Upon the Head of the Goat (8 page)

The woman began to talk. “I had no time to take anything. I just ran.”

“Where were you being sent?” Lilli asked.

“Only God above knows and I hope he is keeping track of what is taking place.”

“Piri,” Mother said, as she came back into the kitchen, “I want you to take this woman and the baby over to Mrs. Silverman's. You know where she lives?”

“Yes.”

Mother had dressed the baby in one of Joli's old dresses, and she held, along with the baby, an armful of Joli's baby clothes and diapers. She handed the child back to the woman.

“You must leave here,” Mother said to the woman, “but I'm sending you to a place where you will be safe for a while. It is a shelter that some of us set up. My daughter will lead you. Take off your head scarf and try not to look Jewish. We'll give you a hat.”

After an emotional farewell and many mentions of God, we walked to the gate. Mother looked out to make sure no one was watching. “Piri, you walk ahead, and if somebody stops her, keep walking; you don't know them. After you've left her at Mrs. Silverman's, I want you to come right back. You understand?”

“Yes, Anyuka.”

I walked with a normal stride several paces ahead of the woman. No one noticed us, and soon I was at Mrs. Silverman's gate, the woman with her infant still behind me. I hesitated a moment, then rang the bell. Mrs. Silverman appeared almost instantly, opening her gate just enough to let me through. I started to explain why I was there, but she interrupted, “Come to the point, child. What is it you want?” I closed my mouth and motioned the woman to come up. As soon as she got close enough, Mrs. Silverman pulled her into the yard and leaned out over the gate, checking both sides of the street. Then she pushed me out. “You've never been here,” were her parting words to me. I walked home swiftly.

“Everything go all right?” Mother asked, turning from the stove to look at me as I came in.

“She is there. What is Mrs. Silverman going to do with them? Does she hide people in her house?”

“Piri, Hungary is the last place for them to run to, it is the last refuge. Don't you have any homework to do?”

I realized then that Mother was involved in things I knew nothing about, and was reminded of how much she was like Babi; when she changed the subject, that was the end of the discussion. But I could not get that woman and her baby out of my mind, and sometimes when I thought or dreamed about her, the woman's face became Mother's or Lilli's.

In the following weeks I met other runaways on the streets of Beregszász. I learned to recognize them from a distance. Most of them were women, some older, some younger, but their posture showed that they were refugees. Their bodies drawn in almost to a curl, they moved fast, yet hesitated a few seconds, scanning the space around them. Sometimes they asked me for help and sometimes I went over and whispered swiftly in Yiddish, “Follow me at ten paces behind, and I will take you to shelter.” I didn't bring them home, but had them follow me straight to Mrs. Silverman's. She no longer asked me what I wanted when she opened her gate, but beckoned the runaway behind me in as she searched the street, and then pushed me out with a whispered “Be careful.”

One day when Iboya was with me, we recognized a boy of about seventeen as a runaway. I went up to him and whispered in Yiddish the words that I had used with the others, but instead of falling in behind me as I turned away, the young man grabbed me, his hunched shoulders instantly relaxed, and he broke into a stream of Yiddish sentences. Iboya joined me alongside of him, and we started to walk three abreast.

“Mother said not to talk to them, just to walk them over,” I protested.

“Nonsense,” said Iboya, “if anyone stops us, we'll just pretend he's a friend of ours. And if we act natural, nobody will stop us.”

The young man, speaking animatedly in Yiddish, told us what had happened to him and to all the other Jews rounded up in Bratislava. He was surprised that Iboya and I did not know about the new anti-Jewish laws in Slovakia, defining who was a Jew. “They are rounding up Jews all over Slovakia,” he said.

“Who are they?” we asked.

“The Hlinka Guards—they are Slovak volunteers in the SS—the Gestapo, Hitler's secret police. Some of them used to be our friends, but the Gestapo gave them boots and uniforms and made them feel important. Some can't even read or write their own names…” He sighed. “Anyway, in our town alone they rounded up close to a thousand of us since the law came out.”

“What do these new laws say?” I asked.

“That Jews are stateless unless our forebears were residents before 1868. They keep chasing us from place to place, then ask us to prove that we have lived in one place for over seventy years.”

