The Devil's Arithmetic (13 page)

Too exhausted to react, Hannah nodded and held up her bowl for its dipperful of watery potato soup. At the next table, she was given a small slab of dark bread. She began to eat even before she left the line. She was too hungry to eat slowly, and the soup and bread were gone before she had time to look around.

After the meal, the
zugangi
were lined up again in what seemed to Hannah to be a totally arbitrary order, orchestrated by the same three-fingered woman. She dealt out slaps and pushes with such fervor that they all did her bidding without protest. Hannah managed to dodge a slap. The slap meant for her hit Shifre, who cried out in pain and was hit again for the noise. Hannah bent her shoulders over against Shifre's muffled sobbing, guilty because she had been the cause of it, relieved because the blow had not fallen upon her.

When they were lined up to the woman's satisfaction, she nodded abruptly and walked to the front to address them.

“You wonder what to expect from now on?” she asked. “I will tell you what to expect. Hard work, that is what. Hard work and more hard work. And punishment if you do not perform well and on time, without complaints.”

Her speech was short enough that Hannah took a deep breath in relief. She was just starting to relax when a man in a dark uniform jangling with medals walked over to the woman. The woman bowed her head and then looked up at the gathering of prisoners, smiling an awful warning.

Standing for a long moment, hands behind his back, the officer silently surveyed them. Hannah felt as if he were looking deep inside her, toting up her abilities, guessing at her chances. Someone else she knew stood that way.
Mr
. . . .
Mr
. . . .
Mr
.
Unsward
. She had the name and could almost see him in her mind's eye, but she couldn't remember who he was, only that he was someone who stood up in front of a group and shook his head just like that. She wondered if she should smile at the officer and whether it might help. Sometimes it worked in school. With Mr. Unsward.
In school!
There—she had it, an elusive slip of memory. Then as quickly it faded, replaced by another, much more vivid memory: little Tzipporah, lying still on the low shelf, her finger corked so finally in her mouth. That image stopped any chance of a smile.

The officer cleared his throat. “You will have discipline,” he said suddenly, without preamble. “You will work hard. You will never answer back, complain, or
question. You will not try to escape. You will do this for the Fatherland. You will do it—or you will die.” The officer turned smartly on his heel and left.

Then the three-fingered woman came forward to tell them about the work that lay ahead and what they were to expect each day.

Above them, a quartet of swallows dipped and circled, twittering madly as they plunged after insects. There was a drone of machinery somewhere off to the right. In the distance, beyond another long row of barracks, Hannah could see a single strand of smoke rising against the bright spring sky, curling endlessly out of a tall chimney stack.

Once again it occurred to her that there was something she was not remembering, something terribly important to her, to all of them. She wondered if Gitl would know what it was, and resolved to ask her. But the raucous swallows, the woman's droning commands, the ground bass of the machinery mesmerized her. She could feel her eyelids starting to close. To stop herself from falling asleep on her feet, she threw her head back suddenly and took a deep breath.

Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed Gitl. Then, without moving her head farther, only her eyes, she managed to find Fayge. She was standing halfway down the line, her face paper white and her eyes fully closed. She swayed where she stood. Behind her was Esther and beside Esther was Shifre, her lashless eyes even stranger-looking under the shaved head. Hannah remembered them, remembered each and every thing they had said to her in the forest. She remembered the
forest. And remembered she had told them stories. But the stories—those she could not remember, and it bothered her that she could not.

She'd seen men running to get into a line behind them during the first moments of the assembly, but she hadn't dared turn around then. Even now she was afraid to look. Would Shmuel be there? Yitzchak? Would Rabbi Boruch, the
badchan
, the members of the
klezmer
band? Would Mr. Unsward?

“Gitl,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, low enough so that the woman in blue couldn't hear her. “Gitl.”

Gitl touched her hand. “Chaya,” she whispered back, so fiercely, it sounded like a promise. Or a command.

THAT EVENING, AFTER ANOTHER MEAL OF WATERY SOUP AND
a small piece of bread, the girl Rivka found Hannah. She already had Esther and Shifre in tow. The other two girls looked as uneasy as Hannah felt, out in the open, with the watchtowers spaced every hundred feet along the barbed wire fences staring down at them.

“Do not be afraid,” Rivka said quickly. “We have little to fear in the night. Any ‘Choosing' is done during the day. They do not run the gas at night. They let us out for an hour each evening for enforced recreation. If you are alive now, this minute, it is enough.”

“What do you mean
it is enough?
” Esther said, her voice rising in pitch. “My father is missing. My grandmother died on that train. I cannot find any of my aunts. Yente and Rachel are gone.”

Rivka shook her head sadly. “I have been here a year, and in that time my mother and my sisters, my
father and brother have gone there.” She pointed to the far smokestack. “My mother because she was coughing too badly to work, my sisters—three younger than me—because they would not leave her side. My father and my brother Saul because they were too angry, too strong, too outspoken. Now my brother Wolfe is left, but he is a
Sonderkommando
, one of the walking dead. He might as well be with them. We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I—I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

Esther started to turn away, but Rivka caught her arm. “Listen to me. Please. You must listen if you wish to stay alive. I know the things you need to know in this place. There is the
malach ha-mavis
, the Angel of Death, hovering overhead. But we can fool him if we follow the rules.”

“Who are you to tell us anything?” Shifre asked. “What makes you an authority?”

