In the Land of Armadillos (9 page)

“It was kind of you to come,” he said. He tried an affable smile. “We had some good times, didn't we?”

The hooded eyes believed otherwise. She hadn't bothered to remove her gloves, and now she folded her hands on the table. “My family is dead. I am the only survivor.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

The look she gave him was undeniably ironic, but she chose her words carefully. “You may have killed many people, Haas, but you were very good to me. As for Toby, you treated him like he was your son. That's why I came.” He dropped his gaze to the table, surprised to find that his eyes were wet. Her words drifted over him like a cloud. “We should pledge our allegiance to the people we love. Not nations, not countries or politicians. I think you understood this, but only when it was already too late.”

From her pocket, she slid a yellowed and creased square of paper. “The day of the last
Aktzia
 . . . after Toby was murdered . . . I ran back to the villa to collect a few things. I shouldn't have, I had to leave right away, but I climbed up to the attic one more time. It was the only way I could think of to say goodbye to him.”

She unfolded the paper and began to read. “ ‘Shayna Mirsky, the miller, and her brother Hersh. Hammer, the tailor. Morganstern, the rabbi's son. Bella Soroka, the saddlemaker's daughter. Adler, whose father owned the bank. Hipsman, the letter-writer. Glincman, who was Falkner's coachman. Katz, whose family owned the lumberyard. All three Pomeranc boys, whose father traded cattle. Szapiro, who collected tolls on the bridge. Tannenbaum, who ran the projector at the movie theater. Wakerman, who raised chickens . . . ' ”

She went on, but he wasn't listening anymore, her soft, husky voice transporting him back in time to a place where dust motes danced in the sunlight and a thin black scarecrow of a man ravished white walls with blinding color. “ ‘. . . Edelsberg. Melczer. Wizotsky.' ” She finished and glanced up at him over the paper. “Do these names mean anything to you, Haas?”

He shook his head.

“You might know their faces. They are the thirty-six people whose likenesses Toby painted on the walls of your son's bedroom, scattered among the patrons of the Café Blue Cockatoo.”

She signaled for the guard and rose to her feet.

“Ten thousand Jews from Włodawa went up the chimneys in Sobibór,” she said. “But the people in the paintings . . . all of them survived.”

F
or generations, Lufts and Hellers had been next-door neighbors on Wirka Street, a polite name for a string of ramshackle wooden cottages at the southern end of Włodawa. Here, where civilization sputtered out before giving way to the deep primeval forests, Zosha and Zev's parents were just the latest in a long line of Hellers and Lufts that stretched from the present back to the early 1700s, two hundred years of eking out a hardscrabble existence, shoulder to shoulder, from the compacted soil behind the rundown houses that sat on the ever shifting border between Poland and the Ukraine.

They knew each other in all the ways that brothers and sisters know each other. At the same time every morning, they set off to school attired in hand-me-downs, Zev's oversize pants cinched tight around his six-year-old waist, Zosha's blond pigtails in disarray; with both parents in the field before dawn, there was no one home to braid them. Often Zev and Zosha would meet on the same errands, to the butcher, the baker, the tobacconist, the newspaper kiosk, dodging the press of older customers in the shopping streets that led to the marketplace. On holidays, Zosha would peek between the railings of the women's gallery to find Zev among his brothers on the main floor of the Grand Synagogue, usually in the process of being cuffed by his father for dozing off. Until Zev turned thirteen, Zosha was taller and stronger, and she used it to her advantage, secretly tying the laces of his shoes together under a chair, or grabbing his cap and sailing it across the muddy cobblestoned street.

After classes were through for the day, Zosha and the other girls often lingered near the sports fields to watch the boys play soccer. Damp with sweat, his sharp knees bruised and dirty below his short pants, Zev would come to an abrupt stop whenever the soldiers of the local regiment marched by, rigid and splendid in their green uniforms, leather boots polished to a high, gaudy shine.

She came to know the features of his face as well as she knew her own. The straight brown hair that fell around his ears, the gray eyes that resembled the surface of a calm ocean. The round cheeks that lengthened and hollowed as he grew, the tea-with-milk color of his skin. The way his full pink lips smiled when he teased her. As they entered the long corridors of adolescence, he grew taller than she did, and she noticed that, too, the width of his shoulders, the strength in his hands.

But by all customary measures of Jewish success, Zev began to fail. In arithmetic, history, and literature, his grades scraped bottom. At Hebrew school, the rebbe beat him for restlessness. Instead of praying three times a day like his brothers, Zev slipped away to play cards with boys his father called
gangsters.

It was about this time that the fights came on with alarming regularity. There were no secrets on Wirka Street; the windows were open, walls were thin.

You want another helping? I'll give you another helping!
Smack!
Your rebbe says you're as stupid as a golem!
Smack!
Willig says you started a fight with his boy today. Why do I believe him? Because he's the butcher's son, and you're a nothing!
Smack!
Why are you crying? I'll give you something to cry about!

Voices were raised, harsh words flew, the kind that can never be taken back. Sometimes Zosha heard things break, or the blows of flesh on flesh.

On those nights, Zosha would find Zev hiding out in the animal shed, his forehead pressed against the smooth gray flank of Ferdele, the horse. While the dog slept in a corner and a few skinny brown chickens scratched for bugs in the straw, Zev would allow her to slip her hand into his, and she would tell him marvelous tales of a make-believe world called Yenensvelt, where clouds were spun from colored sugar and waterfalls ran with milk. Hip to hip on a tussock of fragrant green hay, they would remain for hours, safe in the close warmth of the barn.

In the year Zosha turned fifteen, Zev ran away. It was the end of May, at the height of a glorious spring. During that azure hour between night and dawn, she was awakened by the stealthy squeal of the Hellers' front door opening and closing.

