16. Massive Catastrophe

MASSIVE CATASTROPHE

When he arrived at Shady Glen after the meeting with the social worker, Maya-Jade was standing outside the entrance, waving wildly at him.

"Friend of yours?" his aunt asked.

"Not even close!" he replied.

"Guess she missed the memo," his aunt said as he unbuckled his seat belt and Maya-Jade sprinted toward the car, hands flapping.

"What?" he said as a greeting. It came out more gruff than he intended, but he was still upset about the social worker's question and his refusal to tell him who that mystery lady was.

"There's been a massive catastrophe !" Maya-Jade said, her entire voice sounding like an exclamation point.

"What? Who?" The boy's heart thudded so hard he thought he might be sick, because all he could think was that something bad had happened to me. His concern was not misguided. At 107, every moment is a potential massive catastrophe.

But Maya-Jade's catastrophe was of a different flavor. "They separated Ginny and Dickie!"

"Huh?" he asked.

"Ginny and Dickie," she repeated. "They separated them. It's a miscarriage of justice. And of love."

"What are you talking about?" the boy asked. He was relieved nothing bad had happened to me but annoyed at Maya-Jade for making him think it had.

"Nana lives across the hall from Ginny, and a little while ago I came out of her room and found Ginny in the hallway, positively ranting."

"Ranting?"

"Well, maybe not ranting, but for her it was ranting. She's always so smiley and happy, but she was whimpering about how they were taking Dickie away. At first I just assumed it was the, you know." Maya-Jade paused to spin a finger around her temple, the universal sign for cuckoo . "But then I went with her down to Dickie's room and there were two aides there with a luggage cart and they were packing up his things and that awful woman who's been nosing around was there too, and Ginny was crying, ‘Don't take him,' and Dickie was showing the awful woman the flower book, like he didn't know what was happening, and she kept saying, ‘If you like flowers, you'll like the Garden,' like they were taking him to an actual garden, but Nana says that the Garden is where people go who can't remember anything anymore and might wander off and the doors are locked so they can't escape."

Maya-Jade paused to gulp some air before she carried on. "But I saw what was going on and I said, ‘You can't separate them,' and she seemed to think I was Ginny's granddaughter and in this case I let her. So she was nice at first, saying, ‘It's for the best, sweetheart. He needs more care.' And I was like, ‘But he and Ginny are in love. They're inseparable. They'll be positively heartbroken to be apart.' And then she said, ‘They won't even remember after a week.' Like they're goldfish or something and not people. And then she was like, ‘Mr. McGinity's family okayed the move.' And then they made Dickie get into a wheelchair, even though he walks just fine, and pushed him away, and Ginny kept crying and crying and so that awful woman called a nurse and made them give her a sedative and now she's asleep in her room and it's…" Here Maya-Jade's chin trembled. "It's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

The boy stared at her. He'd never heard another kid talk like that, so many words, so fast. Like she was barfing up paragraphs.

"So will you help me?" she asked.

"Help you what?"

"Get them back together?"

"How?"

"I thought maybe you could talk to Julio," Maya-Jade said.

"What good will that do? He's not in charge. Mrs. Winston is."

"But she's not here and Julio can tell her."

"She's supposed to be avoiding stress," the boy replied. "And anyhow, if you want Julio to help, you ask him."

Maya-Jade kicked the cement with her sandals. Her toes were painted a sparkly purple, matching the color on her nails. Probably from her beauty date with Vivian, the boy thought ungenerously. "Julio doesn't like me," she said.

"Sure he does," he said. Maya-Jade seemed like exactly the kind of kid adults liked.

"He doesn't," Maya-Jade insisted. "I asked if I could eat in the kitchen but he said employees only, but you get to eat in there."

"Why do you want to eat in the kitchen? You get to eat with your grandmother."

"Exactly." She sighed dramatically. "I spend a lot of time with Vivian, and in case you haven't noticed, she's kind of a lot."

