Once (7 page)

“There,” I say. “That should help.”

I put her back down.

“It feels funny,” she says after a few steps.

I try to think of something to help her get used to it.

“All the great travelers in history had rags round their feet,” I say. “Christopher Columbus, who discovered America, he had rags round his feet. Dr. Livingstone in Africa, he did. Hannibal the Great, he did too. So did his elephants. In the future, by the year 1960, I think they’ll make shoes with rags already in them.”

Zelda gives me one of her looks.

“By the year 1960,” she says, “people won’t need shoes. They’ll have wheels instead of feet. Don’t you know anything?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I forgot.”

“Why do those people look so sad?” asks Zelda.

I’ve been expecting her to ask. She’s been staring in a concerned way at the people walking with us. An elderly woman near us is crying and Zelda’s been looking at her a lot.

I’m not sure what to say.

Zelda squeezes my hand even tighter than usual.

“Well?” she demands. “Why do they?”

I know why the people look sad. They’ve been walking for hours and they’re tired and hungry and worried about their books and parents, just like us. We probably look sad to them.

But I don’t say this to Zelda. When a little kid doesn’t even know her parents are dead, you’ve got to try and keep her spirits up.

“They’re feeling sad because they haven’t got rags in their shoes,” I say to her. “They’ll be much happier when we get to the city.”

I’m about to tell Zelda about the rag shops that are probably in the city when I see something out of the corner of my eye.

The elderly woman has just fainted at the side of the road. She’s lying in the dust. Nobody is stopping to help her. Not the other Jewish people, not the soldiers, not me.

I can’t give anyone else a piggyback. I can’t even lift Zelda, the way I feel now.

“What’s wrong with that lady?” asks Zelda.

I tell her that the lady is just having a rest, and after we’ve gone a farmer will come and take the lady home and she’ll live happily on the farm with his family and become very good at milking cows and in the year 1972 she’ll invent a machine that milks them automatically and also makes butter.

Zelda thinks about this.

“In 1972,” says Zelda, “cows will make their own butter. Don’t you know anything?”

I’m tempted to say, “No, I don’t. Not anymore.”

I look around at the tired hungry sick Jewish people staggering along the road. An awful question has been throbbing in my head for ages now. It’s the question I first thought of when I saw Zelda lying on her lawn.

Why would the Nazis make people suffer like this just for the sake of some books?

I need to try and find an answer.

“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.

  I spent about six hours telling stories to Zelda, to keep her spirits up, to keep my spirits up, to keep our legs moving as we trudged through the rain toward the city.

At least the rain is washing my hat, but my head is still hot and throbbing. Every time a Nazi soldier yells at me or at another person in our soggy straggling group, my head has stabs of pain.

Me and Zelda have eaten our bread and we’re both hungry. As we trudge on I keep my eyes open for food. Nothing, just dark wet trees and big fields full of mud and wet grass.

I keep thinking about Mum and Dad and hoping they’re not this hungry, but worrying about them only makes my head throb more.

“Why have you stopped the story?” says Zelda.

“Sorry,” I say. I’m telling her a story about how much fun kids can have in the city, but my imagination is as tired and hungry as my body, and my shirt’s wet and I’m worried my notebook is getting ruined.

Zelda is looking annoyed. I don’t blame her. Her pajamas are as sodden as my shirt.

“Keep going with the story,” she says. “William and Violet Elizabeth are in the big cake shop at the zoo. Remember?”

“I remember,” I say. “Did I tell you about the elephants? The ones that float in by parachute with the extra supplies of cakes?”

“Yes,” says Zelda crossly. “Don’t you know anything?”

I’m being distracted again. Another straggling crowd of Jewish people have appeared out of a side road and are walking with us now. They look terrible. Some of them have got bigger bruises than Zelda.

Zelda’s so exhausted she hasn’t even asked me about them, but I can see she’s noticed and she’s as concerned as I am.

Somehow I find the energy to carry on with the story.

“William and Violet Elizabeth eat another six cakes each,” I continue. “Then suddenly a zookeeper rushes in, upset and yelling. A vicious gorilla has escaped and is on a violent rampage across Poland.”

“Across the whole world,” says Zelda.

“Yes,” I say, glad I’ve got her mind off the bruised people. “So William and Violet Elizabeth come up with a plan to capture the gorilla.”

“Violet Elizabeth comes up with most of it,” says Zelda.

“All right,” I say. “The plan is, they go to a luxury hotel and get a luxury hotel room and put lots of things in it that gorillas like. Bananas. Coconuts. Small roasted monkeys.”

I can see Zelda isn’t happy with this.

“Why do they put the things in a hotel room?” she asks.

“Because,” I say, “luxury hotels in cities are made of a modern invention called concrete which is super strong. Even a gorilla can’t bash his way out when he’s locked in a concrete room.”

“The gorilla might be a girl,” says Zelda.

I look at her wearily.

“He might,” I say. “Anyway, William and Violet Elizabeth send a message to the gorilla about the hotel room, then hide in the wardrobe with a big net.”

“And toys,” says Zelda.

I look at her, puzzled.

“Gorillas like toys,” she says.

