The Keeper of the Walls (75 page)

The principal thing was to avoid being selected for the ovens, which belched red flames and sweet-smelling odors of burning meat into the dark night skies, and into the gray daytime heavens.

B
y July
, Aunt Marthe had started to weaken. She suffered from four illnesses, and, once a week, Kira, in the disguise provided by her new hairstyle, crossed town on the subway to obtain a certain precious medicine at the laboratory that manufactured it. She had to make her journey despite the many air raid warnings that were a daily occurrence in Paris; if outside, she had to dart into the first building she saw, and wait out the alert. And if on the subway, she would have to sit in total darkness while the minutes ticked by. Her trips to Ménilmontant took at least three hours.

One afternoon, when she came home at four, she was surprised not to find Sudarskaya waiting for her in their “sitting room,” the large kitchen. Alarmed, she went to check on her aunt. When she opened the door, a strange panorama unfolded before her. Aunt Marthe, propped up in bed, was drinking a cup of beef broth, the small piano teacher seated by her side.

“Oh, Kirotchka!” Sudarskaya cried, preventing the young woman from speaking first. “I did exactly as you instructed when you left me here for a few hours. Madame Bertholet rang her bell, and I came to see what I could do. She wanted a hot beverage.”

“Your friend is very pleasant,” Aunt Marthe declared. “Of course, I disapprove of people coming here to visit you without my permission . . . but we've had our broth together, and talked about the Communists. I didn't know you had any White Russian friends, who feel, just like me, that the world is actually protected from the Reds by that man Hitler.”

“Madame Soudaire is an old friend of Papa's,” Kira ad-libbed. A tremendous amusement swept over her. “You
know
how
he
used to feel! Why, I do believe that when they were both young, in Moscow, Papa and Raymonde had a small romance. But Raymonde has been a solid French citizen for as long as I can remember, voting for the Right.”

Sudarskaya, who had always lived in dread of Misha, allowed her lips to part. But Aunt Marthe merely raised her brows. Then Sudarskaya, her small hat firmly planted on her head, looking very much the visitor, rose, patting her skirt into place. “It was a charming afternoon, even if you and I missed chatting together, Kira,” she announced. “And now I'll say my good-byes.”

Outside, in the hallway, the two women breathed out their relief. The small visitor's hat had stood them in good stead; just as the fact that Sudarskaya's weekly reports, filled with gloom, had kept Henriette and Alain away from the apartment. Furthermore, Kira was certain that no one from her old life, seeing her in the street, would have recognized her with her vulgar, bleached blond hair. And so they felt a measure of safety in their ingenuity.

The next few days were topsy-turvy. Aunt Marthe, barely conscious, rang for Kira and demanded her favorite beef broth. For neither coffee, tea, nor milk was any longer available in the capital. When the young girl arrived with the steaming cup, the old woman burst out furiously: “Why did you bring me this? I hate it! Take it back!” But before she could reach the doorstep, Aunt Marthe called out, querulously: “Open the window! It's stuffy in here!”

Accordingly, Kira complied without protest. She moved once more toward the door. “Girl, close that damned window!” Aunt Marthe screeched. “Do you intend to kill me with this draft?”

It was the beginning of three days of constant capriciousness, and of a steady decline. Kira took up her vigil by her aunt's side, feeling that the end was approaching. On Tuesday, July 18, she began to cough, and the next morning, started to vomit on an empty stomach. Kira went to fetch the doctor, who applied suction cups to the old woman's back, and who sent her niece out to purchase cotton.

Several days passed, punctuated by the doctor's visits and by errands. On the morning of the twenty-second, Kira was just leaving the apartment, when a troop of German Gestapo officers, the janitor in their midst, blocked her way on the staircase. The janitor smiled at her. “Hello, Mademoiselle Brasseur,” he remarked gaily. And the leader of the Gestapo men raised his cap and inclined his head.

Kira waited, a nameless terror in her chest. Perhaps ten minutes ensued. Then she saw them reappear, their upstairs neighbor manacled among them. “Another Jew apprehended. Well, have a pleasant day, mademoiselle,” the Gestapo captain said.

She wondered how her small gold heart had swayed the heads of the pair of collaborationist janitors, and allowed herself to fall back against the door panel, sweat on her forehead.

That night, at eleven, Aunt Marthe's breathing began to sound like dried peas shaken in a bowl. Twenty minutes later, the dreadful rasping stopped. On unsteady feet, Kira took a small hand-mirror and held it to Aunt Marthe's lips. No mist appeared. And so she went to her bedroom and roused Sudarskaya. “Aunt Marthe is dead,” she announced, her voice oddly detached and cold.

