In the Land of Armadillos (13 page)

The priest waved it off. “Have you always lived here? In this town, I mean.”

“Yes, always. Where are you from? You speak Polish, but I heard you speaking another language with your friend.”

“I lived here for a while when I was a kid,” he said. “But I live in England now.”

“England,” said the old man. “I've never been west of Warsaw.”

The priest gestured toward the green patch of grass. “Perhaps you can tell me something about this place,” he suggested. “On my map, it says something happened here in 1942.”

“Oh. Yes. Well . . . ” The old man's gaze wandered. “My grandson . . . nursery school . . . ” he said vaguely.

“Oh, I'm sorry. Please, don't let me keep you.” It was a cold day. For warmth, the priest put his hands in his coat pockets. His eyebrows drew together, and he fished around inside his pocket until he pulled out a chocolate bar. It had a yellow wrapper with a picture of a little girl on it. “May I?” he asked.

The old man nodded. The priest squatted down until he was level with the boy, who accepted the candy in his mittened hand. The priest smiled. The child looked back at him with grave, dark eyes.

“You do this every day?” inquired the priest as he stood back up, brushing off his coattails. The old man nodded. Under his hat, the skin was fragile and thin, like parchment, except for his cheeks and the tip of his nose, which were a startling pink. “You're a good grandfather.”

The old man shrugged. “My only grandchild,” he replied.

Nothing prevented him from leaving, but still, he lingered. There was something about the priest, his moist green eyes rimmed with long black lashes. It was the face of a man who had heard many sad stories. Just now he was gazing with curiosity at the grassy patch between the buildings.

“It's my own little project,” the priest explained almost apologetically. “Well. Obsession, really. I'm traveling around Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, trying to collect stories of what the Nazis did. Before the people who witnessed them are gone. Things that didn't make it into the history books.”

The old man's lips compressed into a thin line. “The history books,” he said contemptuously, dismissing the entire genre. “All they ever tell you is what happened to the Jews. Never what happened to the Poles.” He added hastily, “It's not their fault, of course. What happened to them was terrible, I'm not saying it wasn't. All I'm saying is you never hear anything else.”

The priest nodded. Encouragingly, the old man thought.

“The first thing the Nazis did when they got here was round up anyone with a brain. The mayor, Jablonski. The superintendent of the schools, Wygand. The judge, Wiesneski. Slipowitz, who was something important in industry, I don't remember what. Anyone who could think for themselves. They marched them all off to the forest and shot them. But do you see
that
in the history books?”

The priest nodded sympathetically. “Terrible,” he agreed.

“The Jews, that was later,” the old man continued morosely. “In 1942.”

“How can you possibly remember?” said the priest. “You must have been very young. Six? Seven?”

The old man's thin lips curved upward, and then he broke into a dry, shrunken laugh. “You are a flatterer, Father,” he said, shaking his head. “I was born in 1927. Eleven years old when the Germans came.” He released his grandson's hand so that he could wipe the end of his nose with a soiled handkerchief that he excavated from his coat pocket. Immediately, the little boy turned to the task of making snowballs.

“I remember everything about that day. The sun was shining, turning everything to gold. A soldier came down that road on a motorcycle with a sidecar. He stopped at the pump for a drink of water.” The old man sighed moodily. He took off his hat, an old moth-eaten karakul with earflaps, to run a gloved hand over his sparse white hair. “We lived at the edge of town then, next to a Jewish family. The Singers. The parents, Moshe and Maryam. The children, Aron, Cilla, Reuven, Sender.”

“You remember their names.”

“Of course I remember their names, what do you think? I practically grew up in that house.” The priest tipped his head to one side, listening. The old man explained, “My mother died when I was very young. My father worked for the earl, managing his forests. How could he know what to do with a little boy?”

“A hard life,” suggested the priest.

“Yes. A hard life, always,” he agreed emphatically. He plopped his hat back on his head with a flourish, meaning he had said everything he was going to say.

