The Thief of Auschwitz (27 page)

The capo walks him along as if the two of them are going up the aisle. Endlessly patient, uttering a word of encouragement now and then, keeping his voice low. As they draw nearer to Jacob he indicates him with his free hand and whispers to Max, “Perhaps you’ve heard that your assignment has been changed. You’ve been given a position in Canada. That’s right. Canada, with your father. Side by side. It will be like a family business.”

Good news. More good news. So much good news that as Wenzel sweeps aside the last few men and hands him a bowl and personally selects with his own fingers the largest and leanest scrap of fatty pork in the pot, Max doesn’t notice how the other men are assessing him. How ravenous they are.

*

They’re walking to Canada on the first day, and Chaim appears out of nowhere. His short legs ordinarily work double-time to keep up with Jacob, but today Max’s crutch and the rutted ground have brought their pace to a crawl.

“The painting,” says Chaim.

“What about it?”

“It’s definitely in the antique shop.”

“You’re sure.”

“I spoke to someone who knows for sure. Frau Vollmer returned it herself.”

“So it hasn’t been destroyed.”

“No.”

Max gives his father a hopeful look, but his father doesn’t return it.

“As far as we’re concerned,” Jacob says to both of them, “it may as well be.”

“But I had another idea,” says Chaim.

“And that would be?”

“Buy it. Buy it fair and square.”

Jacob coughs and spits on the icy ground. “In case you haven’t noticed,” he says, “we’re not exactly rich men.”

“People owe me this and that,” says Chaim. “You know.”

“I’d rather not owe you as well,” says Jacob.

“Never mind that,” says Chaim. “Nobody owes me quite enough, as it turns out. You see, now that your painting has hung in Vollmer’s apartment, the price has gone sky high.”

“But Vollmer didn’t want it.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Vollmer
hated
it.”

“Who cares? Provenance is everything.”

”Provenance.
You pick up the most curious information.”

“I pick up what I can pick up,” says Chaim. “You never know when something’s going to be useful.”

They’ve neared the corner where they’ll need to separate, Jacob and Max keeping on for Canada and Chaim turning off. Guards stand to the left and the right but they’re occupied with the tricky business of lighting cigarettes in a cold wind, so the three pause for just a moment. Jacob frowns and chews his lip and studies the sky. Max slumps, only the crutch holding him up. Jacob says he’s learned to live without the painting before. He supposes he can learn to live without it again.

Chaim shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have to do anything of the sort,” he says. “Maybe we can figure out a way to steal it, instead.”

*

Eidel works slowly, not for any selfish reason but because she must. Her pace is a product of her uncertainty, but as the weeks go by the figures of the Vollmer family do begin to emerge from the depths of that blue curtain, resolving into a kind of life that she’d never thought she’d manage. By and by the weather beyond the window turns brighter and a little springlike, but the thick curtain excludes any such change from the twin sealed universes of the painting and the dining room. When she enters each Saturday morning, stepping into that little hallway redolent of cinnamon and sausage, she goes straight to the dining room to draw the curtain tight against the day. She pauses sometimes to look out the window, out over certain low buildings and fences and underbrush, into the middle distance where the camp lies like some treacherous thing sleeping. Only the smoke from the crematoria moves in the bright air, heavenward if there were a heaven. She watches the change of the seasons and she fears that by taking so much time she’s captured something false in the painting. It’s taken her too long. Things are different. The girl Luzi is taller than when they started. The boy Karl is heavier, more filled out, although he was plenty filled out before. The result of too much sausage, she thinks. Karl is practically made of sausage. Overstuffed and slow, lazy in his movements.

If there were any consistency in the judgment of the Reich, someone would send him off to the gas as unsuited for work.

The painting itself, though. Sometimes she hates herself for granting this family of monsters a thing so fine, whatever the reason. Even with a gun to her head. They should have been satisfied with the picture of Lydia. As she nears the end of each morning’s session and as the sun creeps around the building and begins to illuminate the family from over her shoulder, she thinks she understands what Vollmer saw in that painting. Not its evocation of a time and a place. Not its attempt to capture the sweet and hopeful soul of a young girl. But the resemblance that Lydia, with those caramel highlights on her sunshot hair, bore to his own daughter.

Each time her mind begins to travel down that path she knows that the time has come to leave off for the day. Stopping is the only way she can go on. So she purses her lips and squints at the paint on the easel and pushes some last little dab of it around, sighing and saying that although she would like to get more done this morning, the pigment must have its way.

It’s the only power she has.

*

“This is not a game,” says Jacob to Chaim. They’re alone in the corner of the kitchen, late on a Friday morning, in between customers. “You talk about taking the painting as if it were something we could actually accomplish. As if we’d know what to do it with it if we had it.”

“The war won’t last forever.”

“That’s a comfort,” Jacob says, passing the blade of a straight razor over a rough leather strop. “I won’t last forever, either.”

Chaim is pushing a broom, and he stops to look up at the barber. He’s grown some in the last few months as well. He’s noticeably taller but he’s no more filled out—or at least not much. Jacob wonders how long a child like Chaim will be able to work his magic in this place, once he’s a child no more.

“Don’t worry,” says the boy. “We’ll find someplace to keep it. That’s the least of our troubles.”

“We’ll find someplace like where?”

