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

and started shouting the same thing and his father’s friend had to drag all three over to the green and blue police to work the whole thing out. Zofia and I went a block away before stopping to watch. The rule withus was always if one got stopped the others walked on. The old woman made a racket we could hear from there. Zofia said Lutek had dropped whatever he’d been carrying into her bag.
“This is going to take a while,” she said and I told her she was probably right. Neither of us had anywhere to go. She worried that Adina would be beaten even if they set her free and said she should’ve gone in her place. When she’d been caught, because of her looks the blue policeman had beaten her but not as a Jew.
“What makes old people like that?” she wondered. I told her I didn’t know.
She said that a few days after the city surrendered, someone had told her mother that her father’s father, her other grandfather, wanted to see her. Zofia had never met him. He was a rabbinical scholar, she never knew what sort.
I waited for her to go on. I was happy that we were talking like this.
She said her parents told her that this grandfather had a lot of money, she didn’t know why, and that her mother was excited because maybe this would allow them all to emigrate. Zofia had never met him because when her father married someone non-Orthodox, hisfather told him that as far as he was concerned, his son had died, he’d already buried him and mourned his passing.
“So what was he like?” I asked.
“The one thing my father told me was that he wrote letters to God,” she said. “That seemed like an interesting idea. I wondered what he did with them.”
“So what was he like?” I said.
“All my mother ever said about him was that he could dig money out of the ground,” she said. Some trolley brakes screeched around the bend on Chłodna and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it made me wish she was somewhere quiet and safe. “So now I was being summoned to see him, alone, and my mother was very excited and anxious and my father was angry with her for getting everyone stirred up. I remember them fussing about what I would wear and then I was delivered to a big dark house and told to go inside. An old woman opened the door and disappeared and I went up flights of stairs. I didn’t know where I was going and I had to feel my way around the landings but I could see a light on the top floor. The top floor was a long dark room with angled ceilings. At the end of it an old man with a beard sat behind a desk piled with books. Some of the stacks reached the ceiling. There were stacks on the windowsills inthe dormers. There were spiderwebs everywhere, even on his lamp, so I stopped to wait for him to say something. I finally said hello but for all I knew he was deaf. He looked up and gestured for me to come closer. I ducked under the webs as I went. When I was halfway there he held up his palm and I stopped and he watched me for a while. A clock was ticking somewhere in the room. I said hello to him again, then took a step, and again he held up his palm. So I told him who I was. His face didn’t change and he waved his hand upward for me to go away. I took a step back, to see if that was really what he meant, and he went back to his reading.”
“So after all that he didn’t even talk to you?” I said.
The green and blue police lost patience and started beating Adina and Lutek on their heads. Adina put her hands over her head, so one of them beat her hands. Then he stopped and everyone went back to their posts.
“I shouldn’t even be with you, you’re so unsanitary,” Zofia said to me. I put a hand to my neck, as if I could hide the lice.
Lutek and Adina disappeared down Żelazna Street and the old woman stood there talking to herself for a few more minutes before she finally left. Once shewas gone, Zofia stood up and brushed the dirt from her skirt.
“When the war started, when it came to food I was always more