The Thief of Auschwitz (18 page)

Jacob shakes his head and tells himself that if he were working on an escape plan, an essential element of it would be stealing those marvelous gloves at the last minute. They would go a long way in the outside world. They would mark a man as a king. But he isn’t planning an escape, so he sets his fantasies aside and proceeds according to the rules, shaking out shirts and jackets and going through pockets and cuffs and knife-split seams with a probing finger in case someone indoors has missed something. Usually he comes up short, but not always. In the waistband of one pair of trousers, he discovers a tooth. Not just any tooth, but a tooth capped with gold. Its crevices are tobacco-stained and its roots are red and rusty, and he contemplates how it might have come to be hidden here in this waistband. He imagines an old man arriving in one of the thousand train cars, a canny old figure experienced with the world and not easily fooled by anything or anyone, a banker or a lawyer or a doctor perhaps. Yes. A doctor. A doctor, for what must come next.

He pictures the doctor having set aside everything at various points along the tortuous journey to this place—his watch and his rings and his money, his practice and his dignity and his loved ones. And then he pictures him looking out the window and seeing the station, this final station, bedecked with its flower boxes and painted with that stalled
trompe-l’oeil
clock. Marked with the hanging sign that even now, not far from Canada and visible from where Jacob stands, is being touched up by a prisoner with a stepladder and a fine brush and a can of thick bright velvety paint.
Auschwitz.

He sees how the old doctor’s understanding grows, he sees it in the weariness and revulsion that pass over his fallen face—weariness, not fear; revulsion, not despair—and he sees him reach defiantly into his own mouth with two steady fingers and extract his own gold tooth. He lowers the prize to his lap and studies it furtively, swallowing blood, pushing his tongue into the welling socket, perhaps thinking of how much it cost him in the first place and when, and then he wipes it dry on the back of the seat ahead of him and works a few threads free in the seam of his waistband and slips it inside as far as he can. The Nazis can take the tooth from his trousers for all he cares, they’ll take everything sooner or later, but they will never take it from his mouth. He’s granted himself that much grace.

Good for him,
thinks Jacob, holding the tooth. One of the guards sees its gleam and points with the barrel of his gun. Jacob stiffens. Lately he’s found himself imagining stories like this one for every single thing he encounters in Canada, against his will dreaming up some sadly detailed narrative for every last stick of chewing gum, every last nail file, every last hair ribbon. The stories leap up in his mind unbidden and he catalogs them the same way that the system here catalogs the artifacts themselves. They weigh on him like curses, like stories from the Torah. Like anything with the sudden shocking incarnate power of the Word. He nods to the guard behind his gun, and he carries the gleaming tooth to the table where it belongs.

*

A change in the weather has been coming since sunup, a transformation unfolding itself. The wind has been howling nonstop and the clouds have been racing overhead like liquefied rock and Jacob has found himself ill at ease, troubled, more unsettled than usual even for a day in Auschwitz. He checks out of Canada in the gathering dark and wraps himself around himself, bone upon bone, and hurries along to reach the yard in front of his block just as the prisoners are filing back in from the dig. One or two of them pass him a look that he reads as pitying, but he could be wrong. Surely he’s wrong. Pity is everywhere, moving freely from man to man, like a current in water. Pay it no attention.

Nobody speaks. Not even Wenzel, who waits before the coalescing grid of men with an unreadable look on his face and a pencil in his hand. He stands impassive, conserving his breath, looking ahead. The men will certainly not speed up, not after a day’s work and not without rations, so why demand it. To ask the impossible is to fail. To fail is to weaken. So he waits. A sly one.

Jacob looks left and looks right, but Max is nowhere. He feels naked and alone, more alone than he has felt since he first arrived here so long ago. A lifetime, really; the only lifetime he knows anymore. The prisoner to his right looks in his direction and frowns. It’s the sad apologetic look of an unwilling conspirator:
Don’t blame me.
Then the man looks straight ahead again, toward Wenzel, who has coughed up something and noisily spat it out on the ground by way of getting everyone’s attention.

