Chaim had never seen anything like it before. Glasses, he decided, should come in twos, even if one eye is blind. He wondered if there was a poem in that peculiar eyeglass. He often tried to write, about things that he found either fascinating or horrible. His teacher in his old school, Master Majewiski, had thought Chaim had talent. Even published two of Chaim’s poems in the school’s newspaper, though he made Chaim revise them three times before he pronounced them ready. After the poems were published, Chaim wished he’d revised them another three times because they seemed so thin next to the poetry the class had been studying, the Polish Mickiewicz and the Russian Pushkin especially. And of course the great Łódź poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch. When Chaim said as much to his teacher, Master Majewski had quoted some French poet named Valéry first in French then in Polish, saying, “A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death.” It had seemed an odd thing to say.
But that spectacle! Chaim thought,
It should be called a spec, singular,
perfect for a Cyclops spying
Odysseus under the sheep’s belly . . .
He promised himself to write it in his journal that very evening, repeating it in his mind three times to be sure he remembered every word.
Then he turned his attention to the woman with the Cyclops man. She was very peculiar. Chaim couldn’t stop staring. He must have made a sound, because Gittel responded with a tsk. He looked at her, and his hands drooped, their sorrow/sorry sign, bending at the wrist.
The woman was dressed in trousers, a beige silk shirt, and a corded jacket, which made Chaim want to giggle. No grown woman from Łódź would ever have been caught wearing such clothes, at least not in public. They made her look like a man. A slim, tall, elegant man with bright red lipstick, pocketbook slung over one shoulder, and a leather suitcase, which she set down carefully in the hallway. Her lipstick was so bright, Chaim couldn’t have described the rest of her face, even if the Nazis had threatened torture.
There was a girl on the other side of the rabbi, maybe fourteen or fifteen. Chaim was good with numbers as well as poetry, but not ages. She had braids like Gittel’s, but there any resemblance ended because she, too, was tall, though a bit ungainly, as if her body had grown faster than it could manage. She was also carrying a bag.
Suddenly, like one of those jack-in-the-boxes that spring out as a surprise, a blond boy who looked a bit younger than Chaim stepped around the group and glared at everyone. He had a closed-in face, like a bulldog’s, with large ears.
Chaim disliked him at once.
It wasn’t that Chaim hated dogs. Certainly not bulldogs. The cantor in their old synagogue had a bulldog, a scruffy creature named Mazel that the cantor walked every morning so it could do its business out in the street. Chaim used to see the two of them together on his way to school, until two years ago, when the Nazis had forced all the Jewish children out of the public school. Chaim and Gittel had to go to the Jewish school, where they were behind in the study of Hebrew because they were not a religious family, and so they’d been made to sit with the younger kids learning the alephs and beths.
Chaim wondered idly if the cantor’s dog had been conscripted by some soldiers for guard duty, though perhaps the beast was too friendly for such a job.
Chaim hoped no one had been hungry enough to eat the dog.
Thinking about Mazel and his fate was better than considering the bulldog-faced boy standing immobile at the door.
But then the boy spoke, breaking Chaim’s chain of thought, saying in Polish, “Can’t we go in already?” His voice was loud enough that everyone on both sides of the door shushed him, even Chaim, who rarely did any such thing. The boy’s accent marked him out as someone foreign to Łódź.
Papa moved forward and swung the door wide.
The family—because they were clearly that—plus the rabbi crowded into the apartment without any invitation other than fear.
Chaim could feel the fear as they entered, and the middle fingers on both his hands trembled. Signing, even when not directed at his sister, was so engrained he didn’t notice he was doing it.
The boy carried a dark blue school bag. Chaim discovered later that it held no books, only a collection of comics like the German Father and Son and Tintin cut out from newspapers and pasted into scrapbooks. Whatever clothes he brought with him had been stuffed in the bag seemingly as an afterthought.
The rabbi kissed the mezuzah on the door frame, an artifact from the last people who’d lived in the apartment. Chaim often wondered who they were and what had happened to them. “Probably resettled somewhere else,” Mama said, and that was all the information he ever got.
The boy and girl and their parents didn’t even seem to notice the mezuzah, not that Chaim or his family ever kissed it themselves. “So old-fashioned,” Papa said, though sometimes Mama touched it when he wasn’t around.
Shutting the door behind them, careful not to let it slam, Chaim took a deep breath and caught up with everyone already crowding into the small living room. The rabbi was just beginning to explain why they were there.
“These are the Norenbergs,” he said in his rumble of a voice. Chaim thought, It’s a voice better suited to the bimah than a two-by-three-meter room. “Dr. Norenberg, his wife Dominika, son Bruno, and daughter Sophie.”
Sophie sketched an awkward little curtsey, more of a head bob, but Bruno just scowled.
“They come from their home in Lublin,” the rabbi continued, as if the Norenbergs were in Łódź on holiday. “Along with a number of their neighbors. As a doctor, Norenberg and his family were allowed to stay later in Lublin than most. We’ve been told to find them all accommodations.” He gave a sad little smile.
