‘I’ve seen enough of him to know him.’
‘You don’t need him. You have Mikhail.’
Reuven said, ‘I have Mikhail, who didn’t protect me. Josef has Viktor and Grigori and they didn’t protect him.’
‘Is protection so necessary now that you wish to bring a stranger to stand alongside you?’
‘Because of where we go, what we buy and to whom we sell, I need a good man in front of me, behind me and alongside me. A good man …’
‘A stranger.’
‘A proven man.’
She zipped the bag shut. It was old, battered, scraped and scuffed. He thought of the bags he had seen, from across the street, carried by the porter into the hotel when Josef Goldmann had arrived. Three of them, and they had shone with quality. His own bag had come from the market in Perm, from the stall of the man who had been his first customer, who had bought the first roof that Reuven had sold there. Two rivals had been bludgeoned for trying to take back the customer’s trade and impose their own roofs. The zip worked, the hand straps were still secure, it did not have breaks in it from which the contents could fall, and he had no need for a newer, more expensive bag. She washed his clothes by hand, and ironed them. No maid was allowed into the apartment. No luxury was permitted.
She asked, ‘Are you wise, Reuven, to trust?’
‘I can’t watch my sides and back.’
‘You have Mikhail.’
The bitterness was a quiet rasp in his voice. ‘And he did not watch my front.’
‘How long will you want him for, the stranger?’
He softened. He took her old fingers in his, ‘You trusted, once.’
She would never weep. Since those days as a child, when his father was dead in the corrective labour colony from pleurisy, his mother was going to the East, as far as it was possible to go, to look for work as a bar singer, and he had been dumped with a plastic bag of clothing in the home of his grandmother, he had not seen her cry. He could see the eyes but not beyond their glaze … One thought was perpetually shut from his mind. What would he do when she died? His grandmother, Anna, was now in her eighty-fifth year. She was so frail … He wouldn’t think of it.
He knew the story, every word.
It was 27 September. Autumn was coming quickly to the forest outside the fence, and there was a heavy damp in the air because the summer of 1943 had been poor. On that date a train came from the Minsk ghetto, and it transported more than one thousand seven hundred Jews to our camp. A few were POWs of the Red Army.
As the Russian prisoner soldiers were marched into our compound, we could see them from the barracks hut where we worked. Immediately it could be recognized that one man among them was different. He was tall, had cropped hair under his military cap, was sallow-skinned, and wore the uniform of a Soviet officer. They arrived early in the morning, and at the midday break we came out of the places where we worked and met them as they stood around, trying to focus on where they were now held. I think there were ten of them, chosen for their stature and because they were still capable of work. They stank of the cattle trucks in which they had spent four days and nights without food, water or a latrine.
That late September was a time of particular crisis for those of us who clung to life in the camp, a time when despair edged closer. Rumour ran rife. Before the transport from Minsk arrived, no trains had come to the forest sidings for three weeks. Rumour said that the camp was to close. Then we would not survive. We lived because the camp lived. If the camp died, we died. All of us who had clung to life would be put to death when the camp had no purpose. Rumour said it was ‘soon’ that the camp would close.
It achieved little, but at the camp — among the workers servicing it — there was an escape committee. A few of the men who went into the forest for woodcutting, in the last months, had broken away and run into the trees. They had been advised by the committee on where to hide the first night, where they might find partisans and where they should avoid the murderous Polish farmers and foresters; each time there was an escape attempt the rest of the work party were shot. The head of the committee was Leon Feldhendler, who was from Lublin.
I did not hear it, but others did, and each word of the first conversation between the Russian officer and Feldhendler careered as free charging whispers among the prisoners. The name of the Russian Jew, the sole officer among them, was Sasha Pechersky, a lieutenant. Pechersky was a fighting soldier, not a cook or a lorry driver. Each exchange between him and Leon Feldhendler came to us by relay of mouths … It was a day of fine rain and the cloudbanks were low over the fences and the trees, but there was darkness that day over all of the camp except on the north side where the glow of fire turned the cloud orange. The darkness was from smoke. He asked, Pechersky, what was burning, but Feldhendler told him not to ask. He asked again, in innocence, and demanded an answer. Feldhendler told him, ‘It is the burning of the bodies of those who came on the train with you.’ And, Feldhendler told Sasha Pechersky of the Road to Heaven, the sealed chambers, the engine of Gasmeister Bauer, the work parties who took the bodies from the chambers to the dug pits and the others who burned them. He explained why there was dark smoke against the cloud and the firelight. It was said by those who were closest that there were tears in Pechersky’s eyes.
A young soldier was standing a step behind the Russian officer. I thought he was my age. A smooth face, no beard or moustache, and downy hair on his cheeks. Our eyes met. Pechersky had just been told why there was smoke and fire. The young soldier looked at me and I at him … He was beautiful. Quite slight, with fine, gentle hands, a clean white skull where his hair had been shaved, but he stood tall and not like a prisoner, as tall as Pechersky. He smiled at me. In all the months I had been at the camp, no man had smiled at me. He called his name to me — Samuel. I blushed and called my name back. I couldn’t say why I let him have my name. In the compound of Camp 1, I had survived by trusting no one, man or woman, but I did it … Then guards came and an SS officer, and they were led away to start work.
The next day rumours spread of Pechersky.
The SS officer, Frenzel, took the work party into the forest to cut timber. When he brought them back to the camp, Frenzel demanded they sing, and said they could sing in Russian. Did they sing an anthem? A love song? A lament? Pechersky, the leader, told his men to sing ‘If War Comes Tomorrow’, a partisans’ song. They marched back to the camp, and Frenzel did not understand, but the Ukrainians did and didn’t tell him.
On his third day there were more rumours of Pechersky. He had been set a challenge by Frenzel to hack apart a tree stump within five minutes. He would have been whipped had he failed, but he had achieved it with half a minute to spare. He had refused Frenzel’s offer of cigarettes as reward, and refused half of a fresh-baked roll from a Ukrainian’s lunch, saying that the rations at the camp were adequate. I tell you, with honesty, there was no defiance at the camp until that man came. To refuse cigarettes and fresh bread was defiance on a scale not seen before. Everyone, by the evening, knew of it.