The roll call begins. A million things go through Jacob’s mind, racing like the clouds that have chased each other across the sky all day, chief among them certain garish images of the various dead men he’s seen dragged to their feet for roll calls in the past. Schuler in particular, old man Schuler whose stink was on his uniform when Slazak lay down in it for his last rest. And then Slazak himself, the very next morning, propped up between two of his own murderers.

The count, like most counts under the businesslike Wenzel, goes mainly without incident. There’s some confusion over a prisoner who’s acquired a case of laryngitis and probably won’t last out the week as a result of whatever’s behind it, but he raises his hand to show the number on his wrist and another prisoner answers for him and all is well. Max, though. Max is the problem. His number isn’t even called. It’s as if he doesn’t even exist. As if he’s never existed. And yet he can’t be dead, or else he’d be here. That’s a hard fact for a father to take any comfort in.

Jacob’s mind goes to his wife. He wonders how he’ll let her know about Max if there turns out to be something she must know. Perhaps he can make contact the same way that she first did with him, through that fellow in the delivery commando. Perhaps Chaim can help. Chaim knows everyone. Yes. He’ll ask Chaim.

He wonders further if he should take a lesson from whatever it is that’s befallen his son—if he should sieze the day, make up his mind at last, and tell the deputy that his wife, Eidel Rosen of the women’s camp, is the artist he’s been seeking. The same one who painted the girl.
Absolutely,
he decides, he must do it as soon as possible, if only to give her one single day a week during which her body will be more or less safe from the violent predations of the camp. He must trust that her mind and heart are strong enough to endure the sight of the painting.

The roll call breaks up and the men proceed to their supper, squeezing together into one long line. Jacob asks the man who’s given him the sad look if he knows what’s become of Max, and the man says oh yes, he certainly does. Max is in the hospital. A broken leg. It happened this morning, when they were stacking pipe. Wenzel was furious over the interruption, he says, the little bookkeeper acting as if they were all participating in some kind of race together and now Max had spoiled their chances by coming up lame. This man himself had hauled him to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. The injured boy had made quite a load, and one of the guards had amused himself by firing at the ground near the man’s feet just to see how fast he’d go.

“Max couldn’t walk at all? Not even with a crutch?”

“It’s a bad break. Your boy’s a tough one, but it was a bad break. Compound, the doc said.”

“What else did he say?”

The man shrugs. “I had to come right back. You know.”

“Of course.”

“I couldn’t very well wait around.”

“I understand.”

“He gave me a little note for Wenzel. It’s what excused your boy from the count this once.”

“This once. Of course.”

“You know how it goes.”

“I do.”

*

Wenzel grants him permission to visit Max, and in case the hospital proves to be only the first of the stops he needs to make he lights out as fast as his feet can carry him, scurrying over the cold clay like a bug, oblivious to the searchlights and intent on his mission. In his pocket he has his own concealed rations, along with a few crumbs of cheese scraped from the pocket of an overcoat in Canada earlier in the day, presents for Max, something to build up his strength. The best he can do.

The doctor is a prisoner himself, a bespectacled Frenchman. At least he claims to be a doctor, and the Germans believe him because belief costs nothing. He says that he specializes in women’s complaints, but there are plenty of other doctors, good sound Nazi doctors, more qualified for such things, and so he has been pressed into service as a general practitioner, dealing with the usual run of burns and lacerations and broken bones. Ailments of the heart and the liver and the lungs. Puzzling accumulations of symptoms that when taken together point nowhere but the grave.

Max is in a cot, pale and unconscious, his leg bent at an odd angle. The doctor has stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet and he’s packed the wound with some rags but he hasn’t done anything about setting the bone and he surely hasn’t given him anything for pain. Nor will he. There’s nothing to give.

“Wenzel wanted him kept alive,” the doctor says, “but I can’t say why. It seems cruel.”

Jacob hurries to the cot and kneels there, whispering in his son’s ear, but his son doesn’t respond. He wonders what to do with the rations and the crumbs of cheese in his pocket, thinking that he can’t trust the doctor with them and aware of his own burning hunger and hating himself for letting his attention wander from his child to his stomach.

