The Devil's Arithmetic (11 page)

Hannah started to answer but Gitl pulled her down to the bench. “She is right, child. What is here is bad enough. Let us live moment by moment. There is no
harm in dreaming about a shower. God knows we could all use one.”

Hannah was furious. They
had
to listen. She would have to make them. What use was her special foreknowledge if no one would listen? Maybe they thought her strange or sick or even crazy, but she was none of that. She was from the future, somehow. She could summon up those memories by trying really hard. She knew she could help them all if only they would let her. Then she looked up. The women and the other girls were shyly, painfully, slowly taking off their clothes. Hannah thought they looked so vulnerable, so helpless. Yet they had a kind of innocence about them and a kind of hope. All they were looking forward to was the shower. Biting her lower lip, she thought what her knowledge of the ovens, of the brutal guards, of names like Auschwitz and Dachau could really do for them here, naked and weaponless, except to take away that moment by moment of hope. Maybe Gitl was right.
We are where we are
. She would not add more to their misery. She bent over and untied her shoes.

They waited nearly twenty minutes in the cold room and the silence was frightening. Beside Hannah, Gitl began to sing a quiet song about dreaming. “Dreaming is better, dreaming is brighter,” she sang. Esther, Yente, and Shifre joined in.

Hannah looked around the room, then leaned over and whispered to Esther. “Where is Rachel?”

Esther kept on singing, but tears ran down her cheeks.

“Dreaming is brighter.”

“Where is she?” Hannah insisted, though her question seemed to lack authority, with both of them sitting naked, goosebumps scattered over their arms and thighs.

Esther stopped singing all at once and looked down at her bare legs. At last she spoke. “Rachel always had trouble breathing in the spring.”

Hannah remembered the peculiar breathy hesitations Rachel had made when she spoke.

“Did she have . . . trouble breathing . . . in the boxcar?” Hannah asked. She began to shake even before Esther's answer, though she wasn't sure why. “Is she . . . is she . . . dead?”

“Dreams are better,” Esther sang, her voice breaking on a high note.

Hannah opened her mouth and found herself sucking in air in great gulps. She couldn't stop. After about seven big breaths, she said, to no one in particular, “I should have told her she was my best friend. I should have said yes. I . . .”

Suddenly the doors were flung open and two soldiers marched in, their boots loud on the wooden floor.

“Achtung!
” one shouted, a young man with a wandering left eye.

The girls screamed, turning their backs, and the younger women tried to cover themselves with their hands. Fayge bent over at the waist and her long black hair was like a blanket over her. The older women didn't move.

“Into the showers,” the soldier with the bad eye called. “And then you visit the barber.”

Hannah stood slowly, thinking:
I will be brave. I am the only one who knows about the ovens, but I will be brave. I will not take away their hope, which is all they have. I will not tell them that the Nazis often lied and said people were going to take showers when they took them to be killed
. Her legs were weak. She felt she could not make one foot go in front of the other. She was glad that Gitl's hand was at her elbow the entire time.

The showers were ice cold, but Hannah was so relieved it was water—and not the gas she'd expected—that she stood under the sprinklers a long time. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, drinking in the cold drops until her belly was full.

Suddenly the showers were turned off.

“Schnell, schnell!”
the soldiers shouted, ushering them back, without towels, into the cold room.

Head down, hands over her breasts, Hannah walked through the line of soldiers, remembering how childish she'd thought the blue dress and longing for it.

Their clothes were gone. With nothing to dry themselves and no clothes to put on, they waited, shivering, in the bare room. The children began to make small, whimpering sounds and Hannah had to stop herself from joining in.

Just then the door from the outside opened and a soldier escorted a short, dark man into the room.

“Here is the barber,” the soldier said. “You will make a line for him and he will do his job. There will be no noise. Remember—no hair, no lice.”

Lice?
Hannah thought.
We have no lice
.

The barber was clearly a prisoner. His own head was shaved, and with the bones so prominent on his face, he looked to be all forehead and nose. He cut their hair without any discernible skill, often pulling great clumps out with the blunt scissors. Shifre's two pale braids came off whole, landing with a soft
thud-thud
on the floor. She touched one with a bare foot, as if the plait were some sort of unknown animal. Fayge's curls, tight from the shower, scattered across the floor like patterns in a rug. Little Tzipporah screamed in terror at her turn until a woman held her tightly.

