Jim - Two.

Jim

Hersch and I were left alone in the deserted, and now almost completely dark, street. Hersch watched Erich and Gabe until they were out of sight, and then sighed and turned back towards me. “All right, come on,” he said. “I’ll find you a place to stay the night.”

            No way in hell was that b*****d getting rid of me that easy. “Hersch,” I said, trying to remember how to sound dark and serious. It must have worked, because Hersch spun around in surprise. I rooted myself in place, keeping my face threatening and sober. “You’ve got to let me see her.”

            Now, you don’t know Hersch, but I do. He’s a quiet one, but when he gets mad he’ll tear you limb from limb. Staring down that average-sized, bespectacled guy could be just as scary as facing the six-foot-four brick wall of a Nazi we know as Erich. But I had spent the last year getting to this point, and one scary look from Hersch wasn’t going to stop me now.

            So I stood my ground and said the one thing I knew he couldn’t argue about: “You know she wants to see me.”

            Hersch’s face twisted, but he knew I was right. He didn’t say anything, but turned away from me and headed down an alley to our left. “Come on,” he growled.

            We made our way through the dark, battered alleys without speaking. I had no idea where the hell he was taking me, and he sure didn’t seem to want to talk about it. In the silence, I thought for the thousandth time about the ridiculous turn my life had taken.

            I should have been two years into university by now, I knew. I should have been well on his way to becoming a doctor, university, tuition bills, steady girlfriend. Instead I was wandering through a disease-infested rubble pile in Poland with the person I had been trying for two years to track down.

            I had never gone back to America, after what happened at Wellington’s. At first, I couldn’t have left if I wanted to, when I was stuck in the hospital.

            At the risk of sounding like the biggest baby of the group, I can tell you that I definitely came out of the explosion in the worst shape. It was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, really. Hersch and Erich made it because they were outside, and Gabe had been in the safest place on campus. But Rebecca and I were inside, just coming out of the main hall, when the sirens went off. Really, we were lucky we had gotten off the third floor; one more minute in Rebecca’s room would have killed us. I pulled Rebecca with me towards the door when we heard the sirens, knowing that the building would come down on us. It was too late though. Every boy in the school was panicked, cramming either in or out of the school. Rebecca and I were caught in the middle, so we had just barely reached the front steps when the bomb finally fell.

            Now, I don’t want to make myself sound too noble or anything, though I would take a few opportunities to remind the guys of my heroics. I didn’t even think about what I did when I did it. It wasn’t any kind of self-sacrifice or anything like that. I really don’t think I knew what I was doing at all. But when the ceiling starting coming down, I threw myself over Rebecca. She screamed, but the rubble never touched her. I took the full force of it on my legs, and mercifully blacked out two seconds later.

            I woke up in a hospital, with both of my legs slung up practically over my head. Apparently they had had to sedate me while they set the bones straight. The doctors kept telling me how lucky I was, how it was a miracle an injury like that hadn’t paralyzed me. Two shattered tibias and a splintered femur didn’t seem like a miracle to me, no way. The first thing I asked, one they un-drugged me, was where Rebecca had gone. I got told over and over again that there were three different hospitals for victims of the bombing, and it would take weeks for everyone to find who they were looking for. Longer, for Rebecca, because she wasn’t a student. Still, I never thought that she might actually be gone.

            Weeks passed, and I started going crazy trapped in that hospital bed. After a month in bed, they let me out to be wheeled around by a nurse, but that just made me feel pathetic and helpless. I drove myself insane thinking about what could have happened to Rebecca, and Hersch and Gabe and Erich. I hadn’t heard a word from any of them.

            When my begging for information became too much for the hospital staff that had to deal with me, they tracked down the rescue worker who had pulled me out of the rubble. He looked at me like I was a ghost, and sputtered for a good minute about how he was sure I would die when he pulled me out. I really didn’t care if he thought I was f*****g Lazarus, all I wanted to know was whether he had seen Rebecca. He sure remembered her. He told me he wanted to get her first, since she had a better chance of surviving, but when they realized I was actually breathing they had raced me to the ambulance. They had left her behind, and by the time he got back she was gone. Really, he was no help at all. But that didn’t matter, in the end, because Gabe showed up just a few days after that.

            He was the one who told me. It really wasn’t fair to Gabe, because after that I always associated him with that world shattering news: Hersch had taken Rebecca back to Poland. They were gone.

            I wouldn’t believe Gabe at first, refused to talk to him for days. But when I finally let him explain, there was really no room for doubt. Knight, whom Hersch had sent a very, very brief letter explaining that they would be taking the boat back to Poland after all, had told Gabe. By the time any of us knew, they were long gone. I threw a fit that night, like a kid. I think they had to sedate me again, though I don’t remember it very well (which is probably pretty good proof that I was sedated). I couldn’t handle it. Hersch had gone back on everything he had said. Rebecca was gone. I had nothing left.

