Jim - Three.

Jim

I was so cold and stiff when I woke up that morning, I wondered for a second if I was dead. Hersch, naturally, had not allowed me to sleep anywhere near Rebecca’s vicinity. There were only two mattresses, and I wasn’t about to displace Hersch or Rebecca, so I had spent the night between two threadbare blankets on the freezing stone floor.

Hersch claimed that he remembered agreeing to let me and Rebecca be together, but the fact that I had spent the night two rooms away from her proved that he was just as stubborn as he used to be. I spent more than two years imagining the earthshattering sex I would have with Rebecca when I found her, but instead I had spent the night alone and scared and too cold to even jerk off. I blamed Hersch. Clearly, at that point, I had absolutely no concept of the gravity of the situation.

Lying there alone, all I could think was how close to Rebecca I was and how I unlikely I was to get any closer any time soon. It was partially my own stupid fault. Last night I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to kiss her. I felt like a fairy for it now, but at the time I was so stunned and happy I had just hugged her for ages. Hersch came in after about five minutes, and none of us really talked. I don’t think any of us wanted to. We were so exhausted and confused, we couldn’t even consider the impasse that we had reached. I just wanted to sleep, and Hersch just wanted me out of the way. I let go of Rebecca, he pointed me in the direction of the empty room, and that was it.

I knew we would have to deal with each other today. There was no more putting it off. There was absolutely no way of knowing what time it was, but I figured Erich and Gabe would be there any minute. God, if I thought I had a rough night, those two probably suffocated on the awkwardness. Unless the suffocated on each other instead. I swore that if those two got some last night and I didn’t, I would just lie down and die.

I hated this place. I mean, obviously no one has a really excellent opinion of ghettos, but I could feel myself getting more scared and lonely by the second. Lonely, that was the real problem. The other ghettos I had seen were inhumanely crowded. But this one was like a ghost town, and that was almost scarier. Everything was just silent and gray and frozen. Even two rooms away from Hersch and Rebecca, the two people I cared about more than anything in the world, I felt like I was completely alone.

So I was unnaturally grateful when the door swung open and someone crept into my room. I sat up immediately and ran my fingers through my hair, sure that Rebecca had come to see me now that Hersch was asleep. I felt like an idiot when I saw it was Hersch in the doorway. For a second, I wondered why Rebecca hadn’t found me once Hersch was asleep. That was how we always operated, wasn’t it? A wave of panic " panic that somehow maybe Rebecca wasn’t still in love with me " sent a jolt through my chest. Hersch really didn’t seem to care.

“Come on, get up. We’re going upstairs.” He sounded so businesslike and irritated, he could have been waking me up for class at Wellington’s. I threw back the blankets and followed him. No need to change; I had been wearing the same clothes for two weeks now.

Rebecca was out in the main room, sitting at the table in a housecoat that was clearly not hers and a pair of very old slippers. The sight of her in the morning made my heart drop into my stomach.

Hersch saw me looking at her, and he sent me an icy look. “Down the stairs, Banhart. I’m right behind you.”

“I thought you said…” Hadn’t he said ‘upstairs’?

Hersch didn’t let me finish. “Just do it. Don’t do anything stupid.” He said it like I couldn’t handle a flight of stairs without blowing up the country. I grumbled as I went to the stairwell. Being in the basement, I wasn’t sure how there could be a downstairs staircase, but there was. About halfway down I realized Hersch still wasn’t behind me. I stopped climbing and listen.

I heard Rebecca shove her chair back angrily. “Herschel!” she barked. I cringed, glad that her rage was not directed at me. “You have to let me come.”

“No.”

“I want to see them!” she fumed. “You can’t keep me hidden down here forever. I’ve already seen James, and I know that is what you were worried about. For God’s sake, I brought them here!”

I had to guess that this was a continuation of a fight from last night, which could have been yet another reason Hersch hadn’t wanted me around. Still, I cursed Hersch for keeping me from Rebecca; at this point it seemed like he had vastly bigger problems to deal with. “Exactly!” Hersch seethed. “You’ve caused enough trouble bringing them here, so don’t cause any more getting them home.”

“You idiot!” she hissed. “Don’t you dare send them back! They’ll help us, Herschel. They came so far. We need them.”

I didn’t dare go back to defend myself. Mostly, because I wasn’t sure how much I could help at all. My only plan involved running, fast and far, and Hersch did not seem to be up for that.

