Jon Clinch @ Work

More years had gone by and the old man had passed away and the barber shop was in Jacob’s hands when Eidel arrived, Eidel Mankowicz from Warsaw, here for a month’s skiing with her parents and her three younger sisters. She’d never seen a place even half so beautiful. She couldn’t get enough of it. The truth was that she could barely bring herself to come indoors, and late one afternoon she waited outside the shop as Jacob trimmed her father’s hair, utterly rapt and completely indifferent to what was going on inside, caught up in the gathering of clouds over the high peaks, her face illuminated by the last rays of the fading light. Jacob slipped and nicked her father’s cheek and Mankowicz said, “Perhaps you ought to turn a light on, the evening comes so early here in the mountains.” He was a hard man by the look of him, worldly but tough-minded, a lawyer perhaps. Someone with the means to bring a large family here to the limits of the Carpathians on an extended holiday. He was a hard man but he could see that this barber wasn’t going to turn on a lamp until the last possible minute, not while pretty young Eidel was standing outside his window with her face tilted up into the dying light. Not as long as he could still see her. Mankowicz was a man who understood the world, and he resigned himself to enduring another nick or two.

What was the harm? They were children. They wouldn’t be young forever.

Partly indoors and partly out, Canada is a great open-air bazaar of the lost and the stolen. Treasures lurk everywhere: rare gems and glittering costume jewelry, wedding rings and coins of all nations; dark Belgian chocolates and rich French cheeses and fat fragrant sausages from every corner of Europe. The first lesson that Jacob learns is that you never know where you’ll find such things, and the second lesson is that the first lesson is an illusion. There are, after all, only a limited number of places where desperate people might have hidden their valuables upon reaching the end of the line. The hems of coats and dresses. The toes of boots. False bottoms and secret compartments in trunks and suitcases.

The capo—the individual in charge of the work and in charge of the block too—is Slazak, pot-bellied Slazak from Lodz, denizen and product of one ghetto after another. He is both a Jew and a disgrace to Jews, and if Jacob had encountered him back when he was a free man freely at work in his father’s barber shop in Zakopane, he wouldn’t have stooped to cut his hair. Even six months ago, working for a couple of apples at a time, he would have turned his back. But six months ago Slazak was already ensconced here at Auschwitz, already proving himself the sort that the SS could depend on, clawing his way up toward that subtle meniscus where the prisoner begins to confuse himself with those who have imprisoned him. The role of the capo is an essential position but a tenuous one, because in order to earn the job and the green patch that goes with it a man must demonstrate a capacity for cunning and brutality that will surely doom him one day. For certain men, though, the dream is irresistible. No one believes in the future anyhow.

“Use your imagination,” says Jacob, his words the only sound in the kitchen other than the whistling of steam and the officer’s footsteps approaching across the tile floor. “You’re the one with the ideas, with the connections. Prove to me that the world isn’t the terrible place I think it is. That there’s one small spot of light left within it.”

“I’ve walked with a cane ever since the days when I could pass it off as an affectation. One of those things that artistic types just do, like dressing in those diaphanous hand-dyed fabrics if you’re a woman, or wearing a beret if you’re a man. Like using a cigarette holder. Not that I’ve ever smoked, and not that I could ever see myself in a beret. Berets are for old Frenchmen, and as far as people of my background are concerned, an old Frenchmen is most likely a sympathizer.”

His mind races as the razor drips. Should his wife be lost, everything will be possible. All strictures will be removed. And he knows exactly what he will do. He’ll persuade Chaim to feign illness, and in the boy’s place he’ll arrange to use Max as his assistant. For just one day. One day is all they’ll need. The two of them, father and son, will murder Liebehenschel together, locking the door to keep the cook and the housekeeper out and tying him to his chair with the linen drape and letting his blood paint the walls and soak the carpets and run down between the floorboards. Then out the window they’ll go. Out the window to freedom or whatever else might be waiting

Jacob smiles at him from a distance in case he should happen to glance his way, but the officer only looks straight ahead. He stands at attention with the thumb of his left hand parallel to the seam in his trousers and his right elbow cocked and his right hand lifted up to a point beneath his chin, suspended there as steadily as if it were hung from a wire. As each individual passes beneath his gaze, the index finger of that one hand makes a single tiny movement. It’s the only part of him that stirs, the one component of a broken machine still functional. The finger points by five or ten degrees either to the left or to the right, apparently independent of anything but its own volition, not even seeming to consult with the officer himself, who stands at attention and makes no other movement while the line of men approaching him becomes two lines. Two streams of weary travelers parting around him like water.

In the end, once past the guards and down the lane that leads to the main street and exposed to life in the town, she keeps her eyes averted and doesn’t see anything at all. She’s like some superstitious child afraid to step upon a crack in a walkway, daring to look in no direction but down. What’s become of her? she wonders. What’s become of the certainty with which she once met the world? What’s become of the unstoppable urge she once felt to see everything, to capture everything, to make from the rough raw materials of the universe some new and shining creation of her own? She despairs to realize that this private thing has been taken away from her along with everything else, and she keeps her gaze cast down

The doctor is a prisoner himself, a bespectacled Frenchman. He claims to be a doctor anyway, and the Germans believe him because belief costs nothing. He says that he specializes in women’s complaints, but there are plenty of other doctors, good sound Nazi doctors, more qualified for such things, and so he has been pressed into service as a general practitioner, dealing with the usual run of burns and lacerations and broken bones. Ailments of the heart and the liver and the lungs. Puzzling accumulations of symptoms that when taken together point nowhere but the grave.

Chaim ducks under the carton and Jacob ducks around it and together they go in, down a little hallway with more gas lamps mounted on the walls, and along past a low and dimly lit room where the piano player entertains a mixed audience of SS officers and young women from the auxiliary. There are tables with tablecloths and candles and there’s a jammed dance floor down at the far end, but they don’t look closely. They just scurry past. Some singing starts up behind them, the chorus of that folk song with everyone raising up his voice on cue, and the surprising assault of it makes them jump. One of the officers laughs to spy their terror. “Afraid of a little singing?” he calls, as amused as if he’d shot them himself. “I’m not surprised,” he hollers. “It’s a German number, after all.” They pretend not to hear, and he barks another laugh and returns to his music.