Irena waited half an hour to make sure the major hadn’t forgotten something and decided to return unannounced to fetch it. Convinced now that he’d be gone for at least several hours, she again ensured all the doors were locked and her key was inside the lock of the front door, then went down into the cellar.
“Have you brought the list of things I wrote down?” Clara asked, keeping her voice completely neutral, much as she might do with a highly irrational patient no longer in touch with reality.
This was, Irena realized, how the others now regarded her. As if their situation had not been precarious enough before, they believed their lives were in the hands of a religious fanatic, someone who suffered a derangement not dissimilar to the Zealots of old or Joan of Arc.
And everyone knew exactly how things ended for Joan.
“No,” Irena said, “not ... not yet.”
Perhaps suffering the guilt of being the father of the unborn threat to their existence, Lazar Haller said, “Why not yet? Do you think it will be easier if we wait another day, or another two, or another week, until you come to your senses and make up your mind? It will only be more difficult!”
“Irena,” said Zosia, “putting this off helps no one.”
“You have to think like an adult,” said Moise, agreeing with his wife. “Not like a child.”
“Not like a child,” Irena repeated.
“Yes!” said Lazar. “Think like a grown up now!”
Clara tried to lower the tension. Speaking quietly, she said, “Or rather, Irena, think like an adult who must make a difficult decision, which as painful as it is, cannot be put off because it is literally a matter of life and death.”
“What’s so difficult about that to comprehend?” Lazar said.
Irena looked from Lazar to Ida.
The young pregnant woman looked down at her shoes, as if they somehow held the answer to her dilemma.
“Ida,” Irena said softly, “everyone has something to say except you. Everyone has an opinion—”
“We’re not talking about opinions!” said Lazar. “These are facts! We cannot allow this—” He too assiduously avoided using the word “baby.” “We cannot allow this...to endanger all our lives. Period! End of discussion!”
Irena looked again at Ida. “You are the only one who hasn’t said a thing.”
“Oh my God, not again!” said Clara.
“Why do you torture her?” said Moise.
“Why do you torture all of us?” Tomas said.
“I’d like to hear what the mother has to say,” said Irena. “I don’t think this is unreasonable.” She turned to Ida. “Do you want to have this baby?”
“Of course,” said Ida. “But they’re right, aren’t they? It would be too dangerous.”
Marion threw her hands up in disgust. She was a scientist, a chemist. She held no patience for mystics, those who saw visions, heard voices, divined miraculous signs in the heavens, in tea leaves or wherever they chose to look for them. “We’ve all decided this, Irena,” she said, “and with all due respect for your religion—”
“This isn’t a matter of religion,” said Irena. “Alex was right.”
“Irena, please.” Abram said, “you don’t understand.”
“You’re right!” said Irena. “Or at least I didn’t understand until today.” She turned to all of them now. “I saw a baby...ripped out of its mother’s arms and killed in front of me while I did nothing, could do nothing. I saw that baby’s mother shot to death in front of me, and I did nothing.”
“Because you had no choice!” Clara said.
“Just as we have no choice now!” said Marion.
“But that’s not true,” said Irena. “I couldn’t do anything to save that baby. I would have been killed too. But I made a vow then and there to God, that if ever I got the chance to save a life, I would. And that is why, without even thinking, I brought you here to hide. Because of that vow.” She looked from one of them to the other, trying to connect, as if she were speaking to each person individually.
“But I was wrong,” said Irena. “You taught me it isn’t enough just to save a life, to preserve a heartbeat, to simply survive. You taught me we must live even in the face of Death. We must live! Otherwise, the Hitlers and the Rokitas of the world have won.”
She turned to Ida. “Ida, if there was no Hitler, if there was no Rokita, no ghettos, no camps, no SS, no Major Rugemer upstairs, would you keep this baby?”
Ida looked around to the others as if for help, but before anyone spoke up, she began to cry, and said, “Yes, yes.”
“Then I’ll have no part of this,” said Irena. “Hitler is not going to get another Jewish child.”
“Irena, please,” begged Lazar.