Hersch took a few deep breaths. “Listen, I have to get them out of here. You should never have gotten them mixed up with this. They’re not safe, Rebecca. They don’t know what it’s like here. F**k, Erich’s a soldier!”

“But "”

“Just leave it, Rebecca. If you want them to be all right, just stay down here now.”

Rebecca took a deep breath. I had never known her to do as Hersch said, but she seemed not to have the will to fight with him anymore. “Can you promise I’ll see them? I want to see Gabriel.”

            “Yes, I’ll send Gabe down to see you,” Hersch huffed. “Now will you let me go? For all I know, Erich turned him into the Germans already.”

            “Don’t say things like that, Herschel.” Rebecca’s voice was vicious. Hersch didn’t say anything " giving up, I assumed. He appeared at the top of the stairwell a second later.

            “I said down the stairs,” he grumbled, shoving past me. I was really pretty taken aback by how nasty he was being to everyone. But I could tell that, whatever had happened in two and a half years, I couldn’t expect Hersch to be the same person he was at Wellington’s. He wasn’t a refugee student trying to appear normal anymore. He was fighting for his life again. I hated it. I missed my best friend.

I was glad Hersch had pushed past me, though, because the staircase quickly ceased being a staircase. Turns out I was right when I thought there couldn’t be a downstairs to the basement. There wasn’t. We were headed for a tunnel. The passage was pitch black, and I imagined it was a sewer at some point, though the ghetto obviously no longer had running water. If it weren’t for Hersch and his candle in front of me, I probably would have been stuck down there forever. I resisted the urge to latch onto his shoulder. Trying to fight down the terror, I forced myself to make conversation.

“Tunnel, huh?” I still had a gift for pointing out the obvious.

“Shut up, Banhart.” That was the end of that.

Finally, the blackness gave way and we reached a very rickety ladder that looked like it probably stretched up forever. Hersch snuffed the candle and began to climb, and I clambered after him. This was perhaps worse than the tunnel. My legs were long healed, but they were never going to be in perfect condition for a ninety-degree climb up two stories. I could hear my knees popping, but didn’t dare ask Hersch to stop. At this rate, I imagined he would probably just leave me behind in the tunnel.

We finally surfaced in an equally pitch-black room. Now that we were finally back in the surface world, I could see that it was indeed still dark outside. I could not, however, see where we were. Groping around in the dark, trying to figure out where Hersch had gotten to.

“I thought the tunnels were closed.”

“Not all of them,” Hersch’s voice came from the dark. “The Germans blocked the tunnels out, but they never found their way back to the center. The old Resistance headquarters, that’s where you were.”

This seemed risky for Hersch to be telling me, and I wondered briefly if he was actually starting to trust me again. “Why are you telling me?”

I heard what sounded like curtains being pulled shut, and whirled around to try and face Hersch. “Because you’re not going back there.” I would have argued, but at that moment, I whacked my shins on something solid. “Quiet!” Hersch growled.

I knelt down to clutch my injured shin. “F**k it, Hersch! Can we turn on the lights?”

Another curtain. “Just a candle. The soldiers can’t see the light in the window, especially in this place. They will know it’s me.”

That didn’t make any sense until he actually lit the candle, and I found myself at eye level with an empty pair of eyes.

“GAH!” I stumbled back and knocked over something behind me.

“Quiet!” Hersch hissed.

A little shaky, I took a step forward to inspect the eyes that had terrified me. Hersch didn’t say anything, but he moved the candle closer so I could see. On the counter in front of me, there was a faceless marble mannequin head wearing a round pair of glasses. That still didn’t make much sense, until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I could see the light of the candle reflected on a hundreds of small cuts of glass. We were in a storefront, covered on every surface by dozens of pairs of glasses.

I extended my hand for the candle, and Hersch, not seeming to want to explain, handed it over. I raised the light to an open case on the wall, watching the flame flicker in the reflection flicker in the lenses. Something crunched underfoot as I took another step forward.

“Careful!” Hersch warned harshly. I crouched down, throwing the candle’s light on the floor. I had crushed a pair of glasses. They were all over the floor, too. In fact, there was more glass on the floor than could have possibly come from the lenses. The place had been ransacked.

“Hersch,” I asked, turning back towards him. “Where are we?”

Hersch was standing behind the counter, inspecting a hexagonal pair of glasses. “My parents’ shop.”

“Your father?”

