Once (5 page)

I peer in through the shop window. If I have to smash my way in, I must make sure the flying bits don’t damage the books.

I stare for a long time. I have to because when you’re shocked and horrified and feeling sick, your eyes don’t work very well, even with glasses.

There aren’t any books.

All the books in the shop are gone.

The shelves are still there, but no books.

Just old coats. And hats. And underwear.

I can’t believe it. The Nazis can’t have burnt the books already or the lock would be broken and there would be ash and weeping customers everywhere.

Have Mum and Dad changed their business to secondhand clothes? Never. They love books too much. Mum’s not interested in clothes, she was always saying that to Mrs. Glick.

Have I got the wrong shop?

I kneel at the front door.

It is the right shop. Here are my initials where I scratched them in the green paint the day before I went to the orphanage so the other kids around here wouldn’t forget me.

What’s going on?

Have Mum and Dad hidden the books?

Suddenly I hear voices coming from our flat over the shop. A man and a woman.

Thank you, God and the others.

“Mum,” I yell. “Dad.”

Mum and Dad stop talking. But they don’t reply. They don’t even open the window. I can see their faint shapes, moving behind the curtains.

Why aren’t they flinging the windows open and yelling with joy?

Of course. It’s been three years and eight months. My voice has changed. I look different. Plus I’m wearing a rabbit hunter’s clothes. They’ll recognize me once they see my notebook.

The shop door is locked, so I race around the back and up the steps.

The back door of the flat is open.

“Mum,” I yell, bursting in. “Dad.”

Then I stop in my tracks.

While I was running up the steps part of me feared our kitchen furniture would be gone, just like the books. But it’s all here, exactly where it was. The stove where Mum used to make me carrot soup. The table where I had all my meals and my bread-crumb fights with Dad. The fireplace where Mum and Dad used to give me my bath and dry my book if I dropped it in the water.

“Who are you?” snarls a voice.

I spin around.

Standing in the doorway from the living room, glaring at me, is a woman.

It’s not Mum.

Mum is slim with dark hair and a gentle pale face. This woman is muscly with hair like straw. Her face is angry and red. Her neck and arms are too.

I don’t know what to say.

“Get out,” shouts the woman.

“Grab him,” says a man who isn’t Dad, coming in from the bedroom. “We’ll hand him over.”

I back toward the door.

The man comes at me.

I turn and run down the steps. Halfway down I crash into a kid coming up. As I scramble over him, I see his face. He’s older than he was, but I still recognize him. Wiktor Radzyn, one of the Catholic kids from my class when I went to school here.

I don’t stop.

I keep running.

“Clear off, Jew!” yells Wiktor behind me. “This is our house now.”

They’ve stopped chasing me.

I crouch in my secret hiding place at the edge of town and listen.

No more yelling.

The crowd that was after me must have given up. They mustn’t know about this hollow sentry space in the ancient ruined castle wall. When Dad showed me this place years ago, he told me it was our secret, so I never told anybody and he mustn’t have either.

Thanks, Dad. And thank you, God and the others, that I wasn’t able to fill it up with books like I’d planned, or there wouldn’t be room for me in here.

Through the arrow slit I can see the townspeople walking back toward their homes. Now they’re gone, I’m shaking all over.

Why do they hate me and Mum and Dad so much? They couldn’t all have bought books they didn’t like.

And why is the Radzyn family living in our place?

Have Mum and Dad sold it to them? Why would they do that? The Radzyns aren’t booksellers. Mr. Radzyn used to empty toilets. Mrs. Radzyn had a stall at the market selling old clothes and underwear. Wiktor Radzyn hates books. When he was in my class, he used to pick his nose and wipe it on the pages.

I lean against the crumbling stone wall of my little cave and have a very sad thought. Wiktor has my room now. My bed and my desk and my chair and my oil lamp and my bookshelf and my books.

I think of him lying on the bed, blowing his nose on one of my books.

Then I have a much happier thought.

America.

Of course.

The visas for America must have come through. The ones Mum and Dad tried to get before I went to the orphanage. That’s why they’ve sold the shop, so they can open another one in America. Dad told me a story about a Jewish bookseller in America once. The bookshelves there are solid gold.

Oh, no.

Mum and Dad must be on their way to the orphanage to pick me up. Doesn’t matter. They won’t leave without me. I can be back at the orphanage in two days, two and a bit to allow for walking up the mountain.

Of course, that’s probably where all the books are. Mum and Dad have taken them up to Mother Minka so she can buy the ones she wants before they ship the rest off to America.

Phew, I’m feeling much calmer now.

It all makes sense.

I wipe the sweat off my glasses, repack my rags and my feet into my shoes, and wriggle out through the thick undergrowth covering the entrance to the sentry space.

Then I freeze.

Somebody’s behind me. I just heard the grass rustle.

I turn around.

Two little kids are staring at me, a boy and a girl, barefoot in the dust.

“We’re playing grabbing Jews in the street,” says the little boy.

“I’m a Jew,” says the little girl. “He’s a Nazi. He’s going to grab me and take me away. Who do you want to be?”

I don’t say anything.

“You be a Nazi,” says the little girl, squinting at me in the sunlight.

I shake my head.

“All right, you be a Jew,” she says. “That means you have to be sad ’cause the Nazis took your mum and dad away.”

I stare at her.

She gives an impatient sigh.

“All the Jew people got taken,” she says. “My dad told me. So you have to be sad, all right?”

Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a game.

But panic is churning inside me.

“He doesn’t want to play,” says the little boy.

The little boy’s right—I don’t.

I stand outside Mr. Rosenfeld’s house, doing what I’ve been doing for hours. Hoping desperately that the little girl is wrong.

