Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 49 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
A paper hanging on the wall of the rabbit cage:
Attention kennel children!
Anywun who finishes his choors by eleven in the morning can kum to a short, intristing shiur in the back room. It will be given by Binyamin Schvirtz.
It’s worth hurrying; he’s kuming for a very short time.
Yanku
“We need to talk, Yanku,” Binyamin said after he finished reading the note. He glanced into the back room, where about ten boys of various ages were waiting for him.
“About my spelling mistakes?” The boy scowled. “Everyone tells me about them. You want a pen to fix them?”
“No, that’s not the issue at all. Our conversation yesterday, about my father’s matzeivah, was too short.”
Yanku glanced around worriedly. “The boys are waiting for you, in case you didn’t notice. You promised a shiur. And I promised it would be interesting.”
“It will be very interesting,” Binyamin reassured him. “But listen, I spoke to my sister the other day. She found out that I wanted to clean something off our father’s headstone, and she wanted to know what it was about. So I told her that when I scraped off the ink, someone was watching me, and then I spoke to him.”
“Did you tell her that it was me?”
Binyamin took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“And you told her what we talked about?”
“We hardly spoke, Yanku. All you told me was that you know what it says there, and that you know who wrote it, and you also know why. But you didn’t tell me anything more than that. You ran away too quickly.”
“And you went and told your sister the little bit that I did tell you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, then, goodbye, I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“She knows how to keep secrets, and she’s also very smart. And you need to realize that I was very upset when it happened!”
“Nu, so what do you want to know now?”
“If my guess and hers is right, then you are the one who wrote the word.”
The boy was quiet for a long moment.
“Yanku?” Binyamin pressed quietly.
“I spoke too much yesterday. Don’t expect me to be that foolish again.”
“It’s safe to assume that if I was your father, I would certainly be nervous that my son is so impulsive,” Binyamin agreed. “Think about what could have happened if someone else would have seen the word ‘murdered’ and not me.”
Yanku was quiet, not affirming but not denying.
“So I can understand if your father doesn’t let you continue discussing the issue. But maybe he’ll agree to speak to me himself?”
“The boys are waiting for you,” was the response of the thirteen-year-old. “And also, if you offered this shiur to me yesterday so that you’d have an excuse to come and talk to me again, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t get a word out of me.”
“I don’t want you to tell me anything if your father doesn’t let, and my sister already suggested this shiur a few days ago, as soon as I got this break. So the shiur has nothing to do with you. Alright, I’ll go in to the boys now.”
“What are you going to teach them?”
“Ten minutes of how to build useful tools from wire, and ten minutes about the parshah.”
“Nice.” It was a meager compliment.
“But before we part, I want to ask you to think about one thing.” Binyamin lowered his voice. “It’s not that I have any interest in digging into stories that are fifteen years old, and I have no plans of taking revenge on whoever harmed my father. But maybe we’ll have a way to prevent such a thing from happening again, if we know exactly what happened there.”
“If you dig too deep and learn what happened there,” the younger boy retorted, his eyes blazing, “then it will happen again, and you’ll be next in line.”
***
There are some especially long days, and today was one of them. When six-thirty came, and the children went running out of the classroom, Naomi took a deep breath. The effort to engage in simple routine actions relating to the preschool was so draining that she didn’t have a drop of energy left to wash the floor.
“Are you feeling okay?” Katy grilled her in her high-pitched voice.
“So-so,” Naomi said.
Rivku studied her from the side. “Just don’t tell me you’re going to ask for a day off tomorrow,” she snapped. “As it is, you owe me lots of hours.”
“No, no, b’ezras Hashem, I’ll be here.”
“But you can go now, if you want,” Katy offered. “I’ll wash the floor myself. Rivku, you can go, too, if you want. Naomi, maybe go to the infirmary?”
That was a good idea, not because Naomi wanted medical care that she didn’t need, baruch Hashem. She just wanted to see Babbe.
Why, actually? She wouldn’t share any of her suspicions with Babbe, at this point, as Binyamin and Aryeh had asked.
“And your mother?” she had asked Aryeh. “When I saw that sentence on the package, I immediately asked her what she thinks.”
“She for sure won’t do anything about it,” her husband had said. “And I imagine it’s a good idea for us to be very careful if we want to find out what really happened in that spice factory.”
Then Binyamin had told them about Tatte’s matzeivah and the strange conversation he’d had with the young Elkovitz boy, and she’d gone to sleep with a pounding headache.
She couldn’t consult with Babbe; she mustn’t. Still, her legs carried her to the infirmary.
“Here’s our teacher!” Dror Elkovitz’s voice hollered behind her.
Naomi turned and waved to him and his mother. It wasn’t difficult to hold back from saying anything to them regarding the black letters that Yanku Elkovitz had written on the matzeivah, not only because Suzy Elkovitz always had this air of distance about her, but primarily because Hauptmann Katarina was standing right beside her.
