4

When I awoke the next morning, Uri was gone. He returned dragging a mattress. It was small, about half the size of his, but plenty big enough for me.

I lay down on it. He jerked me to my feet and snapped, “Not yet.” He hauled me outside.

We walked to the shopping district, where the big stores were. Except some of them were not so big now; the bombardment had left them crumples of brick. Looking down the street, I saw spaces where stores should be. Like broken teeth.

We went behind the stores, to alleyways of trucks and trash bins and staring cats. Uri said, “Wait here.” He disappeared in a maze of air shafts and fire escapes and doors, and when he came out his arms were loaded with clothes. “For you,” he said.

I reached.

“Don’t touch. Follow me.”

He led me to a bombed-out building, nothing but the back wall standing. We climbed over a jumble of bricks and splintered wood and twisted pipe. “Watch the glass,” he said. I kept stumbling over the heads and arms of manikins. We came to a lopped-off stairway. Uri tested it. “Okay,” he said. We went down into the rubble. Whenever he came to a knob in a pipe, he turned it. Some gave out steam, some nothing. We stopped at one that gave water.

“Take those rags off,” he said. I took off my clothes. He laid down the new ones and went rooting through the rubble. He returned with a manikin’s leg and a scrub brush. He filled the leg with water. “I’m not thirsty,” I said. He dumped the water over me. He began to scrub me with the brush.

At first it felt wonderful. Then it didn’t. Leg after leg of water he poured over me. After the scrub brush got down to the soles of my feet, he started again on my face. He grunted as he scrubbed. I squirmed. I cried out. He was scrubbing my skin off.

At last he stopped. “Baby,” he said. He dried me with a shirt. I screamed in pain from the rubbing. He patted the rest of me dry.

He glared at me. “Did you ever have a bath?” I stared at him. “Didn’t think so.”

Then he dressed me in a clean shirt and too-big pants. People gave us looks as we climbed out of the rubble and onto the sidewalk. By the time we were halfway home, I was feeling terrific. I felt new. I felt the air, the sun on my skin. Uri brought his nose to my neck and sniffed. He nodded.

Back in the cellar we ate sugar cookies and jars of plums in syrup. Then he led me upstairs to the barbershop. I had never been in a barbershop. He was right: the barber had left everything. Rows of colored liquid—green, red, blue—lined the shelf beneath a great mirror.

“You never had your hair cut, did you?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Have a seat.”

I climbed into the red padded chair. He spun me around till I got dizzy. He pumped a lever and I rose higher. He shook out a large cloth and draped it over me. From a glass canister he pulled a comb and scissors and he began combing and snipping. Soon my hair was like fur.

“All right,” he said, “which one?”

“Which one?” I echoed.

He pointed to the bottles. I did not understand why I should be offered a drink after having my hair cut, but I didn’t argue. I had learned never to turn down food.

I pointed to the blue. “That one.”

To my surprise he did not give me a drink but instead poured the blue liquid over my head. He shuffled his fingers through my hair and then combed it. It became wet and shiny.

         

Outside, people hurried this way and that. Many carried shovels.

“Are they going to a farm?” I said.

“They’re digging trenches to stop the tanks,” he said.

“What’s a tank?”

“You’ll see.”

Soldiers marched and ran and blew whistles. People carried large fat bags. They must have been heavy, for one person could carry only one at a time, over his shoulders. If you had a wheelbarrow, you could take three.

“What’s in the bags?” I said.

“Sand,” he said.

I found out where the bags of sand went. I saw them stacked in front of machine guns in doorways and on roofs and at the ends of streets.

We hopped a streetcar as it rattled down the tracks. We got footholds on the outside and clung to window posts. The wind blew through my new hair. Passengers frowned at us. “Get off,” they said.

“Look,” said Uri.

A boy was running along the sidewalk at the same speed as us. It was the boy who blew smoke in my face. His arms were wrapped around a lamp of pure white glass in the shape of a naked woman. The lampshade fell off, but he kept running, weaving in and out of sidewalk people. I looked behind him. A man was chasing him, shouting, “Stop him!”

Uri swung out from the side of the streetcar like a gate. He waved. “Hey, Kuba!”

Kuba looked over as he ran. “Hey, Uri!”

It was then that someone stuck out a foot and tripped him. Kuba went sprawling, and the pure white naked woman shattered on the sidewalk. “Get him!” someone yelled, and the sidewalk people converged on Kuba.

“They won’t get him,” Uri said.

As the streetcar rattled on down the tracks, I saw someone swing a leg out and kick, and then Kuba was popping from the crowd and racing across the street, and the people hurled curses and laughter after him.

Uri shook his head grimly. “Stupid. Stupid. They take everything. Just to take it.” He looked at me as the streetcar clanged above us. “Take only what you need. You hear?” He pinched my nose until my eyes watered.

I howled. “Yes!”

For a minute the passengers had forgotten us as they stared at the excitement on the sidewalk. Now they remembered us. A man in a silver necktie snarled, “Go. Get off.” A little boy stuck out his tongue. And then a woman in a fox fur came down the aisle and reached over the seats and drew down the window on Uri’s hands. I screamed, but Uri didn’t. The fox’s eyes were like little black marbles. The lady reached over to bring down my window too, but she stopped because there was a loud sound, and it wasn’t the clang of the streetcar. It was sirens. Ahead of us a shop exploded in a gush of flame.

People screamed. The streetcar gasped and jerked to a halt. Within moments it was empty. Even the driver was gone, running with the crowds in the street.

And then the streets were empty. A strange music filled the air: the sirens’ wail and the thump of exploding shells.

I pulled myself up into the streetcar. I opened the window that clamped Uri’s fingers. He fell to the ground and in a moment appeared at the door. He threw his hands in the air and cheered, “Finally!”

I thought he was celebrating the release of his fingers, but it was something else. “I always wanted to drive one of these.” He sat in the driver’s seat. He stared at the controls. He pushed one thing, pulled another; the streetcar jerked into movement and we were heading down the tracks.

What a ride! Uri turned the steering stick this way and that. He learned how to make it go faster, then faster, and the streetcar screamed along with us through the deserted city. Smoke rose beyond the rooftops, as if giants were puffing cigars. He showed me where to pull the clanger, and I pulled and pulled and the clanging joined the music of the bombardment.

At last we came to a loop, where the streetcar was meant to turn around, but Uri did not slow down, and the streetcar leaped from the tracks, and it was like riding a house into other houses. We smashed into a restaurant, plowed through a field of red tablecloths into the kitchen with an ear-ripping clatter, and still there were no people and no one to yell, “Stop! Stop!” Sauerkraut splattered across the windshield as we came to a halt against the ovens. By now the streetcar was on its side and we were hanging from our places. Uri was howling like a wolf, and even as the oven chimney pipes toppled like trees, I laughed and pulled and pulled the clanger rope.