Day After Night

Shayndel nodded. “I think it has something to do with proving that they are different from—”

“From Jews?” said Leonie, ferociously scrubbing ancient dirt from the bottom of a pot. The French considered Jewish men effeminate and impotent, but also sexually insatiable. The Germans thought they were financial wizards with hidden stores of gold, yet too stingy to buy themselves decent clothes. Effete and barbaric; brilliant and small-minded. And dirty. Always dirty.

Francek burst into the kitchen. “They’re putting up bars over the barrack windows.”

Shayndel and Leonie followed him outside, where Nathan took each girl by the arm. “Let’s take a little walk together and see what’s happening, shall we? But you, my good man,” he said to Francek, “relax a little. Sometimes, what lo

oks like a problem is actually a gift.”

“I don’t like riddles,” said Francek.

“You must be Hungarian,” said Nathan. “My grandfather is Hungarian. He doesn’t know how to take it easy, either.”

By the time they got to G barrack, near the northern perimeter of the camp, workers were hammering the last nails into a double layer of chicken wire over the windows. A padlock had been screwed into the door. The British soldiers stood a little apart from the scene as inmates shouted curses at them, including a dozen especially filthy Hebrew epithets newly acquired from Nathan.

“This isn’t going to end well,” Shayndel warned.

Nathan shrugged. “Let them blow off a little steam.”

The younger boys started screaming, “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” aiming pebbles at the Englishmen. When one of them was hit in the eye, they all wheeled around quickly and pointed their rifles at the crowd.

Nathan stopped smiling and rushed forward, standing between the guns and the prisoners.

“That’s enough,” he shouted to the inmates. “Listen to me now. It’s time for my afternoon class. I’m going to hold some races and the winners get a new package of American chewing gum.”

The men and boys were not so easily bought off, and it took Nathan a lot of shouting and swearing to get them to back down. Eventually, they did follow, but his class turned into an angry debate about politics and ended in a fistfight.

In the kitchen that evening, Tirzah kept her back to Shayndel. The silence between them seemed to grow thicker and more tangled with every minute, and by the time Shayndel hung up her apron for the night, she was worn out by anger and resentment. Had she done something wrong? Did Tirzah distrust her after that odd scene with Bryce? Did Nathan say something about her?

Just as she was about to walk out the door, Tirzah stopped her. “A moment, please.”

Shayndel could not recall ever hearing her use the word “please.” Tirzah gestured for her to sit down beside her on the step. She lit a cigarette and offered it to Shayndel, who shook her head.

“Suit yourself,” she said and smoked in silence. Shayndel waited, annoyed but aching with curiosity. She looked out through the fence at a harvested field, dull gold in the slanting light of sunset. The sky was purple streaked with low orange clouds, like a tinted photograph with a caption like, “The beauty of autumn in Palestine.”

At last, Tirzah got to her feet, stepped on the cigarette butt, and said, “Follow me.”

She walked briskly, leading Shayndel toward a storage building that had been turned into bedrooms for some of the staff. Unlocking the door, she pulled the chain on an overhead bulb, revealing what amounted to a large closet furnished with a cot, a stool, and a small table. The walls and floor in the narrow room had been painted battleship gray.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Tirzah said.

“That’s a pretty coverlet,” Shayndel said, pointing at the red comforter, the only bright spot in the room. The walls were bare, except for a framed studio portrait of a towheaded toddler wearing short pants and holding a stuffed lamb.

“He was a lovely baby,” Shayndel said, waiting to be told what she was doing there.

Tirzah closed the door and perched on the stool. “When you go back to your bunk tonight, you’ll find that we moved in that new German girl from A barrack.”

“Not the one who doesn’t bathe,” Shayndel groaned. “Not Lotte?”

Tirzah shrugged.

“But she’s crazy as a cuckoo. Anyone can see that. Why you haven’t already shipped her off to a mental hospital I don’t know.”

“We have reason to suspect her.”

“I know she’s German. We all know that. That other German girl you had me spy on turned out to be a regular Jew like everyone else.”

“We’ve had collaborators and kapos from concentration camps here,” Tirzah said. “Men who beat their fellow Jews to death to save their own skins, informers, sadists, spies, common criminals. Even some gentiles who thought they could get away with murder by coming here.”