I know I should be agreeing with her, but I don’t, partly because I’m not sure if gorillas do like toys, and partly because what I’m seeing ahead of us is suddenly making it hard for me to speak.

One of the people in our group, the man who isn’t a book lover, has started yelling at the soldiers, screaming hysterically. Suddenly a soldier hits the man in the face with a machine gun. The man falls down. The soldiers start kicking him. People cry out. I almost do myself.

Instead I step between the man and Zelda so she won’t see. I put my arm around her shoulder and walk as fast as I can, talking loudly to distract her.

“William and Violet Elizabeth’s plan is a big success,” I say, “because when the gorilla hears about the toys, he rampages straight to the hotel.”

“I think it’s a silly plan,” says Zelda.

I’m struggling to stay calm. Behind us I can still hear the poor man grunting as the soldiers kick him.

“Tell me a better plan,” I say.

“Well,” says Zelda, “Violet Elizabeth and William dig a big hole, like those people over there, and the gorilla falls into it.”

I look over to where Zelda is pointing. In a patch of forest near the road a big crowd of people, hundreds it looks like, are digging what looks like a huge hole.

I stare, confused.

It’s hard to see because of the trees, but the people don’t look like farmworkers. Some of them look like children. Some of them look very old. Some of them look like they might be naked. And I think I can see soldiers pointing guns at them.

“What are they doing?” says Zelda.

I wait for my imagination to come up with something.

It doesn’t.

“Maybe a gorilla has really escaped,” says Zelda.

She puts her arm round my waist. I keep mine around her shoulders.

Some of the people in our group are stopping, trying to see what’s going on in the forest. The soldiers are yelling at us to keep moving.

We trudge on through the rain.

“The gorilla has a friend,” says Zelda. “A kind man. He doesn’t want the gorilla to be captured, so he tells the army to leave the gorilla alone and they hit him with a gun.”

I look down at Zelda. I can tell from the sadness on her face that she did see the man being hit.

I squeeze her tighter.

“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.

I don’t either.

The city isn’t anything like it is in stories.

The wide streets are dirty and the tall buildings, five levels high some of them, have all got Nazi flags hanging off the balconies and out of the windows.

Army trucks and tanks are parked everywhere and lots of soldiers are standing around telling each other foreign jokes and laughing.

There’s no sign of a zoo and I haven’t seen a single cake shop or rag shop and the local people are really unfriendly. Lots of them are standing on the footpaths yelling unkind things at us as we straggle past.

Dirty Jews.

Stuff like that.

Of course we’re dirty. We’ve been walking for nearly a whole day in the rain.

I’m looking around for Mum and Dad, but I can’t see them. Zelda is doing the same. I hope I find mine before she realizes hers aren’t here.

Where are you, Mum and Dad?

I must try and be patient. That’s what Mum used to tell me when I was little and I got upset because I couldn’t read any of the words in Dad’s big book about two thousand years of Jewish history.

This is hopeless. There are too many people. I’ve never seen so many people in one place. And all the Jewish people look as unhappy as us, huddled and weary in dark damp coats and blankets trying to ignore the rude things the city people are shouting at us.

“I don’t like the city,” says Zelda.

I wish I knew what to say.

I wish I could tell her a story to make us all feel better. But I’m too exhausted and my feet are too blistered.

We’re heading for a big brick wall built right across the street. That’s a very strange place to build a wall. There’s a gate in the wall with soldiers guarding it and the people ahead of us are going through the gate.

No, they’re not, not all of them.

The soldiers are grabbing some of the Jewish people. They’re giving them buckets and scrubbing brushes. They’re making them kneel down and scrub the cobblestones.

This is terrible.

The city council should pay people to clean the streets, not make visitors do it while the locals stand around laughing.

I hope Mum and Dad didn’t have to do this.

Oh, no, what now?

This is even more terrible.

Soldiers are grabbing Jewish kids and throwing them into the back of a truck. It looks like no kids are allowed through the gate. People are screaming and crying as their kids are snatched away.

What’s going on?

Why are the Nazis separating the kids from the adults?

I don’t want to be separated, I want to stay here and find Mum and Dad.

I pull Zelda over to the side of the street. I look around for an alley we can run down. The local people are pointing at us and yelling at the soldiers that we’re Jews and we’re escaping.

What was that noise?

Gunshots.

Everyone is screaming.

Over by the wall two people are lying on the ground bleeding. Another man is wrestling with a soldier, trying to get to a kid that another soldier is holding. The soldier with the kid points a pistol and shoots the man.

Oh.

The screaming is even louder now, but I can still hear Zelda howling in fright.

I try to cling to her. Too late. Somebody is dragging her away from me.

A Nazi officer with a bored look on his face is holding her by the hair and pointing a gun at her.

“Please don’t,” I croak.

I wait for my imagination to come up with a reason I can tell him why he mustn’t shoot her, but my head is burning and everything is spinning round and I fall down shouting but not words.

The cobblestones hurt my face. Gunshots hurt my ears. I start crying. I don’t know what to do.

I haven’t got any more stories.

  I lay in the street in tears because the Nazis are everywhere and no grown-ups can protect kids from them, not Mum and Dad, not Mother Minka, not Father Ludwik, not God, not Jesus, not the Virgin Mary, not the Pope, not Adolf Hitler.