Naomi nodded politely to both women. She wanted to keep walking, but her eyes suddenly spotted an object that she had seen so many times before this but had become, just right now, something she wanted to grab with all her might: the cordless phone in Katarina’s hand.
A telephone. If she could only get hold of it, perhaps she could connect with the outside world, without saying who and what she was. Maybe this way she could find out if there was a labor camp for Jews that produced the Max Hanter spices!
The Nazi, who was unaware of Naomi’s thoughts, pointed to one of the buttons on the device and said something. Suzy, baby in her arms, nodded with understanding. “First you need to check the line,” she suggested.
“So come now and we’ll try that,” Katarina replied.
“To the manor house?” Dror asked with a huge smile. “Great! Yes, yes, Mama, come, let’s go there!”
“You’re not coming with me there. You’re going to Papa,” his mother said with her characteristically serious expression.
The boy shrugged. “I have no energy to walk all the way to the factory,” he whined.
“He and the baby can stay with me until the end of the workday,” Naomi interjected, not very politely. “When the men come home, I’ll send them.”
“That would be so nice of you!” Suzy released an aristocratic smile. “The baby should be calm now. And you, Dror—you’ll be a good boy, right?”
“For sure!” the boy exclaimed, and naturally moved his hand from his mother’s to Naomi’s.
“I’m just popping into the infirmary for a minute, to my grandmother,” Naomi informed Suzy as she carefully took the little one. “Then I’ll be going home. Is that okay with you? I won’t go inside, so she won’t catch anything.”
“That’s fine,” Suzy said. “Thank you so much, Naomi.” And she hurried after Hauptmann Katarina, toward the manor house.
“Your mother is very talented,” Naomi said to Dror, once the two women were in the distance. “She knows how to fix all kinds of important things in the camp.” She tried to remember what else she’d heard about Suzy Elkovitz nee Sherer’s golden hands.
“She once fixed Herr Josef Wangel’s watch!” the boy boasted. “I saw it, because she brings the expensive things home to fix late at night. But mostly she fixes the sewing and embroidery machines. The only things she doesn’t know how to fix are the big machines in the factory—that’s what she told me. They already called her a few times for that, and she didn’t go. My father fixes those machines. She taught him a little bit, and then he taught himself the rest.”
Sure, Sherer’s daughter wouldn’t get her delicate fingers dirty in puddles of grease and oil. Not that there was clear water running through the pipes of the sewing and embroidery machines, which were at least twenty years old…
“Where are we going? To the infirmary? What, Babbe Sara Liba is sick?”
“Chas v’chalilah! She volunteers there.”
“Right. She helped take care of our baby, Cherut!” he enthused. “Until she got all better and came home!”
“How is your baby at night? Does she cry a lot?”
“No, only a little.”
“And how does your mother manage? Do people bring a lot of things to the house for her to fix, even though she has a little baby?”
He wrinkled his little forehead as he thought. “Not so many things…”
“Good, because how can she be up so much at night taking care of Cherut, and also be busy fixing people’s things?”
“I help her!”
“You help her with Cherut?”
“No, I help her with the work!”
“That’s so nice. What do you help with?”
“I hold everything she’s fixing. You know that I once held the Hauptmann’s telephone myself?”
“Really? And it rang?”
“No, but we heard inside the voice of Gefreiter Helena talking!” He was all excited, flushed and sweaty. “She wanted to see if Mama had fixed it! So she got small and got inside the telephone, and she talked there!”
“She didn’t get inside it,” Naomi corrected him gently, as she shifted the baby’s weight in her arms. “It’s just her voice. She was in her house, in the manor house.”
The boy didn’t argue, but it was clear that something about the adults’ strange theory didn’t exactly sit right with him.
“I would have liked to hear her voice over the telephone, too,” Naomi said carefully. She stopped at the door of the infirmary. “I never heard what it sounds like when people talk on a phone.”
“My grandfather has something like a telephone on the wall. This way, Herr Josef tells him important things that he needs to do.”
“Really? A telephone at home?”
“Not at home. In the office.”
Binyamin had once told her that with telephones, someone can talk to almost every place in the world. And Babbe had told her that they existed already when she was little; they would go to a special office and speak into the telephone to someone who was even in a different city. So of course, they couldn’t bring such a dangerous instrument here, and the devices in the office could only connect with the Nazis. But maybe from Katarina’s phone she could call someone on the outside. The problem, of course, was getting her hands on it.
Maybe Suzy Elkovitz could help?
Or maybe they’d be able to convince Suzy to do something to make the phone in her father’s office connect to the outside world?
There was something about David Elkovitz that had changed, Binyamin claimed. After the story that he’d had with Dror’s father in the clinic, the nights after he’d been hospitalized; and after that strange incident with Yanku and Tatte’s matzeivah, it wasn’t crazy to think that Suzy Elkovitz might agree to cooperate.
Maybe that would be a way to help her figure out what was going on in Hanter’s spice factory.
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