The Storyteller (32 page)

Rubin nodded at me and slipped off his apron. He had arranged with my father to leave through the back door of the bakery, but he wasn’t going to announce his departure, lest someone else see it as a special favor. I stepped up beside my father and began to expertly rip pieces of dough and shape them into batards. “How was work today?” he asked.

I shrugged. “The same. What news have you had about Majer?”

My father shook his head. “Nothing. But no news is good news.”

And that was all we said. Even talking took too much energy when we had a set number of loaves to produce before the transport to the warehouse. I thought instead of what it used to be like inside my father’s own bakery, how sometimes he would sing in a scratchy baritone and how Basia, at the register, would say he was scaring away customers. I remembered the way the light would slant inside at about four thirty in
the summer, when the sun was beginning to slip behind the buildings across the street; how I would curl up in the padded window seat with one of my schoolbooks and doze off, my stomach full from the roll my father had made me, cinnamon sugar dusting my skirt like glitter. How he would shake me awake, asking what he’d done to deserve such a lazy girl, smiling the whole time so that I knew he meant the exact opposite.

And I thought of Majer, who had just learned to say my name.

When it was nearly time for us to load the loaves into baskets and transport them to Jakuba Street, the door opened, letting in a flickering tongue of cold air. Rubin walked back into the bakery, his hands buried in his pockets, his chin ducked into the scarf wrapped around his neck. “Rubin?” I said, my stomach flipping. If he was here, it could only be to tell us something awful.

He shook his head. “Nothing’s changed,” Rubin said. “Basia and your mother are home now with Majer.” He turned to my father and shrugged. “It was doing me no good to sit around there.”

“Then grab a basket,” my father said, squeezing Rubin’s shoulder.

Rubin and I and the other bakery employees began to load up the bread from the wire racks where it cooled. It was backbreaking work—loaves weigh more than you’d think when packed tightly together. I ferried baskets from the bakery into the cart that was pulled up to the front door. Three little boys gathered on the stoop across the street. They were shivering, but they stood in the snow, stamping their feet, for as long as we were out there. They could smell the steam and the flour, which was the next best thing to eating the bread itself.

When it was full, my father walked behind the cart and pushed, while two of the stronger employees grabbed the yoke in the front to tug. He motioned to me to walk beside him, because I hadn’t the strength to pull. “Oh!” I cried out, remembering that I’d left my scarf wrapped around the neck of a chair inside. “I’ll be right back.” I ran into the bakery again to find Rubin still inside. He had unbuttoned his coat partway and was slipping a loaf beneath his clothing.

Our eyes met.

Bread smuggling was a crime. So was any speculation on the black
market for foodstuffs. But occasionally people would sell their rations on the black market, usually because something tragic made it necessary.

“Minka,” Rubin said evenly. “You saw nothing.”

I nodded. I had to. Because if I turned Rubin in to my father, he would look the other way. And if Rubin was caught trading that bread for something else and it was discovered that my father had been in on the theft, he could be punished, too.

As the cart creaked toward Jakuba Street, with a plume of steam rising from the bread and teasing our nostrils, Rubin disappeared. One minute he was walking behind me; the next, he was gone. My father did not comment, which made me wonder if maybe he already knew what I was trying so hard not to tell him.

 • • • 

I lied to my father and told him I had to give Darija a book I had borrowed and would meet him at our house before curfew. Instead, I went to the spot in town where I had seen the deals happening between smugglers and thieves, hoping to catch Rubin before he did something stupid. At nightfall, when the sky was gray and blending with the cobblestones and you could not be sure if what you were seeing was real, those who were desperate moved through the shadows, willing to trade their food, their jewels, their souls.

It was easy to find Basia’s husband, with his red beard and the loaf of bread wrapped in brown paper. “Rubin!” I cried out. “Wait!” He looked up at me, as did the man with the hollow black eyes who was taking the package from him.

One moment the parcel was there, and the next it was hidden, slipped somewhere in the ratty folds of the other man’s coat.

“Whatever you’re doing,” I begged, grabbing Rubin’s arm, “don’t. Basia wouldn’t want you to.”