Little kids are wrong quite a bit in my experience. There was a little kid at the orphanage who thought you could eat ants.

That’s why I’ve waited until dark and crept back into town. Mr. Rosenfeld is Jewish. If he’s still here, that’ll prove all the Jewish people haven’t been taken away.

I knock on Mr. Rosenfeld’s door.

Silence.

I knock again.

Silence.

That doesn’t mean he’s not here. He could be reading and concentrating very hard. Or asleep with lots of wax in his ears. Or in the bath and naked.

I knock again, louder.

“Mr. Rosenfeld,” I call softly, “it’s Felix Salinger. I need to ask you something. It’s urgent. Don’t be shy if you’re in the bath. I’ve seen Dad undressed.”

Silence.

Hands grab me from behind. I try to yell, but one of the hands is over my mouth. I’m dragged backward over the cobbles, into the alley next to Mr. Rosenfeld’s house.

“Are you crazy?” hisses a man’s voice in my ear.

It’s not Mr. Rosenfeld.

I squirm around and look up.

I can’t see the man’s face in the dark.

“They’re all gone,” he says. “Rosenfeld, your parents, all of them.”

I want him to stop. I want him to tell me it’s just a story.

I try to bite his hand.

“They’ve all been transported to the city,” he says.

I try again. This time my teeth sink in a bit. The man pulls his hand away. And clamps it back on, harder.

“That’s why those weasel Radzyns are living in your house,” says the man. “That’s why Rosenfeld’s favorite brown hat is for sale in their shop. And most of the other things he left behind.”

Fear stabs through me. He’s right. I did see Mr. Rosenfeld’s hat in the shop.

I squirm around again.

The moon has come out.

I can see the man’s face. It’s Mr. Kopek. He used to empty toilets with Mr. Radzyn.

“You shouldn’t be here,” says Mr. Kopek. “Bad time for you lot around here. If I was one of you I’d go and hide in the mountains.”

Suddenly he lets go of me.

“If they get you,” he says, “we never spoke.”

I understand what he’s saying.

“Don’t worry,” I reply. “The Nazis won’t be interested in me. I haven’t got any books. I lent all mine to a friend.”

Mr. Kopek stares at me for a moment, then stuffs something under my arm and hurries away down the alley.

I’m too shaky to stay standing up, so I sit down on the cobbles. I take the package from under my arm. It’s wrapped in greaseproof paper. Inside is a piece of bread and a bottle of water.

I don’t understand. Why are some people kind to us Jewish book owners and some people hate us? I wish I’d asked Mr. Kopek to explain. And also to tell me why the Nazis hate Jewish books so much that they’ve dragged Mum and Dad and all their Jewish customers off to the city.

I tell myself a story about a bunch of kids in another country whose parents work in a book warehouse and one day a big pile of Jewish books topples onto the kids’ parents and crushes them and the kids vow that when they grow up they’ll get revenge on all Jewish books and their owners.

It doesn’t feel like a very believable story.

It’ll have to do for now, though. Perhaps while I’m on my way to find Mum and Dad I’ll be able to think up a better one.

I carefully wrap the bread and the bottle of water again.

I’ll need them.

It’s a long journey to the city.

  I walked as fast as I could toward the city to find Mum and Dad, and I didn’t let anything stop me.

Not until the fire.

I slow down, staring at the horizon.

The fire is miles away, but I can see the flames clearly as they flicker in the darkness. They must be huge. If that’s a pile of burning books, there must be millions.

I stop.

I wipe my glasses and try to see if any Nazis are over there. I can’t. It’s too far away to see people, let alone armbands.

I can hear trucks or cars, though, and faint shouting voices.

Part of me wants to run away, just in case. Another part of me wants to go closer. Mum and Dad might be there. This might be where all the Jewish book owners have been taken, so the Nazis can burn all their books in one big pile.

I go closer.

I don’t want to stay on the road in case I bump into any Nazis who are running late, so I cut across some fields.

One of the fields has cabbages in it. As I get closer to the fire, the cabbages are starting to get warm. Some are starting to smell like they’re cooking. But I don’t stop to eat any.

I can see what’s burning now.

It’s not books, it’s a house.

I still can’t see any people, so I stuff the bread and water inside my shirt and take my hat off and pee on it and put it back on to keep my head from blistering and go even closer in case there are some people inside who need to be rescued. I wrote a story once about Mum and Dad rescuing an ink salesman from a burning house, so I know a bit about it.

Blinking from the heat and the glare, I reach the wire fence that separates the house from the fields. The wire is too hot to touch. I wriggle under it.

The lawn is covered with dead chickens. Poor things, they must be cooked. That’s what I think until I see the holes in them.

They’ve been shot.

The owners must have done it to put them out of their misery.

Then I see the owners.

Oh.

They’re lying on the lawn next to the chickens, a man and a woman. The man is in pajamas, and the woman is wearing a nightdress. They’re both in the same twisted positions as the chickens and both lying in patches of blood.

I want to run away but I don’t. Instead, I pick up a chicken feather and hold it in front of the woman’s mouth and nose. It’s how you tell if people are dead. I read it in a book once.

The feather doesn’t move.

It doesn’t move with the man either.

I’m shivering in the heat. I’ve never seen real dead people before. Real dead people are different from dead people in stories. When you see real dead people you want to cry.

I sit on the lawn, the flames from the house drying my tears before they’re halfway down my face.

These poor people must be Jewish book owners who couldn’t bear to let the Nazis burn their books so they put up a struggle and to pay them back the Nazis killed them and their chickens and set fire to their whole house.

Please, Mum and Dad, I beg silently.

Don’t be like these people.

Don’t put up a struggle.

It’s only books.