Turning once more to the Norenbergs, he added, “Ten thousand sent away in four transports this past February, so we have some rooms available. We’re making sure you—as a professional, Dr. Norenberg—get the best accommodations on offer.”
Chaim knew that because Papa knew. And because rumors were the gold coin in the ghetto. But—as Papa always said about rumors—“better to buy than sell.” By that he meant they were not to tell Gittel and Mama.
Chaim recalled that the majority of deportees had been prisoners from the jail. Five of them had frozen to death at the train station, and their corpses had been sent back to the ghetto. No one actually knew where the resettlers had been taken. Or maybe, Chaim thought, some people know but aren’t allowed to tell.
“How nice,” Dr. Norenberg said, his accent different from his son’s. Almost—Chaim thought—German. The doctor looked disdainfully around the small living room, the one-eyed glass sparkling.
Chaim could tell by the man’s frigid tone that he didn’t actually think there was anything nice about the apartment at all.
Hands on his hips, Chaim signed to Gittel: sarcastic, his two pointer fingers waggling to and fro, meaning two sides of the same word or phrase. She nodded back.
“I’m afraid the Nazis have taken all the houses and the very best apartments for themselves,” Mama said. “The hotels were set aside early for the general and his advisors.”
Dr. Norenberg acted as if Mama hadn’t spoken and turned his back on her.
“Even our house was taken,” Gittel put in.
“But of course,” said Mrs. Norenberg, dismissing Mama as casually as her husband had, and dismissing Gittel as well. She refused to look any of them in the eye, which made her seem colder still.
Chaim decided he didn’t like the doctor or his wife. He thought suddenly, Norenberg’s a German name, which means they’re German Jews. Yekes. Probably Yekes who came to work and live in Poland. So they’re probably just like all Yekes—they think they’re better than us. And probably used to big meals and will want all our food. He finger-signed the letters for Yekes to Gittel but did it as if combing his fing
ers through his hair.
She understood, of course, and grinned.
Well, he thought, they won’t find much to eat in the ghetto.
“Brought here like cattle,” Papa remarked to the rabbi before another fit of coughing took him.
“One herd like the other,” Chaim finished for him, then turned away, having used up his meager supply of words quoting his father.
“Well, poor as it is, you are welcome,” Mama said quickly. “And perhaps—as you’re a doctor—you can help my poor Avram with his cough.”
“I am a dentist, madam,” Dr. Norenberg said, a bit stiffly.
Perhaps, Chaim thought, a dentist isn’t used to polite conversation. After all, his patients couldn’t very well talk to him while he worked on their teeth. Or maybe the Norenbergs only speak German at home unless forced to talk to the lower classes. In Polish or, God forbid, Yiddish.
He and Gittel had been studying the Russian Revolution when they were last in school, and Chaim had been fascinated by the rankings of class order that Lenin and Trotsky had spoken of. He also had a sudden sneaking admiration for Dr. Norenberg, who had put them all down using only five words: I am a dentist, madam. That was the sort of thing Chaim could understand, and for a moment, he almost liked the man. But only a moment.
Dr. Norenberg gave a quick nod to Mama, adding, “I fix teeth and gums,” as if Mama weren’t smart enough to know what a dentist did.
Chaim bristled at the man’s condescension, but he said nothing, for there was nothing to say. Certainly not in five words.
Besides, the rabbi hadn’t been asking if they’d take in the Norenbergs. He was saying they had to.
“Sophie can sleep with me,” Gittel said quickly. “I’ve got a double bed.”
“Then you are a very lucky girl,” the rabbi said, grinning, the gaps between several teeth indicating a dentist might be just the thing for this section of the ghetto.
Sophie tentatively smiled at Gittel before glancing at her father, who shook his head. When she turned to look at Gittel again, Sophie was no longer smiling.
“It’s best we four stay in one room,” Dr. Norenberg said. “Less distraction.”
Less destruction is what he really means, Chaim thought. That way we can’t corrupt any of them with Polish Jewish ideas. And then he had another thought: But in which room?
“Then you shall have our bedroom,” Mama told them. “That’s the only one of the three that can accommodate all of you. It has its own washbasin, too. But we have to carry the water up four flights, so be sparing, please. We have an extra mattress for the floor, if that’s helpful.”
Papa always said she couldn’t help being a giver. It was in her nature.
“Very kind,” murmured Mrs. Norenberg, though Chaim thought there was no kindness in her voice.
Dr. Norenberg took the single glass from his eye and polished it slowly with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He nodded but didn’t add anything to his wife’s comment. When he was finished nodding, he put the spectacle back over his right eye. “It will be for only a little while, I suppose, until they find us better accommodations.” He looked meaningfully at the rabbi, who made no answer.
“But where will you and Papa sleep?” asked Gittel. She was fingering her left braid, a sure sign that she was uncomfortable or nervous, worried or scared. Or all four at once.
Mama said briskly, “Papa will sleep in Chaim’s room. I will sleep in yours. We’ll use the family bathroom, and everyone will make do.” She turned to the Norenbergs. “The motto of this house is Where there’s love, there’s room.”