Rubin shrugged me off. “You’re a child, Minka. You don’t know anything.”

But I wasn’t a child. There were none left in this ghetto, really. We had
all grown up by default. Even a baby like Majer was not a child, because he would have no memory of a life that wasn’t like this one.

“Get rid of the girl,” the man hissed. “Or the deal’s off.”

I ignored him. “What could possibly be worth your own life?”

Rubin, who had kissed me on the forehead the night he got engaged to Basia and told me he had always wanted a little sister; who had found me a copy of
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
written in German for my last birthday; who had promised me he would interview any boy who dared to ask me out on a date—Rubin shoved me away so hard that I fell down.

My woolen stockings tore. Sitting up, I rubbed my knee where I had scraped it on the cobblestones. I watched the man press a small brown packet into Rubin’s palm.

At the very same instant, there was a shout, and a whistle, and suddenly Rubin and the other man were surrounded by three soldiers. “Minka!” Rubin shouted, and he threw the bag at me.

I caught it just as he was shoved to the ground. The butt of a rifle was smacked into the side of Rubin’s head, and I started to run.

I did not stop—not when I reached the bridge over Zgierska Street, not even when I knew that none of the soldiers was pursuing me. Instead, I flew back home, burst through the doors, and collapsed into my mother’s arms. Sobbing, I told her about Rubin. Basia, who was standing in the doorway with a wailing Majer, started to scream.

It was then that I remembered the package I was still clutching. I held out my hand, and my fingers opened like the petals of a rose.

My mother cut the twine with a kitchen knife. The paper, waxy and mottled, fell away to reveal a tiny vial of medicine.

What could possibly be worth your own life?
I had pleaded.

His son’s.

 • • • 

Information in the ghetto traveled now like a wisteria vine: twisted, convoluted, and blooming from time to time with unlikely bursts of color. It
was through this network that we learned Rubin had been put in prison. Yet even though Basia went daily to see him, she was not allowed in.

My father tried to use every business connection he had outside the ghetto to find information about Rubin, or better yet, to bring him home. But the connections that had gotten me into Catholic school back then were meaningless now. Unless my father happened to be friends with an SS officer, Rubin was going to remain in jail.

It made me think of Darija’s policeman, the one from the Stuttgart Ballet. There was no guarantee that he would be in a position to help, and yet, he had been a name in a sea of German uniforms. But Darija had burned his card, and so even that tiny spark of possibility was lost to me.

We did not know what would happen to Rubin, yet earlier that month, Chairman Rumkowski had issued a statement: thieves and criminals would be sent to do manual labor in Germany. It was the Eldest’s way of removing the riffraff from our community. And yet, who would ever have thought of Rubin as riffraff? I wondered how many people in prison were actually criminals at all.

The thought of Rubin being shipped away left Basia inconsolable, even though she had Majer—who had improved quickly once he’d started taking the medicine—to think of. One night she slipped into my room. It was just after 3:00 a.m., and I immediately assumed something was wrong with the baby. “What is it?”

“I need your help,” Basia said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re smart.”

It was rare for Basia to admit she needed anything from me, much less my intelligence. I sat up in bed. “You’re thinking of doing something stupid,” I guessed.

“Not stupid. Necessary.”

That reminded me of Rubin, selling the bread. Angry, I stared at her. “Do either of you even
care
that you have a little boy who depends on you? What if you wind up being arrested, too?”

“That’s why I’m asking
you
for help,” Basia said. “Please, Minka.”

“You’re Rubin’s wife. If
you
can’t get into the prison to see him, there’s nothing
I’ll
be able to do.”

“I know,” Basia said softly. “But that’s not who I’m going to see.”

 • • • 

Chaim Rumkowski’s reputation in the ghetto sat squarely on the fine line between love and hate. You had to publicly admire the chairman or your life could be hell, since he was the one who granted favors, housing, and food. But you also had to wonder about a man who had willingly agreed to deal with the Germans, to starve his own people, and to explain away the horrible conditions we were living in by saying at least we were alive.

