The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online Page A

everyone taken to the station to sort things out. That was the code for the blue police to arrest us, and the blackmailers ran away. At the station we gave the blue police their cut and they let us go when the coast was clear.
We were waiting to go through a week later when Zofia and another girl with dark curly hair walked by with two baskets of goods. They set their baskets down, chatting and laughing, and the other girl shookout her hair like she’d just taken off a hat, and they pulled off their armbands and hoisted their loads again and walked right past all three sentry posts and out of the ghetto. The green policeman even said some kind of hello as they went by. Zofia waved and said something in response that he seemed to like.
The next day we visited her apartment to ask if she and her friend wanted to join our group. “What group?” Zofia asked, and seemed unimpressed when I told her what we had going.
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. Those who wouldn’t jump were shot. A cousin who escaped into the woods had told her about it. Then her whole family had been herded west with other families through three villages and those who couldn’t keep up were shot at like ducks until finally they were all loaded onto some trucks and driven into Warsaw. She said she’d brought her best clothes but that hermother had managed to bring only her ceramic stew pot loaded with three bottles of cooking oil.
Lutek kept asking her about the fire part of her story until Zofia finally told him that if he didn’t stop she’d throw him into a fire herself.
So I asked about the oil instead. “What are you looking at?” Adina said to me, and made a face. “He’s in love,” Lutek told her. “He worries me,” she told him back. “Why would your mother save oil?” I asked her again.
She said her parents used to have a shop that sold oil her father had produced himself and was very proud of. He died before the war and the shop had gone downhill even before the Germans came. Her mother was bitter about it still and whenever anyone asked for credit or a favor, she always said, “Sure, it’s nice to screw on somebody else’s sheets.” Lutek said that that could be our group motto and Zofia said again what made him think there was going to be a group.
“We might as well do something,” Adina told her. Back home she said that there’d always been something she needed to be doing but that here she went out into the street and then in no time at all she’d go back to their apartment again, since what was there for her to do in the street?
Lutek asked what made them think they couldjust walk through the gates and Adina told him she’d always had a talent for that sort of thing. When they got to the city and passed through the center for refugees she told her mother that she’d hide their money and made sure she went first when her family had lined up to be searched, and a Volksdeutsche woman felt around in Adina’s hair for a long time, as though she kept her treasures there, then found a bundle in the pocket of her skirt and pulled it free and exclaimed, “And what are these? Diamonds?” and spilled them out onto a table only to discover they were hard candies. The other Volksdeutsche laughed and the woman slapped Adina’s face and threw her out of the room without finding the gold coins she was also carrying.
W E ALL WORKED TOGETHER FOR A WEEK AND THEN an old Polish woman grabbed Adina and shouted “Smuggler! Smuggler!” when they were coming back through the gate, so Lutek grabbed the old woman