Once

Once I was living in an orphanage in the mountains and I shouldn’t have been and I almost caused a riot.

It was because of the carrot.

At last. Thank you, God, Jesus, Mary, the Pope, and Adolf Hitler. I’ve waited so long for this.

It’s a sign.

This carrot is a sign from Mum and Dad. They’ve sent my favorite vegetable to let me know their problems are finally over. To let me know that after three long years and eight long months things are finally improving for Jewish booksellers. To let me know they’re coming to take me home.

I don’t argue. You don’t with Mother Minka. Nuns can have good hearts and still be violent.

“Jankiel’s not hiding from the men in the car,” says Dodie. “He’s hiding from the torture squad.”

“We can only pray,” says Mother Minka. “We can only trust that God and Jesus and the Blessed Mary and our holy father in Rome will keep everyone safe.”

I can hardly breathe.

Suddenly I realize this is even worse than I thought.

“And Adolf Hitler?” I whisper. “Father Ludwik says Adolf Hitler keeps us safe too.”

Mother Minka doesn’t answer, just presses her lips together and closes her eyes.

“Look,” he says, “I can’t tell you what the Nazis are doing because Mother Minka made me swear on the Bible that I wouldn’t tell anyone. She doesn’t want everyone upset and worried.”

“Thanks,” I say. “But I know what they’re doing. They’re burning books.”

Sometimes real life can be a bit different from stories.

The street is narrow like I remember and the buildings are all two levels high and made of stone and bricks with slate roofs like I remember, but the weird thing is there are hardly any food shops.

At the orphanage I used to spend hours in class daydreaming out all the food shops in our street. The cake shop next to the ice cream shop next to the roast meat shop next to the jelly and jam shop next to the fried potato shop next to the chocolate-covered licorice shop.

Was I making all that up?

I turn and run down the steps. Halfway down I crash into a kid coming up. As I scramble over him, I see his face. He’s older than he was, but I still recognize him. Wiktor Radzyn, one of the Catholic kids from my class when I went to school here.

I don’t stop.

I keep running.

“Clear off, Jew!” yells Wiktor behind me. “This is our house now.”

“We’re playing grabbing Jews in the street,” says the little boy.

“I’m a Jew,” says the little girl. “He’s a Nazi. He’s going to grab me and take me away. Who do you want to be?”

Why are some people kind to us Jewish book owners and some people hate us? I wish I’d asked Mr. Kopek to explain. And also to tell me why the Nazis hate Jewish books so much that they’ve dragged Mum and Dad and all their Jewish customers off to the city.

I tell myself a story about a bunch of kids in another country whose parents work in a book warehouse and one day a big pile of Jewish books topples onto the kids’ parents and crushes them and the kids vow that when they grow up they’ll get revenge on all the Jewish books and their owners.

It doesn’t feel like a very believable story.

Please, Mum and Dad, I beg silently.

Don’t be like these people.

Don’t put up a struggle.

It’s only books.

I feel really sorry for her. It’s really hard being an orphan if you haven’t got an imagination.

Each person is wearing an armband. Not a red and black armband like the Nazis had at the orphanage. These are white with a blue star, a Jewish star like on some of the Jewish houses at home. Must be so these travelers can recognize the other members of their group. We used to have paper saints pinned to our tops on sports day so everyone could see which dormitory we were from.

“Excuse me,” I say to a man walking nearby. “Are you a book lover?”

The man stares at me as if I’m mad. His gray sagging face was miserable before, but now he looks like he’s close to tears. He looks away. I feel terrible. I wish I hadn’t asked.

Not just because I’ve made a suffering Jewish man feel upset at the sight of a crazy kid. Also because I’ve got a horrible suspicion I know the answer to the question.

Maybe it’s not just our books the Nazis hate.

Maybe it’s us.

“That’s a good story,” I say. “And when the man gets better, he and the gorilla go and live happily in the jungle and open a cake shop.”

“Yes,” says Zelda quietly.

She doesn’t look as though she totally believes it.

Neither do I.

“They’re in danger,” I croak. “Really bad danger. Don’t believe the notebook. The stories in the notebook aren’t true.”

I want to yell at them, Don’t you know anything? Our parents are out there in a dangerous Nazi city. The Nazis are shooting at people. They could be shooting our parents. A story isn’t going to help.

But I don’t. It’s not their fault. They don’t understand what it feels like when you’ve put your mum and dad in terrible danger. When the only reason they couldn’t get a visa to go to America is because when you were six you asked the man at the visa desk if the red blotches on his face were from sticking his head in a dragon’s mouth.

Suddenly I’m thinking about another story. The one Mum and Dad told me about why I had to stay at the orphanage. They said it was so I could go to school there while they traveled to fix up their business. They told it so well, that story, I believed it for three years and eight months.

That story saved my life.

A story?

Then I get it. When Mum went to the dentist, she had an injection to dull the pain. Barney hasn’t given this patient an injection. Times are tough, and there probably aren’t enough pain-dulling drugs in ghetto curfew places.

Suddenly my mouth feels dry. I’ve never told anyone else a story to take their mind off pain. And when I told myself all those stories about Mum and Dad, I wanted to believe them. Plus, I didn’t have a drill in my mouth.

This is a big responsibility.

“Once a princess lived in a castle. It was a small castle, but the princess loved it, and she loved her family who lived there with her. Then one day the evil goblins came looking for information about their enemies. They thought the princess knew the information, but she didn’t. To make her tell, the goblins gave the princess three wishes. Either they could hurt her, or they could hurt the old people, or they could hurt the babies.”

Chaya pauses, trembling, staring at the floor. I can see how hard it is for her to finish her story.

“The princess chose the first wish,” she says quietly. “But because she didn’t know any information, the goblins made all three wishes come true.”

“Sometimes […] parents can’t protect their kids even though they love them more than anything else in the world. Sometimes, even when they try their very hardest, they can’t save them.”

If Zelda’s dad’s a Nazi, does she deserve carrot soup and aspirin?

Yes.

She can’t help what her father did. Plus he’s dead now and so’s her mum and I don’t know if she’s got any other living relatives but after what we’ve been through together that makes me one and I say yes.

“Zelda,” I moan. “Why didn’t you stay?”

“I bit the Nazi,” she says. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Here,” I say to the woman in the corner. “Use this.”

The other people pass it over to her and when she sees what it is she starts crying.

“It’s all right,” I say. “I haven’t written on it.”

You can’t force people to believe a story.