• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 343 0

it was odd not to know on what day they began. She asked if I remembered my grandparents’ visits to T. and how grandfather was never too tired, never too dressed up to race with me on all fours or gallop around in the garden. Neither she nor my mother nor my uncle had played with him that way. She was sorry that he had never taken me to the synagogue; in better-ordered families boys even younger than I went on the holy days and sat with the men. Now I would never get to hear the ram’s horn blown for the New Year. It was the moment in the synagogue my grandfather most looked forward to. It meant that the service was almost over, and he would be able to take off his homburg and light a cigarette. All that was lost. But she would teach me what every Jew must do when his death is near: cover his head, with only his hands if necessary, and say in a loud voice, Shema Yisrael, Adonai elocheinu, Adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God the Lord is one. That was a way for a Jew not to die alone, to join his death to all those that had come before and were still to come.

The next morning we expected Reinhard around nine as usual. He always left T. early to have a full Saturday with Tania, but it was nearly eleven and he had not yet arrived. Tania said she was worried, but there was nothing to be done: telephoning from the post office was unthinkable. If Reinhard had left, grandmother would not answer. If he was still there, he must have a good reason, and the telephone might ring at an awkward moment. The only thing to do was to wait patiently. She would shop later.

The day wore on uneasily; such a thing had never happened before. She decided we would work on our Mickiewicz. I asked to do my new favorite, a poem about the young colonel of a band of Polish fusiliers fighting against the Russians. He is mortally wounded; the soldiers carry him to a humble forester’s hut. Time has come to bid farewell to his horse, belt, saber and saddle. The priest arrives with the last sacraments; peasants crowd to see the hero laid out on a rustic couch. Suddenly, the scales fall from their eyes: this beautiful face, this breast, are not a man’s. The colonel is a Lithuanian virgin! Reciting the word “breast” in front of Tania made me blush. I did not want to think about her the way I thought about Zosia and Irena, though I could not always help it. I longed to see or, better yet, touch her breast directly, not through her blouse, as when she wanted me to hear her heart hammer. It occurred to me that Reinhard would not come to Lwów that day. In that case, perhaps she would allow me to sleep in her bed. Then I could put my arms around her and pretend that she was the virgin hero and her breast was in my hand.

Our lesson was interrupted by a persistent ringing of the doorbell. It could not be Reinhard; he had a key. No one, except the janitress, when she came for the garbage, rang our bell. This was not her usual hour. This was danger. Tania said: Go into your room, shut the door and stay there, I was right about Hertz from the start. I heard her steps, rapid and sharp, then the front door opening, then a loud gasp and the door slamming shut. She was crying and speaking Polish. It was not the Gestapo. I opened my door just wide enough to see and hear Hertz. He was saying Panna Taniu, Panna Taniu, this is not the time to cry, this is the time to be brave and very quick. Please trust me, you have no choice, please let me help. But Tania was crying harder and harder, then she was kneeling on the floor and hitting it with her fists, and saying, I don’t want help, I want it all to end now, take the boy away, I will give you all my money, just leave me here. Hertz kept on talking and quieting her. Slowly, I understood his story.

There was a network of the underground, mostly Jewish, in touch with Jewish partisans in the forest. He was in some way a part of it. That was how he got news, sometimes from the forest and in this case from T. Bern and the men with whom he went to the forest had been unlucky; they had wandered about, unable to find the Jewish