Free Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker Page B

might also discuss something other than the house, if you can think of anything, anyway let’s begin with the house. Not too small, not too big, let’s say five rooms, that’s not asking too much. Now don’t start yelling, that much one can ask for, we’ve been modest long enough. There’d be one room for you, one for me, and two for my parents. And a children’s room, of course, where they can do what they like, stand on their heads or scribble all over the walls. We would sleep in my room, we don’t need a special bedroom, that would be giving away space that would be wasted during the day. We have to think in practical terms too. When we have guests we could sit in your room: a sofa in the middle of the room, that’s quite modern, a long, low table in front of it and three or four armchairs. Though I don’t want too many guests, just so you know right now. Not because of the upheaval, that’s no great problem, but I’d rather be alone with you. Maybe when we’re a bit older. And no one’s going to tell me how my kitchen should be. It has to be tiled, that’s always clean and attractive. Blue and white is what I like best. The Klosenbergs used to have a kitchen like that, just like that, I can’t imagine a nicer one. The floor covered with pale gray tiles, on the wall shelves for plates and jugs and ladles, and there must also be a little shelf for all those spices. Nobody knows how many spices there are — saffron, for instance. Do you have any idea what saffron is used for? That it makes cakes and noodles yellow?
    The rest of it I don’t know since just about here my informant Mischa finally fell asleep, in the midst of all the spices. Perhaps Fayngold could have told me more about this particular night, perhaps he lay awake all the way from basement to attic, but I never asked him.

T hen at last it is daytime again, daytime at last. We hurry this way and that in the freight yard with our crates; only a few years earlier it would have been described as cheerful, bustling activity. The sentries behave quite normally, shouting or dozing or shoving as usual; they show no alarm or don’t feel it yet. Maybe I am mistaken, but I seem to remember that day very well, although nothing unusual happened, at least not to me. As if it were today, I am standing, so I recall, on a freight car; my job is to take the crates and stack them so that as many as possible will fit into the car. There is another man with me, Herschel Schtamm, and that, come to think of it,
is
something unusual. For Herschel Schtamm has a brother, in fact he has a twin brother, Roman, and the two of them work together and normally are always seen together. But not today. Herschel had a little accident right after starting work. He stumbled while carrying a crate, Roman couldn’t hold the crate alone, crate and Herschel crashed to the ground. Herschel had to suffer the usual beating, but that wasn’t the worst part: in stumbling, he sprained one foot and could hardly walk, so he couldn’t go on carrying with Roman, which is why he is now standing with me on the freight car.
    He is sweating buckets, I have never seen anyone sweat like that, and he won’t stop sweating until the Russians have captured this damn ghetto, not a day earlier. For Herschel Schtamm is devout. In his lifetime he was a sexton in a synagogue, we call that a shammes, as devout as the rabbi himself. And then there are the earlocks, the pride of all Orthodox Jews: go and ask Herschel whether he is prepared to part with them. Not for all the money in the world, he’ll tell you, looking at you as if you were mad. How can you ask such a thing? But the earlocks may only be displayed within one’s own four walls, nowhere else. In the street and here at the freight yard one runs into Germans who take a dim view of them: where do we people think we’re living for some of us to be running around in a get-up like that? Cases have been known where a grab was made for the nearest