The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard Page B

awake and started talking in a low voice. He said his family had taken over the previous apartment they’d been in, that they’d just stormed the place with another family. Then it had been taken away from them by the Germans. He said in the shelter at the synagogue all of the boys stole bread fromone another’s families, and what they didn’t eat they traded for horseshoe spikes they used in games. He said he’d gotten the honey outside the ghetto when an O.D. man had turned his back and pretended not to see him coming or going. I asked what an O.D. man was and it turned out that’s what he called the yellow police, because of the German name for them, Ordnungsdienst, the Order Service. After we listened to my brothers snore he asked if I thought he looked strong.
“Are you talking to me?” I asked. He said he was. He asked again if I thought he looked strong. I told him I guessed so.
He said that that was because he was. “Smugglers eat more than other people because they work harder,” he said. His cheeks had the pockmarks from chicken pox and he had an expression like he was sharing the floor with a sick person.
I told him smugglers didn’t usually tell everyone that they were smugglers, and he snorted. “I don’t think you’re Gestapo,” he said.
“You never know,” I told him.
He asked how long we’d lived there. He said he’d hated his village and that when he and his friends trampled their neighbor’s vegetable garden the neighbor had come out of his house and tried to beat themwith a leather strap. Then he turned loose his dog, who bit them. Dogs hate the poor, he added, thinking about it further. He talked with his hands, like a Jew.
He said he’d been thrown out of the Polish Scouting Association after being told that as a Jew he couldn’t be sworn in on a Christian Bible and he suggested to his troop leader that they use a spare-parts catalog instead. He said his only real friend hadn’t shown up to say goodbye on the day he left. He said all of this gave him an advantage because he never felt homesick. And it was better to have no one to miss.
He said his father had a weakness for the bottle and I’d probably already noticed that he never refused a toast. “And why should he?” he asked.
If he was waiting for an argument, he didn’t get one from me. “You’re soon going to have trouble with my mother, too,” he told me. He said it was never long before she was sure she was being cheated and that’s why she was always shouting at someone. I asked if we were going to have trouble with his sister, too, and he said she was so shy she’d told him that if she ever got married she wanted it to be in a cellar where no one would see.
I asked what happened to his sister’s hand and he said that on the way to Warsaw his father had let himtake the reins of the wagon and that he had steered the thing so badly when crossing a bridge that he’d turned them over in a ditch.
I asked how they’d managed to get the wagon back on its wheels and he said he told people stories like that because he thought it was important to be clear in your own head on what you could and couldn’t do and this was how he’d grown up to be someone with open eyes. Inasmuch as he’d grown up at all, I said, and he told me he’d show me how much he’d grown up the next chance he got.
I told our group about him and repeated some of his stories and Lutek said I should bring him along tomorrow. Adina wanted to know why and he said she shouldn’t worry about it, since Sh’maya’s friend Boris probably wasn’t going to survive long anyway, given what we were up to.
“Why’re you calling me that?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what your brothers call you?” he said.
When everyone was asleep that night, I told Boris he should come meet the group. He said he looked forward to becoming our leader. I told him that as far as he was concerned school was starting once the sun came up the next morning, so he should get some