The Thief of Auschwitz (15 page)

No wonder there’s so much more packed into it.

Eight

The
sturmbannführer’s
apartment is on the second floor, and he’s busy when they knock. Vollmer walks home to have lunch with his children each noon, and since he hasn’t spoken with the commandant today he doesn’t know that
obersturmbannführer
Liebehenschel is lying face-down in his own villa sleeping off last night’s schnapps. Otherwise he’d have adjusted his schedule by the required fifteen minutes—not to accommodate the Jewish barber, but to remove that vulgar little pest Chaim from the premises as quickly as possible. He hates that creature, even though he would seem to be the only one around who does. He hates exposing his children to him.

Jacob and Chaim wait in the entry hall, standing at attention and dead silent, listening through the dining room door as the family finishes lunch and talks together in their muted voices. When the housekeeper swings open the door to the kitchen, they jump like rabbits. “In here, quickly,” she says, and no sooner has the kitchen door closed behind them than the dining room door creaks open onto the vacated hall and the children emerge on their way back to school. To Jacob they are nothing but voices and scuffling feet. A girl and a boy, he thinks, but he can’t be certain. By the sound of it, their mother goes with them. That leaves Vollmer waiting alone in the dining room.

Chaim leads the way once the water has come to a boil. With white linen draped over his arms and a basin of water raised up before him, he could be a participant in some holy sacrament. This moment of entry into the dining room is the first time all day that Jacob has seen him subdued, however, the first time he’s seen him subdued in the least, and there’s a sudden and palpable tension in the air. It isn’t just a matter of Vollmer’s rank. The man simply doesn’t look at the boy and the boy simply doesn’t look at the man. Jacob watches as Vollmer pushes his chair away from the table and Chaim puts down the bowl and unfolds the drape and arranges it around the
sturmbannführer’s
neck. Vollmer recoils at his touch, as if the boy has been dipped in poison.

“Begin,” he says to Jacob, and Jacob begins.

The light here is good, pouring in from large windows on two sides and reflected by a broad mirror mounted high on one wall. He doesn’t need to ask Vollmer to change position even once, which is good, since he’s not certain that he ought to be speaking to him at all. Now and again Vollmer checks himself in the mirror with a sly look not intended for Jacob to see, and it’s clear enough that he finds the work satisfactory.
It ought to be, after the butchery committed by Schuler.
Jacob catches the thought before it’s halfway formed and reminds himself not to think ill of the dead, especially the dead with whom he’s recently been so intimate. If he weren’t wearing Slazak’s uniform instead of his own, the deputy commandant would no doubt detect the stench of Schuler’s corpse on him right now.

He’s wearing one dead man’s uniform so as not to smell like another one. All things considered, he’s lucky to be alive.

Nearly finished, he steps back and slowly circles Vollmer in the chair, the comb upraised in his left hand and the scissors upraised in his right, narrowing his eyes and permitting the scissors to dart in exactly once for a final microscopic snip.
There.
Perfection and relief in one quick movement. He puts down the comb and the scissors and takes up a little whisk broom to tidy Vollmer’s neck, and that’s when he finally looks up and sees the painting.

It hangs right over the fireplace. He doesn’t know how he could have missed it, and yet he does know. In the presence of a cobra, a rabbit wouldn’t take notice of a da Vinci.

It’s Lydia. Lydia in Eidel’s attic studio in Zakopane, lit by that alpine sunlight and caught by that loving hand and preserved by both of them forever. Lydia lost and Lydia found.

Vollmer can’t possibly
know.
He can’t have any idea as to where the painting has come from or what sort of child it represents. The mountain light falling like gold upon Lydia’s hair has surely persuaded him that the image represents one of his own, an Aryan child. Damn him for his blind stupidity. Only an imbecile would be so persuaded, an idiot lacking any ability whatsoever to perceive the world before him. Why, the deputy’s hair itself has shifted color and tone and texture a million times as Jacob has circled around him during the past ten minutes, changing with the changing light from the north window and the east window and the mirror hung high on the opposite wall. It’s the simplest thing in the world, a matter of physics, a matter of geometry. Shadow and light.

Damn his pigheaded stupidity, then, but be thankful for it too, because it has saved this painting—and with it this child—from at least one kind of oblivion.

The painting is matted in alpine greens and browns and mounted in a grand gilded frame carved all over with oak leaves and acorns. Jacob can’t stop looking at it, looking at it the way a parched hiker would look at a mountain stream. Thank God, then, for the reliability of old professional habits. He sweeps the long white drape from around Vollmer’s body, and with the skill of a stage magician he vanishes it into the wooden supply box. Chaim moves in with the broom and Vollmer lifts up his feet with a cringe that suggests aversion more than accommodation. But meanwhile the deputy has noticed the failure of Jacob’s concentration, the drift of his eyes even as he packs away his tools, and he pats absently at a cowlick that has never before stayed down and turns toward him in the chair and says, “Isn’t she lovely?”

The painting. The child. Lydia.

“Without question, sir. She is.” Lovely enough to enchant a monster.

Perhaps this is why they kill the children. To keep themselves from falling in love.

Book Two
Testament

Nine

On their way back to the camp, Jacob asks the boy what he knows about the painting. How long it’s been hanging there. Where it came from.

Chaim knows everything. “Believe it or not,” he says, “it came through Canada. Which means I’ve got news for you: That kid? She’s no
shiksa.”

“Never mind that. Never mind the girl. Tell me about the painting.”

