Milkweed: Chapters 36–45

There were no scabs or boils on Uri’s face.

“Deportations,” he said. “They’re going to begin soon. They’re clearing out the ghetto.”

His red hair was cut so short it was just a tinge of rust creeping out of his cap.

“I am a Lutheran. Everyone knows. I have nothing to fear. I am only thinking of you”—he jabbed his book in Mr. Milgrom’s face—“with your Hanukkahs and stubbornness. You."

Uncle Shepsel became more and more agitated.

He ranted at the people on the stairway.

He called down from the window to the courtyard: “Jews! Repent! It is not too late! Come with me! Save yourselves!”

Then I saw the Jackboots poking them with rifles and the dogs lunging and snapping.

Voices in the stairway, in the courtyard, said: “There is a quota. The trains must take five thousand Jews every day.”

“They are sick of us. They are kicking us out. They are sending us to the East. To resettlement. We will have our own villages. No one but Jews!”

“Lies,” said the old man. He did not shout. We had to strain to hear him.

Silence again, and then a louder burst of laughter and jeers.

Jackboots and dogs and bayonets threw gigantic, jerking shadows on the ground.

Everything—the people’s heads, the straining dogs, the roofs of the boxcars—was in black silhouette against the sickly light.

She was thrashing and screaming above the silent masses.

I thought she would sail forever like a milkweed puff on an endless breeze, and I was running and wishing I could fly with her, and then she was gone, swallowed by the black maw of the boxcar, and even as I felt the hot breath of the dog, I could hear the rumble and the boxcar door clanking shut.

A spot of white caught my eye—the armband, snagged on a thornbush.

The hucksters fascinated me the most. I stood in front of them for hours as they ranted to the passing parades about the wonders under their tents and handkerchiefs.

The following spring, as I hauled the farmer’s rocks, the Jews turned on the Jackboots with stolen guns and bottle bombs. But the Jackboots were too many, with their tanks and flamethrowers, and the revolt was over by May and the people were herded to the last of the trains and the ghetto was no more.

I smiled to think of him on the last day, once again in his own clothes, shaking his fist at the oncoming tanks, his red hair flaring, invisible no more, calling all the world’s attention to himself.

A gristly, bony man. White whiskers. Sunken eyes. Ragged clothes.

If my cart was empty, I kept on hawking just to hear myself talk.

I wallowed in words. There was no end to them. They were free for the taking. No one ever chased me down a road yelling, “Stop! Thief! He stole my word!”

I talked enough and stole enough and sold enough to buy a steamship ticket, and I joined the multitudes going to America.

The problems were my size (I had stopped growing at five feet, one inch), my accent, and my missing ear, which now looked like a clump of cauliflower. I couldn’t blame them. Who would let such a galoot in the door?

I began describing the wonders of the miracle chopper. Somebody called, “Wha’d ya do, chop yer ear off?” Before I was half through my spiel, the last person was walking away.

She came back every day, staying longer and longer, bringing me hot chestnuts. She lured me away from the street corner—lunch at Horn & Hardart, walks in Rittenhouse Square, card games in her ground-floor apartment.

Vivian was a normal, sensible person, but I think at that time she must have gone a little cuckoo.

She pushes off from her toes a little too hard, which sends her tiny body sailing past a headstand and into a backflop onto the hard floor. I wince at the thump.

When I said one day to my daughter, Katherine, “Drive around, out of town,” and I brought along a trowel and a bucket, she did not ask why.