The Devil's Arithmetic Read online

  Once again it occurred to her that there was something she was not remembering, something terribly important to her, to all of them. She wondered if Gitl would know what it was, and resolved to ask her. But the raucous swallows, the woman’s droning commands, the ground bass of the machinery mesmerized her. She could feel her eyelids starting to close. To stop herself from falling asleep on her feet, she threw her head back suddenly and took a deep breath.

  Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed Gitl. Then, without moving her head farther, only her eyes, she managed to find Fayge. She was standing halfway down the line, her face paper white and her eyes fully closed. She swayed where she stood. Behind her was Esther and beside Esther was Shifre, her lashless eyes even stranger-looking under the shaved head. Hannah remembered them, remembered each and every thing they had said to her in the forest. She remembered the forest. And remembered she had told them stories. But the stories—those she could not remember, and it bothered her that she could not.

  She’d seen men running to get into a line behind them during the first moments of the assembly, but she hadn’t dared turn around then. Even now she was afraid to look. Would Shmuel be there? Yitzchak? Would Rabbi Boruch, the badchan, the members of the klezmer band? Would Mr. Unsward?

  “Gitl,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, low enough so that the woman in blue couldn’t hear her. “Gitl.”

  Gitl touched her hand. “Chaya,” she whispered back, so fiercely, it sounded like a promise. Or a command.

  14

  THAT EVENING, AFTER ANOTHER MEAL OF WATERY SOUP AND a small piece of bread, the girl Rivka found Hannah. She already had Esther and Shifre in tow. The other two girls looked as uneasy as Hannah felt, out in the open, with the watchtowers spaced every hundred feet along the barbed wire fences staring down at them.

  “Do not be afraid,” Rivka said quickly. “We have little to fear in the night. Any ‘Choosing’ is done during the day. They do not run the gas at night. They let us out for an hour each evening for enforced recreation. If you are alive now, this minute, it is enough.”

  “What do you mean it is enough?” Esther said, her voice rising in pitch. “My father is missing. My grandmother died on that train. I cannot find any of my aunts. Yente and Rachel are gone.”

  Rivka shook her head sadly. “I have been here a year, and in that time my mother and my sisters, my father and brother have gone there.” She pointed to the far smokestack. “My mother because she was coughing too badly to work, my sisters—three younger than me—because they would not leave her side. My father and my brother Saul because they were too angry, too strong, too outspoken. Now my brother Wolfe is left, but he is a Sonderkommando, one of the walking dead. He might as well be with them. We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I—I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

  Esther started to turn away, but Rivka caught her arm. “Listen to me. Please. You must listen if you wish to stay alive. I know the things you need to know in this place. There is the malach ha-mavis, the Angel of Death, hovering overhead. But we can fool him if we follow the rules.”

  “Who are you to tell us anything?” Shifre asked. “What makes you an authority?”

  “This is my authority,” Rivka said sternly, holding up her arm so that the number showed. J18202. “J because I am—like you—a Jew. The 1 is for me because I am alone. The 8 is for my family because there were eight of us when we lived in our village. And the 2 because that is all that are left now, me and Wolfe, who believes himself to be a 0. But I love him no matter what he is forced to do. And when we are free and this is over, we will be 2 again. God will allow it.”

  “God is not here,” Hannah said. “The badchan was right. This is the Devil’s place.”

  “God made the Devil, so God is here, too,” Rivka said.

  “Pilpul, a man’s game,” Shifre said.

  Rivka smiled. “I play the man’s game. I play the Devil’s game. I play God’s game. And so I stay alive. Alive I can help you. Dead I am no help to you at all.”

  Without meaning to, Hannah smiled back.

  “Good,” Rivka said, nodding. “If you smile, you will stay alive.”

  “Then tell us, Rivka, about all these rules,” Hannah said.

  “First, you may call me Rivka and I may call you by your names, but remember my number as you remember your own. You must learn to read the numbers as you would a name. There are good numbers and bad numbers.”

