The Thief of Auschwitz (11 page)

“You should know better.”

“I
do
know better. I didn’t—”

Jankowski tells Wasserman to bring him the coin. Wasserman does, naked on his knees in the naked dirt, lifting up the gold piece like an offering. The capo takes it and heaves it with all of his strength toward Jacob, who actually makes the catch. Poor Jacob, making himself Jankowski’s accomplice in the process.

The capo steps away from the kneeling man. It’s in the hands of the guards now. He can’t take responsibility for how they might judge so terrible and daring a crime against the Reich. The one with the raised machine gun, the one who laughed, fires a single short burst. There’s something offhand about it, and when it’s over, perhaps half a second after it began, he lights a cigarette.

Jankowski hopes aloud that whoever is sent to replace Wasserman will be an improvement. Regardless, the new man has certainly learned how things go.

Wasserman’s clothing goes straight to the sorting tables. His boots as well. And within moments, one stealthy prisoner or another has pocketed those two precious twists of wire.

Max

Andy had Frolic Weymouth’s roomy old place down on the Brandywine River, attic and barn and all, but what do I have? Where would I hide anything that I wanted to keep a secret? Space is precious in the city, and I’ve been a creature of the city ever since I came to America.

People go around singing
O beautiful, for spacious skies
and that’s fine for them, but I say to hell with spacious skies. Spacious skies give me the willies.

It’s true enough that in the city you never know what’s lurking around the next corner, but in the wide open spaces you just never
know,
period. Anything could happen. In the city you’ve got a fair chance, but out in the open you could get struck by lightning or the earth could open right up or you could just get lost without one single thing to help you tell one cornfield from another.

Don’t call it paranoia, either. It’s not paranoia. It’s an acquired response. It’s one more souvenir I picked up at Auschwitz. Try working in the sun and the wind for a year or two, with Ukrainians pointing machine guns at you the whole time—or try lining up in a big open square every day for something that’s ostensibly roll call but that’s really a kind of random selection process for who’s going to get a bullet in his brain this morning—and you’ll decide that a blind alley with a broken streetlamp is a pretty good alternative to the great outdoors. Try watching the clouds race overhead when you can’t go anywhere yourself. Try watching the seasons change.

You’ll end up like me.

Anyhow, there’s a young girl working on the retrospective, an intern or an assistant or whatever who comes up from Washington and camps out in a hotel somewhere for a week at a time just to keep tabs on me, and she keeps asking if I’ve got any pieces I haven’t shown. I keep saying where in hell would I keep them. I’m nice enough about it. At least I hope I am. She’s just a girl, after all, just a child, and she keeps asking the same way a child would keep asking. As if there’s a chance that I might have a cookie jar hidden on a high shelf somewhere.

You know what would make me blow my top? If she asked in the context of Helga. If she said, “Andrew Wyeth came up with those Helga paintings when he was 70 years old, you know, so I was wondering—”

She’d
never
see what I’ve got in the locker. Not after a question like that. Nobody would ever see it.

Six

To know that her husband and son are alive changes things, but not entirely for the better. Such is the way of the camp. Like the river of the world it bears a certain fixed amount of everything there is—good and evil, love and hate, life and death—in proportions that are cruel but constant. Any gain here requires a loss there. The slightest disturbance ripples through everything.

Where once she worked at murdering time, at creating a perpetual present, at eradicating her memories and destroying her dreams, she is unmoored now. She can think of nothing but Jacob and Max. She certainly can’t empty her mind entirely. There’s no more counting bowls of soup and mechanically stirring the pot and sinking the ladle halfway regardless of the pleas of the women in the line. Each prisoner’s woe speaks to her, and she would help every one of them if she could, for every one of them is an incarnation of her husband or her son.

Jacob and Max are here but not here, and the frustration of their proximity brings her back to Saturdays in the synagogue in Zakopane, sitting with Lydia in the balcony, trying to concentrate on her prayers but unable to—listening instead for the sound of their voices rising above the rest.

She sees the two of them everywhere. She sees Jacob back when they first met, stealing glances at her through the window of his father’s barber shop in the fading alpine twilight; she sees Max charging through her house and her heart like some unstoppable force, the duplicate of his father in so many ways; she sees the two of them standing side by side in the line alongside the camp train station.

And in the midst of it all she sees Lydia. For such is the way of the camp too, with its precarious balance of life and death, and love and hate, and good and evil. If it should permit a heart to rise, it will just as surely strike it down.

*

“Canada is just like everywhere else.”

Jacob has given Max half of his bread and a little bit of the gristly boiled beef that the cooks slid onto his plate. They sit side by side against the foundation of the block, on the shady side where the masonry is cooler against their backs. The day has been hot and their shirts and trousers are soaked through and this is the only pleasure to be had. This and companionship.

“Did you get any food there?” says Max, chewing and chewing on that tough scrap of beef.

“No,” says his father. “There’s food around, but they keep a tight rein on things. I don’t think Schuler ever really got much from Canada.”

Max reaches into his mouth and takes out the gray knot he’s been working on. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought,” says his father, holding up a hand. “I didn’t get anything extra, but on the other hand I haven’t worked as hard as you. I’m sure of that.”

Max sits holding the meat between two fingers and a thumb, the knob of it like another filthy appendage and just as appetizing. “Papa—”

“Go on. You’re a growing boy.” He takes what remains of his own bread and scrapes the plate with it, soaking up the little bit of watery runoff that arrived with the beef. “Eat up,” he says.

