44

It’s seven in the morning. A gusting flurry of cold rain wets Max’s face as he pays a pair of smugglers for the use of their stepladder. He is weak and nauseous with hunger. He feels like he has been punched in the groin when he climbs the wooden rungs in his stockinged feet.

“Hurry up!”

On top of the ghetto wall he struggles to clamber through the barbed wire and nearly loses his balance on the jagged shards of glass cemented to the uppermost bricks. He lowers himself down the other side, hanging from the wall by his hands, the entire weight of his body straining at the muscles of his arms, his feet scrabbling for a foothold, fidgeting in thin air like those of a hanged man. He slides down, only momentarily finding a slippery support for his foot, and curses as a searing pain shoots through his left knee on contact with the ground. He stands listening for a moment in the deserted street. He is in the wild part of the ghetto, the forbidden area. And he has lost his armband. It was in his stolen jacket pocket. He hobbles into a building opposite. Sits on a stair and massages his knee. He feels a moment’s contempt for his ageing body. Then he begins rummaging about in the downstairs apartments for food. Nothing. He gulps down water from the tap and splashes it over his face. There’s a tape measure on the sideboard. Commonplace objects now have the power to evoke a surging hopeless love for the past. He thought once he secured Eugenia outside the ghetto he would no longer care much if he lived or died but he finds while running the tape measure through his hands that his will to live is still strong.

He limps up to a ransacked apartment on the second floor. He tries to dismiss the pain in his knee as a temporary handicap, like his hunger. He opens all the brown terra-cotta jars on the shelves, all of which are empty. Then he sits down at the table and opens a recipe book sitting there, recalling times when he ate the dishes described. He remembers the distinctive flavour of Sabina’s soup, how it differed from his own and the playful arguments they had over whose soup was the best. He remembers her making pancakes, the taste of sour cream a fleeting taunt on his tongue. Then he jumps to his feet as he hears voices down in the street. The pain in his knee no longer of importance. He enters a bedroom, carpeted with white feathers. The only place to hide is under the bed. He lets out a muffled cry of alarm when he realises somebody else is hiding there, pressed against the wall. There are footsteps downstairs in the building. Arrogant carefree voices. Max edges closer to his mysterious companion under the bed. She gives off a static of terror. His fingers make contact with her hand. Her heart is pounding with such force it conveys its distressed charge into his fingertips. He whispers what he hopes is a comforting sound.

The voices are in the apartment now. They are speaking an unknown language. One of them seems to speak through his teeth. Max doesn’t like the sound of this man. He listens to the noises of cupboards and drawers being opened, the clatter of shifting cutlery. Then footsteps grow in volume. He sees a pair of lacquered black boots enter the room, the hem of a black trench coat. The body next to him stiffens and shakes with a new charge of fear. His own pulse is loud in his ears. He watches the black boots trample over the feathers. The iron bedstead rattles against the wall. The bedsprings flex and tighten. The owner of the boots has sat down on the bed. Max can see a tiny spot of what looks like dried blood on the leather heel. He struggles to believe the intruder can’t hear the fist-punching pounding of his heart. He grips his mysterious companion’s hand more tightly. He expects her to begin choking for breath at any moment, so frantic is the heaving of her ribs. Then another man enters the room and begins talking. His voice is unnaturally loud, as if shouting over noise in a packed nightclub. The man sitting on the bed grunts with impatience. The springs of the bedstead relax. The inverted hump in the mattress above flattens out. The man stands up and leaves the room with his companion.

His fellow fugitive is a teenage girl wearing a man’s large suit jacket and a filthy headscarf knotted under her chin. She is sobbing and shaking when he helps her out from beneath the bed. Her face blanched and convulsed. She barely seems to register his presence. Her hands are clawed inside the sleeves of the oversize jacket. Eventually he finds out her name is Clara. He sits her down at the kitchen table, the recipe book still open on a drawing of fried cherry jam doughnuts. The grubby netting at the window is flustered by an icy draught.

“Is this your home?”

She shakes her head. She keeps bringing her hands up to her mouth as if to protect herself from something only she can see. Eventually she tells him her story. Her unfocussed eyes beginning to show a muted spark of life. She feels guilty because she failed to save her little brother. She keeps returning to this guilt she feels.

“Everyone feels guilty,” he says. Talk nowadays rarely strikes him as anything more consequential than confetti, tatters of colour flung out to mask the black finality of defeat every Jew feels. It’s like everyone in the ghetto only now has need of the elementary vocabulary of birds. We ought to squawk at each other, he thinks. A new crazy current in his mind urges him to begin squawking at Clara. “This guilt is crazy from every rational perspective,” he says instead. He looks across at her. She is chewing the skin of her blackened thumb. “We feel guilty because we’ve been singled out to survive and we don’t feel worthy of this dubious gift. It’s even more crazy when you stop to think of how slim our chances of surviving for much longer are. I’ve just spent two weeks on the other side of the wall. If anything, it’s even more terrifying there than it is here. You can’t trust anyone, not even Jews.”

His former acquaintances greeted his appearance at their front door with concealed fear and horror. He was something they didn’t want to be reminded of. His presence made them all feel angrily ashamed. It was a former girlfriend who took in Eugenia. A woman he had treated badly because she became too slavishly demanding, because she wasn’t Sabina. She agreed to shelter Eugenia as long as she never left the building and hid in a dark mildewed crawl space littered with old bottles, rags and yellow crusted newspapers whenever anyone came to the door. He misses Eugenia now. She was his last connection to the man he used to be.

“I like to remember my brother surrounded by dogs,” says Clara. “That’s when he was happiest. We had to leave all our dogs when we moved to the ghetto. If you’re a Jew, why aren’t you wearing an armband?”

It’s the first time he feels seen by her. “I lost it. But what’s the point anymore? They shoot us on sight anyway.”

She takes off her armband and throws it down on the kitchen floor.