Chaim’s jaw had dropped as Mrs. Norenberg ranted on. He glanced at Papa and Mama to see if they could stop her. But they were as stunned as he. Sophie made a mewling sound and was comforted by Gittel, who put an arm around her. He could see Sophie was trembling.
Chaim had a sudden realization—It’s Sophie Mrs. Norenberg is ranting about. As always, it was Gittel who’d understood first, and Gittel whose comfort was swift and straightforward.
Bruno startled up out of his chair. “Mutti!” he cried. His first word in a long while, a wild wail.
None of it seemed to register on Mrs. Norenberg, who was now in full cry. “I will go to the Commandant and explain the mistake. How I was taken advantage of by the Jew. How I was raped. Stolen from my parents, good Germans, God-fearing Christians, Father a member in fine standing with the party.”
Nazi Party? Chaim’s fingers quickly spelled out the words to Gittel. He knew Mrs. Norenberg must mean the Nazi Party, but wanted Gittel’s confirmation.
She nodded.
Mrs. Norenberg glanced around the small room as if she knew no one, as if they were all beneath her contempt. Then she focused on Bruno, already half out of his chair. “You, boy! Bring me my coat, the good one with the fur collar. I must speak to the Commandant now. You look a fine lad. A good German.” She was speaking in Polish but with a heavy German accent. It was if she were another woman entirely.
Transfixed by his mother’s ranting, Bruno couldn’t move.
She stiffened at his reluctance to follow her orders, then leaned toward him, barking out, “Schnell! Schnell!”
Bruno’s eyes got wide and he ran over to the coat closet, but Mama turned and put her hand on Mrs. Norenberg’s shoulder. “Madam,” she said quietly, “let me do your hair first. You must look your very best when you go to tea with the party head.”
“Dummkopf!” Mrs. Norenberg said. “I’m not seeing Herr Hitler, only a minor functionary.” But she let Mama take her back into the room, where they heard her collapse onto the bed in a fit of hysterical weeping as if she had no control of her emotions at all.
Papa said to the children, “I will go to the rabbi at once.” Then he turned to Bruno, who was standing there holding his mother’s coat, though not the one with a fur collar, since she hadn’t brought that one to Łódź. “Put your mother’s coat away. She won’t be needing it now.”
As soon as Papa had put on his own coat, he went out the door. It closed behind him with a careful snick.
* * *
• • •
Nearly an hour later, Mama came back into the kitchen. “It took three of my precious aspirin,” she said, “for she was complaining of a headache. And a hundred strokes of the brush through her barbed-wire hair. But she’s finally dropped off to sleep.”
She sat down hard on one of the kitchen chairs and sighed loudly. “I am so sorry, my children.” It was clear she meant all four of them. Then she addressed the Norenbergs especially. “But you must tell me everything you know about your mother’s condition. We are all in this tsuris, this trouble, together.”
Bruno refused to say anything other than “She yelled at me. She’s never done that before. She must be crazy.”
It was Sophie who explained. “High strung, the doctors call her. Papa said with the pills and enough cosseting, she does just fine. But the move to this . . .” Her hand made a circle taking in the apartment. “It has made her worse than ever.”
“And is it true that she isn’t Jewish?” Mama asked.
“She studied to become a convert in the days right after I was born,” Sophie answered. Her voice still seemed soaked with tears. “But she gave up after a month, saying it was just too hard. Papa never pressed her. He’s not very religious anyway. And he doesn’t want to alienate our grandparents any further, I guess.” She looked down. “They aren’t very nice to Bruno or me, but they’re especially mean to me. They called me Dominika’s Downfall.” She added, in case it wasn’t clear enough, “Dominika—that’s Mutti’s name.”
Chaim noticed that Sophie was still using the present tense about her father, proving either her loyalty or her delusion. Without thinking, his right hand strayed to his face, and he wiped away a pretend tear with a flip of his right finger, meaning Sophie was unwilling to give up hope.
Then he glanced at Gittel, who shook her head at him.
He wasn’t sure why. After all, certainly the dentist was dead. Or, Chaim thought suddenly, perhaps he has been transported. He shook his head. In the end, Papa says, they are very much the same thing.
“So, then, my children, what are you?” Mama leaned toward them. “Christian or Jew?”
There was a long silence in the room.
Much too long, Chaim thought. And then he said the word no one else seemed willing to say. “Mischling.”
It hung in the air between Sophie and Bruno. They knew as well as he did what Mischling meant. It was German for a half-blood, or in the case of Jewish grandparents, a quarter-blood. Even if Sophie and Bruno denied such a thing to themselves, the Nasties considered them Jews. Unless—as Papa had once explained—unless they had the money to go to court to prove the marriage a fake. A sham. Or a shame. Mrs. Norenberg would have to say the children were not the dentist’s children, that she had been with someone else. It was a court case, Papa had said, in which the woman lies and everyone else colludes in the lie.
When he’d asked Papa what collude meant, Papa said, “They all play along with the lie, even knowing it to be false. Judge, lawyers, those who bring suit, all their friends and relations. Everyone knows it’s a lie. But they swear to it anyway.”