“This is my authority,” Rivka said sternly, holding up her arm so that the number showed. J18202. “
J
because I am—like you—a Jew. The
1
is for me because I am alone. The
8
is for my family because there were eight of us when we lived in our village. And the
2
because that is all that are left now, me and Wolfe, who believes himself to be a
0
. But I love him no matter what he is forced to do. And when we are free and this is over, we will be
2
again. God will allow it.”

“God is not here,” Hannah said. “The
badchan
was right. This is the Devil's place.”

“God made the Devil, so God is here, too,” Rivka said.

“
Pilpul
, a man's game,” Shifre said.

Rivka smiled. “I play the man's game. I play the Devil's game. I play God's game. And so I stay alive. Alive I can help you. Dead I am no help to you at all.”

Without meaning to, Hannah smiled back.

“Good,” Rivka said, nodding. “If you smile, you will stay alive.”

“Then tell us, Rivka, about all these rules,” Hannah said.

“First, you may call me Rivka and I may call you by your names, but remember my number as you remember your own. You must learn to read the numbers as you would a name. There are good numbers and bad numbers.”

“What do you mean?” Shifre asked.

Esther walked away from them, shaking her head and humming loudly as if to drown out the sound of Rivka's voice.

“Esther . . . ,” Shifre called.

“Leave her,” said Rivka. “Leave her. Sometimes people get like that. They stop listening. They stop seeing. It is as if they decide that life is not worth fighting for. We call them
musselmen.
It is sad. Very sad. I will be sorry if your friend chooses that, but if she does, I will let her. And you must let her as well.”

Shifre nodded. “I understand.”

“I don't,” Hannah said. “You can't just let her go.”

“You will have to,” Rivka said. “It is one of the hard things you must do to stay alive. To let people go. To
know when to fight and when not to. To know who to talk to and who to avoid. Listen. Never stand next to someone with a G in her number. She is a Greek—and Greeks do not speak Yiddish and do not understand German. Greek Jews disappear quickly.”

“They become these
musselmen?
” Shifre asked.

“They become . . . gone,” Rivka answered. “Because they do not understand commands fast enough, they do not react fast enough. Anyone standing next to them may be gone with them, sent off to Lilith's Cave alongside a Greek. And here is another rule . . .”

“Those aren't
rules,
” Hannah argued. “Those are crazinesses.”

“Nevertheless, you must learn them,” Rivka said. “See my number? It is lower than yours. Someone with a number like mine has been here a long time. We are survivors. We can tell you things. Read the numbers. My lower number tells you I can
organize
things.”

“Organize?”
Hannah shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“Organize,”
Rivka said. “As I have
organized
some shoes for you, and not wooden clogs, either. And sweaters. You will need them because the nights are cold still. And if you need medicines, though we have few of them, even in the hospital—and you do not want to go there if you can help it—you must find Sarah the Lubliner, J11177. She works in the sorting shed and sometimes she can
organize
ointments from the pockets of coats or valises. And sometimes pills. I think some bandages, too, though you can wear them only where no one can see or Sarah would be in trouble. The commandant
likes her. She was a singer in Lublin. In the cafés. He has her sing at suppertime when he visits.”

Hannah and Shifre stared at Rivka as she rattled on. It was like a waterfall of information, Hannah thought. How could she take it all in and be safe?

“And you must never go near that,” Rivka said, turning suddenly and pointing way across the compound to a large wooden fence. There was a black handleless door. Beyond the fence loomed the smokestack. “We call that the door to Lilith's Cave, the cave of death's bride. If you go through that door, you do not come out again.”

“Lilith . . . ,” Hannah muttered as if remembering a story.

“But the most important thing for you to know is the midden,” Rivka said.

“The garbage dump?” Shifre and Hannah asked together.

“Yes. Commandant Breuer is not supposed to allow children under fourteen in the camp. So whenever he comes to inspect things, the children have to disappear. What he does not see does not exist. The best hiding place is in the midden. None of the Germans go there. It is beneath them. Oh, they know the children are hiding in it, of course, but they pretend it is too dirty, too disgusting. So they do not look. Even Breuer really knows.”

“We have to go
into
the midden?” Hannah was clearly shocked.

“Not us. We look old enough. I am only ten but everybody thinks I am older. And you two can surely
pass. You have . . .” She motioned toward her own undeveloped chest. “So we do not have to be
dumped.
But it is our duty to help the little ones.”

“The Germans are right,” Shifre said. “It
is
disgusting.”

“Disgusting? Garbage can be Paradise,” Rivka said. “One of my sisters could not run fast enough to disappear into the midden's sanctuary. They sent her with my mother, right through the door into Lilith's Cave. I can still hear her calling to me to save her, to hide her . . .”

Hannah suddenly heard a child's voice, as if from far away, saying,
“Hannah, look where I hid . . .”
She couldn't think who the child was. Or who Hannah was. Her head hurt with trying to remember.

“She went on the line and was gone,” Rivka finished.

Hannah stared at Rivka. “What line?”

“
The
line. The one drawn by the
malach ha-mavis
, the Angel of Death. The one into . . .” Her face pale, her coffee-colored eyes unreadable, Rivka stopped.

Hannah nodded slowly, suddenly sure of one thing, as if she had known it all her life: “Into the gas ovens,” she whispered.

“Oh, Chaya, not another one of your stories,” Shifre said, her eyes wide and full of fear.