Slava noticed a cyclist staring at him from several seats away. In fact, he had been staring for quite a while, Slava noted belatedly. As soon as Slava looked back, the cyclist turned back to his phone. When had he gotten on? The same stop as Slava, Slava was suddenly sure. Again, his heart started going. “Twenty-five-year-old suffers heart attack on the D train. At an age when others are swaddling children and commanding platoons under Stalingrad, he is felled by anxiety at being pursued for a crime. ‘He wet his underpants for no reason, that one,’ Yevgeny Gelman, a philosopher, said from a low stool.”
They stormed into Fifty-Fifth Street. Slava kept track of the cyclist out of one eye. The train took an eternity to come to a halt. Finally, the doors opened. Slava waited, his heart in his throat. Wait, wait, wait. The conductor began to announce the next stop. Wait. The doors dinged, signaling they were about to close. Now! Slava barreled from his seat and out onto the platform, the doors sliding closed behind him, no time for the cyclist to pursue him. Slava, a rookie, could not resist turning back to gloat at his pursuer as the train pulled away, but the cyclist was absentmindedly chewing on a fingernail.
Slava sat on the platform, alone, his head in his hands. He took out his cell phone, called his mother, still at the Rudinskys’—now she and Aunt Lyuba were best friends, now they’d go long into the night — and asked for his grandfather.
“You making peace?” Slava said.
“Schnorrers.”
“Go into the kitchen, please,” Slava said. He waited until his instructions were heeded. “How long have you been charging?”
“It’s all for you.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Calm down. They’re going to get ten thousand euros, what’s five hundred the cost?”
“So you gave Lazar a break? Two-fifty.”
“Goodwill.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Slava said.
“It’s almost over. The deadline is next week.”
“It’s not the money.”
“Now you don’t want to do it? You liked it fine five minutes ago. When you say you’re going to do something, you have to do it to the end. That’s what a man does. So, what, you’re not going to do Lazar’s?”
“Give his money back.”
“I’m not giving his money back.”
“These people hate you. Because you do—this.”
“Who hates me? They envy me. They wish they could do it.”
“That’s not the truth.”
“Who tells the truth.”
“That’s the truth.”
“How did it go with Vera?”
“They dressed her like a doll for me.”
“So, she looks after herself. What she does—piar, what is that?”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Slava said. “It’s like advertising. The shampoo commercial with the woman whose hair is like after electroshock? And then she’s twirling with the umbrella?”
“Vera sells shampoo?”
“No. I don’t know. It’s just an example.”
“There’s a nice girl, Slavik.”
“She wants to reunite you — that’s all she wants. She’s obsessed.”
“My heart aches, Lazar is so sick. Your grandfather is a rock compared to these guys.”
“You’re in pieces every time I call.”
“I’m a frail man and my wife’s just passed away, what do you want. Do you know how much I’ve been through?”
“Look, do you know anything about how Grandmother got out of the ghetto? How she made it out, how it all ended?”
“I wish I could say something,” Grandfather said. “I’ve told you everything.”
This conversation had become a nightly ritual, a minyan of two, readings from the slender book of Sofia Gelman née Dreitser. Usually, it went the same way — he had told Slava everything — but Slava called anyway. Sometimes a detail floated up through the murk of his brain, and sometimes Slava called just to make sure he was still breathing.
“I wish I’d made her tell me,” Slava said.
“It was because you loved her that you didn’t,” Grandfather said.
Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.
Lazar Rudinsky
Soon after the start of the war, an underground network formed in the Minsk ghetto. We organized contacts between the partisans, couriers from outside the ghetto, and ghetto workers who could carry off radios, iodine, cartridge belts. I worked in a tool shop, where I helped in what you could call a negative capacity. We mixed sand into the lubricant they used to clean their guns. We all tried to do something. Cobblers drove nails up their boots. At the auto-repair shop, they ground emery dust into the engine oil; it melted the bearings when they started their Volkswagens.
There was a neighborhood girl named Ada — she is dead now, may the earth be like down for her — whom I would see once in a while as they marched the work columns back to the ghetto. She was on a detail carting firewood for the building that the Germans were using for headquarters. Your heart dropped seeing these girls: our girls, plus some who had been brought from Austria and Germany. (They called these “the Hamburg girls,” even though they were from all over.) The Belarusian policemen made them walk on the roadway while city people jeered and threw spoiled fruit from the sidewalks. Not everyone — people cried, too, watching these Jewish girls being led to labor like horses.
Ada signaled to me one time; this was March 1943. We had known each other slightly in the neighborhood, but she didn’t circulate with my kind. I was too much a “child of other people’s gardens,” as we used to say. Maybe that’s what made her turn to me for help.
At headquarters, there was a German, a Hauptmann Weidt. He worked in the quartermaster service corps. Weidt had fallen in love with one of the Hamburg girls. Ilse. I had seen her, too. She couldn’t have been over eighteen. God had touched this girl — she was radiant. Weidt was almost three times her age. One afternoon, Ada told me, Ilse and Ada had been pushing a wheelbarrow when Weidt pulled them into a doorway and locked them in a closet. Soon, they heard wailing and that kchyum-kchyum-kchyum that you never forget. They were shooting the girls right in the courtyard. They had made them take off their clothes and shot them, one after the next.
Weidt had no special feeling for Ada, but Ilse, both of whose parents had been buried alive, was nearly mute, so Ada, who knew a little German, which after all is similar to our Yiddish, became like a go-between. It was the two of them he called when it was time to pick up lunch coupons for the work detail. While Ada choked on a pot of soup with beef chunks that Weidt had called up from the mess hall as if for himself, he and Ilse spoke quietly, their language the only thing they shared. Eventually, Weidt decided he wanted to get Ilse out. His rank was too junior for him to do much. The only way was to smuggle her to the partisans.
“What should I do?” Ada whispered to me. “He’s in charge of all the equipment. He can get a work truck for twenty-five people.”
“How do you know it isn’t a trick?” I said.