“Where are they taking these stateless Jews they round up?”

“To German-held territories.”

“What are they going to do with them?”

“I'm not sure. That's why I ran away. They say all sorts of horrible things like slave labor and massacres. Who knows what the truth is? Germans, they will do anything to the Jews.”

As we reached Main Street, Iboya asked the young man, whose name, he told us, was Jonathan, to lower his voice. “Too many people on this street,” she said. When we were a few houses away from Mrs. Silverman's gate, I walked on ahead.

“So it's you again,” said Mrs. Silverman, drawing back inside her yard after having opened the gate for me. I waved Jonathan in.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as he hurried past me. Walking home, Iboya and I hardly spoke.

*   *   *

One afternoon, on the eve of Simchas Torah, I came home to a big celebration. Mother pulled a postcard out of her apron pocket and handed it to me. “Your father made it back to the train without getting caught. He is alive,” she exclaimed. There were only a few lines of writing on the card: “All is well with my men and me. I miss you and the children. No address for a while, we'll be on the move. With love I kiss you. Ignac.”

“They must be near Russia,” Mother said.

Mrs. Gerber, Judi, and Pali arrived just as Mother and Lilli finished preparing a batch of doughnuts concocted from a mixture of flour and cooked pumpkin.

“How nice to see you,” Mother greeted the Gerbers. “We are about to have a treat.” Mrs. Gerber took a postcard from her purse and gave it to Mother, who read it and then smiled at her. “Dear Charlotte, just in time to celebrate the holiday. God is still keeping us in mind.” Handing it back, Mother pushed the plate covered with doughnuts toward the Gerbers as they sat down around our crowded kitchen table. “Be careful,” she said, “they are still very hot in the center.”

“My, that's good,” said Mrs. Gerber as she bit cautiously into the puffy pastry. “Whatever is it made of?”

“I have been stretching the flour with all sorts of tricks I learned from my mother. For these, I mixed mashed pumpkin into the flour. But I also use potatoes or squash or carrots; it just depends on what I have on hand and what I am baking.”

“Babi once made fish balls without fish,” I offered. “She had all her ingredients prepared and was waiting for Michael to bring her his catch. Then it got so late that she couldn't wait any longer. I remember what she said: ‘Fish or no fish, I have to go on with the Sabbath.' So she mixed all the other ingredients together, rolled the mixture into balls, and simmered them in the usual broth. ‘Babi, how can you make fish balls without fish?' I asked her. ‘The same way I make them with fish,' she answered. But what really surprised me was that they tasted just like real fish balls.”

“You see, Charlotte, what a good teacher I had,” Mother commented with a laugh.

“How is your mother?” Mrs. Gerber asked.

“Rozsi still writes and tells us that they are managing, and my mother sends us whatever she can spare.”

“I don't know how much longer the Stern brothers can bring us baskets from Komjaty,” Lilli said. “The fact that they look like two Ukrainian peasants helps them to keep from getting caught. It's their activity in the black market that keeps their families alive.”

I usually went to the train station when Rozsi wrote that one of them was coming. The first time Mother sent me on this errand alone was during the summer. She had told me that if anyone asked questions about who gave me the basket, I was to say that the man got right back on the train and that I didn't get a good look at him.

“Why can't Iboya do it?” I had asked fearfully.

“Because you are younger and smaller and won't be noticed as easily.”

When I met the 7:30 a.m. train from Komjaty that morning, my heart was pounding in fright. Shimi Stern was the third person off the train. He spotted me instantly and put down his bundles, hunching over them as though he were looking for something. As soon as I got close, he straightened up and stepped away, leaving a basket on the platform. I picked it up and he walked right past me with no sign of recognition. The basket was very heavy; a man's tweed sport jacket was pulled through the handle and covered the contents. I hiked it up on my right arm and let the weight rest on my hips as I walked home. Mother, waiting at the gate, took the basket from me, and together we walked into the kitchen. After Mother had hung the sport jacket in Father's wardrobe, she emptied the contents of the basket on the table—jars filled with lekvár, raspberry jam, and egg yolks; a small sack of barley and one of yellow dried peas. After that first time, meeting the train every few weeks became a game.

