The Thief of Auschwitz (17 page)

As I believe I’ve already said, spacious skies give me the willies. The critics have never known exactly what to make of that. It would be politically incorrect to blame it on my being an East Coast Jew, a New Yorker, a city boy. It would be philosophically taboo to blame it on my history in the camp. Heaven forbid. People act as if you make everything up out of whole cloth, as if you could possibly help the way you’re built and the things you’ve gone through and the way your work comes out. As if you could choose to overrule your own nature and experience.

They’re wrong. I’ve tried.

You can’t paint someone else’s paintings. You can only paint your own, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Does this mean I’ve been too hard on Andy, after all? Andy and his fields and his farmhouses? Andy and his beloved teutonic Helga? I don’t suppose he could help himself any more than I can.

Calder, though. There’s no excusing Calder. Never mind what I said about airports. His kind of nonsense belongs underneath a circus tent.

Ten

They never really see Vollmer’s children. Not in the apartment, at least. There is one occasion when they spot them going back to school in the company of their mother, hurrying toward them down the sidewalk and crossing over at the last minute even though the school is on this side. According to Chaim it is, anyway, and he knows everything.

Aside from that one moment, the boy and the girl are just voices through a closed door, footsteps on hardwood. The day when they finally do get a chance to see the two of them is cold, bitter and blowing with the windy change of the seasons, and the children are too bundled up to be entirely visible. Jacob and Chaim shiver in their thin burlap, thinking of how they’ll want to race between buildings when the winter comes, too distracted to look closely.

“There they go,” says Chaim, and they’re gone. Jacob shoots a look across the street, over his shoulder, but even looking is dangerous. That policeman on the corner has been keeping an eye on them ever since the day they paused with the apple. They can see he’s waiting for them to make a single misstep. Just dying for his chance.

“They could have been anybody,” says Jacob. “I didn’t see.”

Chaim sighs. “You didn’t miss much,” he says. “They’re a couple of little piglets. Exactly as you’d imagine.”

Jacob nods and hugs himself and they walk on.

The
sturmbannführer
wants to talk about the little piglets, though. With Chaim sequestered in his usual corner, he begins by rhapsodizing over the painting of Lydia as he has done so many times before. A person might think that Jacob would be accustomed to this by now, accustomed not just to seeing the painting each week but to hearing it analyzed in painstaking detail, but such a person could never have been a father. He tries not to listen as Vollmer keeps on about the angle of the light, the curve of the child’s neck, the golden gleam of her hair. Enchanted as he may be he’s no appreciator of art, since for the most part his response is not to the painting before him but to the girl it depicts, not to the rendering but to the flesh. He speaks as if she’s right there before him. He goes on to say that even though the painting brings unspeakable joy to his narrow life in this dreary little town, there is one thing about it that troubles him.

Oh, no.
Jacob guesses that someone’s told him the child in the painting is a Jew.

But that isn’t it it. “Each time I study her,” Vollmer says, referring to the painting by referring to the girl, “I wish that I could find a way to pair her with a similar painting of my own children. Perhaps the whole family. A formal portrait.”

Jacob nods.

“The question is, where would I find an artist even half as accomplished as this one?”

In the corner, Chaim clears his throat.

“There’s a fellow in town who does landscapes. Mountains and trees and that sort of thing. The occasional still life, I believe. A bowl of apples. A round of cheese.”

Jacob chews his lip.

“But my children are not apples,” says Vollmer. “They are not cheese.”

Jacob sighs in a kind of abashed agreement.

“I can see you’ve learned nothing whatsoever about painting,” says Vollmer, “despite all I’ve tried to teach you.” He shifts in his chair, causing Jacob to recalibrate. “But whether you can understand or not, I simply cannot put my children in the hands of a landscape artist.”

Jacob shrugs. Chaim clears his throat again. And nothing more gets said on the subject, not today. But on their way back to the camp, Chaim asks Jacob if he’s lost his mind.

“No” he says. “No, I haven’t.”

“That was your big opportunity.”

“So you say.”

“So I
know.”

“You’re the expert in such things.”

“I am. Vollmer likes you.”

Jacob laughs. It makes quite a sight: a shaven Jew in striped burlap, laughing on an Auschwitz streetcorner.
“Vollmer likes me,”
he says, shaking his head.

“He does. And this is your chance to make him like you even more. To earn some favors for both yourself and your wife.”

“Never. I could never send Eidel to that apartment. If she saw the painting, she would die on the spot.”

“You
didn’t.”

“I nearly did, the first time.” He looks down at Chaim, indignant. “And what do you know? I very nearly die each time I set foot in that room.”

“But that’s in a manner of speaking.”

“She would die, period. It would kill her.”

“Maybe she’s tougher than you think.”

“She’s an artist.”

“A person can be tough and be an artist.”

“She doesn’t paint Nazis. She paints subjects of beauty.”

“Leave the beauty to her,” says Chaim. They turn and keep going, down the lane toward the gate in the barbed wire fence. “Next week, tell Vollmer that it was your wife who painted the girl. Don’t forget: she’ll get a soft job out of it. That’s the main thing to keep in mind. A soft job.”

“If she can endure the shock.”

“She’s endured worse.”

Which Jacob can’t deny.

Trucks come and go. A motorcycle or two and a couple of children chasing a ball, crying out, oblivious to the camp just a few yards distant. They walk on. Up ahead, the lane intersects a gravel road used by the familiar Red Cross vans on their way to and from the processing station. The man and boy watch them sail past raising gray dust.

“What if I were to go ahead with it?” says Jacob. “Should I take a step further, and tell him it’s my daughter?”

“I wouldn’t. He doesn’t need to know that.” Chaim lifts his shoulders a little straighter and walks a little more erect, having taken on the role of trusted counselor.

