“Please come in,” he said.
Adella Greuner and Grandpa Yosef sat at his desk for a long while, but the world could not tolerate such behavior. Feiga fluttered in her bed. The fridge rattled in the kitchen, emitting a series of complaints. Planes overhead shocked the neighborhood with distant sonic booms, the windows shook and rattled, even the walls could barely stand up around the two of them. The Frequent knocked and asked to come back — enough already with the Rare. But Grandpa Yosef sat with Adella and explained what the City wanted, who she must see, what to say.
It was difficult. It was up to us. We had to hear as much as we could about Doll, to fill in the empty gaps, to get it done before everything blew up and we would have to explain ourselves, standing in a shower of shrapnel, facing Grandpa Yosef and hoping everything would scatter and there would be an end to it. We had to get through.
Levertov kept talking.
“He planned ‘portions’ for the gas chambers. He knew exactly how many went in with each portion, the children and everything. They kept the children for last and when it was already crowded they threw the children in between the heads and the ceiling, and finally the babies too. If he couldn’t push them all in, he got angry. That was when you wanted to escape his look. Us, and the Ukrainians, and his SS.”
Six Formacil.
“One day I’m walking through the camp. On duty, not just like that. You didn’t walk through the camp just like that. There was a man from my hut, Yankel Klein, standing there petting the dog Barry. Petting him! And Yankel says to me, completely calm, that when Doll isn’t around there is no sweeter dog than Barry. He was one of those big Saint Bernards that never really do anything, just drool a lot and have a stupid look on their face. And Yankel said I should pet him, he was a good dog. God help me, I didn’t pet that dog. That, I would not do. But exactly one week later, just before the uprising when we escaped, I watched that dog finish off Yankel Klein. He bit Yankel until he stopped yelling, and Doll stood on the side, lashing him with a whip. That, I saw.”
He got a whole packet of Formacil, even though we had agreed on only six pills. He looked thankful. The next day, a horse with a shiny chestnut-colored coat passed through the neighborhood, stopped briefly on Katznelson opposite Gershon Klima’s house, stood up on his hind legs, his coat glimmering in the sun, neighed and ran away.
From Adella Greuner’s garden, the scarecrow disappeared. The one we thought she was yelling at, “Kalman, vi geystu? Kalman, vi geystu?” Peculiar hypotheses were suggested. There was even an explicit accusation against Grandpa Lolek, who snorted disdainfully, “I am to be lucky if I can get ten shekels for the wool hat, and nothing at all for those clothes, which the rain eats, and his plank also worth nothing. Who would buy from me such plank?”
From which we surmised that he had given the scarecrow an economical appraisal but had rejected it. We tried to picture Grandpa Lolek in his suit, haggling over the price of a scarecrow with a rag merchant. We couldn’t. Proof. We acquitted him beyond a doubt.
“Once he went up to an old man to offer him his ‘hospital,’ but suddenly he couldn’t hold back and he started to strangle the old man. He didn’t shoot him, nothing, just strangled him, like a madman. Suddenly he stopped, as if everything was fine, and after a moment not fine again; he strangled him and strangled him until that was it…”
Two Formacil, even though we had promised more. There was no more. Levertov was angry, but to no avail. And the next day it rained hard, out of season. (Asher Schwimmer, having learned from the pioneers’ letters about the strangeness of the Israeli skies between the dry season and the transition season, wrote in Poland, “A land of trespassing clouds / Their constitution of wilderness.”) The laundry had not yet recovered from the miracle of rain when Grandpa Lolek’s Vauxhall suddenly showed up. He brought Grandpa Yosef a wonderful edition of the Babylonian Talmud, with all volumes intact. He’d found a good deal — seventy-five percent off on the whole thing — and he gave it to an excited Grandpa Yosef for free, why not?
“Doll, he fancied himself a boxer, and he trained in the camp. He would get hold of a prisoner and that was it. The prisoner had to hold his head straight so Doll could hit it, and Lord have mercy on anyone who couldn’t hold his head up straight after a round of boxing. But it didn’t matter anyway because after Doll was finished they didn’t stand much of a chance. SS Miete, damn him and all the rest of them, who was in charge of the ‘hospital’ that Doll invented, he would always walk around wherever Doll had been because he knew he’d find clients for his hospital. A bullet in the back of their neck, straight into the pit and that was that. And anyone Doll left after the boxing, this Miete would come quickly to take him to the hospital, one-two. Once, so they said, this was before I came, back in ’42, Doll heard that a real boxer from Krakow had come on a transport. He made a big deal, organized a fight with gloves and everything, on a Sunday, their day of rest. But Doll was well-prepared. Inside his glove he put a little pistol, just in case. As soon as the fight started, while they were still facing each other with their gloves, he couldn’t resist. Through his glove he shot the young man from Krakow. On the spot, that’s that.”
Four more Formacil and some other pills we had gathered up to offer Levertov because we couldn’t get any more Formacil.
One Saturday, we came to visit Grandpa Yosef with our parents. We were strong, fortified by our betrayal. We glanced at Feiga, everything seemed fine. When it was time for tea and the conversation began to slow down to make way for the silence, the dreams, we went outside to play. We walked slowly down Katznelson. In the midday heat only Moshe survived outside, rubbing his hands together, something passing across his face, a kind of smile, as if inside he had completed a quick transaction. The shade from Gershon Klima’s bombax attracted us. We went to see if the trunk had grown any new thorns (someone, perhaps one of the night wanderers, liked to abuse the tree, cutting off its thorns every night). We found a few that had slipped by. We touched them carefully, pricking ourselves painlessly. Our eyes traveled upwards, to Gershon Klima’s forbidden window. We didn’t have to look at each other. The Formacil, the power, the boldness. We decided that today was the day Gershon Klima would take us to the sewer.
We started climbing without a second thought. We skipped easily among the branches all the way to the open window. From there a small jump, and we’d be in the bathroom. We poked our heads in. Before us, inside the bathtub, lay the scarecrow from Adella Greuner’s garden. We wondered, frightened, what was it doing there? We pushed our questions aside to make way for more important matters, but our astonishment kept showering us with its sparks. We found Gershon Klima standing in his room (Not sitting? Always standing or lying?), and before we could formulate our request, he said, “I’ll tell you whatever you want.”