            Gabe stayed with me for a few days. But his visits dwindled off to a few times a week. I couldn’t blame him. By then, everyone left in the hospitals had heard the story of the German runaway who had escaped the west Essex infirmary in the middle of the night a week after the bombing. Gabe had lost as much as I had; it wasn’t fair for either of us to lean on the other. Whenever he came to see me, his eyes were always puffy and red. I hated seeing him like that, so much that I sometimes avoided seeing him at all. One day, a month and a half after the bombing, he told me he was going back to Heathshire. I didn’t ask to go with, and he didn’t offer.

            My parents wrote constantly, telling me over and over to come home. But I was eighteen, nearly nineteen, by then, and there really wasn’t anything they could do to stop me. The hospital wouldn’t release me for six months anyway. I spent four months in the casts, doing what felt like waiting for my legs to grow back. When the casts finally came off, I had to spend another two months just getting myself to walk again. It was September, and I hadn’t stood up since May. Hell, if I thought my legs were skinny and pale before, they were like tooth picks when I finally managed to use them again. I spent another month after that in a kind of halfway house for victims of the Blitz, then found myself a job in a grocery store, working for a tiny room to live in upstairs. I stayed like that for a year, going nowhere, completely hopeless. I don’t know exactly what happened to me in December of 1942, but something snapped in my head. After one more mind numbing shift at the store, another long climb up to my tiny, empty apartment, another news report about the slaughter of Jews in Poland, I pulled my razors out of the cabinet.

            I just lay there on my mattress for a long time. I should have known I wouldn’t really do it, because I didn’t just do it quickly. But I just sat there with the razor to my wrist, not cutting, but just holding the blade against my forearm. I watched the serrated edge slowly dig into my skin, blood seeping to the surface. When the blood began to drip down my forearm, I tossed the razors out the window. I ransacked the apartment that night, ended up getting evicted for it, in the end. Low point, I kept telling myself, low point. After that night, I knew what would happen to me if I didn’t find Rebecca.

            I wrote to Gabe and asked him for money; he was my last hope. He sent a laughably enormous amount without even asking why. Guess his inheritance left him better off than any of us. He must have been holding onto Wellington’s too, thank God. I felt wrong, leaving without telling him where I was going, but I didn’t want him coming with. It was something I had to go at alone, and I couldn’t let it turn into a hunt for Erich too. I deliberately waited until the day before I left to send him the letter explaining where I had gone.

            The next year was a nightmare. The underground in Poland supported me, once I finally got off the boat that had taken me through Denmark and into German territory. If you can imagine how I typically handled high stress situations, try imagining me sleeping in a crawl space for three days during German house raids. Not a pretty picture. I didn’t even know where to start. Eventually, I realized I had started in the completely wrong end of Poland. No one I spoke to had ever heard of the Abrahamson’s. I didn’t even know what ghetto they lived in. Rebecca had never told me.

            With my hope of finding Hersch and Rebecca fading, I threw myself into the underground. I hid in basements and attics, I tried to offer medical advice when I could, and I helped refugees in the underground as the opportunity arose. In a station where I was waiting to hop a train, I once helped pry open a boxcar full of Jews being taken to one of the Nazi camps. In the following chaos, I managed to get away and hide in the rafters of the station. I’ll never know how many actually got away, but it was a story I never even shared with Rebecca until years after the fact.

            And that’s how I lived for one whole year, until one week before November 29, 1943, when I letter came, literally written on the back of a scrap of fabric, from G. Moretti. He must have been just a mile or two away from me, or we never would have reached the ghetto at the same time. He told me he had a letter from Rebecca. That was all I needed to uproot myself again and take off for Piekło. I think you can piece together how the last leg of my adventure went down.

            Thinking about all this, I wondered if I should be afraid. But deep down, I knew I still trusted Hersch. I still trusted all of them, even if Erich looked a little too comfortable in that uniform.

            I was feeling pretty shaken up. I had known Hersch was here, but I almost passed out in surprise when he saw Gabe and Erich. I had missed them too, I guess, but I thought those two were out of my life for good. Seeing everyone again was like running into long lost brothers who had suddenly pointed guns at me. I wondered for a minute if the other guys had missed me as much as I missed them.

            Hersch stopped suddenly and I had a powerful sense of déjà vu. We were standing in the alley in back of a destroyed building. Hersch had stopped at the top of a short flight of stairs. I stared down at the staircase, which disappeared under the street and ended at a basement door.