We have a motto? Chaim was almost surprised into saying it aloud.
But whether or not Mama had made up the motto that very moment, it seemed the Norenbergs were there to stay.
At least that was good enough for the rabbi, who scuttled from the apartment as soon as possible, kissing the mezuzah on his way out, with Papa behind him to shut and lock the door.
As Papa explained afterward, the poor man had so many blocks to go to get home before curfew, he might have to run. “Which is a danger in itself,” he said, before explaining to the Norenbergs, “The Germans mistrust anyone who is running. Or speaking to the guards. Or—”
Mama put her hand on Papa’s arm. “We can fill them in on the rules tomorrow, my darling.”
And even if the rabbi doesn’t run, Chaim thought, if he’s out after curfew, he can be shot by any soldier who decides to do it, or taken to prison. They knew of no one who’d ever returned from the jail.
* * *
• • •
Mama took the Norenbergs into the big bedroom, saying, “We’ll spend tomorrow moving our things from here. But now you must be hungry. We have only a little potato soup and a bit of bread, but we’re happy to share.”
Happy, Chaim thought, is not the word I’d use. Forced is more accurate. Since he used so few words, he liked to be accurate with them. He looked around for Gittel to tell her, but she was already in the kitchen.
He could hear her setting the extra places at the table, opening up the two side panels so the table was bigger, which also made the kitchen seem smaller than it already was and difficult to get around. In their old house, there was a separate dining room and a table large enough for eight chairs easily, ten in a pinch.
But, he thought, what does it matter anyway? There was little enough food to be put out. A thin vegetable soup. Usually potato. Spelt bread several days old, though if you soaked it in the soup, it got nice and mushy. But now each small portion was going to have to be cut by half. Sometimes knowing math was depressing.
He went into the kitchen to help. After all, twins shared things. Thoughts. Soup. Chores.
The good things.
And the bad.
Gittel Remembers
Our old house was on a half acre of land on a side street, which meant we could ride bicycles and have picnics on the back lawn. Papa would sit with us under the trees and identify birds, pointing them out with both their everyday names and Latin names: thrushes and nightingales, common rosefinches, with their rosy heads and breasts, black woodpeckers hammering on trees, woodlarks, and others. And once on a trip to a nearby forest, a black grouse.
“Rare,” Papa said. “And not at all in its proper territory, poor thing. How could he have gotten so far off the track?”
“On vacation?” Mama had asked.
We all laughed, far more than the small joke deserved, but “grouse on vacation” became something we chanted whenever we went into the forest for fun.
Mama had an herb garden and grew lots of vegetables—cabbage and lettuce, potatoes, onions, several kinds of beans. There were two apple trees, two plums, and a pear tree that tried to make pears every year and never quite succeeded.
Papa had been a woodworking teacher in a large vocational school, and Mama was a history teacher during the day and, two evenings a week, a tutor for boys failing in their bar mitzvah studies, the only woman in all of Łódź to be allowed to do any such thing. Mama’s father—may his name be for a blessing—had no son, so he’d taught his daughter Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin. It was said that he could recite the whole of Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish. Many of his friends thought he’d written the story as well, or so Mama told us. Sometimes in our family it was difficult to distinguish the real from the story.
Oddly, Chaim refused to take bar mitzvah lessons once we were moved to the ghetto. Mama thought it was because he didn’t want to learn from her. But I assured her it was because he didn’t want to have to stand up in front of the entire congregation and stutter.
My best friend, Ilka, lived next door to our old house. We played endless games of guma, the elastic jump rope twisting as high as armpit level. Even before we knew how to write our ABCs, we chalked pictures from favorite stories on the walk in front of our houses. She always chose the
pink chalk, I the blue.
We played the glass-piece secrets game, too, burying smooth pieces of glass or miniature bouquets of wildflowers. Or the glass eye from an old doll. Or the broken clasp from a charm bracelet. That sort of thing. Only we two knew the secret of where we buried our treasures. Chaim laughed at us, called us squirrels, and refused to take part in such girlish games, preferring to play at war with the boys in the field behind our houses, throwing pebbles. He needed no words for such games. Just grunted and yelled with the other boys.
One day Ilka told me they were moving to America. Her papa, who was a professor, had found work there.
“Is it far away?” I asked. “America?” We hadn’t studied geography yet.
“Over the ocean,” she said.
I’d never seen the ocean. I thought it was like the pond in the nearby park, only bigger.
“I will visit,” I said.
“I will write,” she said.
The Nazis came.
We did neither.
* * *
• • •
When we were moved out of the house and into the ghetto, I missed only three things: the swing in the backyard, my bookcase and its many books, and the porch where, in the evenings, Chaim wrote in his journal and I counseled my dolls.
Later, in the ghetto, when there was little to write about but death and terror, and no dolls, Chaim still kept on writing, though he had to scribble in the margins of his journal, for such books were in short supply and far too expensive for us to buy. After dinner, he’d read me the day’s work—what he was thinking, a line for a possible poem, an observation from the window of our apartment, a wicked word portrait of a Nazi soldier standing alert on a side street.
He never stuttered while reading aloud.