“It’s a pretty good joke on Vollmer, don’t you think?”

“Never mind the joke.”

“A Jewish kid on his wall?”

“Never mind his wall. Never mind Vollmer. Tell me about the painting.”

“What’s the difference? You some kind of artist yourself?”

“Let’s say I have an interest.”

Chaim stops and puts down the box and picks it up again and they go on. “Word is that Jankowski got his mitts on it and traded it to one of the Ukrainians for a whole pile of cigarettes and then the Ukrainian sold it to an antique dealer in town. The dealer was the one who put it in the frame. Dressed it up so when Vollmer’s wife saw it looking so nice, she just had to have it.” Chaim shakes his head. “Women.”

“Women. Right.”

“Plus even the wife could tell it wasn’t a genuine antique, so she got it for next to nothing.”

“Really?”

“Really. She practically stole it. Frame included.”

For the first time all day, Jacob laughs. “And they talk about Jews,” he says.

“Exactly,” says the boy. “And they talk about Jews.”

*

It’s just a bottle. A long tall narrow glass bottle that once held vinegar. Gretel has discovered it beneath one of the big coal stoves, glinting there in a dusty black corner, and one of these days when no one is looking she’ll take the poker or a stick of wood and risk whatever burns might be necessary in order to get her hands on it. In the meantime she’ll wait and keep her own counsel and perfect her plans.

How will she get it out of the kitchen?

In her sleeve, her own arm being so thin as to take up no room at all.

Where will she take it?

Home to the block, where she’ll hide it in the rafters above her bunk.

What will she do with it once she’s claimed it for her own?

She’ll fill it up with stories, and then she’ll bury it. She already has a spot in mind, a place she knows behind the block where water runs down from the roofline and disturbs the earth, churning up mud around the foundation and exposing loose gravel. It will be safe there, safe until the day when some historian excavates this place and finds it.

The bottle is everything she knows of hope. That and the scraps of paper and the tattered bits of gauze bandage and whatever else she can find upon which to scratch out the history of Auschwitz. She has the stub of a pencil that must have fallen from an officer’s pocket—she keeps it in the hem of her jacket by day and jammed into a crack in the wall of her bunk by night—an irreplaceable stub that was the catalyst of her campaign. When she came upon the single bitter inch of it scuffed down hard between the floorboards, it was like discovering a passageway to a new continent. A whole world bloomed before her, a world in which someone would someday know what she and the rest have endured here. She marks time not from the date of her birth or from the date of her arrival at the camp, but from that transformational morning.

The bottle under the stove seems to have a paper label on it, the idea of which thrills her. She’ll peel it off and write carefully around the printing and then turn it over and write on the back, for she must let nothing go to waste. Any inch left unfilled is a story untold, a cry unheard. Search as she might she can never find scraps to write on as quickly as the testimony piles up, but she does her best. The tip of the pencil is blunt, and she makes her letters as tiny and precise as she can.

Eidel finds her squinting down at such a project one day, a charred curl of cigarette paper pressed down flat on the chopping block and a look of utter concentration on her face. Eidel clears her throat and Gretel jumps. She’s prepared to swallow the evidence, pencil and all.

“Drawing,” asks Eidel, “or writing?”

“Writing.” Gretel smiles and rolls the paper up around the pencil. “Just getting some things down,” she says, tucking everything into a hole in the hem of her jacket.

“I understand,” says Eidel. “I was a painter, once upon a time. I was forever getting things down.”

Gretel nods, picking up a rag with one hand and worrying the pencil deeper with the other.

“It seemed so important when I was doing it,” Eidel says, “but now I don’t know. The paintings are all gone, everything’s gone, so maybe it was just wasted time. Maybe I should have been doing something else instead. Living instead of looking.”

“I’ll get that down too,” says Gretel. “If you want me to. If there’s room. There’s already so much.”

“What do you mean?” She moves toward the oven with a rag in her hand and opens the door and checks on the bread.

“I’ll write down how you lost your paintings.” Gretel moves closer to the oven’s radiant heat and puts a finger to her lips. “I’m writing down everything that happens here, so people will know.” She goes on to tell Eidel about the vinegar bottle she’s discovered beneath the stove, and about her plan for filling it up with words and burying it as evidence. A message set out upon the sea of time.

She says that she has scraps hidden away in every corner of the camp. She’s jammed them under clapboards and pushed them into gaps in masonry. She’s stuck them beneath washtubs with a paste made of water and mud and rolled them tight enough to slide into the little tunnels eaten into her bunk by worms. She’s spread them around everywhere, her own furtive infestation of truths too precious to be concentrated in one place until now. It’s entirely possible that she has enough scraps to fill the vinegar bottle already, she won’t know until she tries, but if that’s so then she’ll cap it with a plug of wood or stone and bury it where it will come to light one day, and then she’ll keep her eye out for another bottle. Perhaps Eidel will help.

“On the other hand,” Eidel says, “you could trade that bottle for something better. Food. Cigarettes if you must. A favor of some kind.” For bottles are notoriously hard to come by. They can contain anything, for purposes ranging from safekeeping to transport. Even when broken they can be put to use. Perhaps especially when broken. So it seems a shame to bury one. Eidel comes to her feet and closes the oven door and takes her by the arm. “You’re so
thin.”

Gretel pulls free, her mind on other things. “I could never be that selfish.”

“It’s not selfishness. It’s self-preservation.”

“For what? You and I won’t live to see the end of this place. The bottle will be all that’s left of us.”