When my mother returned she found him out of bed and standing in his nightshirt on a chair to look out his window. She warmed his feet and got him back into bed and told him that if he looked outside when he woke, then all of his dreams would escape. She sent me to the kitchen to make him some tea and asked if I thought I could do that much. While I was filling the kettle I could see them both. She took his hands and called for him to look at her. She said she wanted to tell him a story, that it was going to be a long story, and he needed to stay awake for it. He seemed to come out of a daze and smiled at her. The story was about a poor Jew and a sultan. She said about one of the sultan’s decisions, “Isn’t that amazing?” and while she was asking him, he died.
SHE STAYED IN BED FOR TWO WEEKS. I DID WHAT housework I could. My father and brothers ate at taverns. I made my own dinners. Lutek stayed away. Once the sun had set my mother took to talking to me in the dark. She wouldn’t let me light any lamps until my father and brothers came home. After my brothers went to sleep, my father would sit up at the kitchen table with vodka and weep without making any noise.
She said she forgave me. She said none of us had done all we could for my younger brother. She said she still remembered when she’d been a little girl and a teacher had said, “I predict that someday you are really going to amount to something.” She said this teacher had told her favorite students, “Well, you’re sitting on the wagon. Let’s see how far you can travel down the road.” She said this teacher had awarded her with a book inscribed For your good conduct and many talents.
She said she’d lost all of her energy for work, but that maybe it would return in time. She said her feelings were like a coin in a strongbox and that from now on maybe I alone would have the key. She said she knew that my father was spending what little money they had saved. Let him take it and choke on it, she said. Maybe then he’d leave her in peace.
She said that when she was ten she’d had to care for her infant sister, who screamed when she was wet, screamed when she was hungry, and screamed when she was poorly diapered. She said she used to run all over the house holding her sister, not knowing what her sister wanted from her. She said she’d lived for the day when her mother would come home and take her sister back, and everyone would be happy with the good work she had done.
When it got warmer, she started cooking again and doing a little cleaning. She went outside. My tenth birthday came and went without raisin cake. One morning when I thanked her for my breakfast she said that the older she got, the more of an infant she became. I asked if she was feeling better and if she wanted to walk in the park when I got home from school, and she said that yes, she did. She said that sometimes it felt as if everything had been taken from her, and that all she wanted was to take something back.
THE NEXT MORNING MY FATHER TOLD ME TO GET up because it was war and the Germans had invaded. I didn’t believe him, so he pointed at the neighbors’ apartment and said, “Come to the radio, you’ll hear it.”
People had spent the day before taping up windows and running through the streets buying up food. In the morning our teacher told us that as of the next day our school, which had had an anti-aircraft battery moved onto its roof, was under military control, that we should leave our registration books to be signed, and that he would see us after the war. We wanted to go to the roof to view the anti-aircraft guns but a soldier wouldn’t let us on the staircase.
When I got home, my father and older brothers were taping our windows and one of my brothers showed me a blue glass filter that would fit over our flashlight.
That afternoon we saw an airplane with smoke coming out of its tail and two others chasing after it. Another plane flew over very low and a soldier took his rifle and started shooting at it until people on the street screamed that he was endangering everyone, so he stopped.
There were air raid sirens at night but for a few weeks nothing happened. Lutek would tell me the next day how much he liked the sirens because everyone had to get out of bed whatever time it was and the kids in his building would meet in the basement and play. He said all of the kids in his building liked the air raids except one whose mother was crazy and caused a lot of trouble by running out into the street and uncovering the windows while the sirens were still going.
For a few days in the afternoons we went to our neighbors’ apartment to hear the news. It was all bad.
The bombardment of the city lasted all day and night without stopping and went on into the next day and night. We stayed in the cellar and the wailing and crying and praying drowned out the explosions if they were far away. My mother sat against the wall with her arms around me and whenever I stood to stretch my legs she asked where I was going. My father and brothers sat against the opposite wall. After three days things quieted and someone came down the stairs and shouted that Warsaw had surrendered. My mother told us not to leave but my brothers and I climbed out into the street.
Dust and soot hung in the air. There were giant craters in the intersection. The big tree on the corner had flown all apart. Our back courtyard was covered with broken glass. Down Gęsia Street something was still burning.
My mother led us back up to our apartment, which only had some broken windows. She sent us out to look for planks to board them up, so I walked over to Lutek’s neighborhood. He threw his arm around me and grinned and said, “Well, we survived the war.” I told him what we were looking for and he led me to an alley fence that was blown apart. Together we brought home so many planks that my father told my mother to leave me alone whenever I wanted to go out during the day. We especially needed water since nothing came out of our faucets, and Lutek showed me how to steal from his building’s cistern.
We gathered anything we might need. Sometimes we were chased off but not often. The destroyed buildings were a great playground and we always found something surprising in the rubble. One building’s entire front had been sheared away and we could see into every apartment up to the roof, and near the top a family was still living there. They looked like a store display. One leg of an iron bedstead hung out into space. In the attic, sparrows flew in and out of the holes made by the artillery shells.
On the way home with my water I was stopped by a bald-headed man in a filthy green surgical apron who was carrying a little boy. The man had eyeglasses covered in dust and a yellowish goatee. “Where’s the shoe store that was here?” he asked.
“There,” I told him, and pointed.
He looked at the smashed walls that had fallen in on one another. “I just found him in the street,” he said. The boy looked asleep. “He can’t walk on all this glass without shoes. I have to carry him until I find something for his feet.”
I recognized his voice and said, “You’re the Old Doctor from the radio.”
“Would you have shoes at your house that might fit him?” he said. But then someone else called, “Pan Doctor! Pan Doctor!” and he turned and carried the boy off in that direction.
WHEN THE GERMANS MARCHED IN, THE CROWDS were so quiet I could hear a fly that was bothering a woman a few feet away. Lutek said there was more noise at the parade on his street and that some people waved little flags with swastikas on them. At the market square the next day no vegetable stalls were set up and instead more Germans unloaded crates from trucks. One talked to me in Polish. “Bring us something to drink,” he told me, and then he and his friends straddled the crates and waited.