“No. Just that ... every once in a while this unreality becomes real and you stop working long enough to think. You’re in a hole under the ground, and the only way out is death. When I have time to think I become frightened. Just plain frightened.”
Rachael patted her mother’s hand. “It’s strange, Momma, but being with Wolf ... He has a way about him. I’ve always the feeling that we will get through.”
“That is a good way to feel,” Deborah said.
“Yes,” Rachael said quickly. “He makes everyone around him feel that way. I can hardly believe it sometimes because he’s just like a little boy. He didn’t let me go on the Brushmaker’s raid, but everyone told me afterward how he was. Calm—like ice. A real leader. I just know we can get through anything together.” Rachael stopped short. What was she saying? Speaking of the hope of freedom to her mother, when her mother’s position was hopeless. “I’m sorry, Momma ... I didn’t mean ...”
“No, dear. It’s nice to hear a voice filled with hope.”
“Tell me about it, Momma.”
“With Susan gone, I have no girl friends to talk to. You are my best girl friend now.”
“I’m glad.”
“Simon and Alex and Andrei are moving heaven and earth to get Chris out of the ghetto. He’s the most important man here now. Alex calls him our passport to immortality. One day he will have to run for it. He must go alone, of course. It’s killing him, and it’s killing me.”
Deborah lay her head on her daughter’s shoulder and sobbed softly, and Rachael comforted her.
How terrible for Momma to love without hope. Each day a hell of torture and the knowledge of inevitable doom. The inability to combat it, cry out against it. With Wolf there was hope, always hope.
“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ...”
Deborah was wound up like a spring.
“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ... shhh ... shhh.”
“I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s just that being shut in that bunker all day with the children ... pretending to them ... making believe everything will be all right. They know I’m an awful liar.”
“Tante Rachael!” Moses Brandel cried at discovering the visitor from Franciskanska.
“Tante Rachael is here!”
Children converged toward them from all corners of the building. Deborah dried her eyes. “It’s time for us to get back,” Deborah said.
They crawled through the tunnel into the Majdanek room. Rachael and Sylvia and Deborah lifted the children into layers of straw bunks and tucked them in. They lay close to the edge, tiny little faces looking to the lone candle on the wooden table near Rachael. Rachael strummed Wolf’s guitar, and her thin voice sang about a never-never land of milk and honey.
And soon they fell asleep and Rachael left and Deborah dozed, waiting for Andrei and Stephan to return.
“Deborah.”
She blinked her eyes open. Andrei stood over her. She smiled.
“Stephan is asleep in my office,” he assured her at once. “Come out into the corridor. I want to tell you something.”
From the rooms of the Fighter companies, the voices of singing, joking, storytelling. A beep-beep-beep from the radio. A howl of laughter as Moritz the Nasher slapped the cards of a winning hand of sixty-six on the table.
Andrei and his sister found a quiet place just inside one of the escape tunnels.
“Chris is waiting for you,” he said. “Muranowska 24. There’s a guard at the other end of the tunnel on the lookout for you.”
“Thanks,” she whispered.
“Before you go, Gabriela found places for three more children. You’ll have to make a selection. It’s an excellent place with a childless couple. Woodcutter and his wife.”
Make a selection! Deborah hurt at the thought. She felt as though she were at the selection center in the Umschlagplatz. The power to give three children the right to life. How to choose? Three sick ones? Three with the saddest eyes? Three with the most pitiful wails? How do you choose? By seniority as subterraneans?
“Their chances of survival are excellent. Pick strong children,” Andrei said.
“Very well.”
She and Andrei looked at each other and passed thoughts without words. Both of them had the same instantaneous impulse. Send Stephan. No one would blame them or accuse them of favoritism. The boy had more than earned his right to freedom. But Deborah and Andrei were trapped by the very things with which they had infused Stephan. How do you tell your son that dignity and honor are things for other people to die for?
Thoughts which never became words.
Andrei patted his sister’s cheek and handed her a flashlight.
“Will Chris be leaving soon?”
“Any day,” Andrei answered.
She plunged into the tunnel, inching along with the dim light poking ahead of her through the narrow dirt walls beneath the dead ghetto above. The last twenty yards were on hands and knees.
The Fighter on watch at Muranowska 24 pulled her through the trap door and helped her to her feet. She caught her breath and wiped the perspiration from her cheeks and stretched her back.
“Is there water here?”
He pointed to the storage basins. It was a ghetto and it was war, but Deborah was a woman about to go to her lover and she was going to make herself desirable. She washed the streaks of dirt from her face and brushed her hair and fixed it the way Chris liked it and was extravagant with a drop of a gram of perfume that Gaby had sent in with Andrei. Then she ascended the stairs to find him.
When Chris had first returned to her Deborah was riddled with a feeling of sordidness. She was ashamed she could desire Chris in such a place. Their trysts were in cellars and attics, cold straw, oppressive heat, in hidden tunnels or on floors. In the torn-up bunker at Mila 19, next to rushing sewer waters. Bodies sweaty or shivering and pimpled with cold.
She was ashamed of the sensuous pleasures. The shame never faded, but neither did her desire for those pleasures.
Deborah pushed open the attic door.
Chris watched the lights of Warsaw blink on one by one as darkness swept the city. She slipped beside him quietly and watched them too.
“A zloty for your thoughts,” she said.
“My thoughts? They aren’t worth a zloty, even with today’s inflation.”
“Then a kiss for your thoughts?”
Chris smiled a smile that was not a smile. “I’ve been thinking of man, God, and the universe—all those damned things no one ever really understands.”
“That is worth a kiss,” she said.
Chris could not be appeased. “Today, in a bunker at Mila 18, Christopher de Monti of Swiss News listened to two men arguing philosophy over a minute point to which each adamantly clung. They clung to their points, although it will never make a bit of difference. It will never affect the price of tea in China. Alexander Brandel argues for Rabbi Solomon to make a statement in support of Joint Forces as a morale factor for the survivors of the ghetto. Rabbi Solomon quotes the Torah, Midrash, and Mishna opinions that an act of vengeance is a form of suicide which is roundly forbidden. So there you have it, Deborah. Two men in a hole in the ground debating a question that is going to be solved for them anyhow. Frankly, man, God, and the universe give me a large pain.”
“My, you are in a mood. Here I get all prettied up to make myself alluring and I cannot even seduce a kiss from you.”
“Sex should never get in the way of man, God, and the universe. I think right now I’d give up sex forever for a cigarette and a good belt of scotch.”
Chris walked away from the window, patting his pockets for cigarettes that were not there. “Why the hell doesn’t Andrei bring in a few packs of cigarettes from Gabriela?”
“Some of us have been living this way for quite a few years now,” Deborah answered sharply.