled me out of bed. “Coat! Coat!” I felt in the dark for my coat. “Shoes!” I grabbed my shoes. He dragged me to the hatch door that opened from the cellar to the backyard.

  “Run!” he said when we got outside.

  I wouldn’t move. “My candy!”

  He smacked me. We ran. Shouts behind us. Gunshots. The yellow stone bouncing at my throat.

  We ran for a long time, stopped to put on our shoes, ran. We came to the jagged walls of a bombed-out building. We picked our way through the rubble. Glass glittered in the moonlight. Frost sparkled on tumbled bricks and fallen timbers. Uri took my hand. We went down into the rubble.

  Uri felt around, found a place. “Okay,” he said, “sleep.”

  I slept. I dreamed I was standing underwater. A waterfall maybe, or a faucet, splashing in my face, my eyes. I struggled to breathe. I woke up. Above me, at the edge of the rubble, stood a boy with schoolbooks strapped over his shoulder, blue sky above him, a boy laughing, urinating in my face.

  “Get out!” Uri shouted, and threw a brick. The boy vanished.

  We went from that place to another, and another. We slept in many places. All were cold. Sometimes I awoke with snow in my ear. Never again did we sleep in beds, or sit in chairs, or reach into an icebox for food.

  We walked the streets. Uri kept looking about. Sometimes he pulled me quickly into a doorway or a dark space betw
een buildings. We did not go into any shop with a star on its window.

  Whenever I heard a horse, I looked to see if it was Greta.

  Uri had to go farther and farther to find pickles. He continued to find cans of meats and vegetables, jars of fruit and peanuts. He always took two of each. Candy he stole just for me. When I found a hazelnut buttercream, I could hardly chew it for laughing.

  I used to see the brown paper bread bags everywhere I went. Now there were not so many.

  One day when I snatched a loaf of bread, the lady called after me, “Stop! Dirty Jew!”

  I stopped. I turned and faced her. I shouted back as sternly as I could. “I’m not a dirty Jew! I’m a Gypsy! My name is Misha Pilsudski!”

  She threw her hands in the air. She called out to the people on the sidewalk. “A dirty Gypsy! Stop him!” She started running after me. The brown snout of her fox fur bounced up and down on her shoulder.

  I had never gotten angry at a bread lady before. I turned the bag upside down and dumped the loaf to the ground. I jumped on it with both feet. I kicked it into the street. I laughed at the running lady and shouted, “Dirty bread lady!” and sped away.

  The next day I stole five loaves. As I snatched each one, I shouted my name into the face of the person:

  “Misha Pilsudski!”

  “Misha Pilsudski!”

  “Misha Pilsudski!”

  “Misha Pilsudski!”

  “Misha Pilsudski!”

  “You cuckoo,” said Uri when I got back. “It’s too much. You’re wasting.” He took four of the loaves. “I’ll give it to the orphans.”

  “What are orphans?” I said.

  “Children without parents,” he said.

  “Like you?”

  “Like me, like Kuba, like all of us.”

  “Except for me,” I said. “I have a mother and father and seven brothers and five sisters.”

  “I forgot,” he said. “Except for you.”

  We took the bread to the orphans. They lived in a large square house of gray stone. Uri rang the bell. The door opened.