There were rumors, too, that Rumkowski had a weakness for pretty girls. Which was exactly what Basia and I were counting on.

It hadn’t been hard to get my mother to watch Majer by explaining that Basia was once again going to try to get into the prison to see her husband. It made sense, too, that she would want to dress in her best outfit and style her hair to look as pretty as she could for her husband. I didn’t lie to my mother; I just neglected to mention that our destination was not the prison but instead Chairman Rumkowski’s office.

There was nothing I could say that my sister could not have said herself to talk her way into a private audience with the Eldest of the Jews, but I understood why she wanted me there. For courage, going in; and for support, going out.

His office looked palatial compared to the cramped quarters of our apartment or the bakery. He had staff, of course. His secretary—a woman who smelled of perfume, instead of grime and smoke, like us—took one look at me and flicked a glance at a Jewish policeman standing like a sentry in front of a closed door. “The chairman isn’t in,” she said.

Rumkowski spent a lot of time traveling around the ghetto—having schoolchildren paraded around in front of him, giving speeches, officiating at wedding ceremonies, or visiting the
Fabriken
that he thought would make us indispensable to the Germans. So it was not impossible
that he would not be present when Basia and I came to his headquarters. But we had been sitting in the cold for hours, and had seen the chairman enter the building surrounded by an entourage no more than fifteen minutes ago.

He was easily recognizable, with his shock of white hair and his round black glasses, his heavy wool coat with its yellow star on the sleeve. It was that emblem that had made me grab Basia’s hand outside when she shivered as he passed. “You see,” I whispered. “In the end he’s no different than you or me.”

So I looked the secretary in the eye and said, “You’re lying.”

Her eyebrows rose. “The chairman isn’t in,” she repeated. “And if he were, he would not see you without an appointment. And he does not have any openings for the next month.”

I knew this, too, was a lie, because I had heard her on the telephone arrange a meeting with the head of the Provisioning Department tomorrow morning at nine. I opened my mouth to say so, but Basia elbowed me in the ribs. “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping forward and averting her gaze. “I think you may have dropped these?”

She held out a pair of earrings. I knew that the secretary had not dropped these. They had, in fact, been screwed into my sister’s ears when she dressed for our outing. They were a beautiful pair of pearls that had been a wedding gift from Rubin. “Basia!” I gasped. “You can’t!”

She smiled at the secretary and spoke through her teeth to me. “Shut
up,
Minka.”

The woman pursed her lips, then plucked the earrings out of my sister’s hand. “No promises,” she said.

The secretary walked toward the closed office door. She was wearing silk stockings, which amazed me. I couldn’t wait to tell Darija that I had seen a Jew looking just as fine as any German lady. She knocked, and a moment later we heard a deep voice rumbling through the door, telling her to enter.

With a glance back at us, she slipped inside.

“What are you going to say to him?” Basia whispered.

We had decided that I would do all the talking. Basia was there as a pretty distraction, as the dutiful wife—but she was afraid that she would grow tongue-tied if she tried to explain why we were there.

“I don’t even know if we’ll get in,” I replied.

I had a plan. I was going to ask the chairman to set Rubin free in time for his wedding anniversary, next week, so that he could celebrate with his wife. That way he would be seen as an advocate of true love, and if Chaim Rumkowski loved anything, it was his own image in the eyes of his people.

The door swung open, and the secretary walked toward us. “You have five minutes,” she announced.

We started forward, holding hands, but the secretary grasped my upper arm. “
She
can go in,” the woman said. “Not
you.
”

“But—” Basia looked wildly over her shoulder at me.

“Beg him,” I urged. “Get down on your knees.”

Lifting her chin, Basia nodded and walked through the door.

As the secretary sat down again and began to type, I stood nervously in the center of the anteroom. The policeman caught my eye and immediately looked away.

Twenty-two minutes after my sister had entered the private office of the Eldest of the Jews, she stepped outside. Her blouse was untucked in the back. Her red lipstick, which I had borrowed from Darija, was gone except for a smear in the left corner.