When the man came to Hannah, she bit her lip so as not to cry and kept her eyes closed the entire time. She concentrated on what was to happen next—after the showers and the hair-cutting, remembering from the lessons in Holocaust history in school. But as the scissors
snip-snapped
through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past.
I cannot remember
, she whispered to herself.
I cannot remember
. She'd been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason. Opening her eyes, she stared at the floor. Clots of wet hair lay all about: dark hair, light hair, short hair, long hair, and two pale braids.
Gone, all gone
, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

She looked up and couldn't recognize anyone in the room. Without their hair, all the women looked the same.

“Gitl,” she cried out, speaking the one name she
recalled. “Gitl, where are you?” Her voice cracked and, without meaning to, she began to sob almost soundlessly.

Someone's arms went around her and the touch of skin on skin made her shiver. Everything felt strange, alien, as if she were on another planet, as if she were on the moon.

“Gitl?” she whispered to the stranger with the shaved head who was holding her.

“Yes, child,” Gitl answered. “But promise me you will cry no more before these monsters. We will
never
cry again.”

“Never,” Hannah agreed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and feeling stronger because of the promise. “Never.”

THEY SAT ON THE BENCHES NAKED AND COLD FOR A LONG
time while the barber worked on each in turn. Hannah glanced around cautiously. With their hair gone, they all looked like little old men. She wondered what she looked like herself, resisting the urge to put her hand up to her head again. She would not think about it. Thinking was dangerous. In this place she would not think, only do.

After a while, time seemed to lose its reality. Only the
snick-snack
of the scissors and the occasional cry of the barber's victims marked the minutes. There was a dreamlike feeling in the room as if, Hannah thought, anything might happen next.

The woman in the blue dress entered the far door and stood for a long moment examining them all with a sour face. Hannah happened to be facing the door when she entered and, without meaning to, locked eyes with her. It was the woman who looked away first,
calling out, “
Schnell!
Into the next room. You must have clothes.” She turned abruptly, signaling with her hand. For the first time Hannah noticed that she had only three fingers on her right hand.

I wonder how she lost those fingers
, Hannah thought.
Was she born that way?
Then remembered she was not going to think. She rose with the others and shuffled out of the room after them.

For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to feel hungry. But when she began to wonder about when they might be fed, the still, small voice reminded her,
Don't think, do.
She reached out and found the hand of one of the children. Silently she squeezed the child's hand for comfort.

The room they were herded into was a small, low-ceilinged place with a single window high up under the eaves. It reminded Hannah of an attic somewhere, she couldn't remember where. An unadorned light bulb dangled down over several long wooden tables piled high with rags.

“Shmattes!”
whispered a woman behind Hannah in a hoarse voice.

“Choose!” bellowed the three-fingered woman in blue.
“Schnell!”

Hannah took her turn at one of the tables and started to paw through the clothes. They were ragged and worn and smelled peculiar, with a lingering, dank odor, part old sweat and part something else Hannah did not even want to guess at. She hesitated.

“Choose, Jews. You cannot be fancy now.”

Don't think. Do.
Hannah put her hand onto the pile
and came up with a dark gray dress with a dirty white collar and cuffs. There was a ragged rip along the hem and deep perspiration stains under the arms. Looking around, she saw that the other women were already slipping into whatever they had chosen. She raised the gray dress over her head and pulled it down. The material was silky and a bit stiff where it was stained. Buttoning the three buttons in front, she remembered suddenly how she had thought the dark blue dress Gitl had given her ugly, how she'd called it a rag. Even that small return of memory was a comfort. She'd called the dress a rag; she hadn't known anything about wearing rags then. Her arms strained the sleeves of the gray dress.

“Help the children,” someone near her whispered. It sounded like Gitl.

Hannah glanced down at the naked child by her side. Was it Tzipporah? The poor little thing had her thumb in her mouth. Her eyelids were a bruised bluish color and she swayed where she stood. Hannah rummaged quickly through the pile of clothes and found a blouse and jumper that looked as if they might fit. The child made no move to help, and Hannah had to dress her as if she were a doll, pushing her arms into the sleeves of the blouse as gently as she could.