Chaim wondered if what they were all doing now in the house was the same. We know, he thought, that Mrs. Norenberg should be in a hospital. We know that Dr. Norenberg is dead. We know the children are Mischlings. But no one will say any of it. They have more words than I will ever have, but they dare not use them.
The moment he had that thought, it wound itself into four lines through his brain, the beginning of a poem without a title. Yet:
There are words we dare not say
Written not in the regular way.
The ink is water, stained with blood.
We’re carried off in the wordy flood.
It wasn’t good. He wasn’t best with rhyme. But the thought was there. He wondered if he’d find time or the will to write down the bits of poems in his journal. He wondered if he could keep them safe from Bruno’s prying eyes.
* * *
• • •
Papa returned from seeing the rabbi with a face like a poor pig roast, or so Mama said. “Not kosher. Underdone. Probably bad for all of us.”
“It’s not true that no news is good news,” Papa said. “In this case, no news is the worst news. I’m sorry, Sophie, Bruno, but your father has simply disappeared.”
“Maybe he’s escaped,” Sophie says. “He’s smart. He’s—”
“He’s a Jew,” Bruno spat.
“As are we all in this room,” Mama reminded him, “as far as the Nazis are concerned.” She stood up and took Papa aside into his bedroom, presumably to let him know of the latest developments—the three aspirin, the hair brushing, the identity of Bruno and Sophie as Mischlings.
“Well,” Sophie said to her brother, standing over him, arms folded, “you’re a fine one to talk, Mr. Mischling. And here you are dependent for your very life upon the goodness of Jews, because with Father gone and Mother useless, they are all that stands between us and starvation. Be careful that sharp tongue of yours doesn’t cut off your lips.”
It was the longest thing Chaim had heard her say. He glanced over at Gittel, who was nodding in approval and clearly willing herself not to grin.
Bruno stood up, pushed past his sister, went to the front door, opened it, and walked out, slamming the door behind.
“He’ll come back,” S
ophie whispered, as if her previous long speech had robbed her of most of her voice. “He always does.”
“He’s got nowhere to go,” Chaim said, choosing his five words with care.
Gittel ignored him and got out two packs of cards. “He won’t go outside. Now—I think a fast game of durak will calm all of us down,” she said.
“I’d rather read,” whispered Sophie, picking up the copy of Rilke’s poetry she’d been carrying around. Riffling the pages, she found the poem she was seeking, then read it aloud in German, before translating the lines for them: “‘What happens with tears? They make—’ Oh! Wait. ‘Made me blind in my glass. They made me heavy. Made my curve sparkle. Made me brittle. And at last left me empty.’” Her mouth turned down as she spoke, as if the poem had become sour in her mouth. Then she added, “We always spoke German at home. Father and Mutti insisted. But of course, in school we spoke Polish. German really is the most expressive language, except when the Nazis speak it. They torture the poor thing, and it weeps with shame.”
Then after making that extraordinary statement, she left to go back into the room she shared with her sleeping mother, her missing father, and the brother she’d just flayed with her tongue.
* * *
• • •
Chaim went to the front door and put his ear against it. He could hear sounds of weeping in the hall, knew it was Bruno, and decided not to open the door, for that would only shame him further. Sophie had said Bruno would come back, and he had to believe her. But a boy sobbing like that needed privacy. Bruno would return when he could act strong again.
It doesn’t make me like him, thought Chaim, but I think I’m beginning to understand him a little better. He tiptoed back into the kitchen and nodded at his sister. “I’ll play,” he said.
Knowing his mind, she’d already laid out the cards.
Gittel Remembers
When did Papa first become ill? Mama said he always had a weak chest. His father was the same.
But I think he got really sick that February, on the twenty-first, standing outside at Bazarny Square, ten o’clock in the morning with eight thousand other Jews watching the first public execution in Łódź. The eight thousand weren’t there out of curiosity. They’d been ordered to the square. They hadn’t even known there was to be an execution. Papa told Mama this in private, but their door was open and so I overheard it all.
Even worse, the execution had been on the Sabbath. “To be forced to witness such an unholy thing on what so many Jews there believe to be a holy day . . .” Papa began, and then started coughing before he could get out the next sentence.
When the coughing finally subsided, he’d said, “Yes, we davened and prayed as the poor man hung there. Even those of us who weren’t especially religious. But we felt dirty, as if we—and not the Nazis—had done the killing.” Then he coughed some more, and I heard Mama’s soft murmurs as she held him.
Very few of the people Papa talked to even knew who was being executed, or why. Someone told Papa he was a printer, that his wife and nine-year-old daughter had been forced to watch as well. “Perhaps it was a rumor,” he said in a voice that contradicted his thought.
“But the execution was no rumor, it was damnable fact.”
Then he added, as if rumor and fact collided, “They are monsters.”
He meant the Nazis.
Fact indeed.
* * *
• • •
As for me, February 21 will not be the day of the first public execution in Łódź. It will forever be the Day Papa Became Ill.
