Wartime lies - Louis Begley [15]
I began to spend all the time when grandfather and grandmother did not need me with Irena or the older boys in the building. There was no school for Jews anymore. The boys and I played hide-and-seek in the lumberyard at the end of the street. No workmen ever seemed to be there. We built a shack where we could sit when it rained or when we wanted to talk. We talked about women; they explained how one could shove it in between a girl’s legs so she would bleed or into her rear end. In either case, it had to hurt. Women bled every month anyway. They used paper to stop it, but sometimes they couldn’t. The blood was called kurwa. The worst insult was to call somebody kurwamać or kurwysyn. That was mother or son of that blood. You could shove it into a woman when she was bleeding and women liked it, but it was a very dirty thing to do. The boys wanted to know if I had already shoved it into Irena. One of them had seen her in the latrine. They thought I should try, when she was asleep. All I had to worry about was the blood that her mother would see in the morning. There was a song that could be adapted to the name of each of us and to the name of each girl we knew. They would sing it about Irena and me: Maciek, Maciek, an officer made Irena an offer, I will shove in my two-meter, you will bleed a whole liter. She cries it’s hard, it’s hard, but this just makes him fart. She cries now I bleed, but he pays no heed. We marched up and down an alley in the lumberyard, taking turns being in the lead and being named in the song with a girl whom one of us was thought to like or who was in his family.
The empty lot and the lumberyard were also, after they got out of their school, the territory of many Catholic boys. They played tag ball and practiced throwing stones at trees, just as they had the day grandfather and I had watched them. When they wanted a space we were in, they would yell that all Jews and other garbage must disappear. We began to throw stones at one another. I would use my slingshot once or twice and then run away. The older boys stayed and fought. I was discovering that I liked to hurt others but was afraid of being hurt myself.
One day, the Catholic boys came in much greater numbers and said they would kill us. It would be a permanent Jew curfew. They had big rocks, the size of fists, and sticks with nails in them. From then on, we went to the lumberyard only during their school hours. We would urinate on the piles of stones they used. It served them right to get Jewish piss on their hands.
I was reading the books of Karl May. Bern had brought them to me, saying they were just the thing to fill my time when grandfather was so busy. Old Shatterhand had no fear of Indians; he liked and understood them very well, and yet he killed them pitilessly. Laughing, Bern pointed out to me that Old Shatterhand often killed fifteen redskins in a row, although his Colt 45 only held six bullets. I was not discouraged by Bern’s scoffing. Probably, May did not bother mentioning each time Old Shatterhand reloaded. Irena liked these books too. When we played, she would be the only squaw left alive in a village where I had just exterminated all the braves. She would plead to be spared; she deserved to be punished for the crimes of her tribe, but she was very young and did not want to die. I would tie her up, sometimes to the chair, and sometimes spread-eagle on Tania’s couch. Then we would argue about whether she should be tortured, for instance by having the soles of her feet burned, or whipped with my lasso, or released at once to become my servant. It was lucky that Irena looked like a squaw. She had black hair and black eyes and a broad nose. She wasn’t very big; I was almost as tall as she and I could wrestle her down when we fought.
Irena found a book called In the Opium Den that her father kept in the back of his shop. We read it in Tania’s and my room, where nobody could see us. A German living in China uses opium. He smokes it lying on a low couch, dressed only in a silk kimono. The German