24. A Start

A START

"Who's Adek?" Maya-Jade asked the boy after they left my room. "I didn't want to interrupt the story, but he sounded important."

"Adek Dworkowicz," the boy replied, getting close enough to pronouncing the name right that even Adek would've been impressed. "He went to the same school as Josey and Olka. He lied and said he was the top student but really it was Olka. It was one of the things Olka and Josey fought about when they first met and hated each other." He told the story with confidence, as if it were his own, too. Which, in a way, it was becoming. "I think he was always a little jealous of Adek," he added.

Maya-Jade had taken to wearing a pencil behind her ear to take notes, and now she took it out and scratched something down before tapping the pencil against her chin. "How come?"

"I guess he felt like Adek was better than him." An image of Toby flashed before the boy's eyes. "And now that Adek was a spy with Olka, it was even worse."

"Why?"

"Because I guess they were both doing something brave and he was just feeling sorry for himself."

"Well, you can hardly blame him, can you?"

She was talking about me, but it might as well have been about the boy. He'd thought as much himself, hadn't he? He'd had his mom taken away and been forced to go live with his aunt and uncle. He had every right to feel sorry for himself.

But the thing was, feeling sorry for yourself is a lot like using anger as a blanket. At the end of the day, it leaves you exposed and cold.

"What do you think happens to Olka?" Maya-Jade asked.

"We're not at that part of the story yet!" He said it firmly, deflecting the same way I put him off when he made such a query. For the same reason, too.

We both knew what happened to you and we wanted to ignore that reality as long as possible.

The boy had gone to Maya-Jade's house three times, often enough that Mim now knew how much he admired the car and let him sit up front and play with the controls and ordered his favorite kind of pizza—barbecue chicken. But he had not yet met Laura, Maya-Jade's other mother. On his next visit, he did.

"It's so nice to finally meet you, Alex," she said when she came into the kitchen to greet them. "Maya-Jade has spoken about nothing but you all summer long."

"Mom!" Maya-Jade said, embarrassed. "Not nothing but him."

"You and your project," Laura clarified. "She won't let us see the footage, but the stories sound incredible."

"Yeah, the residents are full of surprises," he said.

She smiled. "Maybe you'll tell me more at the fair next weekend?"

The fair was the county fair, which Maya-Jade and Mim had invited him to a while back.

"You can't go to the fair!" Maya-Jade said in that scolding adult voice that had made the boy so angry when they first met.

"I'm done with the chemo," Laura replied. "I'm not as immunocompromised."

"You're having radiation. Your immune system is still weak. And all those people there. All those germs. What if you get a cold and it turns into pneumonia and you wind up in the hospital?"

"Honey," Laura began, "we can't live in fear like that." She looked at the boy for confirmation, and though part of him really wanted to nod, out of loyalty to Maya-Jade he did not.

"If you go to the fair, I won't have fun. I'll be too worried about you and it'll ruin it for me," Maya-Jade said.

Laura's face fell and she looked suddenly a different kind of tired than she had before. "Okay," she said. "I'll stay home."

Maya-Jade was quiet as they took their pizza and drinks onto the big L-shaped couch in the den and pulled up the movie on the TV. They were on the fifth one, Fornax Force: The Superstellar Invaders .

Usually, she talked so much during the movie the boy sometimes had to politely shush her, but she barely spoke, barely ate her pizza.

"Are you okay?" he asked her.

Maya-Jade shook her head. "No. I am not okay. I am the world's biggest jerk."

"You always have to be the best at everything," he teased, and when that failed to make her smile, he added, "I'm kidding. You're not a jerk at all."

Maya-Jade swiveled toward him. Her brown eyes were blazing. "Do you know why my mom still has her hair?"

"Uh…," the boy began.

"She wore this special ice pack on her head during the chemo because I was freaking about her going bald. She had to stay at the infusion center an extra two hours, and she hated it there, but she did it for me."

"That doesn't sound so bad," he said.

"But it was. It's okay for her to worry about me in normal times, but not when she's sick. She was supposed to do things for herself. Not for me."

When Maya-Jade said that, the boy thought of his mother. Had she worried about him in normal times? Had there ever been normal times? Both social workers had told him that his mother was sick, but how was he supposed to have known that? He hadn't had a Mim or a Vivian to tell him, or to help her. And unlike Laura, who'd had surgery and chemo and now radiation to get better, his mom hadn't even stayed in the hospital even though she would lose him if she left.

For the first time, he began to see what the social worker had been trying to tell him. That he had deserved more. That everyone deserved more. And maybe the reason he could see it now was that he had more.

"I wish I could be brave," Maya-Jade said. "Like Olka."

"Me too," the boy said.

"I dunno. You seem pretty brave to me. Volunteering at Shady Glen even though you didn't know anyone there. Speaking out at the meeting with Ginny's and Dickie's families. Getting all the residents to talk to you."

The brave thing to do would've been to tell Maya-Jade the truth: not just about why he had "volunteered" at Shady Glen but about his mother, his aunt and uncle. And Toby.

"I'm not brave," he said. "But I'm working on it."

She patted him on the shoulder three times in quick succession. "I'm going to work on it too. Starting now." She paused the movie. "Can you hang on a sec?"

"What are you gonna do?"