It was too dark to know for sure, but I thought Hersch maybe smiled a little. “How do you think I got these?” he tapped the specs on the bridge of his own nose. He squinted at the second pair of glasses in his hand, but when he touched them lightly with his finger, a lens fell loose and shattered on the counter. Hersch winced just a little. “He was a doctor. An ophthalmologist. He loved to help people see. But he got his license taken away when I was just a kid, mostly because Poles didn’t like having a Jew inspect their eyes. So he opened this shop in the Jewish quarter, and saw Jewish patients on the quiet. I grew up in here. My mother designed most of the glasses, and Papa cut the glass.”

I turned back to the case. Most of the glasses were much more interesting than Hersch’s unremarkable pair. “They made these?”

“Most of them.” Hersch pulled off his own glasses and cleaned them gently on the corner of his grimy shirt. He was only telling me the facts, but I knew there was more he wasn’t saying. I had seen it when he cringed over the broken lens, and I had heard it in warning when I stepped on the frames. This place was important to Hersch. It was all that was left of his parents and his childhood. I had known Hersch respected his father, but I never realized how much he missed him.

“Do you come up here a lot?”

Hersch hesitated. “More than I should, probably. The door is barred, and the windows are boarded up, but it’s still never really safe for us up on the street since the Nazis don’t know we’re here. I guess… I don’t know. I figure this will be gone too, soon, and I don’t want to forget it.”

My heart broke for Hersch. I was starting to understand better why he didn’t want me there. I was never going to understand what he went through, so how could I expect to help him. Hersch didn’t seem to want to talk about the glasses anymore.

“Goddamn it!” he pounded on the counter. “Where the hell are they? Erich and Gabe, shouldn’t they be here by now?”

I admit I had forgotten about Gabe and Erich. Instinct from Wellington’s made me want to joke about what they could have been doing to make them late, but I caught myself. This wasn’t Wellington’s. “I’m sure they’ll be here,” I said quietly. I didn’t want Hersch thinking any of us couldn’t handle ourselves here, even if I wasn’t completely sure we could. I wanted him to think we could help. Hersch didn’t respond, obviously unconvinced.

Now I wished he hadn’t brought up Gabe and Erich. I hadn’t been worried about them until right then. But now I couldn’t stop imagining everything that could have possibly happened to them. Erich could have turned Gabe in. He could have sent the soldiers after us. Gabe could have been shot in the street trying to find his way back to us. They might have been caught at the gate and arrested. The Nazis could have found them together in Erich’s room. Oh God, I was so worried.

I didn’t know it then, but that gnawing feeling of dread would become " for me at least " the worst part of the ghetto. The knowledge that my friends might never make it back to me. During those months in Poland, making more and more dangerous plans, the feeling never got easier to handle.

Finally, I could see purple light slipping through the boarded windows, and I knew we had waited too long. My fear for Gabe and Erich was about to eat through my stomach. “Shouldn’t we go look for them?” I asked agitatedly, trying not to let Hersch see how unglued I was.

Hersch shook his head. “I can’t go out here. Too close to the wall. The watch stations can see the street.”

That made me angry, really angry. “Hersch, they could be dead out there. Gabe and Erich are coming to help you, and you would just leave them?” This wasn’t the Hersch I used to know. Hersch used to be loyal; he used to care about us. Could these two years have really completely changed him?

“Amery can take care of himself.”

“And Gabe?”

The break in Hersch’s voice betrayed his stony face. “He shouldn’t have come in the first place.”

Now he was really making me mad. Fine, he didn’t have to trust Erich. I could understand that. But he wouldn’t even go outside to find Gabe, Gabe who had never done anything to Hersch except come halfway across the world to help him. “Well he did,” I growled, shoving a display case out of my way as I stomped over to Hersch. “He’s here. We’re all here, and you have to accept that. Now, I’m going out there to help our friends, and if you’re not going to do the same, then maybe we shouldn’t have come to help you in the first place!”

Hersch’s lip curled, but he knew when he was beat. He shrugged off his jacket. “Take this,” was all he said. I didn’t understand until I had the jacket in my hands. Even in the darkness, I couldn’t miss the yellow star stitched onto the fabric. I ran my thumb over the word Jude, thinking about how the same star that could get me killed was all the protection Hersch had to offer. “Go out the back.”

He wouldn’t go with me, and even though I knew he was only trying to keep himself alive, I hated him for that. I should have known Hersch was doing everything he could, but I hadn’t yet grasped the danger of the ghetto, and to me all I thought was that Hersch would never be the person he used to be. If that had been the last time I ever saw Hersch, I would never have forgiven myself. I took the jacket from him and stalked to the back exit, slamming the door behind me.

