Biederer’s voice shook. He stopped himself, was quiet for a moment. “Everything, everything, he took in stride. It helped. You cannot imagine how it helped. You could look at that man, and while you saw his face, you could pretend there was still a God.”
Aharon shifted in the chair. He was warm in his long sleeves and black vest, and the apartment was getting warmer as the sun grew in strength in the sky. He was sweating. The mental effort of keeping his brain like a fortress, only letting in the information he wanted to hear, didn’t help. “Is there anything specific you remember about his background, maybe something he said about his work? Did he ever mention… Did he say anything about a weapon?”
“Who’s telling the story here?”
Aharon frowned. “I do understand the general conditions of Auschwitz. I’m only interested in Kobinski.”
Biederer squinted at him appraisingly, the way a father does, trying to figure out what his son has done that gives him such a guilty look.
“Uh-huh.” Biederer’s face melted into a knowing and not particularly friendly look. “In our barrack we had something like two hundred to two hundred fifty prisoners. We slept three in a bunk, with bunks three stories high.”
“Yes, I know,” Aharon said futilely. The old fool was going to insist; what could he do?
“We had lice, we had bedbugs, and we had typhus. Food we didn’t have. Water we didn’t have. A place even to wash ourselves—soap, just plain soap—we didn’t have. You think I didn’t mind because I was fifteen? Had I ever had as dirty a day in my life before that? Never!”
Aharon felt a burning swatch on his back where the light from the bottom of the window struck him, scorching like a brand. “Rabbi Kobinski’s work…”
“Some thought he was mad, you know. There were two kinds: the kind who thought he was mad and the kind who thought he was a saint. Myself, I went for the saint. Why not? What else did we have to hope for? In the evenings, he would pray and people would gather to hear him. The capo got tired of beating him for it—he never seemed to mind being beaten. He scared the capo—a nasty Schwein named Gröding. The rebbe scared a lot of people.”
“Scared them? What do you mean?”
“Walking around immune to it all. You cannot imagine how frightening this is. Because the reality,” Biederer held his fingers together in a strong gesture, “the reality…” He bounced that hand, looking for words. “It was like walking on a tightrope. You had to be alert every second. You let down your guard for an instant, and you’re dead. And here was someone who was oblivious! It was a miracle or a terrible danger; no one knew which. And he did this chanting. The first time I noticed Kobinski he was chanting under his breath and making signs all around the room—first on the wooden posts of the bunk where he and Isaac slept, then in all four corners of the room, in the center, on the doorways leading out.”
Biederer stopped deliberately and took drag after drag on that stinking cigarette.
“The capo barks at him, ‘What are you doing there! Stop it at once!’ and Kobinski ignores him. Gröding tries to pull his arm, to pull him away, but Kobinski is a tree. He doesn’t budge, not even his arm, not even a little. And Gröding was not a weak man! So everyone whispers—’the rebbe has magic,’ ‘he’s got supernatural strength,’ ‘God won’t let Gröding disturb him.’ Gröding gets red in the face, says loudly to everyone that the man is insane—a simpleton—and then he leaves like he can’t be bothered.
“After that, you couldn’t see those letters Kobinski had written with his bare finger, but everyone knew they were there. People rubbed the posts of his bunk, the doorways, anyplace he’d marked.” Biederer smiled. It was a brittle, miserly thing. “I’m telling you, it didn’t always go so easy with Kobinski as that bit with Gröding, but many people believed he had magic.”
“He was a kabbalist,” Aharon said, clearing his throat.
“Yes, a kabbalist. Of course, typical Jews, some of the men pooh-poohed kabbalah, even some of the religious. But not to his face they didn’t!”
“What did he say to people? Did he just make marks in the air or what?”
“Say?” Biederer looked at him as if the concept were foreign. “He talked to his followers, but I never dared go over. I was afraid of being noticed. But I did hear him say—and people would quote him—he’d say, ‘The world is a balance of good and evil. It is a physical law. So it can only get so bad before things have to get better.’ Of course, they made sure to teach him otherwise.”
Aharon wiped his forehead. So hot! “What about his work? Did he ever mention a weapon? Or talk about physics?”
Biederer glared at him dully. He finished his cigarette and lit another. “He was writing a book. His followers would bring him anything they could find: toilet paper, butcher’s paper, even dry leaves he would write on. This, too, the men in the barrack fought about. Some thought he endangered all of us with such things. But his followers would always defend! There was one—Anatoli, a Russian Jew. The man was a fanatic. He followed Kobinski around like a dog.
“As for myself, I thought they should leave him alone, let him write. Even though he didn’t have the strength, who did? He worked all day, and in the evening he would write, always, like a madman, as if all day he had been writing in his head and this was his only chance to put it down on paper. If there was moonlight, he would go sit by a window or the crack of a door after lights-out, long after I fell asleep. I don’t know why, but Gröding always turned a blind eye to this.”
“What happened to the book?”
Biederer shrugged. “Anatoli was in charge of that. I think he buried it; I don’t know. Only he and the boy knew where it went.”
“The boy?”
“Kobinski’s son, Isaac.”
Aharon took a breath, wanting to get it over with. “Isaac died in Auschwitz, too.”
Biederer nodded. For some reason this, specifically, brought tears to his eyes, incapacitated his voice. Aharon waited. Biederer dragged on his cigarette.
“In the end,” Biederer said at last, “not magic, not kabbalah, not the greatest rabbi in Europe meant this against the Nazis.” He snapped his fingers.
“Well,” said Aharon weakly. “If there’s nothing you can remember about his work…” He got up.
“Siddown.” Biederer’s voice was menacing. “You started this.” He pointed at Aharon with his cigarette. “Now you listen.”
“But if there’s nothing more specific about—”
“You don’t know what I know,” Biederer said, tapping his temple. The frail old man had suddenly become very hard, dark with anger and other undefined emotions. Aharon found himself shaking, not out any real fear, of course, but from a sense of impending ruin that hovered over him, as it had at Yad Vashem. He felt confined, harried, like a turtle being poked with sticks. Weakly he sat.
“You think this is bad, this little nothing?” Biederer’s watery lips hardened in disdain. “You people! You’ve heard makkes, my friend, nothing! This story…” he trailed off, as if not able to find an expletive large enough. “You wait.” He pointed again at Aharon with his cigarette. “You wait.”