Lilli's remark about the possibility of the Stern brothers' being caught was prophetic, though. A few days after the Gerbers' visit, I came home from school to find Shimi in a gray prison uniform and a policeman sitting on our porch, each engrossed in a plate of food. Mother was standing over them on the kitchen threshold.

“Come, Piri, you look hungry; I'll fix you a plate, too,” Mother said nonchalantly as she walked with me into the kitchen.

“You mustn't ask questions,” she said as she handed me a plate of mashed potatoes covered with giblet gravy. We both went back to the porch, and I sat down next to the men.

Shimi looked up from his empty plate and smiled. “How is the schoolgirl?”

“Are you in jail?” The question slipped out before I had thought.

“Yes, Piri, I'll have to wait for a trial. I was allowed a visit to have some of your Mother's good cooking.”

I was about to ask another question when I remembered Mother's warning, so I just nodded at his comment and continued to swallow my potatoes in silence, noticing, though, that there were slivers of chicken on the policeman's plate. When the policeman finished, he stood up and motioned to Shimi, who stood up also. Then he handcuffed Shimi; they both thanked Mother for the dinner, and the policeman led Shimi away.

As soon as they had disappeared, Lilli came up from the back yard.

“What do you think will happen to him?” she asked Mother.

“I think that they'll let him go. They can't lock up everybody who has a few extra ration coupons.”

“If they caught me with one of the baskets, would they put me in jail, too?”

“No, but I think this policeman would have liked to take Lilli to jail.” Mother and Lilli both laughed their grown-up laughs.

“Why did you give the policeman meat?” I asked enviously.

“So that he'll be tempted to bring Shimi for another visit.”

Shimi did come again a few days later, but this time he came alone.

“How did you get out?” Mother asked.

“I talked myself out.”

“You ought to give it up, Shimi,” Mother said.

“And do what? I have no other way to make a living.”

He asked for his sport jacket. Mother put a plate of soup on the table for him and told me to get the jacket from Father's wardrobe. When I returned with the jacket and handed it to Shimi, he pushed the soup dish aside and asked me for a pair of scissors. I got the one from Mother's sewing basket; he took it and proceeded to cut open the lining around one of the sleeves of the jacket. Pulling out the shoulder pad, he looked up to make sure that he had our attention and called to Lilli, “You are the one who loves to bake, how would you like some coupons for flour?” Lilli came into the kitchen as Shimi opened the shoulder padding, exposing the small blue and white coupons. “How much would you like? Ten kilos?”

Mother drew in her breath. “Shimi, you can't afford to be so generous.”

At Mother's comment, Shimi laughed and winked at me. “You earned it for bringing the jacket here.”

“I insist on paying you the going price,” Mother said.

“Rise, you have paid me a hundred times over.”

Lilli took the coupons, stuck them inside the cover of her book, and gave Shimi a kiss on the cheek. In the winter that followed we were all grateful to him for that extra flour.

11

I
BOYA STARTED
to spend more and more time away from home. She would go to her Red Cross meetings and afterward stay out with other teen-agers. I missed not having her there with me while I did my lessons.

One day, walking to school, Iboya confided that she did not go to her Red Cross meetings every time she said that she was going there. She had been attending Zionist Club meetings with our aunt Lujza. She asked me if I wanted to go to a meeting with her some night. I wanted to go with Iboya and to be with Lujza and her friends, but I did not like to lie to Mother; I knew that she would disapprove, feeling the Zionist work was too dangerous for us.

“I'll think about it,” I said.

“We'll tell Mother we're going to the cinema,” Iboya continued, assuming that I had agreed to go. I didn't say anything.

A few nights later, Iboya told Mother that she was taking me to see
The Little Colonel
with Shirley Temple. We left the house and walked to the fur store where Lujza worked. She was waiting for us, and we walked quickly to the meeting place. As we went into the courtyard on Langel Street, it was just turning dusk, but inside the courtyard it was dark. Looking about, Lujza urged, “Follow me, and step inside immediately.” She went down the path to the last house and rapped on the door in code. It opened, we rushed in, and the door closed behind us.