And what weaponry did I have to counteract Hitler’s insane machine? I had tactics for some sort of theory war, a war fought while sitting at a table. Clogging pipes and dulling files? His arsenal is the kitchen shelf?
Of course, Hitler had already won. Within the walls of a concentration camp, everyone was an animal. He forced the Jews into a philosophy of immediacy, where an hour was a lifetime, where there was no thought, no contemplation, where there was only action, and every action had but a single goal: to live long enough to take one more breath.
So you see? With the camps, Hitler succeeded in returning the world to its primitive state.
And what had Janusz Stern asked me for? An inconceivable deviation from the unremitting beat of that Teutonic drum. A useless luxury, a joke. A profound subversion. And I gave it to him because it was nothing to me. Do you know what he did?
No, I say to my father.
He laughed, my father says. A whisper at first, a sort of wheezing, getting the bellows warmed up, and then his throat engaged, like a cough, and his body began to shudder—the sound was amplified in that enclosed space, but let me tell you, before I had time to cover his mouth, he was roaring, howling. There were tears streaming down his cheeks, he was gasping for air. To this day, I’ve never seen a person so consumed with mirth. He was writhing around, spasming. The guard was banging on the side of the machine, What’s going on in there? Everyone out! Now! Raus jetzt! Raus jetzt! He reached in, one big German paw, and grabbed me by my coat, yanked me out onto the floor. Janusz was thrashing around, the sound pouring full-bore out of the hatch, as if the machine itself was howling. But not for long. The guard dove in, dragged Janusz out, screaming, Raus jetzt, over and over, his eyes popping out of his head, but Janusz couldn’t stop. He couldn’t even stand. He was possessed, flopping around in paroxysms on the floor. Another guard came running, and then one of the B-Truppers, and they’re all screaming.
He couldn’t stop. And that was the end of him. Just like that.
Afterward, they sent for another Polish Jew who spoke German. Through this man they asked me what I said to the dead Jew that was so funny. I told him a joke, I said. What joke? they said. And I tell them the joke, only I tell it the way the Nazi propaganda machine wrote it. A Polack comes home from work one day and hangs up his coat. He calls out to his wife but she doesn’t answer. He goes up the stairs to their bedroom, where she’s in bed with his best friend. From his chest of drawers he pulls out a pistol and points it at his head. You idiot! his wife says, laughing. Don’t laugh, he says. You’re next!
The Germans knew this joke well, and it was even more hilarious coming from the lips of the Jew interpreter. Of course, Janusz Stern had known the Nazi version, too. By some miracle, the Germans were satisfied by my explanation. They assumed he had gone insane. The guard tapped my forehead with the barrel of his rifle and said, No more jokes, Polack, or you’re next. And they all had a good laugh.
Tad and I were called home not long afterward. Our greatest accomplishment had been eluding the Gestapo. Was the intelligence we gathered worth anything? Who knows? Probably not. Was the work I’d done to disseminate simple sabotage equal to the life of Janusz Stern? Well. We were instructed to make our way to Russia for extraction. When we left town, we passed by hundreds of Jews in the fields, digging pipelines for new factories.
At Kraków we sold the horse and cart and bought train tickets. We were accompanied by a man from the underground on the train to Lwów, where we were handed off to a new man, and within a week we were on a plane out of Russia. London, debrief, from there I sailed back to Washington. The very definition of a smooth extraction.
So I return to the Polish desk at headquarters. Nothing’s changed. I’d been gone only a few months, but it felt like years. I moved back into my room on Twenty-Fifth Street Northwest, same bed, same sheets. The other two rooms upstairs were occupied by new tenants, young officers, attachés, but otherwise the house was the same. The towels in the bathroom smelled the same. They had a stiff way of hanging off the racks. On Saturdays our landlady, her name was Sadie Mott, took out the wash, did everything by hand in a big tub on the back porch. She used Ivory flakes. The rasping sound of the washboard. She hung the sheets on the lines in the backyard. The sheets were white with flowers. Yellow petals, brown florets. Sunflowers, I suppose. I could hear them fluttering on the line, exactly as they had before I’d left. I’d lie in my bed on Saturdays and listen. The bathroom smelled like Old Spice and Brylcreem. Memories reconfirmed. Life magazine on the side table in the living room. Casseroles, stews, the thin white curtains billowing while we ate. It was summer and everything was wide open. Dinner was at