"I'm gonna tell Mom to come with us to the fair," she replied. "It's not like being a spy for the resistance, but it's a start."

"It is a start," the boy agreed. And, as had become almost a reflex for him, he thought once again of you, Olka. Going from this frightened angry person to being a spy, a hero. If you could do it, maybe Maya-Jade could. Maybe he could. Maybe anyone could.

IN MY YEARS AS A garment maker, I dressed movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and political wives like Lady Bird Johnson, but the uniform I sewed from the scraps of fabric buried for me in Plaszow remained the best work of my life. I soon came to realize I was fabricating a Nazi officer's uniform. Olka knew that I had sewn many of these in the Madritsch plant and could sew one from memory.

In the factory, where we had machines, shears, measuring sticks, and ample light, such a suit would've taken many hands a week. Here I cut trousers, pieced together a shirt, emblazoned the jacket with the gold-and-silver braid of an Oberst epaulet, using nothing but a needle and thread and the ten fingers on my hands—because, as I told you before, you don't sew with your eyes, you sew with your hands—over a period of six weeks. When I finished one piece, I buried it and waited for Adek to give me a signal. Then I would dig in the same area to find new material replacing my finished piece. In this way I sewed trousers, a shirt, and finally, a military jacket. When the last epaulet was sewn onto the sleeve, I buried the jacket, and I waited.

For what? I didn't know. But by then I had grown a little wiser, wise enough to trust Olka's invisible hand, and Adek's, too.

It was in the dead of night when Adek shook me awake. By the tears in his eyes, I recognized two things: It was time for me to leave. And Adek loved me, just as I loved him. Another regrettably late discovery, because when we said goodbye, I was certain this was the end of our acquaintance.

I found my way to the spot, sank to my knees, and began to dig. But before I could more get dirt under my nails, I heard her calling to me as she had done four years ago, hiding in my family's store, risking her life, even then, for us.

I went to embrace her. "No!" she hissed. She was no longer dressed in Mother's glamorous castoffs. She wore the striped skirt and tunic of Plaszow's female prisoners.

I was confused. Was she a prisoner now too?

She thrust at me the uniform I had fabricated, now pressed like new, along with a pair of regulation shoes.

I stared at her, trying to reconcile the fact that Olka, my Olka, was standing right there, but was a prisoner and was holding an Oberführer's uniform.

"You're going to march me out of the camp," she said.

And that was when I understood that she had disguised herself as a prisoner to sneak into the camp—this was the equivalent of the chicken walking into the fox's den—so that I could impersonate a Nazi officer and escape.

"Get dressed," she ordered, just as she had that first day we met, when I was a half-naked, smug young fool.

I dressed. She handed me a transfer request, stamped by the Third Reich, and a riding crop. "Tell them my transfer is on orders of Commandant Goth."

"But they'll know… I'm a Jew."

"How? Your German is perfect. Your uniform is perfect. Call me the terrible name I once called you. Bully anyone who questions you. Beat me with the crop. You have the rank of Oberführer. Act the part."

"But… what if it gets us both killed?"

She turned to look at me, and I saw in her eyes how much she loved me, undeserving as I might be. How much she wanted a future, any future, with me.

"Then we go down together," she said.

My knees shook so badly as we walked through the camp, I felt sure anyone could see through my pathetic pantomime. But I kept walking, steeled only by the strength from Olka's elbow, which I was grasping, less as the part demanded than as a crutch I needed.

It was early in the morning, before the prisoners were roused. Up on the hill, household servants were beginning the day. A pair of soldiers, stumbling drunkenly through the muddy roads, straightened up with a "Sieg heil!" when they saw me. They believed that I was their superior!

We reached the entrance to the camp. With shaking hands, I passed the guard the transfer papers.

"A transfer at this hour?" he asked.

And for a moment I nearly folded. My tongue was tied, my stomach churning. Olka stumbled and cried out in pain as if I had hurt her, though I had not adjusted my grip on her. I looked at the young man, a boy, really, younger than me, and of a far lower rank than the soldier I was so poorly impersonating.

"Those—those are orders," I stammered.

He leafed through a clipboard, frowning. "I see no orders." He picked up his telephone, about to make the call. Once he did, it would be over. For both of us.

"You want to bother the commandant at this hour? Before his coffee and morning crap?"

He hesitated, the phone stilling in his hand.

This time I spoke louder, my voice sharper. "And you question an officer! An Oberführer!" I whipped the crop against the dusty ground, feeling the power it bestowed. "Shall we ask Commandant Goth why he issued the order? Shall we find out which soldier failed to put it in the log?" I snapped the crop again, and this time the young man flinched as if I'd struck him.

"I am only following orders," he said in a quiet voice.

"You are insubordinate is what you are," I said, raising my voice along with the crop. "And you are wasting valuable time. What is your name?"

I reached into my breast pocket for a pen and paper I did not possess.

"I am sorry, sir." He hung up the phone.

"Name!" I ordered again.

"Please…" His voice broke in fear, and I understood that he was, in his own way, as trapped as I was. We were both prisoners here.

The soldier hurried to lift the gate, his demeanor that of a dog who had just been beaten, trying to please the master who had beaten it.

"H-heil Hitler," he stuttered, opening the gate.

"Heil Hitler," I replied, and marched my beloved and myself out of the camp.