“YOU KNOW ABOUT MY OTHER LATE-NIGHT COMPANION, I assume,” Korczak told Madame Stefa when she appeared in his doorway and saw me sitting on Mietek’s bed. Mietek had the fever now as well.
“You can’t sleep?” she asked, and gave me a sympathetic look. The whole house was quiet. Only a few kids were having noisy trouble breathing.
“There was so much wind and dust yesterday,” Korczak said, once she sat at the foot of Jerzyk’s bed.
“For a while I thought the storm had cleared the air and it would make breathing easier,” she told him. It was so hot that kids had pitched their sheets onto the floor. Everyone who could walk had spent two days washing and washing the floor and it still smelled everywhere of the diarrhea.
I was with him because now each time the lights went out I remembered my mother when she woke and couldn’t find me in the hospital and then her surprise at her inability to make a fist. I saw Lutek’s face when his rabbit-skin cap flew off.
“While I was lying here I invented a machine,” Korczak said from on his back. “It was like a microscope that could look into you. It had a scale that ran from one to one hundred and if I set the micrometer screw for ninety-nine, then everyone who hadn’t hung on to at least one percent of his humanity would die. And when I ran the machine the only people left were mostly beasts. Everyone else had perished.”
“You’ve had a hard week,” Madame Stefa said.
“And after I set the screw to ninety-eight I was gone too,” he said.
“Yes, well, that would be terrible,” she said, and he let it go. Mietek flailed his arms in his sleep.
“The children now say even birds won’t fly over us,” Korczak said, and she rubbed her face, tired or impatient. He said reading had begun to fail him and that this was a very dangerous sign.
“I saw Bula yesterday,” she told him. He smiled at the name and she went on. “Can you imagine he’s forty now? Not long ago he was ten. He asked me in for cabbage soup. He’s still smuggling. He said each morning he gives his boy a half a pint of milk and a roll. I asked why he never visited and he said when he was well off there was never time and when he wasn’t how could he come by looking so ragged and dirty?”
“Bula,” Korczak said, and they were quiet.
“Did you tell him that now he has to stop?” he finally asked.
“You know Bula,” she said.
“Do I have to do everything?” he said. “Do I have to go and find him?”
“He’s not going to listen,” she told him. And he closed his eyes and didn’t answer.
“I have no idea what we’re going to do with Balbina,” he told her instead. “If you want to measure your resistance to going crazy, try helping a shlemiel.”
“She’s still getting her bearings,” she said. “She didn’t have as much responsibility at the other orphanage.”
“You put the paper in her hand. She has to deliver it today; here is the address and the hour,” he said. “But she’s lost the paper or forgotten to take it with her or got frightened or the porter told her to go somewhere else. She’ll go tomorrow. She’ll go the next day. She’ll go when she finishes the cleaning. And was it so important anyway?” He put his hand over his eyes and Madame Stefa told him that he was being unkind.
“I am unkind,” he said. “To work here you have to be unkind. You have to be smeared with crap, you have to stink, you have to be crafty.”
“You seem presentable enough when you make your calls,” she said.
“I don’t make calls,” he said. “I go to beg for money and food. It’s hard and degrading.”
“I know that,” she said.
“You,” he said to me. “You never read. Do you want to sink into idiocy?”
“Leave him alone,” Madame Stefa said. “He’s making progress in his schooling.”
“His schooling?” he said. “This is a prison. A plague ship. An asylum. A casino. A sprung trap. Bodies you clear from the street in the morning have piled up again by the evening.”
“That’s no reason to frighten children,” she told him.
“Everyone’s been tainted by this,” he said.
“You have a lot to do tomorrow,” she told him. “You need to rest.” She filled his glass from the pitcher beside it. He took it and had a long swallow.
“Do you know how Jerzyk got here?” he asked. She took a deep breath and told him no. He said Jerzyk’s whole family had died in quarantine and he’d dug up his father’s body to get a golden dental bridge to sell for food but then had to use the money to buy his way out of the Umschlagplatz. “Do you understand what I mean?” he said. “He had to dig his father’s head out of the dirt and then pull the bridge out of his father’s mouth. And then he didn’t get the food he needed anyway.”
Someone cried out downstairs and Madame Stefa left to investigate. Korczak was so still afterwards that I thought he’d fallen asleep.
He didn’t open his eyes when she came back. “I always think that the relief we feel after the roundups tells us something,” she said. “Why are we relieved to be left here? And why are they starting with old people and children? Why would you begin by resettling those who’d have the most trouble in a strange place?”
Korczak sat up and poured himself another glass from the pitcher. Then he lay back down and closed his eyes without drinking it.
Dora had been rounded up twice and made it back each time, Madame Stefa told him. Dora said if they were ever taken to the Umschlagplatz to hang behind at the tail end of the march because when the trains got filled up they sometimes let the other people go.
Korczak said that was good advice.
“We shouldn’t be speaking like this in front of the boy,” she said tiredly. Korczak agreed.
“Are you ever going to go to bed?” he asked me. I shook my head.
He seemed unsurprised. He said Korczak the dreamer was already far away. Outside of the city. Already in a desert and walking all by himself. He sees an unfamiliar country, he said. He sees a river and a bridge. He sees boats. And over there: small houses, cows and horses. He hadn’t realized everything in Palestine was so small. He keeps walking, he said, until he can’t walk anymore. He keeps walking, until the moment before he just falls down.
~ ~ ~
THE NEXT NIGHT MADAME STEFA WAS TOO exhausted to stay awake so it was just the two of us. Then I fell asleep on Mietek’s bed and when I woke it was almost light and Madame Stefa was getting the day’s report. Korczak pulled the paper from one window but otherwise let everyone sleep. He told her Reginka had the rheumatic rash and that during the night he had administered salicylate until she’d heard ringing in her ears and seen yellow. She’d vomited twice and the lumps on her legs were turning pale and no longer hurt. He said Mietek was still having trouble breathing.
“Your cigarettes are probably not helping,” Madame Stefa said.
He told her that smoke was a good expectorant for the children and she answered that this was his theory. She said that sometimes when she came up to see him the air was so bad that she couldn’t breathe. He said she reminded him of that entire stern regiment of women — wife, grannie, cook — to which his father had always given in for the sake of peace.
“Is he asleep?” she asked, and I didn’t hear his response but I didn’t move. My head was turned away.
She said two of the girls no longer claimed to be hungry and seemed to be hibernating. Others were no longer sleeping because of hunger insomnia. She kept them covered but they were always thirsty and cold. Their stools were semi-liquid and muddled. When she pressed their skin the dimples lasted nearly two minutes. One was so clumsy with weakness she couldn’t fasten a button. The hungriest were always appearing and disappearing around the kitchen. They all had scabies and crusted ringworm.