They padded back to the master bedroom, and Sudarskaya instructed the girl on how to help move the dead body so that it could lie in a proper supine position. They pulled out Aunt Marthe's legs, crossed her arms over her chest, removed all but a single pillow, and closed the windows. And then they faced each other, horrified.

“If we announce the death, the authorities will come to seal off the apartment,” Kira declared.

“Worse than that: this Henriette person will arrive, and we'll have to go into hiding God knows where.”

Close to tears, Kira said: “But we can't keep a dead body here! I'll just have to go to the janitor, and beg him to help us.”

“What have we to offer? He's the one who reported the upstairs neighbor.”

Kira shook her head, overcome by the impossibility of the situation. “I used to hate the old biddy,” she cried. “But why did she have to die on us?”

And then, her face brightened. “Raïssa Markovna,” she said. “We have an apartment full of riches here. If they held their tongue because of a small gold pendant, think how they'd help us if we offered them a chance at Aunt Marthe's things!”

Two days later, in the middle of the night, the janitor and one of his friends removed the dead body, presumably to bury it. The next morning, the same man returned to disinfect the dead woman's room. And, in the afternoon, the janitor and his wife rifled through all the piles of Bertholet antiques, and departed with four sacks full of jewelry and objets d'art.

Kira, continuing to buy food on Aunt Marthe's ration cards, felt the uneasiness of guilt gnawing at her. They had just performed an inhuman, dishonest act. But then the Germans, occupying France, had performed worse in the name of the Reich.

She felt she'd had no choice, if she and Sudarskaya wished to continue to hide out in peace, and to eat without fear of being seized by the Gestapo. For she was sure that the Germans were on the lookout for them in their old neighborhoods, where they'd registered for ration cards.

And Sudarskaya continued, punctually every Friday morning, to telephone Henriette Bruisson to give her this week's bulletin on her aunt's state of health.

B
y August
,
the marshes of the Auschwitz swamp had begun to fester with disease, and many of the women, stooping to lap up the fetid liquid to slake their thirst, caught dysentery. Lily, at ninety pounds, was still relatively healthy; but Maryse weighed a bare sixty-eight, and looked hardly better than a Musulman.

Occasionally, in the evening on the Lagerstrasse, they encountered Nanni. Yet they were not able to speak to her in private, as a young lieutenant of the SS was always with her, his arm possessively around her. She looked lustrous, healthy, and even beautiful in the finery with which she paraded down the main avenue of Birkenau. But her face was infinitely sad, and she tried to look at the ground whenever she was near them.

By August 15, it seemed as if Maryse was very sick indeed. Her scalp was covered with eczema, and her hands had swollen, so that it was difficult to accomplish even half of her task at the factory. Lily was finding it impossible to make ends meet for two people. And so one afternoon, Lily begged Malka to arrange another work detail for her friend.

“You'll have to pay me,” the Slovakian announced, small eyes narrowed.

Lily felt new despair gnaw into her heart. She was sure that Maryse, if not helped, would soon wither away. She had no personal belongings to swap with the
Kapo
for an easier detail. And so she decided that only Nanni would be able to help.

Winding her way through the complexes of huts and fences, Lily, understanding that she was risking twenty-five lashes for being in a forbidden area, kept her head bent. In front of the whores' barrack, a terrible sense of shame spread through her. These were young women, many of them, like Nanni, girls of good family; but she'd seen them on the street, their carriage proud as they kicked at the others who, like herself, were slave laborers. Lily felt ashamed because the Nazis had transformed these tender young women into hard, predatory animals, who boasted of their good fortune with all the delicacy of sadistic monsters. And yet this “good fortune” had to be one of the most degrading forms of slavery. Nanni, barely fourteen, had been raped and used, and Lily could feel this degradation inside the pit of her own stomach.

Shyly, she knocked on the door. An SS officer, his shirt undone, swung it open, his face turning purple at the sight of her. But behind him, she saw Nanni. The young girl thrust herself between the man and Lily, and kneeled before him with the subservience of a practiced geisha. “Please,” she begged, her voice low and pleading. “This woman is my aunt. I must speak with her.”

“One minute only,” the man snapped, drawing back.

Nanni stepped outside. She was wearing a silk dress and a long gold chain with a cluster of rubies hanging from it. “Is it Mama?” she whispered.

Overwhelmed by pity, Lily drew the girl close to her, and held her. “Your mother has dysentery. She can't work anymore, and Malka wants something to barter for a change of assignment.”

“I'll see what I can do,” Nanni said. Her face was darkened with anguish, as if she couldn't wait to be away from Lily, away from a confrontation with what she had been turned into.

Lily nodded. Impulsively, Nanni removed a small gold charm bracelet, and closed Lily's fingers over it. “Heinz gave this to me,” she whispered. “But I don't want it. I don't want any of the gifts he gives me.”

