Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 81 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.
Dr. Katzburg,
I’d appreciate if you could send me something calming for my Rechel.
Thank you, Sarah Liba
Meir, Chani’s son, silently took the little brown glass bottle that the doctor handed him at the door of the clinic. “Tell your grandmother that I trust her not to overdo it!” Dr. Katzburg instructed him. “Not more than two teaspoons an hour!”
It was four minutes to nine, and Meir ran as fast as he could. Aunt Rechel’s little house was suddenly crowded: Babbe and Zeide were there, as was his mother, and Aryeh, his brother, with Naomi, and Rechel herself, of course, sitting on the bed silently.
Only Binyamin was absent.
“Thank you, zeeskeit,” Babbe said as she took the bottle form him. “Naomi, bring me a spoon, please. What did the doctor say, Meir? Two teaspoons?”
“Yes. Two an hour,” the boy replied. “Mamme, should I go home now?”
“Will you make it in time?” she asked him.
“Let him run,” Zeide said hoarsely. “It’s not good for him to be here now, Chani. And even if he gets there a minute after nine, nothing will happen. In case you didn’t notice, none of the Wangel family members have been seen around here this whole day.”
“It looked like they were making an effort not to meet me,” Chani said, her eyes fixed on her young son, standing at the door. “Since we came back from the levayah, I haven’t seen anyone. I straightened up and cleaned the kitchen like I always do, prepared the supper, and then left. There was one point when I heard faraway shouting from the big sitting room or one of the other rooms there, but I was too far to hear what they were saying…”
Meir quietly wished everyone a good night, and only Aryeh, his brother, walked him to the door, an encouraging hand on his shoulder. “It’s going to be alright, Meir’ke,” he whispered. “B’ezras Hashem, everything will be fine. Don’t worry.”
“They won’t kill us?” The boy’s eyes were large and round.
“I don’t think so. They want us to keep working for them for lots more years.”
“And Binyamin? Will they kill him?”
“I really hope not.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“No one knows. But wherever he is…Hashem is surely with him. Run quickly, Meir, so Tatte shouldn’t worry about you at home.” His eyes followed the small figure that fled down the path, and then he closed the door and went back into the main room, just in time to hear Babbe’s comment.
“Well, it’s pretty understandable why they are staying at the manor house now. I’m assuming it’s really not clear to them what to do in this situation.”
“Let them stay with this lack of clarity for as long as possible,” Chani said gravely.
“Sometimes these doubts are worse,” Zeide replied as he glanced at his daughter sitting motionlessly on her bed. “Are you okay, Rechel?”
She nodded, pale and silent. Her fingers were gripping the last page of her mother’s notebook, the letter Binyamin had left her.
“We have to try and find out what’s with him,” Chani whispered to her mother. “The best one to do that would probably be you, or Rechel herself. But right now, it sounds as inappropriate as can be…”
“I think I’m going to go to Katarina,” Rechel said suddenly. “I’ll ask her directly if Binyamin is with them, and what is happening with him.”
“You can’t go, Rechel,” her mother said firmly. “They might take you as a hostage or something like that.”
“And if I stay here, they can’t do that?” She sounded like herself: terrified to death for her son, frightened at the possibilities that no one dared put into words, but focused.
“It’s different than going and actively placing yourself in danger,” her father replied. “And there’s nothing to ask; I already told you—Leo Sherer went to Wangel earlier, and Wangel told him that Binyamin had turned himself in and that they were ‘waiting for additional confessions.’”
“From who?”
“It’s not clear. There are rumors that the conversation Binyamin had on the radio device was with David Elkovitz, but his father-in-law doesn’t let him go, no matter what.”
“Let Elkovitz not go, I’ll be very happy for him.” Rechel stood up. “The only one that does interest me is my son. It’s not enough for me to know that he turned himself in—I want to know what they did to him.”
“You’re not going, Rechel!” Her mother almost pushed her back down onto the bed. “You’re not going, do you understand me? We’ll try to think of other ways to find out what we can.”
“I’m not angry at him,” Rechel said suddenly. “The truth is, I realized that at some point he would get up and do something. Binyamin is smart. He once heard that Asher’s sudden death was under strange circumstances, and he also realized that I’m hiding something relating to one of his notebooks.”
“Notebooks?” Naomi moved closer to her mother. Mamme had known something all these years?
“I came to visit him in the clinic after he fell in the garden, a few hours before he suddenly passed away.” Everyone in the room had to strain to hear her. “He wrote to me, with effort, in a notebook he had with him, that Bernard had told him today something crazy, and if it was true…we are living in a terrible lie.” She sighed and stood up again. “I asked him what Bernard had said. He deliberated a bit, and then wrote: ‘There really are no more Nazis.’”
“No more Nazis…” Naomi murmured. And Binyamin wasn’t even there with whom to exchange glances.
“Suddenly, Katarina entered the clinic. She was furious, railing about why healthy people were allowed to go into the clinic; then they’d spread illness and germs in the camp. I hurried to tear the paper out of the notebook and stuffed it into my sleeve. Asher suddenly began to whisper things that were completely unrelated.” She swallowed.
