head bowed and tracing invisible patterns in the broken asphalt with the end of her brown parasol, did not convey the impression that she was expecting anything else from him. Her suffering had become so deeply embedded that she expected from others neither compassion nor warmth.
Malecki looked distractedly at the movements of Irena’s parasol. More keenly than usual he felt the same onrush of emotion that inevitably took root of its own accord whenever he contemplated the increasingly frequent tragedies of the Jews. These feelings were different from those that arose within him for the suffering of his own compatriots and of the people of other nations. They were dark, complex, and deeply disturbing. At the moments of their greatest intensity, they became entangled in an especially painful and humiliating awareness of a hazy and indistinct sense of responsibility for the vastness of the atrocities and crimes to which the Jewish people had been subjected now for many years, while the rest of the world silently acquiesced. That awareness, stronger than any intellectual reasoning, was probably the worst experience he had taken from all his wartime encounters. There were times, as at the end of the previous summer, when the Germans had first begun the mass slaughter of the Jews and when for days and nights on end the Warsaw Ghetto had resounded with the sounds of shooting, that his feelings of complicity became exceptionally strongly aroused. He bore them then like a wound in which there seemed to fester all the evil of the world. He realized, however, that there was within him more unease and terror than actual love toward these defenseless people, who now found themselves cornered on all sides, the only people in the world whom fate had uprooted from a demeaned, but still existing, human brotherhood.
The present encounter with Irena only heightened Malecki’s confusion, which had been growing within him since the previous evening. He had felt very depressed then because, as a typical man of education, he was the kind of person who finds it easy enough to relate the sufferings and cruelties of all mankind to his own pangs of conscience.
In the meantime, the antitank gun fell silent. From the phonograph in the neighboring courtyard now rose the ringing voice of a male tenor. Round and resonant words of Italian floated loudly and clearly about the walls of the ghetto. Machine guns rattled from the middle of the square. The people who had retreated to the courtyard now returned to the gate. The same small boy, whose mother had called him Rysiek, burst from the entryway and ran up to the woman, still standing by the stairs to the basement.
“Mama! The Germans are blowing up the Jews’ houses! Oh, look what huge holes they’ve already made!” he said, holding his hands wide apart.
“Go home, Rysiek!” the woman whispered.
He shook his unruly, dirty-blond hair.
“I’ll be right back.”
Turning on his heels, he ran back to the entryway.
“Maybe now we can go back out on the street.” Malecki said, and left Irena to see what was happening at the gate.
He saw an artillery piece standing in front of the building and several German soldiers around it. The machine gun rattled constantly from the middle of the square. The gate was half open. A small group of people was negotiating with a tall, broad-shouldered soldier to allow them to exit. The soldier at first did not want to let them out, but at last he stepped aside and waved them past. Instantly several dozen people darted toward the exit.
Malecki swiftly returned to Irena.
“Listen, we can leave, but quickly, because they’ll probably start up again soon.”
Looking at Irena, he fell silent. She was pale and her face had changed. She leaned on one hand against the wall of the building.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, frightened. “Do you feel sick?”
“No,” she protested.
But she grew even paler. Malecki looked around and quickly approached the woman from the basement.
“May I ask you for some water? This woman is feeling faint.”
The woman looked at Irena and hesitated for a moment. Finally she nodded her head.
“Follow me.”
Malecki descended after her and stopped at the door. The odor of poverty struck him immediately. In the basement was a kitchen nook, low-ceilinged, darkened with soot, and saturated with dampness. There was hardly any furniture. On a wooden bed next to the wall lay an old and emaciated man, covered with the remnants of a once-red quilt. Nearer the entrance, a dark young man sat on a stool, peeling potatoes. The work went amazingly quickly. With machinelike speed his pocketknife flashed, and with measured motions he deftly tossed the peeled potatoes into a basin of water on the floor. The young man was leaning downward into the shadows; his face could not be made out.
The woman drew some water from a bucket and handed a mug to Malecki. He thanked her and quickly returned upstairs to Irena.
“Have some of this,” he said, offering her the water.
At first she did not want to take it, but finally she allowed herself to be persuaded. After a couple of swallows she pushed the mug aside.
“I can’t,” she whispered with revulsion.
She was slowly regaining her composure, but she still trembled slightly and kept leaning against the wall.
“How do you feel?”
She nodded, feeling better. At that moment the woman emerged from the basement.
“Maybe the lady would like to sit down?” she called. “Let her come downstairs.”
Malecki looked inquiringly at Irena. To his surprise, she agreed, and he led her down the stairs. The woman wiped off a wooden stool with a rag.
“Please have a seat,” she told Irena and placed the stool nearer the door.
Malecki stood beside her. The antitank guns began to sound again. The man lying next to the wall began to moan, but the woman paid him no attention. She stood before the kitchen, thin and frail, with her arms hanging down, clearly tired beyond endurance. Although she wore a miserable threadbare dress, she looked well-enough groomed. Her hair, already graying, was smoothly combed, revealing the sallow skin of her temples, transparent as vellum. She must have been no more than forty years old, although she looked much older.
Malecki glanced toward the bed.
“Is that your husband? Is he sick?”
“He’s sick,” she replied. “But he’s not my husband. He’s my husband’s father.”
“And your husband?”
“He was killed in September.”2
Irena only now looked about the room. The woman immediately noticed her glance.
“The Germans threw us out of Poznań province,” she explained. “We had a little house in Mogilno. My husband was a gardener there.”
She fell silent and looked about the place herself.
“And now—it’s all gone!”
Malecki, who had been watching the young man peel potatoes for some time, could no longer restrain himself and exclaimed:
“You’re really good at that!”
The youth started, broke off his work, and raised his head. His face, which once must have been gentle and not bad-looking, now was swollen, and the livid, brick-colored spots on his cheeks gave the impression of a mask. His hair was cropped close to the skin, his eyelids deeply red, and his eyes dead, motionless, and without luster. His glassy stare, so little resembling anything human, had a crushing effect on Malecki. He was relieved when the boy, without responding, again bent over and, taking another potato from the small basket, began to peel it skillfully with his red and slightly swollen hands.
No one spoke. The man moaning next to the wall attempted to pull his hands out from under the scraps of quilt. The tenor on the phonograph in the courtyard began singing a new aria. From far away, the short reports of single