More thumping sounds in the distance. "What is that?" I asked him.
“Jackboot artillery," he said.
"What's artillery?"
"Big guns. Boom boom. They're shelling the city." He stared at me. “Who are you?"
I didn't understand the question.
"I'm Uri," he said. “What's your name?”
I gave him my name. "Stopthief."
[One boy] kicked ground straw at a boy who hadn't spoken. […] "That's a Jew." He pointed to himself. "This is a Jew." He pointed to the others. "That's a Jew. That's a Jew. That's a Jew." He pointed to the horse. "That's a Jew." He fell to his knees and scrabbled in the straw near the horse flop. He found something. He held it out to me. It was a small brown insect. "This is a Jew. Look. Look!" He startled me.
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.
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.
I had an idea. The next day I snatched two loaves of bread. One I gave to Uri, the other I took to the house of Janina the girl. It had snowed overnight. Brown stubble poked through the white blanket covering the garden. I pushed the snow from the top step. I set the loaf down, knocked on the door, and ran.
The next day I came back to look. The bread was gone.
That was how it started.
One time I entered a house through an unlocked back door. […] I moved through the kitchen and suddenly found myself standing in a doorway, staring at a family of people having dinner around a long table. Food and silver and glass sparkled everywhere. In the middle was a great, golden roasted bird, perhaps a goose or turkey. I must have surprised them, for all movement stopped as they stared at me while I stared at the table—but not for long. As always, I was the first to move. I believe this was the first rule of life that I learned, though it was a twitch in my muscles rather than a thought in my head: Always be the first to move. As long as that happened, they would have to catch up, and I could not be caught.
I had never seen him so mad. His hair looked redder than ever, only this time it was not because he was laughing. He punched me in the forehead. The back of my head banged against the wall. "Someday I'm going to have to kill you to keep you alive." He flapped his arm. "You want to do it your way? You want to go off by yourself? Not listen to me? Go ahead!" He kicked me. "Go ahead!" He stomped off. By the time he reached the street, I was at his side.
I couldn't believe my eyes: one of the horses was gone!
Only three hooves remained. […] A scrap of surviving color told me the horse had been black. It was mine. My beautiful black-and-golden horse.
"Find the Jew!" people were calling. As I stared at the three horseless hooves, I felt my own anger rising. "Find the dirty Jew!" the voices called over and over, and I think one of the voices I heard was mine.
I told her how I found a low place in the wall and simply stepped over. I added: "I can go anywhere." I was not boasting, I was simply stating a fact. I had come to love my small size, my speed, my slipperiness. Sometimes I thought of myself as a bug or a tiny rodent, slipping into places that the eye could not even see.
Janina looked at me. “What happened?”
“Unlucky orphans,” I said. I told her that was what Enos called them—orphans who did not live in Doctor Korczak's home, or any other, and who roamed the streets hungry and begging and sick.
“Be glad we're not unlucky orphans,” I told her.
“Is gray Jon an unlucky orphan?” she said.
“Oh no,” I said. “He's a lucky one. He's with us.”
The soldiers screamed. With my new armband, I thought: I am Jew now. A filthy son of Abraham. They're screaming at me. I am somebody. I tried to listen well, to hear what they were screaming, but I could not understand much beyond “dirty” and “filthy” and “Jew.”
The screaming never stopped. By now people were falling all over the courtyard, falling and staggering to their feet and falling again. It was easy to tell the people who had not fallen: they were the ones with the highest piles of snow on their shoulders and heads. I could now feel the faint weight of the snow on my head. I wondered how it looked. I took even more pains not to move. I didn't want my snow to fall off.
When I awoke, I thought I was back in the courtyard under the blinding lights, but it was only the sun in the window. And Uncle Shepsel, propped on his elbow, was pointing at me and saying, “Why is he sleeping here? He smells.”
“I regret to inform you,” said Mr. Milgrom, “that you are not a rose garden yourself these days.”
Uncle Shepsel pounded the floor. “He's not family.”
Mr. Milgrom looked straight at him. “He is now.”
From the moment Mr. Milgrom said, “He is now,” my identity as a Gypsy vanished. Gone were the seven wagons, seven brothers, five sisters, Greta the speckled mare. Deep down I guess I had always known my Gypsy history was merely Uri's story, not reality. I didn't miss it. When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go. I supposed my last name was Milgrom now, so Pilsudski went too. I kept Misha. I liked it.