Her hand closed over the cool gold links, Lily's mind suddenly turned over, and a swift anger filled her. “They've given you gifts?” she echoed, pushing the astonished girl away from her with surprising vehemence. “Anna Steiner, your mother is dying from lack of nutrition, and we are all working our hearts out, merely to escape being selected out! And you are
here,
sharing absolutely nothing! In your place, another would have smuggled anything she found, to help her sisters!”

Aghast, Nanni's eyes filled with tears. “But . . . Heinz . . . I'm never alone,” she finally murmured, her face crumpling.

“I'd have gone to the washroom. I'd have thought of
something!
Where do you suppose your fine Heinz has purchased these gifts of his ... these expensive, exquisite gifts?”

“I'm not sure.”

Lily stared at the girl, her own breath coming ragged with excitement. Nanni's face was masked with sorrow, the nameless sorrow of the ageless, of mourners. “You know very well,” she stammered in a low, hard voice. “They were unpacked by the ‘Canada' brigade, from the suitcases of gassed women!”

Before Nanni could reply, Lily strode away, the gold bracelet safely tucked in a fold of a makeshift belt she had confectioned from the hem of a smaller woman's ragged uniform.

All night long, Lily could not sleep. Her heart hammered inside her, and vivid images of Nanni in her whore's outfit kept passing through her mind. All pity had been snuffed out. Next to her, moaning in a trance, Maryse lay huddled like a trusting, ailing child, her body racked by shivers. Already five times, Lily had had to help her void her intestines into the small food bowl they had found in one of the garbage pails, and which Lily had dumped into the communal night bucket, and wiped clean.

Left and right, women were dropping off like insects, brought down by the unsanitary conditions, by the contagion, and by malnutrition. Lily did all she could to keep clean, for herself and Maryse. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, at night, with fifteen women tossing together on the thin wooden slats, to get the proper rest to keep strong. There were repeated incidents of broken tiers collapsing, of inmates crashing on top of their companions on the bunk below. Now, to help Maryse with her diarrhea, Lily had to carry her friend like a baby, climbing with utmost care over the sleeping bodies of the others, to do their business on the dank, wooden floor.

In the morning, Lily slipped the gold chain, without the jeweled charms, into a quarter of her slice of bread, and handed it to Malka. And in the evening, the Slovakian
Kapo
informed them that Maryse had been transferred to the kitchen detail. Then Lily went to Hannah, the girl she knew from this
Kommando,
and gave her the beautifully crafted charms. “That's to make sure Maryse eats proper food, not this slop,” she whispered.

Hannah's eyes widened with disbelief, but she nodded, mutely. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, one had no personal use for beautiful gems; but one could trade them for food, or for special favors.

And at night, Lily reflected on how much they all had changed: she, Maryse, and Nanni. She was most surprised at herself. For now, she felt such a powerful hatred in her heart for all that threatened their survival, that she found it difficult to recognize the person she had been in Paris, when she had found excuses for all kinds of infamy, and forgiven with an open spirit.

“
W
hy did
you want to come here?” Heinz asked.

Nanni slowly let her shoulders rise and drop. “I wanted to see this operation,” she answered sweetly. “Are you angry?”

The young man shook his head, and sighed. “Not angry. But I don't like it when you become curious . . . like all the others. They just want
things.
With you, it's different. I think you care about who I am.”

Nanni's large blue eyes, so like her mother's, rested on him in their calm, gentle fashion. In a sense, she had to like him. This was such an inhuman place, where every value had been sacrificed or distorted for reasons of cupidity, that a simple person like Heinz Kleinert, who only wished to stay near her, seemed like the least offensive participant in a world where cruelty was the norm, and torture the pleasure.

“I do care,” she told him softly. “And I only came here because ... I heard that all the presents that we receive come from
here.
”

“And what of it?” he retorted, suddenly Prussian and aloof, his eyes old and defensive. “Do we have any sort of garrison town in this camp, for us to purchase presents for our girls?”

Putting her hand on his arm, she said: “Just let me look around, all right? I'm not going to get in anybody's way.”

Suspicious, Heinz nevertheless allowed her to step out into the busy workroom of “Canada.” Emaciated inmates in stripes and rags, stood sorting through rucksacks and suitcases. Nanni spotted Mihai Berkovits at once, and, casually, stopping here and there to pick up a lady's slip or a furry wrap, wended her way to where the young boy sat working, alone, with a pile of men's shoes. She bent down, picked up a moccasin, examined the leather sole, and whispered, continuing her scrutiny: “I threw a paper wrapped around a stone into the men's camp, two weeks ago. And when you didn't answer, I asked my mother's friend, Magda, to contact you. She worked on this detail, too.”