“I thought maybe everything he had written to me was a hallucination, because of the fall. I went out, and a few minutes later she also came out, with his notebook. I didn’t dare go back in.” Her eyes were dry. “I thought maybe over the years he had seen something and written about it in his notebooks, but I didn’t go in and I didn’t ask. I was afraid to see him this way: weak, injured, and confused.”
She couldn’t continue.
Naomi sat up. “I’ll go to the manor house, Mamme.”
“You won’t!” Rechel fixed her with a fiery gaze. “It’s enough that I’ve already sacrificed two—” She fell silent as there was a knock at the door.
Zeide Nochum carefully went to open it. The knocks were too gentle to be one of the Nazis, but who knew what kind of news was waiting on the other side of the threshold.
It was Elimelech Kush, Mottel’s father. He glanced behind him, and then slipped inside and closed the door. “Is everyone here family?” he asked, without waiting to be invited inside. “Can I speak quietly?”
“Yes,” Aryeh replied, after a moment’s silence.
“Binyamin is in my house.”
***
“Listen, listen!” Hans Kafnika raised his voice to be heard over Josef Wangel’s hysterical tone. “First of all, calm down—nothing happened yet. The kid was playing with an internal communications device, right?”
“That’s what he says, but I wasn’t able to find out more about it from him. In any case, such a thing must not happen!” Wangel howled into the phone. His nerves—the few that were not completely shot—were on the verge of exploding.
“Of course, of course, and we also must not act hastily. So he came to you, turned himself in, and then ran away again.”
“Right.”
“So, we certainly can decide right now that all of us, all those who know the secret, are setting out first thing in the morning to the camp, and we’re going to leave no stone unturned until we find him, okay? Or, you can detain all the members of his family and announce that if he doesn’t turn himself in a second time, they will be killed instead of him, right?”
“Right.” Josef sipped the drink in his cup. He’d stopped counting how much he had drunk since this horrendous day had begun. And he could not lose his wits now. On the other hand, without these drinks, he could not possibly think.
“With either one of these ways, you might get to him, but what will you gain? Dreadful anger and resentment on the part of the Jews. Those first days of the camp, when your father and Katarina’s father ran the place and allowed themselves these things, are over, you know.”
“It’s easy for you to talk. You aren’t here, deep inside this whole thing, the way we are.”
“It’s not such a big deal, Josef. I’m very involved in whatever goes on here, and it’s all quiet, I promise you. And I check every half hour, and I will continue to check. I can always just smooth things out in the event it becomes necessary.”
“As long as we aren’t actually discovered.”
“The risk is very remote, Josef. And it’s not worth it for you to alter the whole way you conduct yourself with your Jews, because of it. If the risk does become greater, and we decide it’s an emergency, you’ll start to do things differently.”
“I’ll have to decide about that. The one who decides here is me, the one at the scene of the danger, Hans. With all due respect, it’s not you.”
“You’ll decide, we’ll decide—that’s not the issue. The main thing is that since this camp was established, the appreciation of the workers has increased from year to year. Now you want to change the approach and start to rule over them with terror? Have you thought about how much manpower you’d need for that?”
“So help me, you and all the others!” Josef’s voice came out like a hoarse shout. “Why are we paying you all these years, if not for your help?”
“Without us, you wouldn’t have survived, and you know it—without our constant supplies and funding, and smoothing over things in government offices. Maybe go and learn something from your Jews on how to be grateful.”
Josef muttered something unintelligible.
“So if you want to act foolishly,” Hans’s voice was sharp and biting, “and to go and fight with those Jews because of a silly game of one of the youngsters, go and do it. And destroy the idyll in the camp that your father and your wife’s father established with such effort. That’s it—I don’t have anything else to tell you.”
“Alright, alright, I heard you.” Wangel was chastened like a little boy. “Truth to be told, we haven’t done anything yet. We just told Sherer that we are still waiting for those who cooperated with Schvirtz to turn themselves in too—and honestly, we did not tell him that Schvirtz himself fled right after he came here. It was too humiliating for me.”
Katarina murmured something.
“But Katarina is asking, what if the kid did make contact with people outside the camp and told them about this place? Maybe it’s only a matter of time until they get here!”
“I’m telling you—there can be no police directive without me knowing about it. And if you don’t want to lose everything, continue maintaining some tension among the residents. But don’t overdo it!”
“My Bernard is on his way over here.”
“He’s the last creature that needs to be there now, Josef!”
“What can I do, he heard the story and decided to come. After all, what can happen if he catches Schvirtz and kills him? One Jew, that’s all! We killed his father too, and nothing happened.”
“First of all, must I remind you that there is no replacement for that boy’s work? And second, you did it secretly then; they didn’t know, and they didn’t rebel. And third—even then, your Bernard was to blame. Rein him in, Josef, rein him in! For your good and for the good of all of us.”
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