10
Papa went right back out to find the rabbi, Mrs. Norenberg’s empty pill bottle in one pocket, his sucking candy wrapped in one of Mama’s two linen napkins in another. Mama had brought those napkins with her when they’d been resettled. “As a reminder of home,” Mama said, “and so the German command doesn’t have a full set to wipe their filthy mouths with.”
Though Papa had passed his last two examinations by the doctor, the fact that he would have to go to the hospital to get Mrs. Norenberg’s pills meant putting himself in great danger. But it was not something Chaim could do—talk to the doctors.
Chaim worried that Papa might have a choking fit in front of the hospital staff, and by Nasty law, they would have to hospitalize him. Another name for execution. He knew it would be his own fault—if he could talk, Papa could stay home. His stomach ached thinking about it.
The longer Papa stayed away, the more Gittel prowled around the apartment like a caged lion.
At last Mama said, “Sit down and read a book.”
“I’ve read everything we have here ten times over!” Gittel said in a tone Chaim barely recognized. But then she picked up the nearest book, and even though it was one of Sophie’s books, and in German, she struggled through it for an hour.
As for Bruno, just as Sophie had predicted, he returned about twenty minutes later, a quieter, calmer bulldog, his eyes redder than when he’d left and his cheeks also bright since he’d scrubbed them clear of tears. No one said a word about it; they pretended nothing had happened.
Meanwhile, Sophie had finished reading Rilke—or at least as much of it as she wanted to read, and came into the kitchen as well. But there was no joking, no games. The four children sat in different corners of the room. The railroad clock that had been Papa’s mother’s, which was the one good piece they’d brought from the old house, ticked loudly from the mantel as if it were the only live thing in the kitchen. Neither Papa nor Mama had wanted to sell it, especially because carrying it outside to the market or the pawnbroker would make them targets of the soldiers. Chaim felt that once again the tomb of silence was over them.
Knowing how dangerous Papa’s mission was made Mama anxious. She paced the floor in the bedroom she shared with Gittel, wall to wall, window to door, never noticing that she was doing just what she’d rebuked Gittel for a half hour earlier. When at last she tired of her pacing, she came into the kitchen, where she washed too many dishes, using up the family’s water supply. She dusted and swept, and dusted again, making the children move when she was working on their particular corner of the room.
If she wept, it must have been quietly and in the family bathroom, because Chaim never heard a thing.
When Mama asked Chaim to move so she could sweep, Chaim went over to the window overlooking the busy street, checking to see if Papa was on the way home.
Finally, Gittel joined him, but just to scold. “Anyone can see those curtains twitching from the street,” she said. “If the soldiers want to have shooting practice . . .”
She left the rest of the warning to his imagination, but it was enough. He stopped obsessively checking because Papa would most likely sneak in through the back alley anyway, especially if he was carrying pills.
* * *
• • •
Twice Chaim went down the stairs to wait near the door into the alley, but even he understood that it was too dangerous to keep opening and closing the outside door. So he plopped himself down on the floor for long minutes, listening for footsteps, for the sound of the two slats being pushed open, the dull squeak of the door. He wanted to be the first to greet Papa, see that he was safe, hear the news.
But the third time he started for their apartment door, Gittel followed him and slammed her hand against the wood.
“Don’t bring the danger in,” she said quietly.
He turned to her and tried to smile. “Play a game of durak, then?”
“Not feeling like it,” she said.
He was stunned. She’d never said that before.
* * *
• • •
In fact, Papa was gone much of the day trying to find the right medicine for Mrs. Norenberg, a purchase likely also to use up a good deal of the household food money.
When he came home at last with the pills, Chaim thought he looked
a bit too worn. The cough was twice as racking as before, almost constant, too, like a battle in his lungs.
The children had been sitting around reading, but they all put their books down to hear about Papa’s day.
“I didn’t cough in the hospital,” he told them. “Not once.”
Mama embraced him as if he’d been gone a week, and he said into her hair, “Well, maybe once, but it was just a small cough. Old Dr. Morowitz was on duty. And he’s half deaf.”
He sat down heavily at the table, his coat still on, as if he was chilled through and through, though it was mid-May and there had been a warm spell for a week.
He took the pill bottle out of his coat pocket and put it down carefully on the table. “She is to have one after breakfast and one before bedtime,” he said.
Mama nodded and quickly put together a bowl of the last bit of the day’s thin chicken soup, a small slice of the old challah, and a tiny sliver of chocolate.
Chaim was surprised there was any chocolate left. Either he’d miscounted weeks ago, or Mama had been sneakier than he thought.
She took the tray with the food and pills and disappeared into Mrs. Norenberg’s bedroom.
“Those better work fast,” Papa said. “It’s only enough for seven days.”
“And then what, Papa?” asked Gittel. But she and Chaim already knew the answer.
“And then we will make do.”
“What does make do mean?” asked Bruno in a voice that showed the first real interest outside of himself he’d had in some time.
Papa smiled slyly at him. “It means we will do anything to keep ourselves alive for another day. And to keep you alive, too, my boy.”