Zosha rolled out of the bed she shared with her younger brother and went to the window. A man in an old brown jacket and a soft cap was standing on the porch of her neighbors' house, his face hidden in shadow.

She had lived alongside him for too long not to recognize the nape of his neck, the loping gait of his step. But everything else was different. Zev had shed the traditional knickers and the long black coat of his forefathers, the beard and
payess
of the pious. Without them, he was changed, unfamiliar.

At the squeak of the floorboards under her feet, he froze. It was cold enough that she could see his breath, a ghostly mist against the gloom. Satisfied that no one was coming after him, he hefted his burlap sack onto his shoulder and set off down the street.

Zosha was afraid to call out to him, afraid she might jeopardize his escape. Instead, she watched him walk away. When he was no more than a small dot on the brightening horizon, she thought she might have seen him turn around and seek out the window where she stood.

His parents wept and moaned, they tore their clothes. Little by little, she overheard details, late at night, when her parents thought she was sleeping. Zev Heller had abandoned his heritage, his religion. He was sleeping with Polish girls, he'd been baptized in the Orthodox Church. It was even rumored that he was eating pork.

In their religion, this was a sin that required mourning, a fate comparable in gravity to death. But Zosha remembered the hurtful words, the bruises, and the black eyes, and thought,
I hope he is happy.

*  *  *

September 1, 1939, was a Friday.

First the Germans blew up the train station. The day after that, they bombed the bridge that led over the river, barring escape.

Zosha watched as the Deutschen marshaled prisoners in Polish infantry uniforms past her house and down Wirka Street, vanishing into the scrim of trees around the forest. Two days later, hunters found the dead scattered through the marshy underbrush like fallen timber, the leaf litter under their boots saturated with blood.

Watching the silvery bellies of enemy planes fly in tight formation overhead, Zosha felt a tightening in her heart, a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach, and just like that, she knew. This was the beginning of the end of the world.

*  *  *

It was Reinhart who told them that everything would be all right.

He came one day, in his caramel-colored overcoat and his fancy fedora, filling the people in town with relief. Already, people were saying he was a good German.
There is plenty to do here,
he told them firmly, organizing and dividing the craftsmen around him.
Don't worry.

Lawyers and philosophers went to work in the woods, teachers and trombonists rebuilt the railroad and bridges. But people in the marketplace whispered rumors they had heard, old men beaten to death for nothing, women forced to clean paving stones with their toothbrushes, beards cut off with bayonets. They whispered other things: entire towns, men, women, and children, taken to the woods and shot after digging their own graves. Others argued; how could this be true? The Germans would be destroying their own workforce. It was absurd.

Gerstein, the butcher, was carried off by a soldier on a motorcycle; two days later, he was found in the woods, cut like a steer into six ragged pieces. Rabbi Morganthau was imprisoned until a ransom could be collected; it was quickly paid, but the Deutschen shot him anyway. The Lords and Masters made a group of merchants do jumping jacks in the square until they collapsed, then shot them where they lay; Korn the fishmonger was among them. On a hunt organized for important visitors from Berlin, the Germans bagged a tremendous red stag, a record for the district; three wild boars; a lynx; and two Jews.

The day it was discovered that there was a shortage of paving bricks, a work detail was sent to the cemetery to pull up tombstones. Berel Holtzmann swore that when he pulled on his own father's headstone, he could feel him pulling back.

*  *  *

On a cold gray morning, Zosha accompanied her mother to the market square. A stranger in a black leather jacket caught her eye as he crossed in the opposite direction.

She lowered her head. By October 1942, Włodawa had already been occupied for three long years. In times of war, women learn quickly that it is best not to attract the notice of strangers.

Despite her best efforts, he slowed, stopped. “Zosha?” he inquired. “Zosha Luft?”

Lifting her head, she took in the strong hands, the sensuous lips. His eyes were still the gray of a calm ocean, but in the years he'd been away, they had changed. Specks of gold inflamed his pupils.

The air smelled of wood smoke and tanned hides. Plumes of vapor rose like spirits between them as they stood in the center of the square regarding each other.

Her mother gave him a scalding glare, tugging meaningfully at Zosha's elbow. She had not forgotten the ugly rumors of pork and Polish girls. He dropped his gaze and thrust his hands into his pockets. At the same time, a man materialized at his side, calling him Wolf, speaking in an unfamiliar dialect.

Zev roused himself, moving like a man waking up from a dream. “This is Baer,” he said. This was accompanied by a rueful grin, a self-deprecating shrug. “In the forest, we all have nicknames.”

She stared at him, startled by his candor. With those three words,
in the forest,
he had communicated a secret. He was a partizan, a foot soldier of the resistance movement based in the dark heart of the Parczew woods.

“You look different” was all she could think of to say. The child's open face had grown lean, angular, handsome. Embarrassed by the state of her dress, the worn and patched dowdiness of her clothing, she passed a self-conscious hand over her head to smooth her hair, and as if he could hear her thoughts, Zev said, “Leave it alone. It's beautiful.”

“I'll see you around,” he said finally, before he and the man he called Baer sloped off across the square. As her mother hustled her forward, Zosha stole a glance over her shoulder, just in time to catch him doing the same.

*  *  *

Life went on, much as it had before. Zosha looked after her brother, Shimmy, while their parents went off each morning to the forced labor camp. Only now, wherever she went, Zev was already there.

Walking Shimmy to the bathhouse, she would find Zev loitering in front of the cinema. As she traded table linens with a merchant in return for a few rotten potatoes or a wormy cabbage, she would turn to find him gazing at her, deep in conference with a pack of tough-looking men.