When the shower of lice died away, my mother folded the newspaper that was teeming with life and went inside the apartment to the part where the Juzaks lived—of course, only after checking that the coast was clear—and threw the folded newspaper with millions of my lice into the opening of the oven under the gas range in Mrs. Rozalia Juzakowa’s kitchen.
The lice burned silently.
Having my hair combed with a fine-tooth comb became a daily ritual. I enjoyed it very much.
I liked the closeness to my mother, who under different circumstances had not volunteered hugs, kisses, and stroking, and I liked the temporary and surprising relief from my itching head, but mainly I liked the reading.
I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN HOW TO READ. I KNOW HOW TO READ because of the lice.
While my mother spread the newspaper and combed the hair on my bent head, I looked at the black marks on the paper. I quickly learned to distinguish the ones that moved, running every which way, from the ones that remained quiet and orderly in their places.
Those weren’t the lice, they were letters.
There were pictures too. To see them properly, I sometimes had to turn the paper around. That’s how I realized that the letters—like the pictures—had a direction. They didn’t stand on their heads or lie on their sides or decide suddenly to turn over and walk away. The lice, on the other hand, used to dart back and forth in total chaos.
I assume that my mother and father helped me distinguish between the scurrying lice and the inanimate shapes, and taught me how to decipher their meanings. They must have, because I knew how to read. I’ve always known how to read, and reading kept me sane.
The Red Army and Batiushka Tovarish Stalin saved my life, and books saved me from life.
I’ve always read, everything, every word: captions in the newspaper, headlines, articles, advertisements. I even read the four-volume Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge that survived from the Jewish gynecologist’s library. Later, when we were liberated and we could come out of our hiding place and walk on the side of life, the Aryan side, I found that while my legs had forgotten how to walk, and I could talk only sparingly and in a thin whisper, I had no problem reading—reading signs, placards, graffiti, reading everything: what was written on bus tickets, on matchboxes, on cigarette packs, on labels, in books.
Books, those wonderful books. Those colossal heroes—Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Romain Rolland, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Kipling…. A terrible fear crept into my heart: Would there be enough books?
But there were, and there continued to be. They didn’t stop.
Later on, they waited for me in libraries. Bound and rebound, again and again. Sometimes a careless bookbinder would distractedly slice off the edges of the pages, lopping off a bit of the body of the text. Then I had to guess at the beginnings or ends of the words that were missing.
And the smell. The smell of the books. The yellowing, crumbling pages spotted with oddly shaped stains, their corners folded into donkey’s ears. Signposts left by those who had read them before me.
I loved them too, my brothers in reading, my brothers in spirit.
They were here before me.
Here’s a note between the lines written in an educated handwriting. Here’s a stain. Coffee? Or maybe fine, expensive cognac? Or maybe absinthe, a greenish poison the color of celadon, the color of the dress with the satin flowers my mother embroidered and sent me when I was in the village, the color of my reading robe, the color of the expensive varnish of our new furniture in Krakow, the color of my father’s Skoda after the war. Like the green in Picasso’s paintings. Our Picasso. He loved Tovarish Stalin too, and he even painted him—a strange painting.
Cosette of Les Misérables, the gracious Little Lord, Tom Sawyer, Tom Thumb, Emil and all the detectives, Mowgli and Bagheera the black panther, Jean-Christophe, David Copperfield, d’Artagnan, David of The House of Thibault and Sergei from Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Storm, Levin and Pierre, blue-eyed Prince Myshkin, and the brave Oliver Twist.
Thank you all, my heroes.
You are the teachers I never had.
What a terrible shame that I didn’t have a teacher.
Thank you all for the worlds you created for me, that opened up for me when I needed them so badly. Those were my real worlds. That was my chosen reality. I would not have survived if they hadn’t been my parallel existence.
THE HEAD LICE, THE ONES THAT DARTED BACK AND FORTH and the ones that didn’t move, weren’t the most dangerous lice.
The other kind was the most dangerous, the kind that frightened my mother—the clothes lice. The lice that caused typhus. They were much harder to get rid of. They hide in the seams, and my mother and father spent long hours running their fingers along the seams of the rags that were our clothes. When they found a louse, its fate was sealed—to be crushed between two fingernails.
Along with the crushing came a soft popping sound that brought an expression of deep satisfaction to my parents’ faces. Hunting for clothes lice also became a ritual, and like the hunt for head lice, a Sisyphean ritual.
My father and mother carried out that never-ending ritual of hunting for clothes lice with an air of quiet, almost idyllic calm.
It was always quiet; after all, we couldn’t let anyone on the other side, the Aryan side, the side of life, know that Jews were hiding there.
For us, the side of life was the side of death.
I thought that’s how it was in the world.
Sometimes, while the hunt for clothes lice was going on, my father would tell me stories. And so, to the soft popping sound of lice being crushed between fingernails, I heard for the first time about the heavens and the earth, the void, the sun, the moon and the stars, the plants and the animals. I knew all about the plants and animals from my time in the village. And I heard about the snake and about Adam and Eve, the confusion of Babel, and the man who gathered all the animals and put them into an ark right before the enormous rains fell from the sky and flooded the whole world.
That ark was their hiding place because outside of it was the side of death, just as it was with us. But that man had prepared a great deal of food. Each animal had the kind of food it liked, and there was enough for all of them. They weren’t hungry, and the horses could neigh, the cows could moo, the birds could sing and chirp. We couldn’t. If someone outside heard us neighing or chirping, that would be the end of us and of the Juzaks too. We had to whisper, to whisper very, very quietly.
I could smell the fresh fragrance of wood in the ark that man, Noah, built. Juzef Juzak was a carpenter too, and our hiding place, which was disguised as his carpentry shop, had the same pleasant smell of wood splinters, not like the rotting wood smell of the coffin I slept in back in the village, not like the varnish smell of the closet I hid in with my father when the Gestapo searched our hiding place.
Then, in my father’s story, the rain stopped and the rainbow appeared.
The rainbow, my rainbow.
The man with the ark and all the animals were saved, they remained alive, and we too were alive in our ark.
By we, I mean my mother, my father, and I, my two beloved mice, Mysia and Tysia—who hadn’t yet run away because the Red Army still hadn’t begun its heavy bombing—and the millions of head and clothes lice.
The most wonderful stories of all were the ones about the children of light.
We never spoke the word “Jew.” The word “Jew” was equivalent to the word “death.”
There were stories mocking the evil pharaoh of Egypt—how much I loved reading, after the war, Mika Waltari’s Sinuhe the Egyptian