Some people died from sickness, some from hunger. There wasn't much I could do about the sickness, but hunger, that was where I came in. Feeding my family—and as much as possible Doctor Korczak's orphans—was what the world had made me for. All the parts—the stealing, the speed, the size, the rash stupidity—came together to make me the perfect smuggler.
She stood on tiptoes and held it as high as she could and let it go. It sailed toward the sky.
"That's my angel," she said.
Then they were all around us, milkweed puffs, flying. I picked one from her hair. I pointed. "Look." A milkweed plant was growing by a heap of rubble.
It was thrilling just to see a plant, a spot of green in the ghetto desert. The bird-shaped pods had burst and the puffs were spilling out, flying off. I cracked a pod from the stem and blew into the silk-lined hollow, sending the remaining puffs sailing, a snowy shower rising, vanishing into the clouds.
Uncle Shepsel opened his eyes and smiled down at me. I had seen the same smile in the room lately, as he read the book that had changed him from a Jew to a Lutheran. […] Suddenly his expression changed. He seemed confused. He looked hard into my face and did not seem to know me. "You go. Every night you go," he said. "Why do you come back?" I did not have an answer. Maybe he found it in my face, for after a while he turned and walked off.
Now it was Hanukkah time again […] On the first day Mr. Milgrom told me the story of Hanukkah. How long ago the Greeks tried to destroy everything Jewish. ("See, this is not the first time.") How the Jews were outnumbered and had no chance against the Greeks but beat them anyway. How the Jews celebrated by lighting an oil lamp. But the celebration would have to be short because there was only enough oil to last for one day. And then a miracle happened. The oil lasted for eight days.
“And so Hanukkah is eight days when we remember that time, and we remember to be happy and proud to be Jews and that we will always survive. This is our time. We celebrate ourselves. We must be happy now. We must never forget how to be happy. Never forget."
I smacked her. I shouted at her. But I could not change her. I could not understand her moods, her outbursts. I mostly accepted the world as I found it. She did not. She smacked me back and kicked me. In time I found my own best way to deal with her. On many days I went off to a favorite bomb crater and lowered myself into it and licked traces of fat from between my fingers and closed my eyes and remembered the good old days when ladies walked from bakeries with bulging bags of bread.
Then I saw her. […] She was a shadow cut loose, held above the other shadows by a pair of Jackboot arms. She was thrashing and screaming above the silent masses. […] And then the arms came forward and she was flying, Janina was flying over the shadow heads and the dogs and soldiers, her arms and legs turning slowly. She seemed so light, so right for the air […] I thought she would sail forever like a milkweed puff on an endless breeze, and I was running and wishing I could fly with her, and then she was gone, swallowed by the black maw of the boxcar[.]
The Jackboot flung me against a wall. I saw his hand go to his holster. I saw the gun come out and point between my eyes. "Die, piglet!" The voice. I looked up. The red hair. The face. “Uri!" I cried, and the gun went off.
The man placed his foot on my chest. "You're a Jew," he said.
"Yes," I answered. I pointed to my armband. "See?"
“What are you doing here?"
"I'm following the train. Janina. I'm going to the ovens."
"What ovens?"
"The ovens for the Jews. I'm a filthy son of Abraham. They forgot me. Can you take me to the ovens?"
The man spit in the weeds. "I don't know what you're talking about. You make no sense. Are you insane?"
You were the thing that gave me shape. "But I wasn't even listening," you say. "I don't even remember you." Don't feel bad. The important thing was not that you listened, but that I talked. I can see that now. I was born into craziness. When the whole world turned crazy, I was ready for it. That's how I survived. And when the craziness was over, where did that leave me? On the street comer, that's where, running my mouth, spilling myself. And I needed you there. You were the bottle I poured myself into.
I think of all the voices that have told me who I have been, the names I've had. Call me thief. Call me stupid. […] I don't care. Empty-handed victims once told me who I was. Then Uri told me. Then an armband. Then an immigration officer. And now this little girl in my lap, this little girl whose call silences the tramping Jackboots. Her voice will be the last. […] I am . . . Poppynoodle.
