Death in Twilight (14 page)

Aaron took a small sack of the remaining goods for his own, intending to ingratiate himself with Berson’s rabbi by way of an offering. If he walked quickly, he would arrive just after morning prayers.

Chapter 10

B
erson’s shul was located on a street without a synagogue. Instead, it was lined with stables and funeral parlors. The mix was no coincidence. The primary use of horse-drawn carts in the Jewish district was to haul away bodies.

It was later than Aaron had hoped it would be when he arrived. The walk had taken longer than he’d anticipated, and the streets had filled early with hungry people hoping to find something they could afford from the various vendors. The selection, as ever, was poor, with bread made partly from talc and sawdust to make up for a shortage of flour.

Aaron had noticed a stand or two where his own runners had already made their deliveries. He received a wink from several of the proprietors and returned a smile. In more than one case, he was shocked to see how much the prices for his goods had been marked up. But then, a carrot that showed hardly any sign of rot was a true rarity in the ghetto.

Starvation and malnutrition in Miasto weren’t caused solely by lack of quantity. Just as serious was the quality of the bread and produce. The Judenrat was responsible for using money collected in taxes to buy in supplies. They placed orders with both Polish and German contractors and, often enough, the food would arrive.

The problem was that the food delivered was made from the scraps of the German empire: turnips that were unripe or overripe, misshapen or too small, flour that wasn’t entirely flour. Worse, entire shipments were often spoiled or contaminated in some other way.

The challenge to the ghetto’s cooks, stomachs and doctors was considerable. Many people ended up on the street where Aaron now found himself because of contamination and spoilage.

Sheinin & Sons was the biggest of the ghetto’s funeral homes. Aaron could see that business was good. Hearses and carts were queued up and a funeral procession was just beginning its journey to the large cemetery on the border of the ghetto.

The cemetery was no longer just a place for the dead, but, as the only open space now permitted to the citizens of the sealed district, it was also used as a park. Unfortunately, its capacity was limited and the supply of newly dead did not seem to be. It would not be long before bodies would need to be piled on top of each other, in addition to the mass graves that had already been dug for those who died in total anonymity.

Still, the rituals were carried out with care for those who could afford them. The group in front of Aaron put on a fair show of mourning. Both men and women wore respectable black, the men’s lapels were torn to demonstrate their grief, the women’s heads covered. The family was not, perhaps, overly religious, as none of the men had side locks and the women wore their own hair. Still, it was a distinctly Jewish affair in that the men, women and children were humiliated by wearing the armbands the Nazis had forced on them even as they buried their loved one.

An old woman — perhaps now a widow — was at the center of the procession. She was supported by those around her, including a middle-aged man who Aaron decided was her son. The woman herself appeared to have crumpled under the weight of her grief. She would be joining her husband soon, Aaron thought to himself.

A beautifully appointed hearse led the procession. The wagon was constructed largely of engraved glass with the Star of David prominently etched into it, along with a few words of Hebrew prayer. The rest of the wagon was black, of course, the casket inside a simple pine box — the most elaborate coffin allowed under Jewish law. Drawing the hearse was a horse in shockingly good condition. Certainly not fat, but neither were its ribs prominent. It was brown with a white star on its forehead, and clearly somebody loved it very much.

Aaron was also fairly certain it would be a good advertisement for business. Everyone who saw it would remember.

After the funeral had passed him by, Aaron checked the number on the mortuary’s building. It wasn’t the one he was looking for. Next-door was the stable where the still-vigorous horse probably spent its nights. From what Aaron could tell, they must have been lonely ones. There was hardly a whiff of manure on the air as he walked past.

He had to peer carefully at every structure on the street. None of their numbers were prominently displayed. When he reached under his coat for a cigarette, he was surprised to find sweat under his arms. The wind had been defanged, swirling well above zero degrees centigrade. Even the gray of the sky was a lighter shade — brighter than the gray of German uniforms. It was weather that boded better times soon to come. Aaron willed himself to believe it, but failed.