He had noticed. But it was funny hearing it from Maya-Jade, who was also kind of a lot.

"The residents don't like her and maybe that's why they don't like me. Maybe that's why they didn't want to talk to me for my bat mitzvah project. But they talk to you. You even got Mr. Kravitz to talk!"

The boy stared at Maya-Jade. Was it possible that she was jealous of him ? On the one hand, it was flattering, because she was right that I had chosen him. Also, Julio had called him staff and Mrs. Winston had called him "very useful." But on the other hand, Maya-Jade was rich. She had a grandmother. And she went to private school and had so many things and people in her life. He bet no one ever lectured her about opportunities, because she had everything. And he had nothing.

Well, not nothing. Now he had me. And Minna, too. And a growing list of others.

But still, in the scheme of things she was way ahead, and she was acting all poor-me pitiful, and it got him irritated. And anyhow, they were not even friends, so why should he help her?

"I can't help you," he said, adding with a gleeful turn of the knife, "I gotta go. Josey is expecting me."

BEFORE WE LEFT MY GRANDMOTHER'S house in the country, Olka, Babci, and I made a plan. We would hold off telling Mother and Father about our engagement until Babci made her annual visit for Rosh Hashanah in September. They would undoubtedly object to the marriage, but with Babci on our side, they would relent. We would marry quickly and quietly, and after the deed was done, Olka would tell her uncle. He would disown her for marrying a Jew, but he had never treated her like family in the first place, and soon, after what I hoped would be a brief period of acceptance, my family would become her family.

But life had different plans for us. A week after Olka and I returned from the country, Hitler invaded Poland. Bombs rained down from the late summer sky, transforming the beautiful cities of Warsaw and Katowice into war zones overnight. Krakow fell in six days. When Nazi soldiers breached the gates of the city, our mayor met them, hands held up in surrender. "Feuer einstellen," he said. "We are defenseless."

Two weeks after the Nazis invaded from the west, the Soviets invaded from the east. Poland became a pie that had been divvied up to be eaten by giants.

During the first weeks of the Nazi occupation, we scarcely left our apartment, living off the supplies of Mother's ample pantry. Babci, we assumed, was doing the same. Rosh Hashanah came and went without so much as an apple dipped in honey. There was no sweetness to celebrate. We sat around the radio with our downstairs tenant, Professor Palansky, and listened to the reports of the fighting in Krakow and all over Poland. Sometimes the radio broadcast about the war would suddenly include strange words: Charles, coffee, chocolate . A coded call for Polish soldiers and reservists to flee the city eastward.

I was not a soldier, but Father had been. "Should we go?" Mother asked.

"To the east? To the Soviets?" My father may have been Jewish, but his true religion was business. The Soviets were communists, and that scared him more than Nazis. "That would be suicide."

"Maybe to France?" Mother asked.

"I'll send you to Paris when the store reopens," Father promised.

"Who knows when that will be?" Mother countered. "Maybe we ought to go stay with your mother?" It was the surest sign of her desperation that she wanted to go to Babci's cottage.

"No. We'll stay here so that when we are allowed to open the store, we can as soon as possible. And you never know, the war might bring a whole new clientele to serve."

"What do you think, Professor?" Mother asked, even though Professor Palansky taught philosophy, not politics.

"Some of the greatest intellectuals come from Germany," the professor replied. "It's the home of the enlightenment."

"And I do business in Germany," Father added. "I have many German associates who will vouch for us."

"Jozef," Mother asked. "What do you think?"

Olka was what I thought. All that I thought. Because even though we were engaged, I had no way to find her. The store was closed; I didn't know where she lived. We'd spent all our time together in the tailoring room or at Babci's. My only hope was to look up her address in the personnel files in the office. But entering the store—our store—was now forbidden.

A tank rumbled down the street, a mass of menacing metal. The living-room windows rattled. Mother grabbed Father's hand.