  “What do you mean?” Shifre asked.

  Esther walked away from them, shaking her head and humming loudly as if to drown out the sound of Rivka’s voice.

  “Esther . . . ,” Shifre called.

  “Leave her,” said Rivka. “Leave her. Sometimes people get like that. They stop listening. They stop seeing. It is as if they decide that life is not worth fighting for. We call them musselmen. It is sad. Very sad. I will be sorry if your friend chooses that, but if she does, I will let her. And you must let her as well.”

  Shifre nodded. “I understand.”

  “I don’t,” Hannah said. “You can’t just let her go.”

  “You will have to,” Rivka said. “It is one of the hard things you must do to stay alive. To let people go. To know when to fight and when not to. To know who to talk to and who to avoid. Listen. Never stand next to someone with a G in her number. She is a Greek—and Greeks do not speak Yiddish and do not understand German. Greek Jews disappear quickly.”

  “They become these musselmen?” Shifre asked.

  “They become . . . gone,” Rivka answered. “Because they do not understand commands fast enough, they do not react fast enough. Anyone standing next to them may be gone with them, sent off to Lilith’s Cave alongside a Greek. And here is another rule . . .”

  “Those aren’t rules,” Hannah argued. “Those are crazinesses.”

  “Nevertheless, you must learn them,” Rivka said. “See my number? It is lower than yours. Someone with a number like mine has been here a long time. We are survivors. We can tell you things. Read the numbers. My lower number tells you I can organize things.”

  “Organize?” Hannah shook her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Organize,” Rivka said. “As I have organized some shoes for you, and not wooden clogs, either. And sweaters. You will need them because the nights are cold still. And if you need medicines, though we have few of them, even in the hospital—and you do not want to go there if you can help it—you must find Sarah the Lubliner, J11177. She works in the sorting shed and sometimes she can organize ointments from the pockets of coats or valises. And sometimes pills. I think some bandages, too, though you can wear them only where no one can see or Sarah would be in trouble. The commandant likes her. She was a singer in Lublin. In the cafés. He has her sing at suppertime when he visits.”

  Hannah and Shifre stared at Rivka as she rattled on. It was like a waterfall of information, Hannah thought. How could she take it all in and be safe?

  “And you must never go near that,” Rivka said, turning suddenly and pointing way across the compound to a large wooden fence. There was a black handleless door. Beyond the fence loomed the smokestack. “We call that the door to Lilith’s Cave, the cave of death’s bride. If you go through that door, you do not come out again.”

  “Lilith . . . ,” Hannah muttered as if remembering a story.

  “But the most important thing for you to know is the midden,” Rivka said.

  “The garbage dump?” Shifre and Hannah asked together.

  “Yes. Commandant Breuer is not supposed to allow children under fourteen in the camp. So whenever he comes to inspect things, the children have to disappear. What he does not see does not exist. The best hiding place is in the midden. None of the Germans go there. It is beneath them. Oh, they know the children are hiding in it, of course, but they pretend it is too dirty, too disgusting. So they do not look. Even Breue
r really knows.”

  “We have to go into the midden?” Hannah was clearly shocked.

  “Not us. We look old enough. I am only ten but everybody thinks I am older. And you two can surely pass. You have . . .” She motioned toward her own undeveloped chest. “So we do not have to be dumped. But it is our duty to help the little ones.”

  “The Germans are right,” Shifre said. “It is disgusting.”

  “Disgusting? Garbage can be Paradise,” Rivka said. “One of my sisters could not run fast enough to disappear into the midden’s sanctuary. They sent her with my mother, right through the door into Lilith’s Cave. I can still hear her calling to me to save her, to hide her . . .”

  Hannah suddenly heard a child’s voice, as if from far away, saying, “Hannah, look where I hid . . .” She couldn’t think who the child was. Or who Hannah was. Her head hurt with trying to remember.

  “She went on the line and was gone,” Rivka finished.

  Hannah stared at Rivka. “What line?”

