Run, Boy, Run(2)

***

It took two weeks for Srulik's mother to recover enough to go foraging with him again in the ghetto's garbage bins. Removing the lid from a bin, she picked him up and lowered him into it, even though he told her he could do it by himself. He even showed her how, with the help of a running start, he could grab the rim of the bin and vault over. This was easier when it was made of bricks. The metal cans were harder.

"You don't get as dirty when I help you," his mother answered.

"Mama, what difference does that make?" Srulik asked.

Still, he thought, maybe she was right.

The work demanded concentration. When his arms didn't reach all the way into the garbage, he used a stick or a broken board. He looked for the peels of potatoes, carrots, beets, and apples and sometimes found old, moldy bread. Everything went into a straw basket that he handed to his mother. At home, she picked out what was edible and cooked it. Although each family received food rations, these were too small to keep them alive. And in winter, the garbage froze and was hard to handle. It was better once he found a pair of torn woolen gloves and his mother mended them for him.

Now, though, it was a hot June day and Srulik was already eight years old. The trouble with the summer was that the garbage smelled bad and the flies kept buzzing around his head. You couldn't tell them that they'd be better off looking in the garbage. It took something unusually smelly to attract their attention. There were ordinary flies and there were green bottles, which his brother Duvid called "death flies." Today nothing smelled that bad, and there was no way of keeping the flies off him.

The basket was full. "Mama?" he called, ready to hand it to her.

There was no answer. No hands took the basket. He stood up and peered out of the garbage bin. Some boys were playing soccer near the ghetto wall that cut the street in half. Srulik jumped from the bin and ran along the street, looking for his mother. For a second he thought that a woman sitting hunched on a stoop was her. But it wasn't.

He ran back to the garbage bin. Perhaps she had run away from a policeman and come back. Someone was standing there, emptying a pail of garbage. It wasn't his mother. She had vanished as though into thin air.

Srulik stood wringing his fingers, just like his mother did when she was worried or desperate. He didn't know the way home. He looked around as though in a fog. Everything was still the same. The houses and windows on both sides of the street hadn't changed. People continued to walk busily on the sidewalks. The soccer game in the empty lot was still going on. Even he, Srulik, would have looked to someone else like the same boy. Yet inside he felt as though the bottom had dropped out of himself. He pulled himself together and ran to join the boys playing by the wall.





2. Can You Steal?


Srulik was an athletic boy with long legs. Soccer was a game he had learned to play back on a muddy field in Blonie. He and his friends had used the same kind of "ball," a tin can wrapped in rags.

There were eight boys playing. Srulik made nine. One boy volunteered to sit the game out so that Srulik could join it. Though it was hot, the boy was wearing a grown-up's tattered jacket that was too big for him and made it hard to run. After a while, the boys stopped the game and stood looking at Srulik and whispering. Then they formed a circle around him and studied him more carefully.

"He's thin enough," the biggest boy said.

"He'll fit," said someone else.

"Fit where?" Srulik asked.

"Are you hungry?" the boy in the jacket asked.

"Yes," Srulik said. He had forgotten that he was.

"Moishele," the big boy said to the boy with the jacket, "give him a piece."

Now Srulik saw that the pockets of the jacket were bulging. Moishele glanced up and down, saw that no one was watching, took out a sausage from one pocket and a pocket knife from the other, and cut a thick slab of it for Srulik. He hadn't had such a treat in a long time.

"Stick with us," the big boy said. "When it's dark, we'll lower you through a basement window into a store that has more sausages like this one. It's too small for any of us to fit through, but you might make it. Can you steal?"

Srulik shrugged. He could steal. He could do anything for more sausage.

"I want some more," he said.

"Should I give him some, Yankel?"

"Give him some," the big boy said.

The boys went on playing until it began to get dark. Then they hid their ball underneath a pile of junk and set out on the run, darting around the pedestrians in the street. When they reached a bricked-up doorway, they stopped to wait for the night curfew to begin. From the way the streets were emptying, they knew it would be soon. Meanwhile, Moishele took out the sausage and cut a piece for everyone. When they had eaten, he took out some cigarettes and matches, cut each cigarette in half, and passed the halves out importantly. The two biggest boys each got his own cigarette.