“I believe that God led us to this hiding place.” Irena said. “It wasn’t an accident. And maybe it was for this very reason, so this baby could be born. God will not allow any harm to come to us because of this baby.”
As she shared her deepest held beliefs, the armor she used to ward off the fears which truly terrorized her, the others said nothing. They thought she was truly insane.
“Forgive a newcomer,” said Henry Weinbaum, as if he were talking a suicide off the ledge, “but if there is anything history should have taught us, it is that it is very dangerous for any of us to speak for God.” He let that hang in the air for a moment, hoping for it to be a lifeline for Irena to grasp, so she might step back from the abyss yawning before them.
“Wait a second!” said Lazar, unable to remain silent in the face of the most insane, infantile drivel he’d ever heard in his life. Turning to Irena, he said, “You said you know God will not let any harm come to us?”
“Yes!” said Irena.
“You’re on speaking terms with God?!”
“Yes!”
The Jews in the cellar looked slack-jawed at their young benefactor.
“And God told you no harm will come to us?”
“Not because of this baby!”
“Could you maybe get it in writing?” Lazar asked. “Or is there a telephone upstairs on which you call him? Maybe you could get us an extension in the hiding place, so we could talk to him too? I most definitely have a few things I’d like to say to him!”
“Lazar,” Ida said softly to her husband.
“No!” said Lazar, “I want to talk to God too! Why should Irena be the only one who has the connection? It seems to me the last person who decided so much for a group of Jews was named Moses! Did God speak to you out of a burning bush as well, Irena? Did he perform signs and wonders, produce water from stones, rain down manna from heaven?”
Clara took Irena by the hand like the nurse she was, and said, “It’s been decided, Irena. There’s nothing good about the decision. Nothing. But it has been decided.”
“Lazar,” said Ida to her husband, with the kind of finality only wives can intone, “I think we should have faith.”
“What?” he said. “What can you possibly be talking about?!”
“If we don’t have faith,” said Ida, “something will die inside of us.”
Later that night, alone in her room, Irena spoke to God, “Dear Lord, what right do I have to tell them? Maybe they’re right. To save twelve lives, one must be sacrificed. You sacrificed your son to save humanity. You said it was necessary to shed the blood of the Lamb. What do you want me to do, Lord? What do you want me to do?”
In the cellar, Ida and Lazar lay together like two spoons in a drawer. Both pretended to sleep. Both knew the other was awake.
Finally, Ida said, “Lazar?”
“What?”
“I just felt him move—our baby.”
The next day, after Major Rugemer left for his office, Irena went to the pharmacy with the list.
The pharmacist was an elderly man with spectacles on his nose. When Irena handed him the paper, he looked at it, then back at Irena, assuming she was yet another young Polish girl who’d gotten herself into trouble, perhaps even with a German soldier.
He shook his head, then brought the items from the back shelves. He wrapped them in brown paper, sealed and handed the package to Irena along with an itemized, handwritten receipt.
She slid the money across the counter to him.
He said nothing, merely stamped it “Paid.”
“I’ve brought everything you asked for,” Irena said to Clara after coming down the cellar steps.
The Jews said not a word. Instead, they looked at Irena as though she were the cause of all their misfortune.
“The decision isn’t theirs to make,” said Ida, breaking the silence. “This is my decision. We have a hiding place underneath the gazebo. The major never goes out there, does he?”
“No,” said Irena. “He never goes into the gazebo. He never goes into the garden.”
“Well, then,” Ida said. “We’ve managed to come through so many things, and who knows? The war may be over before the baby—before I have my baby. I’m going to have the baby, Irena. I’m going to have the baby.” She put her arms around Irena, and the two women clung to each other as Ida began softly crying on the younger woman’s shoulder.
“And if anything goes wrong?” said Marion. “We pay the price!”
“If anything goes wrong?” said Ida. “My God, Marion, everything has already gone wrong, and we’re still here!”
Just then they heard a window shattering upstairs and a coarse voice shouting, “You filthy whore! You’re hiding Jews in there! Zhids! Zhiiiiiiids! You’re hiding Jews!”