Mila 18 - Leon Uris [114]
From time to time we will vote in new members to the Good Fellowship Club.
Ervin Rosenblum, who still works on the Aryan side and has less demands on his time than we do, has agreed to spend his spare time classifying and cataloguing the information now pouring in.
Rabbi Solomon is making duplicate copies of the first three volumes (in Yiddish and Hebrew only). In the Jewish tradition, special scribes write all our Torah scrolls by hand. That is why they have been so accurate for millennia. Seeing Rabbi Solomon copying the journal reminds me of that.
It is thrilling to see this come alive and the belief that the work is important.
I must admonish everyone to write more neatly, especially Father Jakub.
ALEXANDER BRANDEL
Chapter Twenty-one
“RACHAEL.”
“Wolf!”
They stood facing each other in the hallway outside the main recreation room of the new Max and Soma Kleperman Orphanage on Nowolipki Street. Children swirled around them before herding nurses who clapped their hands sternly.
“Wolf, this is such a surprise, seeing you.”
“I didn’t know I was going to be able to come in. I didn’t have any time to write.”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“Stephan told me. I was with him all morning. I’ve been here for an hour. I was watching you give the recital from out here. You were very good.”
“Why didn’t you come in?”
“I don’t know. I got to watching you singing and playing and watching the kids all laughing ...”
The hallway suddenly became empty. It was shadowy and hard for them to see each other, and they were wordless as the impact of the sudden meeting lessened.
“It’s nice to see you again,” Wolf said.
“Will you be here long?”
“That depends. I don’t know.”
Wolf looked about and grunted. “Could we take a walk or something? Here, let me hold your music.”
“All right.”
Wolf tried to think. There was no place to walk in the ghetto, nor bench to sit upon, nor nightingale to hear. There was only misery and beggars and stone and brick without a leaf of grass or the green of a tree.
“I’d like to sit and talk someplace,” Wolf said.
“So would I. We have so much to talk about.”
“Where can we go?”
“If we go to my place Stephan won’t leave you alone. Then Momma and Daddy will come home and Daddy would make you play chess.”
“Sure can’t go to Mila 19. The minute we walked in the door there’d be all kinds of gossip. Besides, there’s no place there to be alone.”
“We can’t stand here.”
“I’d sure like to talk to you.”
“We could try Uncle Andrei’s place. I stop there often to talk to him. Most of the time he isn’t there and his door is never locked.”
“Boy! If he caught me there with you he’d break my neck.”
“Oh no. Uncle Andrei’s bark is much worse than his bite.”
“Well ... all right.”
They did not see each other on the entire walk to Andrei’s. Wolf’s eyes were cast down, looking at the pavement, and Rachael had learned to walk through the streets looking dead ahead to shut out the terrible things happening on all sides. The beggar children were more pathetic every day, and in the last week corpses of starved persons were beginning to appear in the gutters.
Suddenly they found themselves all alone in Andrei’s flat. Wolf turned on the light over the table in the center of the room while Rachael caught her breath from the climb up the stairs.
Now they could see each other. Wolf had changed. His elongated, gangly body had filled out and his white, blemished skin was unblemished and deepened to a tan from working in the wind and the sun, and the scraggly hair on his chin had turned to a hard beard which could legitimately be shaved every other day and the shaky voice was now a steady baritone.
Rachael had changed too. She had been more like a girl before. Now she was much different. Round and soft, like her mother. Her eyes were filled with sadness and weariness.
Wolf suddenly turned his back and scratched his head.
“Heck! This isn’t the way I figured it would be,” he blurted.
“It’s very strange, isn’t it? Almost as if we were just meeting each other for the first time.”
Wolf sagged