‘Look at them,’ Mama said, chewing the words in the corner of her mouth. She meant the columns of families that I think were heading towards Gdanski Station.
‘Is that what you want to happen to us, Marcus?’
I had recited the M'zonot aloud, twice, to thank God in advance for the cake that he was sure to send me tomorrow, my birthday, so Mama was cross and now we were late and Papa would be twitching at the door. So I stayed silent. Then, remembering my new name and realizing that the question was for me, I began to prepare an answer. Yes, that is what I wanted to happen to us. Those people had been going somewhere, perhaps to Lazienki Park or the flea market in the Praga district or to see the statues at Wilanow Palace. Whole families together instead of just me, Mama and Papa, curled up and buried in the Lefkowitz’s cellar. We were beginning to smell like earth.
‘Are they going to see the barrack statues?’ I asked Mama.
‘The barrack statues?’ she looked down at me, frowning.
‘To Wilanow, where Papa promised to take me.’
Papa had described the statues so many times, and I longed to see their light and their colour and their movement. Movement! I was mesmerized and scared. Papa had said, in his day-dreamy voice, that they overwhelmed even the hardest hearts. And I wondered whether my heart was hard or soft, and if it was hard, would it hurt when the statues overwhelmed it, and would this make it become soft and stay soft forever. Perhaps “barrack” was not the right word. Perhaps I should have said “bedrock” or “bulwark” and, perhaps this was why Mama was so stony. She didn’t like me to use the wrong word for things.
‘No Marcus.’
Her cold hand gripped mine so tightly that I thought it might crumble inside her palm, and if she ever let go, my flesh would drain away like dust. She tugged me, pulling so quickly that I had no time to look up and put faces to shoes, or even to see who it was walking in the snow with no shoes at all. Again. Again. And again.
And all of these thoughts swelled up inside my eyes and so, ashamed, I kept my head bent. But then I remembered how Papa said that crying was good because it purged bad thoughts. And for a moment I was pleased with myself for remembering that word - purge. I was sure that if I told Mama, she would be pleased too.
But then a terrifying thought came: if it was now alright to walk without shoes, perhaps my shoes would have to go wherever it was that things like that had to go. Wherever it was that my toys, my books, my home had gone. I had thought that they were still there, just where we’d left them, but when I’d asked Mama if we could go back to them, she’d said, ‘They’ve gone, Marcus. They had to go. We don’t need them anymore. We are happy here. The Lefkowitzs are kind to us so we must be happy here.’ And I had thought that this was very strange because we were only allowed to use the Lefkowitz’s cellar and most of the time 1 | 2 NEXT |
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