7

Those were the good times.

Our icebox, our cellar shelves, were full of food. We ate peaches in brandy and peanut butter and caviar sandwiches. We ate apples and lemon Danish and cheese puffs and hickory-smoked trout. We ate candy all day long. My favorite was buttercream with a hazelnut inside. There was usually only one to a candy box and often not even that, and I was not good at telling them on sight. So I broke open chocolates by the hundreds, searching for my prize. I raced through candy shops tossing boxes into a sack and raced out to the usual chorus of “Stop! Thief!” At home I frantically dug for hazelnut buttercreams, flinging the rest aside. Uri scolded me for wasting. Except for the candy, he made me finish eating everything I started.

As for Uri, he loved pickles. Big fat juicy pickles. They floated in barrels of brine in grocery stores. The urge would strike him suddenly. He would pop up: “Let’s go. Pickle run.”

We went on many pickle runs because Uri would eat only fresh pickles. If a pickle had been out of the brine more than a day, he stuck his nose up at it. This meant we had to keep finding new stores. No one ever saw him take anything, but after a while a grocer would begin to notice that whenever a certain red-haired boy came into the store, pickles disappeared.

On the way to a pickle place I was not allowed to snatch anything. Uri did not want his pickle run spoiled by a snatch-and-run of mine. But on the way back, as he contentedly ate his prize, I was allowed to do as I wished.

Uri usually took things from store shelves and counters. Except for candy, I took from people. We would be strolling along, pickle juice from Uri’s chin spattering the sidewalk, when I would see something and take it. Off I went, weaving through the crowds of people, while Uri munched away, pretending he didn’t know me.

Back home, he would say, “How did you do that?”

I would shrug. “I just do it.”

“You’re amazing,” he would say, and I would feel like a buttercream with a hazelnut heart.

         

Sometimes Uri went out alone. Scouting, he called it. He told me to stay put.

One time I did not stay put. It was not long after the Jackboots came. I got it into my head to go to the grand boulevard and see the parade again. That’s what I believed: The parade was never-ending, it went on day and night. And I was missing it!

I climbed out of the cellar and started running. But when I came to the grand boulevard, there was no parade. There were streetcars and automobiles and people upon people, but no parade. I saw two Jackboots walking. I ran up to them. “Where is the parade?”

The tall one laughed. “You’re five days late. It’s over.”

I tried to understand. “Are the tanks gone?”

“Not gone.”

“Uri says you hate me,” I told them, “but I don’t believe him.”

“Good.”

“I want to be a Jackboot someday.”

The tall one said something to the other, but I could not understand the words. He reached down and ran his fingers through my short hair. “Someday, dark little boy. Are you a Jew?”

“No,” I said, “I’m a Gypsy. Are you a Jew?”

Again he smiled and said something to the other, who did not smile. “Let’s hope not,” he said, and they walked on.

         

I saw a lady carrying cream puffs. Don’t ask me how I knew they were cream puffs. It was a white pastry box like any other, wrapped in white string. I just had a sense about those things. Maybe it came from snatching food for as long as I could remember.

I was coming up behind her. She wore a red coat, as the air was chilly. The seams of her stockings were perfect black lines running from her heels to the hem of the coat. Her blond hair spilled from a little black hat. The pastry box dangled from one hand.

She was not a screamer. Not everyone was. After I snatched the box, I heard no screams behind me. No footsteps either. She was not a chaser. Still, I ran. I always ran. I did not know how not to run. That was my life: I snatched, I ran, I ate.

So I was running, chased by myself you might say, and I turned a corner and was suddenly flat on my back. I had run into someone. A boy. With one arm.

“Gypsy!” he cried.

“My cream puffs!” I cried.

They were scattered about the sidewalk. So were his cherry turnovers. He reached for a cream puff and threw it at my face. I threw one at him. We laughed and scooped vanilla cream puff filling from our cheeks and ate it. We scooped vanilla filling and cherry goop from the sidewalk and what we didn’t eat we flung at each other, and in between we fell onto our backs and laughed. Walkers veered into the street to avoid us.

“Well, well,” came a voice. “Little thieves.”

It was a Jackboot, grinning down at us—and we were gone, fast as flies, One-Arm one way, me another, the Jackboot’s laughter fading.