            I gave Hersch a disbelieving look. “Really?” was all I could say, though it came out more sarcastically than planned. Hersch just scowled at me, clearly not appreciating the ironic similarity between this place and the stairs to our basement room at Wellington’s.

            “Come on,” Hersch growled, heading down the staircase, well ahead of me.

            “Hey, wait!” I called, as Hersch headed down the dark corridor. The building had obviously been bombed ages ago, but the basement, though blackened by fire, was still standing. “This is where you live?” Hersch did not answer. “Oh, come on, Abrahamson,” I groaned, tiring of Hersch’s secrecy already. He never liked telling me anything about himself. “You really think you can’t trust me? She asked me to come here.”

            Hersch did not turn around, but said, “This is where we stay most of the time. Technically neither of us is supposed to be alive. We usually stay here most of the day, because it’s so safe. But when Gabe showed up here, I didn’t want to…”

            “You knew Gabe was here?”

            Hersch nodded seriously. “She wrote him, didn’t she?” he muttered. “He got here before you and came to see me. But you and I both know where his loyalty lies,” Hersch’s tone was thick with implications, and I suddenly felt a little sick. Erich had clearly returned to his natural state of denial, but God knows what would happen now that we had left him alone with Gabe. “So I met him in a friend’s rooms. I couldn’t take him here.”

            I raised my eyebrows, wondering what else Hersch knew. “Did you know Erich was here too?”

            Hersch nodded. “I hadn’t seen him until today, but about nine months ago I got my hands on the list of incoming recruits from the new police battalion. I just wanted to see the numbers there were bringing in, but Erich was on the list. I knew Rebecca would write Gabe, and I tried to stop her, but she must have done it under my nose.” He paused bitterly for a second. “I never wanted either of you to have to come here.”

            We reached a door at the end of the hallway and Hersch stopped. I took the opportunity to study my old friend. Hersch looked so different than I remembered. He was worn out and much, much thinner than he used to be; his grubby clothes hung loosely from his scrawny frame. His face was dirty and gaunt, his eyes hollow behind those same old crooked glasses, and his whiskers almost long enough to qualify as a full beard. He looked so much harsher I thought he must have aged ten years. He really looked like a man who had spent two years in hell.

Hersch looked down uncomfortably, “Um, she’s in there,” he said uneasily. “Listen, I remember what I said, that last day of school. So I’ll, uh, leave you two alone for a minute.” I bit my lip to hold down the grateful smile, realizing that Hersch hadn’t forgotten the almost-truce we had come to all those years ago. “But,” Hersch’s face was hard again. He pointed meaningfully at me. I noticed his raw, red fingers under ragged fingerless gloves. “If you touch her…”

            “Whoa, don’t worry about it!” I interjected. “I mean, you’ll be right out here, right? I wouldn’t…”

            “Never stopped you before,” Hersch said darkly. I was starting to feel pointlessly attacked, and I really, really wanted to defend myself. But what I wanted even more was to get to the other side of that door, Hersch or no Hersch. So I gave him a nod and opened the door.

Inside was a dark, tiny, dirt room with just a mattress and a table. I had to squint through the darkness, so I didn’t immediately catch sight of the shadowy figure sitting on the mattress in the corner. She noticed me, though; her eyes were well adjusted to the dark. She set down her book and walked tentatively towards me. She stepped into the light of the single lamp, and the breath was forced from my lungs at the sight of her.

            “Rebecca,” I breathed.

            An astonished, almost disbelieving smile broke out over her face. “James.”

            I didn’t have time to take her in, didn’t have time to notice how pale and thin and dirty she was, didn’t have time to say anything else. I wrapped my arms around her waist and she threw hers around my neck. The simple embrace was so unbelievable, I couldn’t bring myself to do any more than hold her there, for fear that I might ruin that moment �" I had the habit of doing that. All I could do was try to convince myself that this was all real. She buried her face in my shoulder I heard her stifle a sniffle. A lump rose in my throat at the sound, but I swallowed it, inhaling the familiar smell of her hair, holding her tighter.

            We would stay like that for a long time, before I finally let her go. Eventually Hersch would come back and we would have to talk about what to do next. Eventually I would have to hear what had happened to them in those years he had been gone. But right then I didn’t care that my friends had all pointed guns at me, that I hadn’t been home to America in two years, that I might die in that ghetto. I had Rebecca.

Author's Note

Rough. Very rough. Also, I'm taking a class on the Holocaust, so historical information and dates are subject to change. If dates don't dovetail, either let me know or assume that I know what i'm doing. :)

Reviews

[Arianna]

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and consistant
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and i dont even have words for how much i love and adore them and how freaking awesome this book is and how excited i am!