Finishing his cigarette, he reached into the bag he was carrying and tore himself off a crust of bread. Young eyes caught the motion and followed hand to mouth. Faster than thought, short legs sprang to action, propelling a girl toward the sack Aaron carried at great speed. As she ran past she snatched it from his lightly clenched hand.

His reflexes were good, though. One of his arms shot out and grabbed the girl before she had a chance to get out of reach, catching her by the collar of her coat. She tried to shrug it off but, luckily for Aaron, it was buttoned, holding her up just long enough for him to wrap an arm around her middle.

She struggled for another minute, quickly exhausting herself. He looked down at her and saw that she couldn’t have been much more than eight years old. Her hair was dirty, stringy, even matted in places. The eyes in her smudged face stood out, piercing green. To look at her, it would have been impossible to judge her either Aryan or Jew. And yet here she was on the Jewish side of the wall.

Aaron found himself somewhere between fury at the little thief and pity for the little girl. As his adrenalin cooled, the pity won out. He reached into the bag and pulled out what remained of the small loaf of bread.

“This what you wanted?”

She didn’t speak. She simply looked numb, defeated. She didn’t try to move, she didn’t reach for the bread. She waited to be punished.

“You have parents? Brothers or sisters?”

No answer except the beginning of tears.

Aaron was not in a position to help every little girl in the ghetto. The Judenrat itself was in no position to do so. There was simply not enough of anything and the need was beyond knowing.

But that was the larger view and the girl in his arms was very small.

His firm grip turned into something else. Tears reached his eyes. It was too much. It was all too much. Perhaps his soft reaction was because of his lack of sleep or the hunger that gnawed at him despite his lavish breakfast. Maybe it was the funeral procession, which trailed behind it the reminder that death had once been treated with respect. Whatever it was, all he could think of was how close this little one was to her own funeral.

And why?

No why.

He knew the outcome of the girl’s struggle on the streets was inevitable. But he could delay it a little.

He put the child down. She did not move.

He took the sack and put it in her hands, deciding to keep the loaf of bread he had already pulled out. She sagged a bit with the weight.

Finally, her eyes met his and she said one word.

“Thanks.”

She ran.

Feeling both infinitely better and worse, Aaron continued looking for his address. He didn’t bother to see where the girl went. His solace was another cigarette pulled from his jacket and sucked down in just a few breaths.

He found the place he was looking for in just another minute. Rather than one of the funeral homes, it was a simple stable. The sign above a wide doorway — clearly intended for wagons to pass through — read “Hershkowitz & Sons.” Horses harnessed to a cart were painted to the right of the owner’s name. The paint was fading but the image was still clear, with touches of bright color still to be seen in the team’s tack. It had no air of a religious place, any hints of holiness cleverly hidden from the casual eye.

Up close, Aaron finally found what he was looking for. Synagogues were traditionally proudly marked, inscriptions and holy symbols welcoming in the congregation. But this was a sign for a different time, pride giving way to discretion.

On a human-sized door to the right of the larger one, Aaron saw shallow carving. The words were the same ones he had seen on Berson’s flyers; the Shema, the declaration of God’s existence and singularity in the universe He had created. A statement of belief and words of courage.

There was no one outside the building and both doors were closed tight. Aaron approached slowly, giving anyone behind the windows a chance to see him and decide that he was neither German nor an obvious threat. He knocked on the smaller door and waited. A minute, two. No sound from inside. He replaced his knock with a bang and waited again. One minute, two. He saw no one come to the window, he heard no sound from inside.

Should he stay? Even with the relative warmth, the sweat under his arms was beginning to cool uncomfortably. Aaron stamped his feet and thought again. If he was stymied here, what should his next step be? There was no time to question every member of the Jewish police. Germans that Berson might have encountered on the night of his death — who might have caused his death — were unavailable for questioning. Perhaps he could return to the building where Berson had lived and hope to find additional roommates with a grudge. Or maybe he should canvass the neighborhood where the body was found.

