Free The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard Page B

he contributing?” Boris said to Lutek, meaning me. But the girls told him to leave me alone.
“My sister hated spinach,” Adina said. “But I liked it.”
“Are you still talking about that?” Boris wanted to know.
“My mother used to tell me I had to be so clean that my knees would shine,” Zofia said.
I could see the lice where her hair was parted. “You’re still pretty clean,” I told her.
Lutek told us their apartment was now cleaner because his father and some of the other porters had taken to using sawdust ovens, which were also cheaper than coal.
“Do those keep you warm?” Adina asked.
“Nothing keeps you warm,” he told her.
“The ovens aren’t the problem,” Boris said. “Hello, Mother,” he said to a woman who came out ofthe shop with three small children, all of them weeping. “Is there any way I can be of help?”
After they left he held up a heavy shawl. “It’s English,” he said, showing us the label. He and Lutek went back and forth over whether he might have given the mother less.
We said goodbye an hour before curfew and I was halfway home when someone grabbed my collar. “I like my bootjack,” Lejkin said.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I told him, pulling free. “I have to get home.”
“You always have to get home,” Lejkin said, as though this was some ongoing mystery.
He walked along beside me, eating something that he didn’t offer to share.
“My friends on Krochmalna Street want to keep better track of who’s doing what at the different gates,” he said. He meant the yellow police, who had moved their headquarters there in January. I knew because Lutek now took a different route through the small ghetto.
“What’s that to me?” I asked.
“You seem to be all over the place,” he said. “I just thought you might notice things.”
“I’m bad at noticing things,” I told him.
“Well, whatever you do notice,” he said.
I kept walking. I stopped at the trolley stop but no one was waiting there. I’d probably missed it.
“It’s just a matter of keeping track of things,” he said. “It’s not as though anyone intends to do anything that’s bad for business.”
I waited for a few minutes more and then started walking again. The top of one shoe had come completely loose and flapped with every step.
“There are also opportunities I could let you know about when they arise,” he said. “There are some confiscated onions right now, for example, that haven’t yet been turned in.”
“I think you’re the one who’s all over the place,” I told him.
He shrugged like he was used to those kinds of compliments. “The Jewish Order Service, by the way, also has the responsibility of deciding which apartments to requisition, in terms of the further resettlement of the incoming population,” he said.
“Well, our apartment’s already packed,” I said.
“Oh, some apartments are fifteen and twenty to a room,” he told me. “You can’t imagine.”
I stopped and tried to rewrap the cloth strips around my shoe. I couldn’t believe I was crying about a shoe.
“And of course there’s always the question of whatyour friends might do once they hear you’re working with the Service,” he said. And when I didn’t answer that either he said, “Or have you already told them?
“Well, think about it,” he said a block or two later, when I still hadn’t spoken. And when I looked back again after another half a block he was gone.
T HERE WAS A COMMOTION BY MY BUILDING. A GROUP of Germans were kicking at something between them and screaming in German at whatever they were kicking. I hadn’t heard men screaming like that before. People stopped on the street to watch. I didn’t want to get too close but they were in front of my door.
It was someone on his side on the cobblestones and when he made a noise like he was in pain I knew it was my father. I stopped and then pushed closer like someone in line for the trolley. After a few more kicks the Germans stayed in a