Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 50 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.
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In chalk, on the wooden wall in the room adjacent to the kennels:
Wire is a very useful material –
Make your mother happy with a nice gift for hanging clothes, which will amuse even the little children!
Make a doll figure from the wire, following the sample piece.
Be careful not to leave sharp edges exposed, because they can damage the fabrics of the clothes!
“Thanks,” Yanku murmured at the end of the lesson, as he escorted Binyamin out of the room. The children stood behind them, arguing about who would be the best person to ask for remnants of wire. Yanku’s expression all but screamed, “Please leave as fast as possible, and don’t try to question me again!” Binyamin didn’t argue. He didn’t have a spare minute in any case. He had to be back at the factory before the end of his break.
“Thanks for the opportunity, Yanku,” he said. “Should I come back tomorrow?”
“I want to make sure that we won’t be missing these few minutes at the end of the day,” the younger boy responded. “I’ll check what we’ve managed to finish by the end of today, and I’ll send you a message.”
“Great. See you.”
Yanku sufficed with a nod, and Binyamin hurried up the path to the factory. He wondered if Yanku knew anything solid about Tatte’s mysterious death, or if he’d just heard something and was quick to draw conclusions.
And if this all had anything to do with Naomi’s suspicions.
A very strange suspicion, to be sure, but not something totally outlandish.
It was likely that just as Ludwig Heidrich and Klaus Wangel, the pair of Wehrmacht officers sent to establish a secret military base, had met Max and Leo Sherer some fifty years earlier, and had identified them as sons of the famous Jewish furriers, there were other greedy Nazi officers in the world who’d decided to get rich off the talents of other Jews. It was very possible that there were other hidden Jews on the planet, either in groups or as individuals, being held by people who concealed them from the eyes of the world.
But Hanter’s spice factory was here in Austria, according to Naomi. And the idea that there could be other Jews so close to them, without each group knowing about the other, made him shiver with excitement.
Still, was it worth it to take the risk of trying to find out if they were right about this?
And how would they even go about doing such a thing?
***
Naomi drew closer to the infirmary and stopped a step before the open door. She blinked when she saw fourteen-year-old Shaindy Herzlich, who was standing next to an open closet as she slid a stack of clean, folded towels inside it. When she closed the door and turned around, Naomi saw she was wearing a white apron.
“Oh, hi, Naomi!” Shaindy said. “How are you?” She smiled at Dror, but then grew serious when she saw the baby in Naomi’s arms. “Is everything okay with her?” she asked.
“With Cherut? Yes, baruch Hashem, everything is fine, and Dror is also fine. I’m just watching them for a little bit until their mother or father get back. Is my grandmother here for a minute?”
“She’s not here now.”
“Oh. And how are you, Shaindy?” Until a year and a half earlier, Shaindy had been a student at the preschool, a child who’d loved Naomi’s stories when she’d been the assistant. “Is this a new job?” In the past, Babbe had asked Shaindy’s family to submit her candidacy as preschool teacher so as not to leave Naomi alone to face Mila and someone else from the other group. Shaindy had not been accepted for the position, but she hadn’t seemed too upset about it.
“Yes, as a trial.” Shaindy looked pleased. “Dr. Annie said she wants to train more medical staff, so I left my other work. This job is more stable, and if it works out for me, then I’ll ask to stay here when I turn sixteen.”
“That makes sense,” Naomi said, but she wasn’t surprised when she felt a twinge of something in her heart. Babbe, if they were looking for a worker here, you couldn’t offer the job to me? Especially since a position in the medical field would certainly give her better wages and conditions; its salary was probably triple her own. And yes, this was on her mind, despite the many other issues that were weighing on her for the past few days.
“Shaindy,” the doctor’s high pitched voice came from further inside the room. “I need help here dosing out Kush’s medication.”
“Good luck,” Naomi said, and turned around, almost colliding headlong into her grandmother.
“Naomi!” Babbe was not smiling. “You came to visit?”
“Umm…sort of.”
“And who did you bring with you?”
Naomi lowered her eyes to Dror and smiled. “They are on the way home with me. Their mother went to fix the Wangels’ phone line.”
“An infirmary is not a place for children,” Babbe said firmly.
“I wasn’t planning to go inside,” Naomi said. “I just wanted to speak…” To speak to you. But I can’t, because Aryeh and Binyamin said that at this point we should keep everything quiet.
“With your friend Elky? To give her some encouragement?”
Naomi didn’t answer. Dror, who was growing bored, sat down to play with the leaves on a nearby bush.