Max does.

“People die in Canada just like everywhere else. It’s no paradise in that department.” He tells Max about Wasserman and the gold piece. Wasserman and Jankowski and the gold piece and the machine gun.

“So there’s really gold? There’s really gold?”

Youth. It hasn’t been wrung out of him yet.

“This fellow Wasserman,” says Jacob, shaking his head, ignoring the question. “He was a weakling. A weakling even here among us weaklings. I’d thought that such a man could get by in Canada. Look at Schuler. He may not be as pathetic a creature as Wasserman was, but he’s older by fifteen years. Maybe twenty.”

“Schuler’s dead.”

“Dead?” Jacob is licking the damp spots on his plate, but he leaves off. It’s only been one day that he’s had the old man’s duties. “Dead?”

“He committed suicide.”

“How? Where?”

“At the excavation.” Max lowers his voice to a whisper, and his father leans in. “Slazak didn’t like the way he was digging. Schuler talked back, told him that his work was always good enough for the capo in Canada. Said that maybe Slazak should take a lesson from him instead of complaining.” Max shakes his head and swallows. “We buried him where he fell. Those nice shoes and everything.”

Perhaps the youth has been wrung out of him after all.

*

Zofia is standing outside the kitchen door, fending off the two
boulevardiers
of the delivery commando. One of them, not the junkman of Witnica but his partner, formerly a knife-sharpener and mender of pots from a village in the Carpathians, has brought her a couple of cigarettes. “Free of charge,” he says, “no obligation on your part whatsoever.” He smiles and shows teeth that he could have sharpened in an earlier life. Tilted incisors and long canines and molars like tombstones. Certain gaps where teeth have rotted and fallen out, and certain other gaps where gold teeth have been removed with a pair of pliers. He has a cigarette of his own jutting through one of those holes, just as if he’d intended it for that purpose.

Three cigarettes in total, then, one between his lips and two more peeking from his pocket, the Holy Trinity incarnate in pilfered tobacco. Three cigarettes, a treasure as great as Blackbeard’s, possessed by a man—this being a coal delivery day—whose skin and clothing and facial stubble are as black as that very name. Call him Blackbeard, then. Blackbeard the sharpener of knives and mender of pots.

Zofia doesn’t fancy Blackbeard the way she fancies the junkman, but he’ll do. He has the cigarettes, after all. That helps. It more than helps. It’s everything. The junkman has never offered her anything but a smile and a flattering remark, and she knows the value of those.

“You must want
something
in exchange,” she says, lifting up a coy hand for her smile to hide behind. The capo, great fat Rolak, is busy somewhere else, probably in one of the storerooms either helping herself to whatever delicacies she has hidden there or enjoying a carrot or a stalk of celery that ought by rights to be going to the prisoners.

Blackbeard takes out his cigarette and purses his lips. “Have you any ideas?” he says.

“Nothing that you haven’t thought of, I’m sure,” says Zofia.

He shrugs. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

“No,” she says.

“Something conventional then,” he says. “One of the old standbys.” As much as he hates putting off the inevitable, he’s well accustomed to bargaining for everything, both here in the camp and in his prior life.
Always let the customer suggest a price,
is his belief,
because you never know what value he might place on something.

Zofia reaches out and takes one of the cigarettes from his breast pocket. It’s probably the most daring thing that this poor timid creature has ever done in all her life, a physical act of flirtation, even if it’s only a carrying-forward of something already begun by Blackbeard himself. The cigarette is gray and bent and precious. “I’ll take this one as a down payment,” she says.

“A down payment on what?”

But Zofia has vanished, blushing furiously, tearing up the two or three steps into the kitchen and bending over the stove to transfer fire from a stick of kindling to the end of the cigarette. She can hardly breathe and it isn’t the smoke or the exertion of running. Eidel looks over from the chopping block and sighs. “A down payment?” she says.

Zofia looks up. Her face is red and wreathed in smoke, and with laughter bursting from her she staggers to the chopping block to take up her own knife again. Eidel laughs too. Laughing is something that neither of them has done in a very long time. It seems as if they’ve never laughed before, and together they keep it up for a while, perhaps the better part of a minute, with Blackbeard down in the yard craning his neck and the junkman climbing back onto the wagon and the capo appearing out of nowhere. She trundles down the hallway from the storerooms like a battleship, wiping her mouth on her apron. She’s still chewing something and when she begins to speak tiny bits of it explode from her lips like shrapnel.

Only the shame at being caught with her mouth full contains her ferocity. It’s a close call, but Eidel and Zofia are both definitely working and the sack of rutabagas on the table alongside the chopping block is surely diminished so she clamps her mouth shut and shakes a finger at them and lets their laughter pass this time. She lets Zofia’s cigarette pass as well, choosing not to ask how she came to be in possession of it. Those men in the delivery commando, no doubt. She wonders what she has given up for it but she thinks she knows. It’s unforgivable, the way these people live.

*

Late Thursday, Jacob is given a new suit of clothes intended to make him more presentable for the senior SS officers he’ll be visiting. His old uniform is taken away and in its place he’s issued a relatively clean jacket and trousers made of a lighter weight fabric, closer to new than the uniform he’s been wearing and showing signs of actually having been pressed at some point during their lifetime. Certain men in his block are envious. Certain men would be envious of anything, of any change, of any attention that doesn’t result in injury or death. “Imagine,” he tells Max, “coveting such a ridiculous thing—when the truth is that my old uniform was heavier and I’ll miss it when the winter comes.”