"There, there," Professor Palansky said. "It will be over soon."

As the days ticked by, Mother occupied herself by sewing secret linings into her coats to hide her jewelry. When I offered to help, she raised an eyebrow—she had no idea I could sew—but handed me a coat, a diamond choker, a seam ripper, and a needle. With the threaded needle in my hand, I felt a little calmer, in control of something, even if only the tautness of a seam.

One night, Father pulled me aside. "Jozef, I need you to do something," he whispered. "Go to the store, after dark but before curfew. In my office I keep a cache of money in the safe. There's also a few cartons of cigarettes. Grab what you can." He handed me the keys. "And don't tell your mother."

Though this would once have been a simple errand, it was now against the law. The store, and all its contents, no longer belonged to our family. It was now the property of the Third Reich, along with our apartment, the jewelry Mother was squirrelling away, every zloty in our bank account. I could be arrested for entering the store. I didn't care. All I could think of was Olka. Now I could find Olka.

I slipped out at dusk, running through the strangely quiet downtown streets, eluding the clap-clap footsteps of the Nazi patrols. Yellow posters peeled off the walls, broadcasting the already-ancient news: Poles, our perpetual enemy has invaded our borders. Flower petals were ground into the cobblestones. Because when the Nazis arrived, some of our neighbors had greeted the enemy with flowers.

The key turned out to be unnecessary. The store windows had all been smashed, the displays Mother worked so hard to put together ripped apart, clothing torn, mannequins naked and dismembered.

The strange thing was, our store was the only one that had been looted like this. Across the street was another clothing store, a rival of ours, but it had been left untouched. We had heard that in the Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz, such looting was commonplace. But our store was in the city center, surrounded by gentile-owned businesses. Our clientele were the well-heeled women of Krakow: Jewish, Catholic, and otherwise. We were open on the Sabbath, and on most Jewish holidays. We did not have mezuzahs in the doorways. There was nothing to advertise the fact that the shop was Jewish-owned. But people knew. That was now abundantly clear.

Kicking off the jagged glass still clinging to the front window, I shimmied inside. The racks were all overturned. Clothing torn to bits. A Star of David had been crudely painted on one wall, the word Juden scrawled beneath. The central staircase, marble with brass banisters, decorated with fresh flowers in summer and wreaths in winter, was missing treads. Mirrors had been smashed. A smell of burnt hair hung in the air. People hadn't come just to loot. They'd come to desecrate.

I sank to my haunches. The store that my great-grandfather had built with only the ten fingers on his hands, the one that Babci and my grandfather had expanded and then my own father had expanded again, the store that was to be my future, was gone. It was all gone.

And then I heard a voice, calling my name: "Josey."

Olka emerged, holding a small flashlight. She shone it on me and then turned it off, but I could hear her footsteps crunching over glass as she ran toward me "You've come," she said, covering me with kisses. "I feared the worst. But you're alive. You're alive."

"I am now," I said as I gathered her in my arms.

She allowed me to hold her for barely a moment before she took my hand and tugged. "Come see what I've done for us."

"For us?"

She led me to the service staircase, down past the alteration room, into the boiler room. She opened the shed where we kept the coal and dug around, dirtying her hands, until she excavated a garment bag, then another, then another. Inside were furs: a fox jacket, a mink stole, a floor-length ermine coat.

"They were the most expensive items in the store. I thought maybe you could trade them," Olka said. "My uncle says there will be shortages of coal—all the miners will be sent to fight; he's already volunteered for the Polish Security Police—so I thought these would be even more necessary in the coming winter."

"You did this?"

She nodded.

"But, Olka, it's too dangerous."

"I did it for us. For your family." She paused. "Who will be my family too. That is"—here her voice faltered—"if you still want me."

I took her hand and kissed it. She was wearing Babci's ring. "Come," I told her. "It's time to meet the rest of your family."