My father had a wholesale building materials business. That was in Bochnia.
The war started, the train loaded with building materials arrived and stopped on the private track leading to my father’s storerooms. The old gypsy woman’s prophecy had come true. My mother, my father, and I, along with Dr. Fishler, a family friend who had performed an abortion on my mother a month earlier, escaped in a wagon harnessed to an enormous workhorse. My mother, as befitted a salon Communist intellectual, condemned uncontrolled reproduction, and like many of her milieu, preferred to have only one child.
She had been carrying twins.
And if they had been born?
EVEN IN THE SILENCE OF THE HIDING PLACE, THE NEW RUSTlings were quiet. I realized very quickly that they were coming from the old iron stove.
It happened when I found my wonderful little figurines nibbled away, the ones I molded from breadcrumbs I’d managed to save from the bread my mother heroically, miraculously brought us from the soda factory manager’s wife. They lived in the neighboring house, on the Aryan side, the side of life, the side of death.
It happened when we’d had nothing to eat for a long time, when the Juzaks went on a trip and left us in the house without food. My mother said that Juzakowa—Juzak, almost always drunk to the point of unconsciousness, was never much of a thinker or planner—wanted to starve us to death so she could finally be rid of us, of that terrible curse, the Jews, who endangered her life and the lives of her husband and little boy, Edjo.
When the war was no longer in the world, Juzakowa told us that Hania Seremet had offered her poison to kill us with.
Only some breadcrumbs were left. I used to mix them with saliva, knead them for hours until the mixture was uniform and smooth, not too moist and not too dry, not too soft and not too hard, but just the right consistency.
My fingers would seek the same consistency from the clay I molded into fancy ballerinas when the war was no longer in the world but I was, and we lived in beautiful Krakow.
In the hiding place, I molded tiny birds.
In the shape of my toes.
I had a marvelous flock of birds.
I hadn’t seen a bird for a long time.
In our hiding place, we weren’t allowed to go near the window, but I remembered the birds from my time in the village. I remembered clearly their shape, the beating of their wings, their chirping and singing.
I arranged the flock of wonderful birds in a splendid row to dry.
I looked at them proudly for hours.
In the morning, the row was in ruins.
The birds were nibbled away. A strange sort of nibbling. One was missing its wings, another its tail. One had lost a wing, another its beak. The bodies of some of the birds had almost completely crumbled, and others had simply vanished.
Scattered among the crumbs of my wonderful, tiny bread birds were small black droppings.
Mice, my mother said.
I was so glad.
I’d known many mice in the village. For whole nights, they scurried around the coffin I slept in, even inside it right on my body. I liked the mice. I liked the horse and the pigs better, but still, I was fond of the mice. They were my nocturnal friends, like the moths, the fireflies, and the owl that lived above the cow, a small owl I didn’t see very much, but I heard his faint voice every night. He flew silently. Hoo … hoo … hoo … that little owl would hoot.
When we trained my dear gray mice, my father told me that owls like to eat mice. How lucky for me that I’d never seen my owl eat any of my mice.
My father told me there was an old proverb that said church mice were extremely poor. Mice hiding with Jews were even poorer, he said.
Until then, I’d never heard the word “Jew,” Zyd in Polish. We never spoke that word. Maybe my father was sorry he’d said it. My mother, who was painstakingly searching the seams of a patched shirt for lice—the dangerous lice, the typhus lice—gave him a piercing stare.
We decided to train the mice, already mine though I still hadn’t seen them. I didn’t even know how many there were, whether there was only one or two or more.
There were two.
We saw them for the first time after lying in wait for days.
We sat very, very quietly. That wasn’t actually very hard to do. We always sat quietly. We waited for them to come out and partake of the wonderful meal I’d prepared especially for them. They didn’t need manna from heaven. They had me.
They were so dear to me that I continued to save precious breadcrumbs for them, mix them with saliva, and knead the mixture for hours. Only when it was uniform and smooth, not too moist and not too dry, not too soft and not too hard, just the perfect consistency, did I mold it into little baskets filled to the brim with Lilliputian treats: miniature apples, tiny rolls, miniscule pears, diminutive wine bottles, and even minute slivers of cheese.
I put those marvelous refreshments at the foot of the old black iron stove, right next to the rounded lion’s feet—or the tiger’s feet, or maybe the baby dragon’s feet—under the slightly open door.
And then it happened, the wonderful thing I’d dreamed of for so long. From the crack of the open door emerged the tip of a sharp little quivering pink nose, twitching gray whiskers, an elongated head that looked at me with shiny black beads, pinkish, transparent ears, tiny legs with long toes, each with a white nail at its tip, and between them, a tiny body rounded into a backside that ended in a glorious tail! A long, narrowing, hairless tail, a flexible, magnificent tail.
It was a mouse.
I immediately gave it the name Mysia. From behind it—how wonderful!—another mouse emerged. I could see right away that the second one had a shorter tail. I called it Tysia.
With endless patience, my father and I trained the little mice.
There were successes and setbacks. We were patient. Time was something we had plenty of. What we didn’t have was food. But I kept on saving crumbs and molding them into treats.
My father and I, with the baskets I’d molded from the breadcrumb mixture, sat very, very quietly, lying in wait for long hours until the little mice appeared at the door of their house—the old black iron stove. At first they would snatch the baskets and scurry off, but they grew more confident with time and would stay longer, move a bit closer, to my father’s shoe, onto his shoe, and finally—how wonderful it was, how exciting!—they’d climb up my father’s leg to his knee. Hooray! The gray mice were mine, they were trained.
We lived in conditions that were perfect for training mice.
After a while, I saw that Mysia was getting rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter.
I wasn’t surprised. After all, she was the one who always came out first and grabbed the food first. She was also the first to be trained. Mysia the glutton.
ONE NIGHT—WHEN THE NIGHTS WERE STILL VERY QUIET, before the Red Army Air Force began its heavy bombing, before the volleys of katyushas began ringing in our ears like the sounds of paradise, the sounds of fierce pride, of joy—I was listening, as I usually did, to the rustling and whispering of my two little mice, when I suddenly seemed to be hearing other, unfamiliar sounds, very soft sounds, a sort of quiet chirping, a subdued murmuring.
Mysia, as usual, the first to come out, was no longer plump. She sat on her hind legs, holding some crumbs from the miniature basket, and I could see tiny, erect, pink nipples on her red stomach.
I knew immediately what had happened.