“HEY,” JIRI SAYS, “WANT TO hear a joke?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Okay,” Jiri says, leaning on his rake. “So, two Jewish kids are walking along a street in Prague, when two guys from the SS approach them. They stop the Jews and ask, ‘Who started the war?’ The Jewish kids answer just like they were taught to. ‘The Jews,’ they say. The SS soldiers are satisfied with the answer and start walking away from the boys. But then they hear the boys say something and laugh, so the Nazis come back and say, ‘What did you say? Why are you laughing?’ So one of the Jewish boys says, ‘And the bicyclists.’ The soldiers, very confused, ask, ‘Why the bicyclists?’ So the boy shrugs his shoulders and replies, ‘I don’t know. Why the Jews?’ ”
I smile, but don’t really laugh.
“Don’t you get it?” Jiri asks.
“I think I do,” I say, and start laughing a little.
“Hey, Kapr,” Jiri says, “Misha doesn’t think the bicyclists joke is funny.”
“Because it isn’t,” Kapr says without looking up from his rake.
“What are you talking about?” Jiri says. “It’s hilarious.”
“Hey, who’s that?” I ask Jiri.
He drops his small rake to the ground and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “Who’s who?” he asks.
“That girl,” I whisper, even though she’s probably a hundred feet from us.
Jiri follows my eyes over to the line of girls our age spreading hay or straw over the dirt we’ve already raked. We’re preparing the gardens for the winter, not that I know what that actually means. But somehow Mother got me this job out here, I guess she wanted me to be out in the fresh air. All the guys say this is a good job, even if I’m not exactly sure why. So I work here all day, instead of participating in the Program. I’m still not sure how serious that whole thing is, though I did hear one of the guys talking about a test yesterday.
What I do know for sure is that there aren’t many plants left at this point, though every once in a while I notice a carrot in the dirt that someone missed. Every time I see one, it’s like seeing a little bit of gold, because in just the short time I’ve been here I’ve already noticed we’re getting less and less recognizable food to eat. And it’s not that I like vegetables very much, but here you’re glad to have anything that you know is real.
“Which girl?” Jiri asks, a little annoyed. “There’s got to be thirty of them over there.”
“That one.” I point with my elbow. “With the red hair and the blue thing on her head.”
Jiri softly kicks Kapr, who’s still raking, on the heel of his boots. “Guess who finally noticed Inka,” he tells him.
“Inka?” I ask.
Kapr looks over at me, shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything.
“What?” I ask.
“Good luck” is all he says. No one says anything for a bit, so I just look at her some more. It’s weird, because I don’t really care all that much about girls. But I can’t stop noticing her. Because it’s not so much that she’s pretty, even though she definitely is. It’s that if somehow, instead of us getting in a line, marching up the ramp, and turning into the ghetto, we turned the other way and were suddenly back in Prague, she’d look like she belongs. After she took her star off, of course. She looks, I don’t know, normal. It’s like she reminds me how everything used to be. And maybe could be again.
“The worst part,” Jiri says, “she’s really nice, too.”
“C’mon, you two,” Kapr says, motioning with his head toward one of the guards at the edge of our group, “get back to work. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later I’m still watching Inka, when I see the strangest thing. She’s on her hands and knees with all the other girls, making sure the straw is spread out evenly. There’s a guard pacing behind them. He walks along an invisible line, about a hundred feet long, and when he gets to the end of it, he turns around and starts back again. Inka’s near the end closest to the canal.
But then this one time, maybe twenty feet after he passes her, the girl to Inka’s left, who’s looking past Inka toward the guard, bumps Inka on the hip with her hip. And then, so fast that all I see is a flash of orange, Inka grabs a carrot from under the hay and sticks it down the top of her shirt. A second later I’m not even sure the whole thing happened.
“Jiri,” I whisper.
“Huh?”
“Inka just . . .”
“Just what?” he asks, not sounding very interested.
“There’s . . . there’s a carrot in her shirt. She put a carrot in her shirt.”
Jiri grins but doesn’t stop raking. “Way to go, Inka. Nice, pretty, and one of the slickest schlojsers we’ve got.”
“Slickest what?” I ask.
“Schlojsers,” he says.
“What the heck is a schlojser?”
“Kapr,” Jiri says, “tell Misha what schlojsing is.”
Kapr stands up straight and uses his rake to pull out some dirt clumps from the bottom of his shoe. He checks to see that our guard isn’t nearby. “If you’re delivering bread, and a roll happens to wind up in one of your pockets, that’s schlojsing.”
“Happens to wind up?” I ask. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Kapr shrugs his shoulders in this exaggerated way. “I was delivering bread, and the next thing I knew, this roll—okay two rolls—wound up in my pocket.”
And then I feel like someone suddenly smacked me in the side of the head. “Stealing? Schlojsing is stealing?”
“No,” Jiri says, like I’m a little dense. “Stealing is stealing. Schlojsing is schlojsing.”
“What’s the difference?” I ask.
“Misha,” Kapr says, starting up his raking again. “Let me ask you something. When you showed up in our room for the first time, which bags did you have with you?”
“Uh.” I try to remember. It seems like two years ago, even though it hasn’t even been a week. “Just my backpack. Why?”
“The rest got delivered later, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So why do you think that was? Because the Nazis run Terezin like a five-star hotel?”
“Your bags, sir,” Jiri says in a silly voice.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Because when you got here, like everyone else, your stuff went through the Schleuse.”
A guard paces past us, so no one says anything for a while. We just start raking instead.
Jiri starts up again. “Anything valuable you had in your bag—”
“But I didn’t have anything valuable.”
“But if you did,” Jiri says, “and a lot of people did, then—”
Kapr snaps his finger. “The Nazis make sure it doesn’t get to you here. That’s what the Schleuse is for.”
I keep raking, though I realize I’m not really raking, just moving the thing over the same patch of dirt again and again. “So what does that have to do with her? With”—I lower my voice—“with what she just did?”
“They have their Schleuse, we have ours,” Kapr says.
“But it’s stealing. That carrot—now whoever was supposed to get it isn’t going to get it. And what if she gets caught? What happens then?”
“If you’re good,” Kapr says, “you don’t get caught.”
The next thing I know, I’m picturing this time Father and I went to King of Railroads. Everyone was crowding around a new track they had set up that morning. But because I’m so short, I didn’t even bother joining them. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see a thing. So I just went over to another, smaller table, where I pushed a tiny black caboose back and forth, until, suddenly my hand was putting it in my pants pocket. A second later Father grabbed my wrist. I looked up at him, and the expression on his face made me want to disappear. Just like that we were standing on the sidewalk. I don’t know what happened to the caboose, but it definitely wasn’t in my hand or my pocket by the time we got outside.
“Michael Gruenbaum,” he said in this calm voice that was somehow much worse than him screaming. “If I ever see you do that again . . .”
“I won’t,” I said, my voice all messed up. “I won’t.” And we walked home in total silence.
“Misha”—Kapr taps the back of my head—“at least pretend you’re raking, okay?”
“But,” I mumble, “but back in Prague . . . I mean . . . schlojsing . . . whatever you call it . . . it’s stealing.”
“Yeah, maybe it is,” Kapr says. “But this place, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this place is definitely not Prague.”