After another half hour, Aaron felt he couldn’t wait any longer.

As he turned to leave, he caught the sound of a cane on cobblestones. Using it was an older man with a white beard and every sign of deep religious faith in the mode of the small towns and villages of the Polish countryside. Of course, since borders were known to be fluid in this part of Europe, he could also have been from the Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Estonia or Latvia.

The rabbi — he could be no one else — wore a black hat made of beaver fur and the silver hair beneath it shone. Payos hung over the stems of the glasses perched on his nose. So perfectly did the glasses reflect an air of study, they seemed almost an affectation. He peered over them to examine Aaron.

“No service this morning, rabbi?” Aaron asked.

The man didn’t bother to deny was what he was.

“I am sorry to say that you missed it. We begin early, as the sun rises,” the rabbi replied. “I’m on my way back from breakfast with my wife.”

The voice matched the man in every regard. It was rich, it was full, it was filled with Yiddish, even as the words were Polish. It reflected a lifetime of deep thought.

“You are certainly welcome to join us tomorrow morning, if you wish,” the rabbi said, a little more warmly. “We would be very pleased if you did.”

“Actually, rabbi, today I’m just as happy to find you alone,” Aaron said. “I’d like to talk to you about a man in your congregation.”

“And who is that?”

“Lev Berson,” Aaron said, his voice giving nothing away.

There was less than a moment’s hesitation. If Aaron hadn’t been looking for it, he was unlikely to have noticed anything amiss. As it was, it seemed to the former gendarme as if the rabbi considered claiming not to know Berson at all.

Instead, the old man shuddered as if a cold wind had struck him, though the day was perfectly calm.

“Hmmm. Well, there’s no reason to talk out here, in the cold.” the rabbi said. “Come. I think I can manage a cup of tea. At least we can agree to call it that, yes?”

Now he smiled and felt in his coat pocket for a key. Finding it, he inserted it into the lock, turned and pushed on the door with a shoulder. Grudgingly, and only under a persistent assault, the door yielded.

The barn was cold and empty, some straw was scattered about on the floor and in the vacant stalls. A few chairs filled the center of the space in a horseshoe pattern — an ironic touch, Aaron thought, since there obviously hadn’t been horses here for some time. A table was set up at the open end, and a few books lay on it. Aaron and rabbi the passed through the room quickly, with little time for Aaron to see that the books were from the Talmud, the accumulated wisdom of the Jewish people, compiled over the course of more than a thousand years.

The air that greeted the two men in the rabbi’s office was considerably warmer than any Aaron had felt for a while, even in the Judenrat’s offices. A coal stove had been left burning while the rabbi enjoyed his morning meal. Aaron wondered at the extravagance.

The rabbi took a seat behind an ornate desk, motioning Aaron to a simple chair in front of it. The younger man found himself looking up at the older one, though they had been equally tall when standing. The rabbi rooted in his desk for a minute, giving Aaron a chance to take in his surroundings beyond the remarkable coal stove.

Shelves lined three walls. They were roughly cut and assembled, with every inch taken up by leather-bound volumes — some of obvious antiquity. The books behind Aaron were simply stacked, apparently not deserving shelves of their own. The spines identified the contents sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Yiddish.

In one case, Aaron suspected the words might have been in English, but he wasn’t sure he would know. Languages had never been his strong suit. He spoke only four, and just Polish and Yiddish with fluency. His Hebrew belonged to a child of thirteen, mainly because after his bar mitzvah he had no interest in studying it further. His scraps of German came seemingly out of the air and from the vocabulary that overlapped with Yiddish.

The rabbi had finally found what he wanted, which turned out to be a leather notebook and a fountain pen. He opened up the little book and scribbled something down before lifting his eyes to Aaron, who wondered idly if the stove had been left burning simply to keep the ink liquid.

The two looked at each other for several minutes without speaking. Aaron was attempting to use the old police trick of silence in the hope that the rabbi would feel compelled to fill the void and perhaps give something away.