“Were there a lot of Jews in this town?” the priest asked quickly.

“No more than anywhere else.” He squinted out at the trees beyond the gray Soviet-era building blocs. “It wasn't true, you know, what they used to say about them,” he said suddenly. “Not all Jews were rich. The Singers didn't have much. But everything they did have, they shared with me. Sender, the youngest, we were in the same class at school. We used to play together. We were like
this.
” He twined the second and third fingers of his left hand together, the fingers thick like sausages. “They saw how things were at our house. Sender used to invite me for dinner. Maryam never said no.”

The old man went on now, absorbed in the past. “The father, Moshe. He was a
shoichet,
a Jewish butcher, with a long black beard down to here. Times were hard. The Depression, you know. They didn't pay him with money. He used to bring home the cuts nobody wanted: hearts, lungs, stomachs, brains. Someone else would have thrown them out. But by the time Maryam was finished with them, they were delicious, as fine as anything you'd get at the fanciest restaurant in . . . in
Paris.”
He looked at the priest defiantly, as if he expected an argument. Finding none, he went on.

“We used to get in trouble all the time. My father was the keeper of the earl's lands, but it didn't stop us from poaching fish from the stream, or picking apples from his orchards.” He smiled wryly with the memory, revealing a series of gaps and gold teeth in his wrinkled mouth. “The lands went on and on. See these buildings?” He waved his hands at the line of gray apartment blocks marching off into the distance down Wirka Street. “This was all forest back then, part of the earl's property.”

The old man plunged on, his pale eyes alight with pleasure. “We didn't have fishing poles. We would take Maryam's big wooden bowl, the one she used to knead bread. We'd set the bowl in the river and stand there with our pants legs rolled up, ready with bushel baskets. When the fish came to nibble on the crusts of dough, we'd scoop them up and bring them home.

“This one time we had just finished filling a sack with apples. It was October, the year before the war started. The leaves were just beginning to turn yellow. The harvest was already in. You could see haystacks standing here and there, the tops pointed, like little huts. Anyway . . . Sender was climbing down from a tree in the earl's orchard. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my father, running toward us down a long lane of apple trees. He was holding a big stick and shaking it at us. Oh, could he holler! I never saw anybody come down a tree that fast. Sender tossed me the bag, threw himself over the gate, and we ran like our behinds were on fire!”

The old man was smiling again. The priest had the impression that he didn't smile often. “I can still see my father behind the gate, shaking his fist at us and screaming curses. I really caught it when I finally had the courage to come home. He gave me a real licking. Beat me so hard, I couldn't sit down the next day. Sender got two lickings. One for tearing his clothes, one for stealing apples.” He shook his head, muttered darkly, “Like the earl would miss a few apples.”

“Were many Polish boys friendly with Jewish children?”

“Oh, no. There was a lot of hatred, even before the Nazis came. People were suspicious of the Jews; they said they were Christ killers or spies for the Communists.”

“What was it like when the Germans came?” said the priest.

“Like I said, first they made a big show, got rid of the intelligentsia
.
Then they killed some Jews and passed a lot of anti-Jewish laws, just to prove they were in charge.”

“What kind of laws?”

“Let me see . . . ” He squinted hard into the sun, trying to remember. “Jews had to give up their businesses . . . couldn't buy food . . . couldn't take streetcars . . . had to wear an armband with a star on it . . . couldn't kill animals the kosher way. Also, the Jewish kids couldn't go to school anymore. That was the end of school for me, too. If Sender wasn't going, neither was I.” He smiled, a lopsided, boyish grin.

“For a while, it wasn't so bad. The father, Moshe, now he had to sneak around to do his job, but he was still a butcher, they had what to eat. There were a lot of poor people. Maryam was always sending us over to someone's house, someone with even less. We'd bring them a pot of soup, some stew, a loaf of bread.” He glanced down at the snowy ground. “She was a saint, that woman. A
saint.