I ran down alleyways. I didn’t recognize where I was, but it didn’t matter. I was in the city. The only world I knew.

I came to a garden. Some people had little gardens in their backyards. The gardens were all brown stalks and stubble and fallen leaves by now, and so was this one, except for one viny upshoot of green and red. It was a tomato plant, probably the last surviving one of the season. I knew something of seasons, but nothing of months and years—I had no use for them. I know now that this must have happened in the month of October in the year nineteen thirty-nine.

Many green tomatoes dangled from the vine, and two plump ripe red ones. I was still hungry. I pulled off a red tomato, sat myself down cross-legged on the ground, and ate it. The juice spilled down my chin as pickle juice often did on Uri. I picked off the other tomato. As I was eating it, I turned my eyes toward the back of the house. Someone was sitting on the step. A little girl. Watching me.

I never ate with someone watching me, unless it was Uri or the boys. Eating came after running. And yet I didn’t move. I sat there and ate the last red tomato in the city and I watched her watching me. Her elbows were on her knees and her face leaned into her cupped hands. Her hair was curly and the color of bread crust. Her eyes were brown as chestnuts. They were very big.

When I finished eating the tomato, I stood and walked off. I didn’t run. When I looked back, she was still watching me. Her round, unblinking eyes made me feel as if I had just become visible, as if I had never been seen before. When I was far from the backyard, I kept looking back.

When I told Uri I found two red tomatoes and ate them, he didn’t believe me.

         

On the first day that the light went out, Uri said to me, “Okay, this is who you are. Your name is Misha Pilsudski.”

And he told me the rest . . .

I, Misha Pilsudski, was born a Gypsy somewhere in the land of Russia. My family, including two great-grandfathers and a great-great-grandmother who was one hundred and nine years old, traveled from place to place in seven wagons pulled by fourteen horses. There were nineteen more horses trailing the wagons, as my father was a horse trader. My mother told fortunes with cards. She could look at cards and tell you how you were going to die. She could look into your eyes and tell you the name of the person you would marry.

Every night the wagons stopped in a grove of trees by a stream. The chores of us little children were to gather sticks for the fire and to feed the horses. My favorite horse was a speckled mare called Greta. Every night one of my brothers hoisted me onto Greta’s back and I pretended to ride.

I had seven brothers and five sisters. I was not the youngest but I was the smallest. I was so small because I was once cursed by a tinker who did not like the fortune my mother gave him.

Since we were Gypsies we belonged everywhere, so we came to the land of Poland. My father traded many horses. My mother told many fortunes. Then we were bombed by a Jackboot airplane. The war had not started yet. Jackboot airplanes were simply flying about practicing for the war. The Jackboot general told the pilots that they could practice on Jews and Gypsies. So when a Jackboot pilot saw our seven wagons full of Gypsies, he immediately dropped his bombs on us, plus his goggles and everything in his pockets.

Fortunately, we looked up and saw everything coming down and we scattered—seven wagons in seven directions. I was with my mother and father. They were sad but I was not, because Greta, my favorite horse, was with us. Then one night, as we were camped in a grove of trees, some Polish farmers, who hated Gypsies even more than Jackboots hated Jews, came with torches and tied up my mother and father and stole me and Greta.

For a long time Greta and I were slaves for the farmers. They fed us nothing but turnips and pig’s milk. Then one night Greta broke out of her stall and ran away. The next day I ran away too. I searched and searched for Greta and my family all over Poland. Finally, I came to the city of Warsaw, where I learned to steal food to keep from starving.

I never saw Greta or my parents or my brothers and sisters again.

And so, thanks to Uri, in a cellar beneath a barbershop somewhere in Warsaw, Poland, in autumn of the year nineteen thirty-nine, I was born, you might say. With one detail missing. I waggled my yellow stone in Uri’s face. “What about this?”

He stared. “Yes . . . it was your father’s. He gave it to you.”

I was greedy. “What else?”

“Before you were kidnapped,” he said. “That’s all.”

I loved my story. No sooner did I hear the words than I became my story. I loved myself. For days afterward, I did little else but stare into the barbershop mirror, fascinated by the face that stared back.

“Misha Pilsudski . . . ,” I kept saying. “Misha Pilsudski . . . Misha Pilsudski . . .”

And then it was no longer enough to stare at myself and repeat my name to myself. I needed to tell someone else.