Wartime lies - Louis Begley [13]
This time it was grandmother who flew to my defense. She said she was ashamed; Tania should move in with Bern if that was how she meant to behave. Grandfather told them both to stop and asked me to come for a walk with him.
I was crying, and I noticed that he was crying a little also. All the same, he told me crying was no use. Everything had changed. We were in for a difficult time. People would act very differently because they were afraid and confused; even he was afraid. He thought what I must learn was to watch very carefully and try to understand things as much as possible with this in mind. He would try to help, but I had to remember that grandmother was sick, that they were both old and that Tania was the one who would take care of me until the war ended and my father came back. Afterward we walked to the end of the street, where there was an empty lot with piles of gravel and larger stones and a lumberyard that seemed deserted. Still farther off was the river. Some Catholic boys, older than I, were throwing stones, aiming at trees. We stopped to watch. They threw very hard and accurately. I asked grandfather if he would teach me to throw like that. He said that he couldn’t; being a bad thrower himself was something he had regretted all his life. There was another skill, though, that was equally useful. We went to the marketplace and bought some thick red rubber and a patch of leather. Then we returned to a pile of gravel in the empty lot. My grandfather cut a low, forked branch from a tree, peeled it, threaded the rubber strip through two holes he made in the leather, and then fastened the rubber to the fork. He explained that he had just made a slingshot and that we were going to practice using it right then, and as often as we got a chance, but I must not tell grandmother about it, and I must not aim at houses because I could break a window. When I got good at it, we would try shooting crows.
Later that afternoon, Bern came to see us. He brought a bouquet of yellow asters for my grandmother. She thanked him and asked if they were to match her new Jewish star. He also brought cigarettes and vodka and said he didn’t know which was for Tania and which was for my grandfather. Everybody laughed at that, and my grandfather told him he was sure the cigarettes had to be for Tania; if Bern had intended to bring Tania liquor he would have brought champagne.
When the bottle was almost empty, and the Kramers had gone to their room, Bern said that he had been asked to become a director at the Jewish community office the Germans were forming and that he would do it. It might be a way to keep his garçonnière and help us with all sorts of things like ration cards; he might be able to get Tania a job. It would become dangerous to be unemployed. He did not care what people thought; if he did not do it, the Jewish-question people at the Kommandantur would pick some illiterate black-market profiteer instead. The only other solution for him was the forest, but it was hard to make contact with the partisans, and besides, he did not want to leave Tania and the rest of us without any protection.
It was true that, quite apart from what perhaps went on between him and Tania, Bern was now our only friend. The Catholic surgeon, like my father, had made his way back to T. when the Polish front collapsed in 1939 but had not been evacuated to Russia. He had been polite to Tania each time she went to see him at the hospital, but Tania said she