Death by famine lacked drama, Korczak told her. It was slow and dispiriting. At least until the crows or the rats or the dogs came along.
“Oh, stop it,” she told him.
“Am I being heartless?” he asked her.
“You’re being unhelpful,” she told him.
“I find it helps if I tell myself that children can die or recover here,” he said, “just as they do in a hospital.”
“Yes,” she said. “Something strange happened today. When I emptied the chamber pots this morning I found a street boy outside our door.”
“I can smell the ammonia,” he said. “And that’s not strange. Did you let him in?”
“He didn’t want to come in,” she told him. “He wanted to see into the main hall. I even stepped aside so he could look all he wanted. When I asked him his business he went on his way.”
“I know how he feels,” Korczak said.
I stayed by the window and watched the street that day and the next but saw no sign of Boris. One kid in a blue cap watched the orphanage both days but it wasn’t him. I didn’t go outside. Everyone claimed I was selfish because I took too long on the toilet. Everyone argued over who had had the worse night. Everyone was preoccupied with his morning temperature. “What is it?” kids asked staff members who were still trying to read their thermometers. “What was yours?” they asked one another.
At dinner Korczak announced the orphanage would be putting on a play called The Post Office by an Indian poet. It would be mounted on the third floor in the former ballroom, which would need to be cleaned and cleared for the event. The text was available to read for the next day or two and auditions would be held after that. One of the staff members, Esterka, would direct it. He asked her to stand to receive our thanks and she gave a wave.
There was a new girl whose brother had left her at the orphanage who kept everyone up with her nightmares and her crying. Her name was Gieńa and she was nine and during the day she didn’t bother anyone though she didn’t work either. Her father had died of tuberculosis and her mother and older sisters of typhus and before dropping her off her older brother had dressed her in so many ribbons and beads and colored crepe streamers that I made her laugh by asking if she was a Hottentot. She ate shielding her plate with her hand. In the dark she screamed so much that for a few nights since I was awake anyway I took her up to the third floor so everyone else could sleep. I sat with her while she wailed and she told me about her brother Samuel, who was seventeen and worked in one of the shops, and showed me how she stood on his feet and put her arms around his waist and was carried around the room when he marched. Her aunt had been unhappy because she said Gieńa ate all the bread and in no time it would all be gone and she told Samuel to put his sister in the orphanage so she didn’t have to live with someone who was stealing from her. Telling her story calmed Gieńa down but the spiders on the third floor upset her. I said she could only go back down if she stopped screaming, so she promised she would and the next night when I checked she was awake and weeping but doing it quietly. She showed me a shell in her palm and chanted, “Snail, snail, show me your horns,” and after we both watched for a minute it did.
OF COURSE THERE WASN’T ENOUGH FOR EVEN THE makeshift sets and costumes that Esterka had planned, Korczak told me early the next morning, standing over my bed, so it was time for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to go back out on their rounds. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said he was used to that. When I told him I didn’t want to go he said he was used to that too.
“Can’t someone else go?” I asked him. I was afraid of Boris.
“Madame Wilczyńska asked recently why I was so taken with you,” he said, while he waited for me to find my shoes. “I don’t see what’s so puzzling about it.”
There was a boy out there who wanted to kill me, I told him. I didn’t look at him when I spoke.
“You’ll be fine with me,” he said. At the front door he stopped outside and pretended to check his pockets until I got the courage to follow. He told me I’d be awarded a Good Care Card for looking after one of the new arrivals. The card could be exchanged for an extra portion of sweets.
Again the only ones out that early were the beggars. Some were still in their nooks with their garbage and others were wrapped in their odds and ends and crossing from person to person and begging. A boy who looked like my older brother had printed on his armband Jew Useful for the Economy. When he caught my eye he bared black teeth at me. “And how are you?” he said. “What time is left on your clock?” He kept his horrible expression even when Korczak gave him a few groszy. An elderly couple went around the three of us with their eyes on the sidewalk as if looking for something they’d lost.
The first house we tried gave Korczak all the money he needed after he described the play and then had a coughing fit. “Well, that’s good news,” he said, but once we started back two bodies in the street covered with sheets of paper made him stop. Where the papers weren’t weighed down with stones they lifted in the wind.
We passed a mantelpiece clock wrapped with rope. “You know, when I was a medical student I used to sit at night in the postmortem room after hours,” he said, after we started walking again. “I paid the guard to let me stay there.”
I was scratching at lice. Even at the end my mother begged me to use the kerosene every day. Even at the end I lied about it. In the hospital I shouted for her to leave it alone and she turned to the wall and told me to go.
Korczak took my arm and almost tipped us over. “I just sat there and stared at the faces of the dead children,” he said. “What was I doing there? What was I looking for?”
A yellow police column jogged by. He looked bothered by his question, so I told him I didn’t know.
“What a strange and unsavory person I was. And am,” he said. He said he wished he’d brought a cigarette. He said he wished he’d eaten his breakfast.
“I’m not sure I know what to do with good times,” he said. “My mother told me her father was so comfortable with being downtrodden that even when he drew the lucky number in a lottery he kept the news to himself for a week.”
We stepped over a desk blocking the sidewalk, its drawers open and inkwell broken. He wondered if it was worth sending some boys back to retrieve it. Then he said to remind him that he still needed to talk with Kramsztyk about the poor quality of his coal. For the rest of the walk back he rolled his head from side to side as if his neck was giving him pain.
AUDITIONS FOR THE PLAY WERE HELD ON THE THIRD floor after it had been prepared. Gieńa was cast as Sudah the flower girl, she told me that night, and I told her that she was already in costume. Jerzyk though he still had his fever was cast as the fakir and had already started working on his magic tricks. They were casting the main role last, Korczak said, and he wanted me to try out for it. I asked what it was and he wondered if I’d read the play and I said no. He said the lead was a boy who was dying and inspired everyone.
“He’s the hero?” I said. We were all stripping beds.
“In a way,” he said. “I think you’d be very good at it.”
“Him?” Madame Stefa asked.
Him, Korczak told her. I said no but was surprised by how happy it made me to have been asked. The next day Korczak announced the star would be a boy named Abrasha, who played the violin.
I was emptying the dustbins with Zygmuś and another boy and saw Boris coming down the street with a tall woman in a straw hat. It didn’t look like he’d seen me and when I got back inside I pushed past the long line of kids waiting for the bathroom and went up to the third floor and climbed inside a painted piece of scenery that said Lord Mayor’s House. I waited and then heard footsteps and someone came in and shut the door. I could see out the crack beside me.