“But Sender and me, we still had fun. We were never bored. Not like today's kids. We'd spend hours building forts in the houses that were blown up when the Germans first came, and spend the rest of the day playing war, throwing chestnuts and rotten apples at the other kids. Some days it was the Americans against the Germans, some days it was the Russians against the Germans . . . some days the good guys won, some days the bad guys. There was always something to do. The day we went deep into the forest and came back with berries and mushrooms, Moshe and Maryam treated us like heroes.”

The priest smiled. “That was very brave of you.”

The old man hunched his coat up around his face, his features almost disappearing behind the upturned collar. “I wasn't so brave,” he muttered.

Now his tone turned somber. “In 1941 all the Jews had to move to the ghetto, in the poorest, most rundown part of town. That was when the situation really started to go downhill. They were picking people up off the street and shooting them. I didn't see the Singers so much after that. You could get into trouble for being too friendly with Jews.” He lapsed into silence.

“What about you?” the priest prodded him, his forehead furrowing with concern. “You were just a kid. Who took care of you after that?”

“That's when I started hunting,” he said. “Rabbits, birds. When the Nazis came, they confiscated the earl's property and turned it into a labor camp. Now my father worked for the Germans. I had to be very careful; you could be killed for poaching on Reinhart's land. He was commandant of the labor camp, all the forests belonged to him. I became an expert at being quiet, at being invisible, like I was a rock or a stump.”

“Sounds risky.”

“Yes, well, I had to eat, right?”

“Were you ever caught?”

The old man turned his gaze toward the little boy, who was erecting a snowman near a row of cars. He had already collected a large boulder of snow for the base and was unsuccessfully trying to fit a smaller snowball on top of it.

“He's going to be a builder,” commented the priest, noting the old man's silence. “Eric, why don't you help him out?” he suggested to the young man accompanying him. Obediently, Eric got down on his knees in the snow.

The priest was sunk in thought for a moment before he summoned up the next question. “Did you ever see the Singers again?”

“They left,” the old man replied. “One day I went to the ghetto, asking about Sender. But they were gone. Some people did that. They went to live with friends or farmers, or they just vanished into the forests. Moshe knew his way around pretty well. He had to travel through the woods in his work, going from town to town. I was sad because, you know, they were like family to me. But I knew it was for the best. One day the war would be over, and I hoped they would be all right.”

The little boy came over to the patch of grass, looked dubiously at his grandfather. “I'm going to be late,” he said. “It's going to be cleanup time.”

“Go play in the snow,” said the old man. Meekly, the little boy returned to his snowman. “You asked if I ever got caught,” he said. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, he was looking up at the sky. “The sky was blue, like today, and cold. There was snow on the ground. I was in a remote part of the woods, where I used to go with Sender, tracking grouse. No one should have been there. No one.”

“Grouse,” repeated the priest.

“A kind of game bird,” he said. “There were all these tracks in the snow. Hoofprints from boar. Bird feet. Squirrel tracks. Deer, of course. A wolf. Even the pawprints of a large bear.”

“A bear!” the priest exclaimed. “Here?”

The old man nodded. “Yes. Not anymore. They were rare even then. But that was when I saw the footprints.

“There was a knoll, a kind of hill, with trees standing on top of it and footprints in the snow all around. Branches scattered near the front disguised an opening. Right away, I knew that someone was living inside there. Someone had made themselves a bunker inside this little hill.

“I was so distracted that I forgot to be careful until it was too late. Angry voices shouted at me in German. I must have stumbled right into one of their patrols. They had me surrounded. Four soldiers were walking slowly toward me, their rifles pointed at my chest.

“They told me to put down my gun, put my hands in the air. I thought,
This is it, they're going to kill me,
and I started to cry. I was only fifteen, you know.

“They looked at my clothes, and the grouse I was carrying, and then they started to laugh. Except for the uniforms, they were just like me, young men out for a hunt on a beautiful winter day. Until they saw the birds, they thought I was a partizan. They
hated
partizans.