The doctor muses on aloud, since they’re alone here except for Max and a handful of other men curled up in corners and sprawled on the floor, sleeping or unconscious or dead. The hospital is a way station, a kind of reverse purgatory located between the hell of the camp and the release of death. The selection might take place tomorrow or it might take place the next day, but either way most of the men here will be bound for the gas. “Perhaps it’s one of their experiments,” he says. “Perhaps they want to gauge how much a young person can endure—for the sake of the war effort, you know.”

Max draws a ragged and shallow breath.

“He
is
young, isn’t he? Fifteen? Fourteen?”

“Fourteen. Just a child.”

The Frenchman’s face lights up as if has discovered the cure for something. As if Max has risen from the bed and walked. “You see?” he says, beaming. “You can’t fool a man of medicine.” Guessing a patient’s age is a mere parlor trick requiring nothing more than the sharp eye of a carnival operator, but in the absence of implements and diagnostic tools and drugs, it’s all he has.

Jacob stands. “So what will you do for him?”

“Let him rest. Watch and wait.”

“How long?”

“How long for a full recovery? It could take years, if all goes well.” The doctor removes his glasses and rubs the lenses between his thumb and forefinger.

“No. Not a full recovery. I mean how long can he rest?”

“Who can say? The capo seems to place some value on him.”

“That’s no surprise. My son works hard. He does as he’s told.”

“Still,” the doctor says, putting his glasses back on and squinting through them toward the single burning light bulb, “it’s difficult to put much value on a cripple. A man who can’t get out of bed. Even if that man happens to be a boy.”

“Has Wenzel come to see about him? Have you filed a report?”

“Neither. Give it time, though. They’ll decide when they decide.”

Jacob puts his hand on Max’s shoulder and Max winces in his sleep, recoiling from his father’s touch into the realms of his own agony. He’s so pale, so thin. His father can’t believe that he has strength enough to cringe.

“I’ll see what I can do,” says Jacob. The folly of which brings a twinkle to the eye of the doctor, back behind his blurry lenses.

He steps out into the night and makes himself invisible, walking as purposefully as he can, neither hurrying nor making any attempt to conceal himself. But he doesn’t return to the block. He goes the other way instead, toward the camp’s main entrance. It’s a walk he makes every Friday, and he hopes that those on guard duty will recognize him in some unconscious way and think nothing of his presence.

He wipes a tear from his eye and tells himself that it’s the cold, even though he doesn’t actually feel the temperature. He can’t feel anything now but the urgent weight of Max. His mission can’t wait until tomorrow, when he will visit Vollmer in his apartment and could beg for a favor, a deal, a compromise. Max could be dead by then, so he must go now. He walks on past the women’s camp, all of it buttoned up tight, the kitchen door shut and the rooms behind it dark. He wishes that he could speak to Eidel, explain the bold thing that he’s about to attempt, in case he should fail and leave her entirely bereft—her son taken by accident and her husband taken by his own love and daring. She would surely understand. She would surely approve now and tell him to go ahead, if only she knew. And so he goes.

The rear entrance to the administration building, the little low entrance through which he passes every Friday morning, is down a walkway at the head of which a solitary guard paces back and forth. Other walkways break off from there toward other destinations, most of them mythical or at least unknown, all of them off limits to prisoners except under special circumstances. The guard shuttles back and forth at a leisurely pace, speeding up only when his course and the course of the searchlight threaten to intersect. Jacob catches sight of him and slows a little in the darkness, not enough to be noticed, not enough to stand out, but enough to be ready to ascertain the guard’s identity when the searchlight passes again. Sure enough: a familiar face. A Hungarian, he thinks, not one of the most fearsome of the guards but then again each one is fearsome in his own way. He wishes now that he’d found something better in Canada today than these crumbs of cheese. A bit of chocolate, perhaps, or a cigarette. But he has what he has, even if it’s nothing but his wits, and he must make do.