They’d lived on Żelazna Street in a big apartment but they’d since had to move and their new neighborhood was so backward that some of the streets weren’t even paved and so muddy there were wooden footbridges to the front doors. She said it was sad to watch her mother wade through the mud. She said that her mother had wept for three days and her father had assured them they’d move again soon, that he’d told them that he was starting a broom factory and that the Germans were very fond of brooms.
She said her brother had told her that even before she was born their parents had been to the rabbi twice for a divorce, that her grandmother had insisted on the marriage and told anyone who would listen that her daughter had married an educated man.
I told her I should get going. “Don’t let me keep you,” she said.
But after I didn’t get up she said she remembered thinking to herself that maybe their family’s move would change everything, even her, and things wouldn’t be so bad. She said the years before school that she couldn’t remember had probably been the happiest of her life. I didn’t know what to answer. Finally she stood up and stretched and said she was late. Then she bent down with her hands on her thighs and said that if I carried the pen case under my belt in the back it might be harder to spot.
WORK ON THE WALLS BEGAN AS SOON AS IT GOT warmer. My mother at first celebrated the news that the Judenrat had been ordered to quarantine the Jews who were sick. Then she realized we might be part of the area to be sealed off. She went with our neighbors to report there was no typhus in our building, but that only meant she spent days waiting to talk to an official who wouldn’t listen and couldn’t do anything.
All day long outside our window we heard wheelbarrows squeaking and trowels scraping and the clink of bricks. It started and stopped, so for days there might be just a few rows and then suddenly something you couldn’t see over. As far as Lutek was concerned, for the time being it was another opportunity. After the workers quit for the day at a dead end near Niska, we carried off two big bags of cement.
In the evenings my brothers argued about what was happening. I had other things to worry about. Whenever there was big news our neighbors with the radio knocked on our door. Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg had all been invaded. I asked Lutek if he thought Belgium would surrender and he said that it didn’t matter, since the way things went for us either one bad thing or another would happen.
No one wanted linens or floors washed anymore, so what I brought home was more important than ever.
In May it got warm and we worked later. Lutek and I got into a scrape, so I ducked into an entryway and waited and was about to leave it when Zofia took my sleeve. She gestured with her head and we stood there quietly as the shopkeeper and his sons passed by. One had a mallet and the other two had nightsticks. Lutek was somewhere on the other side of the street and might have been long gone. The shopkeeper stopped on the corner in a dry spot and his sons started searching door by door.
“I think you’d better come to dinner,” Zofia whispered into my ear. She was watching through the entryway’s frosted glass with me, her cheek close to mine. “We’re right upstairs. You can bring what you have there as your gift.”
Her parents were polite and pleased by the honey, and her mother told their baby it was rare and expensive. They introduced me to her older brother Jechiel, a yeshiva student. He seemed to think I was standing too close to his sister. He said that for looking too often at a woman one was hung by the eyebrows in Hell. Zofia laughed and told me that because his morning prayer, “Let our days be multiplied,” sounded like “cheap fish,” it had become his family nickname.
She introduced me to her younger brother, Leon, who seemed unhappy and had little to say. His brother talked about him as if he wasn’t in the room, then said that while their parents had hopes for him he’d turned out to be a real dunce, already kept back a grade twice before school had been suspended. Now getting his certificate was going to be like making it to the North Pole at a snail’s pace.
Zofia’s mother made what she said was a hometown dish, a pudding of buckwheat meal sautéed with onions. She fed it in spoonfuls to the baby, Salcia, who was wedged into a high chair beside her.
Someone rang the bell and Zofia answered the door and stepped out into the hall and talked in a low voice before returning to the table. When her father asked about it she said that the shopkeeper Lebyl was looking for a thief.
They asked about my family and since I had nothing to say I told them about Lutek. I told them that he liked to climb utility poles just to look down on people. I told them that on crowded trolleys he liked to recite details about what happened between a man and a woman. Zofia’s brother was appalled but her father found it funny. She asked if Lutek had ever had a girlfriend and I told her there’d been a girl he admired and that he’d waited every evening for an entire month beside her gate with a letter explaining his feelings but that whenever she came out he’d panic and walk away.
Her father talked about the broom factory and where the money for it would come from. He talked about Zofia’s grandfather, who had never heard a kind word from anyone and at the age of ten had been sent away every night to eat his evening meal at another family’s house, and once he had his own children he always preferred scrimping on the family’s food to working harder. He said he thought that Zofia took after him. She said she agreed and that as a rule she disliked everyone. He told about how he’d had to throw her out of his shop when she was six years old and had ventured the opinion in front of one of his biggest customers that the price he’d quoted was far too high.
Salcia didn’t like the pudding, so her mother cleaned it from her face with a spoon and then offered it to her again and asked if this Lutek I was describing was despite all of that a good boy. I said yes and Zofia said no. Her father laughed and her mother made a face. They never looked at each other but still the family seemed to get by.
It got quiet. Jechiel looked at me as though I was missing something. Zofia’s father reminded me about the curfew and her mother thanked me again for the honey, which she hadn’t served. Zofia showed me to the door and I didn’t know what to make of her look before she closed it and left me in the hall. I told myself as I went down the stairs that there was nothing wrong with having friends, but that there’d be no butting in where I wasn’t wanted.
EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY WAS EXCITED ABOUT THE news that the Germans were fighting in France, and then miserable about the news that the Germans had taken Paris. One of my brothers said it was because they had an airplane that converted to a tank when it set down on the battlefield. My other brother said it was because they had something called a heavy-air bomb that surrounded their parachutists with a shield that no bullet could penetrate. My mother said that one believed this and the other believed that but what was fated to happen always will. My father said that one way or another the joke he’d heard at his cousin’s factory was that thousands of hammers had arrived from America to pound dreams of salvation out of our heads.
When it was finished the wall was three meters high with another meter of barbed wire on top. I still helped my mother with her chores and each morning she went out to look at it. I asked if she was hoping to find it taken down. They built a wooden bridge across Chłodna Street near St. Karol’s Church to connect the two ghettos that were separated by the street and trolley line. Farther down a gate sealed off Żelazna and all the traffic stopped so the trolley could run through.
And now there was typhus in the building across the street. Packages were left on the sidewalk outside the front entrance because the porters refused to carry them inside.