Outside, it was still darker than I would have imagined. The sun was still well under the horizon, with only a cloudy purple light in the east. It was also freezing out. Like an moron, I had left my meager belongings at the last Polish safe house, thinking it would be easier to get inside the walls without extra baggage. There was really no chance of getting anything back. All I had in the world was Hersch’s coat. The jacket was much too short in the arms and too wide in the torso, remarkably unconvincing. Remembering my new status as a Jew, I shot a glance to the guard post on the wall. Sure enough, there was someone up there. I shuddered and tried my hardest to be invisible. The guard struck me as familiar, though. He was tall and built like a house, with blond hair and a cig in his left hand.

Erich was on duty.

I barely had time to process the rush of betrayal before I was hit by what I initially could only imagine was an entire tree, and my vision burst into stars. I was vaguely aware of being dragged into a much darker alley than the one I was already in, but my brain was too busted to even consider fighting back. The sting of a knifepoint on my shoulder, however, snapped me out of my fog real quick.

            “Who are you?” a furious and terrifyingly unfamiliar voice demanded.

            My head was swimming, but I managed to grasp that I was being held against a brick wall by a powerful hand around my throat. Being strangled did nothing to help my coherency.

            “I’m a Jew.” I only barely managed to choke out the lie.

            “Don’t lie to me!” Well, that was a lost cause. “I can name every person in this goddamn ghetto. So tell me who you are before I take off your nose.” I was now intensely aware of the huge knife digging into my shoulder, drawing blood. I only managed not to cry because my brain didn’t remember how. I was going to die. This was how it ended. After everything, I was going to get stabbed to death in the street for no reason at all. I let out a pathetic gurgle, and the freezing cold blade was suddenly under my chin. “Who are you?”

            At first, I thought the man must have been a soldier. Who else would have been able to take me down so quickly? But his accent was wrong: thick Polish, much thicker than Hersch’s or even Rebecca’s. He was no German. I forced my mind to focus on him. I barely even saw his face, just the yellow star, identical to mine.

            “Herschel Abrahamson,” I wheezed pathetically. “I’m a friend of Herschel Abrahamson.” As little as I knew about Hersch’s life in the ghetto, I was sure his name had power.

            His grip loosened and the blade miraculously disappeared. “Hersch?” He could not have sounded more confused. And if we were both confused then, nothing could have prepared either of us for what came next. The man with the knife went flying backwards, yanked away by an enormous arm behind him. I think maybe if I hadn’t suffered a significant blow to the head, I would have seen Erich come up behind us.

            Clutching my shoulder, I blinked hard and tried to focus on what was happening. The man had not stayed down long. He was not going down without a fight either, back on his feet, brandishing the enormous knife. But Erich had a gun, so there wasn’t much competition. Erich was yelling in a combination German-English-Polish that was impossible to understand.

            They quickly discovered English as a common language. “I will shoot! Get on the ground!”

            The man growled angrily in Polish, and I tried to get a grip on his features. He was close to our age, and shorter but clearly stronger than me. It was too dark to tell much else. “Shoot me, Nazi b*****d! I’ll never get on the ground for you!” He spat at Erich’s feet. He couldn’t have known this, but spitting at Erich was probably the best way to quickly and efficiently fulfill a wish for death. Erich charged towards him, slamming him against the opposite wall, pistol jammed upwards against the Jew’s chin.

            “Erich, no!” The guy was unarmed now; there was no reason to kill him. Erich was about to blow the man’s brains out. “He knows Hersch!” Somehow, logic returned to my brain. If Hersch knew whoever this was, I couldn’t let Erich kill him. Hersch would never forgive any of us.

            “Yes, he does.” An alarming calm voice came from behind us. Everyone jumped, and I turned around to see that Hersch had appeared from nowhere. We all just stood frozen for a minute, before Erich lowered his pistol.

Hersch’s friend wiped blood from his lips and spat again. “What are you up to, Abrahamson?” he demanded. “Bringing an American and a goddamn German in here?” Hersch hissed at him in Polish, but the man with the knife wouldn’t hear it. “No, we’re staying here until you tell me what’s going on!”

Hersch snarled at him before turning his glare on us. “Erich, Jim,” he motioned towards us before turning back to his friend, “Peter Berezovsky.”