“I suppose you’re right,” says Jacob.

“Don’t let pride get the better of common sense.”

“I won’t.”

“Vollmer likes you, but there are limits.”

“I know. And I’m not saying I’ve made up my mind to tell him at all.”

“You should. You will. She’ll get a soft job out of it. She’ll get back to painting.”

They stop at the edge of the gravel road to let Chaim adjust the weight he’s carrying. A drawer in the wooden box slips open and a comb falls out followed by a small glass bottle of witch hazel, the comb skittering across the gravel and the bottle crashing on the stones but not breaking. The guards opposite, standing ranked on either side of the gate, hardly look. Another van careens by, its tires narrowly clearing the bottle. Jacob begins to reach down but stops himself just in time. The guards laugh. Chaim sets his box down by the side of the road and the towels tumble from it into the dirt and he picks them up and studies them with a look of disgust and the guards laugh again. They’re putting on quite a show, these two.

The coast is clear for a moment—no vans—so Chaim ducks into the road and gets the bottle and the comb and restores them to their drawer. He and Jacob recover themselves and take a breath and prepare to cross, but the bunched towels are piled higher than usual and Chaim can’t see where he’s going and he steps out into the gravel road nearly into the path of one of the vans. Jacob catches him by the collar just in time.

The rear windows of the van are hung with black curtains, but the window on the driver’s side is open and the window on the passenger’s side is open as well, and both the driver and his passenger smoke furiously as the car tears past. Three streams of exhaust altogether. There was a time when Jacob would have raised a fist at so careless a driver, but that time is long gone. It doesn’t even occur to him, certainly not in the presence of those guards on the other side of the road. “Some Red Cross they are,” he says as he bends to straighten Chaim’s load, and Chaim says, “Don’t you know?”

“Don’t I know what?” They cross and stop just outside the fence, waiting for the guards to swing open the gate and admit them. Jacob always enjoys this moment. It’s the only time all week when somebody waits on him instead of the other way around. He figures that if he were to reach out and try to lend a hand, though, he’d be shot in an instant. He lowers his chin and speaks to the boy again, “Come come, you little villain. Don’t I know what?”

Chaim bites his tongue until they’re safely inside, well away from the guards. “Those wagons say Red Cross,” he says, “but that’s not what they are. They’re full of bug powder. Only they don’t use it on bugs.”

*

For days, Gretel goes about the camp like a reverse Johnny Appleseed, picking up the seeds she’s sown into every crack and crevice and jamming them into the pockets of her uniform and transferring them from there into the vinegar bottle. It fills up quickly. She’s had no idea, she says to Eidel just before roll call one morning, no idea of how much evidence she’s assembled already. The bottle is in the rafters over her bunk, lying on its side and spilling its contents like milk, and there are still a hundred more little scraps of paper and bark and cloth hidden in a hundred additional places that she knows of right off the top of her head, never mind how many she may have forgotten.

She dreams through the day half-dizzy, wondering where she’ll get her hands on a second container, imagining the moment when the wickedness preserved beneath the clay of Auschwitz will rise to the surface as it must. Overcome with a vision of the bottle rising up from the mud like a corpse, unbalanced as any saint by the certainty of resurrection and rapture, she can think of nothing else.

Eidel struggles to keep her focused on the work before her. “The last girl,” she says, “got careless with that same knife. Her name was Zofia, poor thing.”

Gretel remembers spending her first morning scouring the chopping block, the blood soaked deep into the wood, and she does her best to concentrate. Rolak careens by. Gretel dares not look up. The capo opens the door and steps out into the wind and the wind slams the door shut behind her. The room goes quiet again. Gretel tries to remember all of the stories that she hasn’t written down yet, linking them one after another into a single unforgettable narrative of which she’ll remember every part long enough to get it all down. She finds a place for Eidel’s story somewhere near the end, the story of the loss of her paintings and the loss of her daughter, a touching story to be sure but nothing special compared to the thousand other stories clamoring for their due.

She asks herself how much one person can remember, how much weight one person can carry—even if the weight is as small as a scrap of paper, as slight as someone else’s memory. And she drifts off again, and the pace of her work slows, and Eidel worries. A person can think too much for her own good.

*

It’s cold in Canada. Some men work inside and others out, and those lucky enough to be shielded from the high winds and the occasional burst of early snowfall are unlucky in a different way, for they are the ones who must endure the greater portion of Jankowski’s presence. He doesn’t like the cold any better than anyone else, so he stays inside for the most part, leaving the men in the covered yard under the supervision of the guards.

Jacob is among the outdoor men. He hates the cold but he likes the absence of the capo. Most of what’s being sorted here is the dregs, material that’s already passed once or even twice under the most watchful eyes that Jankowski can put on the job, castoffs among castoffs. Buttonless coats and laceless shoes and hats with the bands torn out of them in case they might have concealed something of value. Suitcases stripped of their linings and trunks jimmied apart into pieces that now resemble firewood more than luggage. The man alongside Jacob has somehow acquired a pair of gloves that are the envy of the commando. Dirty gray wool raveled and threadbare and thin as lacework, they’ll be of only a little use against the coming winter, but a little is better than none. The prisoner wears them only on the coldest of days, and in between he keeps them hidden God knows where. They can’t take up much room.

Jacob looks for a pair of his own. Everybody looks. But not just any gloves will do. There is one pair on a table among the exploded hats, shiny black leather gloves stuffed full of warm white fleece, worth their weight in gold but sadly untouchable. First, because Jankowski and the guards have already taken note of them. Second, because their color and thickness would stand out on a prisoner’s hands. The ideal gloves, if you could find them, would be beneath notice. And so the prisoners’ need for stealth drives them to police their own happiness.