  “The line. The one drawn by the malach ha-mavis, the Angel of Death. The one into . . .” Her face pale, her coffee-colored eyes unreadable, Rivka stopped.

  Hannah nodded slowly, suddenly sure of one thing, as if she had known it all her life: “Into the gas ovens,” she whispered.

  “Oh, Chaya, not another one of your stories,” Shifre said, her eyes wide and full of fear.

  Rivka led them to her own barracks, three buildings away from the place where the zugangi were housed. There were names carved on the bunks and magazine advertisements stuck onto nails in the walls, as if the women had tried to personalize the place, but it did not help. These barracks were as starkly unwelcoming as theirs.

  From under her sleeping shelf, Rivka pulled out a pile of shoes. Quickly, she sorted through them until she found three pairs, two of which matched exactly and a third that was at least the same size and style, though one shoe was dark maroon and the other brown. The shoes were badly scuffed and worn through at the toes, but wearable. “I hope these fit, or at least are close enough.”

  “Why don’t they give us back our own shoes?” Hannah asked.

  “Because the good shoes get sent to Germany,” Rivka said. “But one does not ask why here.”

  “Another rule?” Hannah asked.

  “And a good one,” Rivka said. “It is better not to know some things. Knowing the wrong things can make you crazy.”

  “No stockings?” Shifre said.

  “You are lucky to have real shoes,” Rivka answered. “And not just clogs. When I got here, I had to run around for months on wooden clogs my mother carved for me.”

  “Wooden shoes!” Hannah said.

  Rivka smiled. “Never mind. I shall keep trying for better shoes for all of us.” She looked down at her own shoes. The right was so badly worn at the heel, her foot showed through. “At least now it is spring and we have time to look. Last month was bad. There was snow and frost. Masha from Krakow, J16689, lost two toes and there were many cases of frostbite. Bad cases, bad enough to go to the hospital. The Dark Angel goes there first. You are lucky.”

  “Lucky!” Hannah muttered.

  “Yes, lucky,” Rivka said, sounding as if she were beginning to lose patience. “We count our luck with a different measure here in the camp.”

  Shifre stared silently at the shoes she held in her hand but Hannah shook her head slowly over and over.

  “Now tell me your names.”

  “Shifre.”

  Rivka nodded.

  “Chaya,” Hannah whispered, the name sounding strange in her mouth, foreign. Then she bit her lip and, remembering Rivka’s explanation, held up her arm. “And also J for Jew. And 1 for me, alone. I am very, very much alone. And 9 is for . . . well, in English it is pronounced ‘nine,’ which is like the German word for no. No, I will not die here. Not now. Not in my sleep like . . . little . . . little children.”

  “How do you know English?” Shifre asked. “Did you learn it in your school in Lublin?”

  “You went to school?” Rivka asked, a kind of awe in her voice.

  “No. Yes. I don’t remember,” Hannah said, surprised at the whine in her voice.

  Rivka put her hand out, touching Hannah gently on the arm, stroking the number with two fingers, ever so gently. “It happens sometimes. We forget because remembering is so painful. But memory will return, when you are ready for it. Go on, Chaya—J19 . . .”

  Hannah nodded. “J—1—9—7. Seven is for—for each and every day of the week I stay alive. One day at a time. Then 2 for Gitl and Shmuel, who are here in this place, too.”

  “Her aunt and uncle,” Shifre added. “She is living with them . . . was living with them.”

  “And 4 for . . . for . . .” She stopped, closed her eyes, and thought a minute. Four was such a comforting number, a familiar number, a family number. She wasn’t sure why. “And 4 is for my family, I think. I almost remember them. If I close my eyes they are there, hovering within sight. But when I open my eyes, they are gone.”

  “It happens,” Rivka said.

  “Her parents died of cholera. In Lublin. It was a great tragedy, Tante Gitl said,” Shifre volunteered. “But maybe . . .” She looked around the barracks. “Maybe it was a great blessing.”

  “No,” Hannah said suddenly. “No. Not them. Not in Lublin. Not those parents. At least not exactly.”

