Jim Shepard.
4.
Sh’maya only looks out for himself, my uncle always said, but I never wanted to be like that. I lectured myself on walks. I made lists of ways I could improve. Years went by like one unhappy day.
5.
A whole day was spent trying to get me to draw the semicircle and straight line of the letter alef. But I was like something that had been raised in the wild. I didn’t know the names of objects.
6.
She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.
10.
She later told me that when she was young she never complained, so her mother would always know who her best child was and keep her near.
12.
She put her lips to my forehead and her hand to my cheek. When she touched me like that, it was as if the person everyone hated had flown away.
13.
I told her about a soldier on a horse near the trolley stop on Gesia who took some coins from his saddlebag and handed them to me, and she asked if I’d thanked him and of course I hadn’t. She agreed it was a strange thing he’d done and wondered if he’d been thinking of his own little boy.
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I did kindnesses for my mother but she always wanted me to do them instead for my little brother. He was afraid of everything.
14-15.
I didn’t understand him but liked the way he didn’t complain. He cupped any treat he was given in his hands and peeked at it before passing it along to one of us. If he wasn’t napping or staring out his window, he stayed near my mother. When he got angry he didn’t hit anyone or shout but instead went for days without speaking.
15.
The show was called The Old Doctor
and I liked it because even though he complained about how alone he was, he always wanted to know more about other people, especially kids.
15-16.
When I asked my mother why the show was called The Old Doctor she said there’d been complaints about allowing a Jewish educator to shape the minds of Polish children.
16.
He quizzed me on Jan Henryck Dąbrowski while I ate since he considered himself an amateur historian.
18.
With a French pamphlet he took from a bookstall he proved I didn’t know anything about girls, and discovered I knew so little that I didn’t even know what he was talking about. After he had cursed some filthy Russians he also said I didn’t know anything about politics, which was also true.
18-19.
I asked if his father beat him for such offenses and he said he’d had more luck with his father’s strap since he’d learned to rub garlic and onion onto the welts. And that he was lucky that his father was more upset about his sister’s stutter.
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She liked me because when I had to wait for her to finish what she was saying I never got impatient.
21.
She had me read to him in the afternoons, and he always chose a book called Jur about two brothers, one sickly and in constant need of looking after and the other a picture of health who ended up dying.
22-23.
She took his hands and called for him to look at her. She said she wanted to tell him a story, that it was going to be a long story, and he needed to stay awake for if. He seemed to come out of a daze and smiled at her. The story was about a poor Jew and a sultan. She said about one of the sultan’s decisions, “Isn’t that amazing?” and while she was asking him, he died.
27.
In the attic, sparrows flew in and out of the holes made by the artillery shells.
32.
One night I brought home almonds, but it didn’t matter because some women in fur coats had been ordered to wash the pavement with with their underwear and then to put the underwear back on again, wet, and my mother and everyone else had been forced to watch, and she was still upset.
35.
She said that her mother had wept for three days and her father had assured them they’d move again soon, that he’d told then that he was starting a broom factory and that the Germans were very fond of brooms.
58.
The new girl’s name was Adina. She was from Baranowicze and you could tell she was from the east from her singsong way of speaking. She said she was a year older than us. She was pale and thin with sad black eyes. She didn’t like to talk and always got angry when asked a question. She said that one day she’d come home late from dropping off some sewing and the Germans had driven her cousins out of town in a truck and forced them to jump into an open fire.
62.
Some trolley brakes screeched around the bend on Chlodna and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it made me wish she was somewhere quiet and safe.
72.
I asked if we were going to have trouble with his sister, too, and he said she was so shy she’d told him that if she ever got married she wanted it to be in a cellar where no one would see.
91.
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.
hexafu 