Girl. Alona Frankel
that the tuberculosis bacillus had gnawed in her lung.
My father left and I started to cry.
There were no more Germans and I was on the Aryan side. I started to cry.
I started my crying.
I sat down at one of the French windows and cried.
I cried and cried and cried.
Sitting on the living room couch was a clown whose clothes were made of shiny yellow satin. It had a white porcelain face, black hair, sad eyes with a tear falling from one of them. A beautiful, heavy blue tear, not like my tears, which were just wet and salty.
It was remarkably beautiful. I touched it. The satin was smooth and pleasant. That clown was nothing at all like the clumsy dolls I used to make for myself out of sticks, rags, and apples, the dolls whose heads my friends, the pigs, gobbled up. That sad clown was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wanted it so much through my tears.
But the minute Mrs. Hela Fishman saw what I wanted, the clown disappeared from the couch. She must have hidden it far back in one of the closets. I didn’t even get to see it anymore. I wanted so much, I yearned so much to hold it in my hands.
I didn’t have the clown.
And my father didn’t come.
I waited and waited and waited.
I cried and cried and cried.
I didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t sleep.
I didn’t move from the window. I waited and cried, cried and waited.
Hours, days, nights.
Until I saw my father trudging up the street, his right hand in a sling, a threadbare rag tied around his neck, very pale, very thin, limping.
I told him about the clown and he spoke on my behalf to Mrs. Hela Fishman, but his request was also denied.
I would never play with that clown.
My father asked them to give me some clothes, my rags had completely disintegrated, and they had so many clothes they didn’t need, their dead son’s clothes. But they absolutely refused. The clothes are a memento, Mrs. Hela Fishman said.
In the future, they’d find a sweet, blond orphan and adopt her. Those two mean people didn’t deserve to have a sweet child like Kashya.
The rags continued to disintegrate on me, and the rolled-up sleeves of the soda factory manager’s scratchy wool jacket continued to weigh heavily on my wrists.
They weigh heavily on me to this very day.
Mrs. Hela Fishman and Mr. Fishman told my father that I was intolerable.
That I sat at the window and cried all the time.
That it bothered them a great deal and disturbed the neighbors.
That the neighbors had come to complain.
That this was a very respectable community.
Respectable even before the war.
A quiet, elegant neighborhood.
Even the cat hid from my weeping, and they couldn’t bear it any longer.
A seven-year-old girl in tattered rags, sitting at the elegant French window of the Fishmans’ villa, crying, crying, crying, her tears wetting the chiffon curtains.
My father came and took me away from there.
Thin and pale, he plodded up the street and took me away from there.
The clown and the dead boy’s clothes stayed in the closets.
They took down the chiffon curtains and gave them out to the laundress.
We walked slowly.
We walked, walked, and walked. We walked to the orphanage.
We arrived, and I was seven years old.
THE ORPHANAGE WAS A VERY LARGE HOUSE BUILT OF RED bricks. It had endlessly long, dark hallways. Hanging from the ceiling were light bulbs trapped in little wire baskets, their dim light only increasing the darkness. On either side of the hallway were doors painted in peeling, sickly, dark green oil paint. Through the open doors you could see rooms with narrow barred windows. The windows were tall. Someone the height of a child couldn’t reach the sill to look outside.
Children of all sizes wandered through the hallways and the rooms. There were very small children, smaller than I was, and there were very big children the size of grown-ups. My father talked for a very long time, talked, talked, and talked, then pulled his unbroken hand out of mine and left.
He left and was gone.
I cried, cried, and cried.
I cried, cried, and cried.
I cried, cried, and cried.
In the orphanage, no one interrupted my crying.
That was very nice of all those children of every age and size. They just walked right past me and didn’t interrupt my crying.
We won the war. True, we hadn’t taken Berlin yet, but there were no more Germans. Crying was allowed.
And I sat in a corner of the hallway and cried.
That crying, this crying, hasn’t stopped yet. It never will.
These are tears that have no end.
You can’t stop crying them.
New children of every age, size, and shape were always coming to the orphanage built of red bricks the color of clotted blood. Some children were like little animals. One boy walked around on all fours. He didn’t know how to stand. Another boy didn’t speak, but only uttered strange barking, growling, and grunting noises. One little girl didn’t have an arm. She had only an elbow.
One big, strong boy with muscles and a broad back had legs that were folded back and he couldn’t straighten them out or stand on them. He dashed around at enormous speed on crutches and hit other children with them. For no reason.
And there was a boy who refused to get out of bed. He lay there, his head covered by the blanket, and was silent, didn’t speak. He never ever said a single word.
Strange words were spoken there. Odd sounds. Many languages. We all understood each other.
There was a boy who only slept under the bed. One girl always held a cross in her hand.
Children of war. Little Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians. And there were quick, mischievous children who laughed, played, and ran around.
They’d been found in hiding places, in forests, caves, holes, walls, pits, sewers, damp wells, cellars, attics, stables.
Abandoned orphans, survivors. But all of them were alive—not like the little naked girl Juzakowa found in the garbage pail in the yard, strangled, dead.
War isn’t healthy for children.
And I cried, cried, and cried.
I didn’t talk to any of the children.
I cried, cried, and cried.
They spooned out food from enormous blazing vats with a ladle decorated with congealed drippings, like they did in the soup kitchen next door to the church in the village where I was a Christian girl. Every child had a dish, and you could ask for more. The food was very good. And the bread was light and delicious. There was an abundance of light, delicious bread. As much as you wanted.
The toilets were horrible. Wooden benches with holes in them, always filthy and as smelly as the ones in the ghetto. There usually wasn’t any paper. In the hiding place on Panienska Street, there were always newspapers speared on a crooked nail, and sometimes they had beautiful pictures on them, like the picture of the lovely girl with the curls and the ribbon.
Sometimes I had to go there