“That could have been very good for her, but not here. We sent her home to rest a little. She was here all night… We’re waiting for the results of the blood tests.”
“What does he have?”
“We’re not exactly sure. His skin started to get a bit yellow, and so did the whites of his eyes. It looks like jaundice, a condition when the bilirubin in the body doesn’t break down properly, and Dr. Annie is suspecting that it’s some kind of liver disease.”
“Hmm,” Naomi said. She didn’t say anything about Shaindy. “You know, I read a while ago about some kind of medication for the liver…what was it…”
“Medication for the liver?”
“I don’t know if it’s actual medication, but it’s something that helps the liver function better. It was a plant or something… Oh, I know! It must have been in that album of dried flowers that my student Zuska made!”
“Interesting,” Babbe said. “But whatever the case, nothing is growing in this frozen ground now.” She glanced for a moment at Shaindy, who was closing the curtain at the other end of the infirmary.
Naomi caught the glance and bit her lip. She was angry at herself, because among everything that had recently cropped up, she was still irritated now that this youngster was puttering around here like an old, experienced hand, and she might even become a doctor in a few years.
“Could you come already, Naomi?!” Dror tugged at her hand. “I want to see your house, and you just keep talking and talking for so long already!”
“We’re going, sweetie,” Naomi said, but she hesitated for a moment. “I see that Shaindy is working here,” she said finally, her tone low.
“Right.”
“It sounds like a big job, helping the sick people.”
“With the meager resources that we have, it often means we see how little we can help.” She sighed. “Naomi, don’t be upset that I didn’t suggest you for this position. The winter here was so complicated, so demanding… Do you really think that you can be a doctor here, and raise a family at the same time? It’s a major job.
“Look,” Babbe continued, “I really admire Dr. Annie, our dedicated doctor. Since she was widowed, she has sacrificed her life for us. But do you think it’s coincidental that she remains alone to this day?”
“And Shaindy?” Naomi lowered her gaze to the angelic face of the baby sleeping in her arms.
“Shaindy is not my granddaughter, and her parents did not consult me. Dr. Katzburg spoke to her mother a while back about this, and they considered it and decided that she’d manage.”
“Better than me?”
“It’s not a matter of ‘better.’ I told you, I’m your grandmother, and I personally do not think it would be a good job for you.”
“And you, Babbe?” The question escaped without asking Naomi for permission.
“I started here on a voluntary basis, Naomi, years after I married off my two daughters. And now, if you want to do a chesed with your friend, go and see if she needs someone to be with her. I saw that she doesn’t want either her parents or her husband’s parents with her, but maybe she’ll want to talk to you about things.”
“Hard for me to believe,” Naomi muttered. “But I’ll try. Come, Dror, we’re going on a little outing, okay? To my friend Elky’s house.”
The boy brightened. “Elky is the one who once gave us sugar cubes!”
“That’s right,” Naomi confirmed. They walked, and she knocked at Elky Kush’s door. She remembered one of Zuska’s dried flowers, its stem and its leaves, and thought about how to convince Zuska to give it up for a remedy that might help the husband of the person who had procured the antibiotics for her.
One flower?
Was one flower of any use?
She knocked again, thinking about how awful it had been on her part to judge Elky harshly for demanding money at the time. Because who knew what vital need she had for that money?
Suddenly she heard a moan from inside the house. Then the sound of a piece of furniture being dragged could be heard, and then quiet.
“Someone is there!” Dror said. He banged hard on the door. “Elky!” he shouted. “Open the door for us! I want a sugar cube, and Naomi wants to talk to you!”
Silence.
“Maybe she is sick,” Dror suggested. “Right you want to be a doctor like that big girl with the white hat who suddenly started helping out at the infirmary?”
Naomi did not reply. She studied the closed door with pursed lips.
“But I don’t let you become a doctor. I want you to be my teacher always! Forever!”
Naomi took a deep breath and knocked a third time. Again, she heard the moan. “Elky!” she shouted.
Silence. By now Naomi was almost certain that something had happened to her friend. She turned the knob, and the door opened.
Dror leaped inside. “Here is Elky, here she is!” he announced with satisfaction. “She’s sitting on the floor! Oy, look, Naomi, she’s crying! Do you have a tissue for her?”
Naomi wasn’t looking for a tissue. She stood motionless at the doorway of the house, gaping at her friend Elky, who was sitting and weeping at the foot of the open front closet.
A closet whose top shelf was tightly packed with stacks and stacks of vouchers.
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