Levertov fell quiet. Thought quiet thoughts. We sat silently.
Suddenly he said, “That’s it for today. Enough now.”
We were amazed — so little? We wanted to rebel but something within us did not. Something inside completely agreed and told us to go, there would be time to hear it all. Effi got up first. I stood up too. Levertov stayed behind. We didn’t look back until we’d rounded the corner, and then we ran down the main road back to Katznelson, to Grandpa Yosef’s neighborhood.
The next day we wanted to hear more, but we discovered that Levertov was not in such a hurry. He had enough Formacil for a few days. He would tell us when to meet by the bench again. We were annoyed, but it was no use. It was during the school year and it was hard to get to Grandpa Yosef’s just like that. Still, we tried twice, until Levertov found us, and we didn’t even need to say anything. “In an hour,” he told us, and we synchronized our watches.
We got to the bench half an hour early and Levertov was already there. Effi gave him six Formacil and kept the rest in her pocket. Levertov got angry.
“I need it all!” he shouted.
Effi kept her cool. “It goes by how much you tell!”
Levertov looked at her and at me, wondering what he could say to prevail. His look was hateful, but he simply said quietly, “Two more.”
And Effi agreed.
He grabbed the pills from her and looked around, waiting for the street to empty out.
“Today I will tell you about how he was, Doll, from a work point of view I mean. He was the Deputy Commandant in Treblinka and he wanted to do well, so they would make him Commandant. He was always making plans to improve, to fit in more of the transports that arrived all the time, day and night. Long before I came he already had an idea that went very well for him. He realized that he wasn’t getting as much done as he wanted, because elderly people and cripples did everything slowly. So he had an idea. Near the beginning of the route he closed off a piece of land as if there was a hospital there, put up a sign and a red cross. Anyone who was elderly or handicapped was sent there straight way. Inside there was nothing, just a pit, where they did away with people on the spot. Doll was pleased with his idea. With my own eyes I saw how he went up to an old man and asked him politely why he wasn’t keeping up with the group. The old man answered something and Doll graciously pointed to the hospital. He even got a thank you from the old man, you see. That, he liked. One-two, no more old man. And he always made sure to receive the transports himself, for this pleasure. Where people were stripping down he interfered too, and did things. If he found that women were trying to keep their babies and children with them, he got angry because that was against his rules. He got rid of the children himself. And listen to this: Once I saw how his assistant, Hirtreiter, took hold of a baby by both feet and, hear this, he slammed the baby against the wall until it was over. And Doll got angry and yelled at Hirtreiter that that wasn’t the way to do it, and he stopped everything, even though that was a waste of time, so that he could teach him. He grabbed a different baby by its feet and with one blow, that’s it. Then he told Hirtreiter that was how it was done, with one blow, and he left. God help me, the things I saw. He had strange behaviors, this man. One minute he would go through the camp on his horse, tall you know, and clean. The face of an angel, he had, the Angel of Death, and on the horse he was distant from it all, thinking to himself, clean sort of. And another time he would sneak into the latrines where the Jews went to get a breather, and shoot people doing their business. He found that very funny. There was a man, Itzik Konchinski, whom he hit right as he was using the latrine, and he fell inside and Doll was very happy, as if he had succeeded at something he had wanted to do for a long time. Sometimes he did things where you couldn’t tell what was going on in his mind. Once, so I heard, there was a Jew who came to Treblinka and he was injured when they took him out of the train car. He begged for water and Doll gave an order to bring him a bucket. And they said that the Jew tried to drink and then Doll attacked him and shoved his head in the bucket and kept hitting him with the butt of his rifle until it was over. They always told stories about him quietly, and I can’t explain how frightened we were to think that it would be our turn soon. First the man to your left, then the man to your right, and all the time you had the feeling that that was it. I was there for only two weeks, thank God, until the uprising. Afterwards, this was only what I heard, because of our uprising they got rid of the Commandant of Treblinka and made Doll the Commandant, and that was his dream. That, thank God, I did not see. I was in the woods until the end of the war.”
That was the end of the conversation, for eight Formacils. Effi tried to offer him more, to make him go on, but Levertov refused. He had decided to teach us a lesson. “Same time tomorrow. And bring me a whole packet, otherwise nothing,” he threatened.
We left. We had to find a way to steal more medicine. We thought about substituting similar looking pills and searched our medicine cabinets at home, but we found only one little packet that looked almost the same. We exchanged it for the Formacil. We volunteered to help Grandpa Yosef prepare Feiga’s pills and lukewarm tea and arranged everything nicely on a tray, not forgetting a saucer for the teacup.
Those were trying times. We would come up with all sorts of excuses to come to the neighborhood. After school, even on Saturdays. We met Levertov to hear more of his stories. We stole Formacil and gave Feiga replacement pills. Feiga did not complain but we detected something menacing lurking under the surface of her silence. We imagined Feiga turning blue or yellow. We imagined a multicolored Feiga. We imagined worms erupting out of her body and Feiga erupting out of the house like Godzilla, people scattering. Our imagination spun around the true fear, the one we could not imagine — what would we tell Grandpa Yosef if we were caught?
The neighborhood lived its life in ignorance; Katznelson flowed slowly while we secretly passed Formacil pills from one bank to the other. We felt empowered by the pills Levertov grabbed from us, his eyes glimmering with redness and guilt, and by the secret that went everywhere with us. We were filled with the power of the traitor and the smuggler. It showed in our eyes, in our gait, in the way we held our heads up high. Menachem, the only kid in the neighborhood, dragged around behind us. He was older than us, our undisputed leader, but he surrendered to a force he could not comprehend. He built us tree houses but we refused to enter them, and found all sorts of petty faults in everything he did. He brought Effi new pedals for her bike and gave me books he’d been given for his birthday.
We went to Gershon Klima and asked menacingly why he wouldn’t take us to the sewer. We faced Grandpa Yosef, supported by the force of fear and betrayal, and instead of being ashamed of ourselves, we made demands:
“Why did they move you around in the Holocaust through so many places?”
“Why weren’t you in Auschwitz?”
“Tell us about Hirsch, when did you meet him?”
“Why do you apologize so much when Mrs. Tsanz gets angry?”
Mrs. Tsanz came from Lodz, and for some reason Grandpa Yosef was self-deprecating in front of Lodzniks. A constant tone of self-justification and apology, even when it wasn’t us who had kicked the ball into Mrs. Tsanz’s window.
Our latent power affected the neighborhood. Unlikely events occurred offhandedly. The Frequent gave way to the Rare. A red-capped parrot took up residence in the treetops and for two days squawked from up high, “I’m lost, come and get me!” Or “I ran away, I promised I would!” Then it disappeared. Over at Sammy the greengrocer, a crate of plums was found covered with strange little bite-marks. A great mystery, until they found a small bat and a hole in the wall that had operated in tandem. In the middle of the day, a eucalyptus tree crashed down from the woods into the garden at 12-C Katznelson. We took a book out of the library and from the pages fell a postcard sent from Cypress to a woman named Hedva. Someone had written her a love letter and signed it “Everyman.” Even Adella Greuner sensed something. In the throes of the Era of Things That Should Not Happen, she came to visit Grandpa Yosef. In her hand was a letter from the Municipality. Her dress was light blue and clean. She asked Grandpa Yosef for advice.