  This time it was Shifre who put her hand on Hannah’s arm, though she spoke to Rivka. “Do not mind her ramblings. She was terribly sick before she came to live with Gitl and Shmuel. Once the doctors thought she had died, but they brought her back. She was in the hospital for weeks. She says odd things.”

  “And 1,” Hannah continued as if she had never been interrupted, “because I am all alone. Here. In this place. In this . . . this time!” She ended triumphantly, though part of her wondered what she had meant.

  “Chaya says she will live,” Rivka said to Shifre. “Wherever else her mind may wander, she has said it. I hope she means it. And now, Shifre, tell me your number in the same way. It will help us both remember. After that, we will find your other friend.”

  “Esther? But you said she was hopeless.”

  “Esther! She is not a musselman yet. There is still hope for her. But if she does not get her shoes and sweater and a lesson in camp manners, she will not be long for even this world, I tell you.”

  But they could not find Esther in the short hour before they were herded back into the barracks. Shifre took the mismatched shoes for her and Hannah the sweater, and then they entered the zugangi barracks with the others for the first long night in camp.

  Hannah slipped uneasily into sleep, with the sounds of seventy women around her. Some of them were noisy sleepers, punctuating their dreams with snores. One or two cried out sharply in their sleep. And one woman wept throughout the night, low horrible sobs that rose in pitch until someone got up and comforted her. Then she would begin her sobbing again, slowly gathering volume and strength.

  Hannah’s dreams were filled with the sobs, but in the dreams they were cries of joy. She dreamed she was in a schoolyard where girls in blue dresses and blue pants with brightly colored sweaters hooked arms and laughed, shutting her out from their group. When she woke, she was crying. Her upper arms, which had served as her pillow, were wet. The sweater she had used for a blanket had slipped to the floor. She could not remember the dream.

  15

  IN THE MORNING, AFTER ROLL CALL AND BREAKFAST WERE over, they got their first lesson at the midden.

  “Commandant!” a man called across the wire fence from the men’s camp.

  “Commandant coming!” A woman took up the cry.

  “He is coming,” Rivka said urgently to Hannah and Shifre, who were standing near the cauldrons, where they had been helping dish out the watery soup. “Do what I do.”

  Rivka put her hands up to her mouth as if shouting, but instead made a penetrating clucking noise by placing her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Fro
m all over the camp came the same clicking, as if crazed crickets had invaded the place. The small children, alerted by the sound, came scrambling from everywhere. They raced toward the midden heap behind the barracks. Even the camp guards joined in, alternately clucking and laughing, waving the children on toward the garbage pile. The largest children carried the littlest ones in their arms. There were about thirty in all.

  Hannah watched, amazed at their speed. When they got to the midden, they skinned out of their clothes and dove naked into the dump.

  Suddenly Hannah noticed that one of the camp babies was still cradled in a wash tub. Without stopping to ask, she grabbed it up and ran with the child into the middle of the midden. Garbage slipped along her bare legs.

  She waded through a mixture of old rags, used bandages, the emptied-out waste of the slop buckets. The midden smell was overwhelming. Though she’d already gotten used to the pervasive camp smell, a cloudy musk that seemed to hang over everything, a mix of sweat and fear and sickness and the ever-present smoke that stained the sky, the smell in the midden was worse. She closed her eyes, and lowered herself into the garbage, the baby clutched in her arms.

  When the all-clear clucking finally came, Hannah emerged from the heap with the baby, who was cooing. She scrubbed them both off with a rag until the child’s mother, Leye, came running over.

  “I will murder that Elihu Krupnik. Where is he? He is supposed to take her in. And look! You left her clothes on. They are filthy.” Leye’s face was contorted with anger.

  “No thanks?” Rivka asked. “Leye, she saved the baby.”

  Leye stared for a moment at Hannah, as if seeing her for the first time. Then, as if making an effort, she smiled. “I will organize some water,” she said, leaving the filthy baby in Hannah’s filthy arms.