“Like the attic over the Officers’ Club. The waiters keep things up there you could never imagine. Bottles of schnapps. Big wheels of cheese from Switzerland. Champagne, even. Real live French Champagne.”

“Champagne.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“How do they get such things?”

“The same way we’ll get your painting. They steal them.”

“And the officers don’t notice?”

“The officers have been known to look the other way. It’s either that or train new waiters. Waiters who might turn out to be even bigger thieves than the ones they already have.”

The idea strikes Jacob like a blow. Here he is with a straight razor in his hand, paralyzed in the manner of old dead Schuler, yearning to take the sharp edge of it to the neck of some high-ranking officer but stayed by the enormity of the consequences. For Schuler’s understanding was true: the murder of one such as Liebehenschel or Vollmer, or of some lesser functionary like Drexler or even that ridiculous officer with the bicycle, would take a thousand men and women in its wake. Ten thousand, if the SS could manage to kill that many that fast. They’re already doing their best, and it’s hard work with certain intractable realities about it—the irreducible physicality of bodies to be disposed of, for example, a business that takes time and fuel no matter how you approach it. So Jacob is dizzied, at least for a moment, by the notion that he and the rest of the prisoners may be actually holding the Nazis in a kind of reciprocal but unequal stasis. Why find another barber, when you already have the deferential Jacob Rosen? Why not offer a special kindness to Max, when it keeps his mother content behind her easel?

“We could store it there, you think?” he says.

“Until the war’s over,” says Chaim. “Or until somebody comes to tear this place down.”

“The Messiah, I suppose.”

“Sure,” says the boy. “The Messiah. Or else the Russians.”

Later, after they’ve trimmed every neck in the Administration Building and proceeded into the town and made their way to the commandant’s villa down the road and found him too drunk to sit up straight in his chair (the housekeeper, deaf as the rumors always promised she was, seemed unaware of the man’s condition in spite of the volume at which the old songs—
Ab in den Süden, Fuerstenfeld, Skandal im Sperrbezirk
—rang out from his study), after they’ve stolen a choice morsel of roast beef from beneath the nose of the squint-eyed U-boat cook who’s too busy having a cigar out in the ruined kitchen garden to notice, they return to Canada.

Jacob finds his son without his crutch, leaning against a table, sorting children’s clothes. Max has a tear in his eye but it’s not for the pain in his leg and it’s not even for his own lost sister. It’s for every lost child there is. Children not much younger than he but smaller and therefore less fortunate, should you consider an early exit from this place under whatever terms unfortunate. He’s beginning to wonder. Jacob gets a curt nod from Jankowski, out patrolling the margins of this place like some slow engine of destruction, and he goes to help the boy.

“What’s happened to your crutch?” he says.

Max keeps his mouth shut and tilts his head toward the fire that burns in the middle of the yard. Gray smoke rises in the afternoon air and collects like a thunderhead beneath the partial roof.

“Who did this?”

Max tilts his head toward the capo, who’s just now vanishing through the door.

“Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he know you have a protector?”

“Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he resents it like the rest of them, Papa.”

“Let them resent you. Resentment doesn’t matter.” Jacob picks up a pair of trousers suited to a child of no more than four or five years old, shakes them out, and folds them tenderly before putting them in the pile.

“It matters if I don’t have a protector after all,” says Max.

“Your mother is still painting.”

“It’s been three weeks since I left the hospital, Papa. Three or four.”

“She’s still painting.”

“Maybe Vollmer has forgotten about me. Maybe he forgot about me the minute I left the hospital. Maybe there’s nothing to this
protector
business.”

“I’d prefer to believe that there is.”

“We’ll see, Papa. We’ll see.”

Max

I gave up on God, as did so many.

It was easier for me than it was for a lot of them. I’d never been especially religious. I’d never been all that attached to the synagogue. I was just a boy, remember, and in the years before the camp I’d been more of an outdoor type than a religious scholar. I guess I was an Animist by nature if I was anything at all, which meant that while I was in the death camp I missed the Carpathians more than I missed the Almighty.

Blessed be He.

Old habits die hard, you see, but they’re just habits. Just habits, in the end.

I remember men who would cry out in the night, though, hammering at the wood of their bunks and hammering at their own chests, struggling to understand how their God had forsaken them. They’d have torn at their clothes if they’d been dressed in anything other than rags already and if a man couldn’t have been shot for destroying the property of the Reich. The racket was all around me some nights, lamentation on an ancient and biblical scale, and all it did was keep me awake.

I don’t remember my father going through it. I don’t think he thought about God much. He was too busy worrying about my mother and me.

Sixteen

Gretel holds off on telling Eidel’s story until she’s gotten a good look at the picture she’s inscribing into the ceiling of the bunk. So she works on other things whenever she has a spare moment. Writing down the stories other women have told her, and searching for a likely place to hide the new jar that she’s nearly filled up already. The secret place behind the block where the water drains from the roof has proven to be a problem. She passed it last week and caught from the corner of her eye a glint of the old vinegar bottle, which apparently wasn’t buried deeply enough. Snowmelt had washed away gravel and undermined some of the earth beneath it and left a bit of glass exposed. She must get to that, too. She must cover the bottle again, before it’s discovered and dug out and emptied and all of her work comes to nothing. Her testimony scattered, reduced to a thing no more credible or lasting than birdsong.