Mihai said nothing, but kept on working. “Today I learned that Magda came down with typhoid fever, and was sent to the infirmary. So I suppose she never told you. I need help,” Nanni said urgently, tossing the shoe aside and lifting another from the pile.

Mihai's brown eyes fell fully on her face, and she was touched by the intelligence in them, and the undisguised torment. “Why should I help you?” he asked. “You seem to have done plenty well enough alone.”

Stemming the tears before they could spill out, Nanni said: “You saved my life. I wanted to see you, to speak with you, to walk a little beside you on the other side of the barbed fence . . . but you never answered my messages. And now my mother is dying. She has dysentery. They put her on the kitchen detail, and she's being well fed. But the
Kapo's
an Austrian peasant, and she's decided to let my mother suffer for all the years when we were rich, on the Schwindgasse, and her family was poor. So she's made Mama carry the coffee and soup urns back and forth from the huts, with only one other woman to help her. The urns weigh more than she does, and my aunt Lily's afraid she'll collapse.”

“My father was gassed the first day,” Mihai declared. “And my mother was sent to the soap factory, with my sister. We wash with the fat from their bodies.”

With the back of her hand, Nanni flicked off the moisture from her cheeks. She was angry with herself for giving in to tears. Her young voice suddenly hard, she said: “I'll do anything you want, Mihai Berkovits. I'll meet you in the washroom and make love to you. I'll let you sell me to your friends. But you have to help me. You have to send me
something
I can give this
Kapo,
to prevent her from killing my mother. Magda can't help us now.”

The boy stopped making piles of shoes, and reached over her to pick up a child's slipper. Deliberately, his hand brushed against her leg, and she could feel the warmth. “Anna,” he murmured. “Of course I'll help. It won't be easy, but I'll help because we all need our mothers, and I've lost mine. You don't have to treat me like an SS pig, and yourself like a whore. You're
not
a whore; they've just chosen you for that particular work detail.”

“I wish I could die,” she whispered, fervently.

Again his brown eyes fastened on her. “No, you don't,” he said.

I
n the middle
of the night, the lights were suddenly turned on, and the elegant form of
Oberscharfûhrerin
Irma Griese, a vision of feminine loveliness with her thick, white-blond hair and her eyes of periwinkle blue, came striding in, her silver pistol aimed at the ceiling. “She looks like an angel,” Magda had told Lily, repeating the camp cliché. “But she's more cruel than Mengele.”

“Out of bed, you Jewish sows!” she called, her assistants swinging their clubs randomly through the tiered pallets.
“Selection!
Take off your nightshirts, raise your arms, and run one by one in front of me!”

Dazed, their hearts thumping, the thousand women trampled over each other in their effort to prove their strength. But Maryse had not moved from the bed. Lily jostled her, whispering urgently that they had to get down, that time was of the essence. “I don't care,” Maryse whispered, her face so white that every small capillary seemed clearly delineated like a thick river on the map of a plain. “Let them take me.”

Summoning every particle of strength within her, Lily pulled her friend toward her, and stepped off the bunk. She deposited Maryse on the floor, and held her up beneath her arms. “Just for a few minutes,” she entreated. “Do it for me, and for Nanni. Without you, now that Magda's in the infirmary, I'd be too alone to continue.”

Maryse swayed on her feet, then appeared to regain a modicum of stamina. She's a Musulman already, Lily thought, terrified. How many times this week, Lily had washed her face for her, and helped to clean the urine from the sides of her legs. She could remember her young mother, explaining to her in her childhood that the body was the soul's mirror: that how we treated our bodies was a reflection of the way we saw ourselves as individuals. And Maryse was, bit by bit, forgetting who she was.

“I know you.” Irma Griese was standing in front of her, a charming smile on her perfectly chiseled features. “What's your name?”

She reached out, and her fingers turned Lily's forearm over, to read her number. “B-14448. And what
was
your name?”

“Liliane Brasilova.”

Still that exquisite face smiled, and the blue eyes sparkled. Then, all at once, Irma Griese punched Lily with her fist, right under her diaphragm. The breath knocked out of her, Lily was bent in half. “That's for your activities in ‘Canada,'” she said softly. “We apprehended the other . . . Magda? the Hungarian. Who were you selling those goodies to, B-14448?”

Maryse, her eyes enormous in her haggard face, tiptoed up, like a wraith. She fell to her knees, and seized the hem of the
Oberscharfûhrerin's
skirt, raising it abjectly to her parched lips. “It was for me,
gnädige Frau,
” she murmured. Her voice was toneless, a hollow tube, devoid of will or of strength. “She did it to save my life.”