THE OTHER STAFF MEMBERS SLEPT IN A BUILDING next door but Korczak had his office and bed on the floor above us in what everyone called the isolation ward for the kids who were the sickest. His bed and night table were in the middle of the room with the kids’ beds arranged around them. Each bed had a pail next to it on the floor and all the kids had compresses on their heads. Korczak looked to be asleep, even though his lamp was lit and his clothes were still on. The kids were asleep. It was after four in the morning.
There was a heel of black bread on the table and another piece in his hand, as if he’d fallen asleep eating.
I had crept up the stairs to talk to him. I heard a noise and hid behind his desk and then Madame Stefa appeared in the doorway and watched him sleep before moving over to the side of his bed.
“I always try to nap for an hour before the beehive starts to buzz,” he told her, and I realized he was awake though his eyes were still closed. “When I was a child, I pretended to be asleep and then opened my eyes suddenly so I could see my guardian angel before he could hide.”
She lowered herself to sit on the edge of one of the kids’ beds. She looked as tired as he did. “How was your day today?” she asked. “We didn’t get a chance to talk.” And I could hear in her voice what I’d heard in my mother’s when she’d asked me for news.
“Ten hours and seven calls,” he said. “Fifty złotys and another promise of five a month.”
She said no one expected him to spend ten hours tramping around in the cold and that his ailments were not going to allow it.
“Which ailments are those?” he asked. He was still on his back but his hand was now over his eyes.
“Your weakened heart muscle. Your pleurisy from pneumonia. Your bladder trouble. Your swollen legs and feet,” she said. “Your hernia.”
They were quiet. “It’s not funny,” she said.
“How did the doctor who refused to perform the hernia operation put it?” he asked. “My health is in ruins.”
Go downstairs, I thought to myself. I needed to talk to someone about Lejkin. But what would I say?
“You cough and you complain and then you go out without your sweater,” Madame Stefa said.
“What about you? One can’t give you anything,” Korczak said.
He lifted his hand from his eyes and saw her looking at the vodka and water on the table. “Have you noticed that bread and water taste better at night?” he asked.
“And what happens when someone takes you off the street?” she asked. “Where will we be then?”
Her anger made him angry too. “Who says that when I go out the Germans will be about?” he said. “And if they are, who says they’ll be on my street? And if they are, who says they’ll choose me? And if they do, who says they won’t be persuaded by what I have to tell them?”
“I’m just asking if it’s worth the risk for such a little bit of money,” she said.
He made a noise with his mouth. Then he said, “You know, when I was a child I told my teachers that I knew how to remake the world. Throw away all the money was always step one. My plan always broke down at step two.”
She closed her shawl around her neck with one hand. It was cold. The janitor’s son called up from the courtyard to complain about the light. He said it looked like Hanukkah and he didn’t want to have to tell them again. Madame Stefa went to the windowsill and refastened the blackout paper.
“I have a recurring dream in which one of my boys says about me, ‘He went to sleep when we needed him most,’ ” Korczak said.
“You can’t do everything,” she said.
“How much land have I tilled?” he said. “How much bread have I baked? How many trees have I planted? How many bricks have I laid? How many buttons have I sewn, how many garments have I patched?”
“Sssh,” she told him. “Don’t work yourself up.”
“My father called me a clod and an idiot and a crybaby and an ass,” he said. “He was right. And so were those who believed in me.”
I realized they were talking about something else completely and that I didn’t know how anyone’s mind worked, including my own.
“I know you never promised me anything,” she said. “And I lie awake telling myself, Stefa, you old fool, you got what you deserved.”
“The most splendid assumption still needs verification,” he told her.
“I just always believed that one receives in order to nourish,” she said.
“So what is love?” he asked. “Is it always given to those who deserve it? How do we know if we love enough? How do we learn to love more?”
The room smelled of cigarettes and feet. The blackout paper came loose again and outside the window it was starting to get light.
“Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.
“From seven to fourteen I was permanently in love,” he said, “and always with a different girl.”
The windowpanes rattled and it looked like he was listening to the wind. He gave a big sigh.
“I always think that maybe if I hadn’t been so ugly,” she said.
“I tell everyone, ‘Stefa always reminds me that I’m a miserable human being who makes everyone else miserable,’ ” he said.
She said something so quietly as an answer that he asked her to repeat it. “It’s just hard always feeling alone,” she said.
He didn’t answer so she looked at her hands. My legs cramped from having been in one position for so long.
“I’ve gotten back what I paid in,” he finally told her. “Loneliness isn’t the worst thing. I value memories.”
She stood up and crossed to the door and stopped. “I remind myself that it’s not my place to ask for things,” she said. “But even now my ego gets in the way.”
Even I could see her unhappiness in the lamplight, but he ignored it. “Nothing I can say or do can spare you or spare myself,” he said.
“Always you give up, you postpone, you cancel, you substitute,” she told him.
He sat up on his elbows. “I see my feelings through a telescope,” he said. “They’re a little gang huddled on a polar plain. When someone coughs, first I feel pity and then its opposite: maybe he’s contagious. Maybe he’s going to cause us to use up the rest of our medicine.”
She said she was sorry and that she’d let him sleep.
“I exist not to be loved but to act,” he told her.
“The saint orders and God executes,” she said.
“I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Our God may not have the will to enforce the Law, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t obey it.”
“Whom do we sue for breach of contract?” she asked.
“Rabbi Yitzchak of Berdichov is supposed to have summoned God to a rabbinic court,” he told her.
“I suppose we were never going to find a place where we’d enjoy perfect digestion and eternal peace,” she said.
“Sometimes I think: don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Just listen for another ten minutes to their breathing. Their coughing. Their little noises.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I do.”
“We’re living tombstones,” he told her. “Israel is where they have the baby carriages and the green growing things.”
She made a noise like he’d slapped her and he fell back onto his bed once he heard her going down the stairs.
A BOY EVERYONE CALLED MANDOLIN BECAUSE HE never let go of his instrument, even holding it above his head during his lice bath, died in his bed with both arms wrapped around it. We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it. If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew. All anyone could think about was the table’s next loaf of bread. In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds. We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan. It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand. On the Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard.