of hair that had fallen across his forehead, he ran back to the gate. A pale and wasted woman leaned out of the basement.
“Rysiek! Rysiek!” she called after the child.
But he was no longer there. Walking heavily, the woman lumbered up the steep and uncomfortable stairs. Suddenly an antitank gun began to fire. A deafening series of booms rattled the walls. From somewhere on an upper story plaster sifted down.
“Oh, Lord!” cried the woman, clutching at her heart.
The gun pounded without interruption. Everything about trembled and quaked, while the shooting from the Jewish side had grown quiet. And in this deafening uproar there mingled the sound of a raspy phonograph from the next courtyard playing some kind of sentimental prewar tango. More and more people withdrew from the gate.
“Oh, Lord!” the woman from the basement repeated wearily. “For what sins must we suffer so?”
Irena, trembling and pale from the strain of the gunfire, roused herself to respond to this complaint.
“Those people over there are suffering more,” she said hostilely.
Her eyes flashed and her mouth was tightly clenched. Malecki had never seen such malice and bitter antagonism in her.
The woman raised her tired, faded eyes to Irena.
“More? And how do you know what I have suffered?”
“Over there people are dying,” Irena cut her off in the same hostile voice.
“Drop it …” Malecki whispered.
But Irena, unable to control herself, turned on him viciously.
“Why should I? People are dying over there, hundreds of people, and you, over here, are letting them die like dogs … worse than dogs.”
She raised her voice and became much more agitated. Malecki grabbed for her hand and pulled her aside toward the entry to one of the stairwells.
“Get hold of yourself! You’re looking for trouble. Think about what you’re doing—people are already beginning to stare at us.”
As a matter of fact, several people who had drawn back from the gates were peering curiously in their direction. Irena looked around. Perceiving their glances, she immediately calmed down and fell silent.
“My papers are in order,” she whispered timidly.
She anxiously looked Malecki in the eyes.
It made him uncomfortable, as never before in his entire acquaintance with Irena. He was terribly embarrassed and humiliated by her situation and by his own helplessness and privileged position.
“What are you talking about?” he blurted out somewhat artificially. “No one is going to look at your papers now. The worst thing is that there’s no way of knowing when we can get out of here. Where are you living?”
“Nowhere.”
Malecki shuddered.
“What do you mean nowhere?”
“Just as I say.”
“But you said you’ve been in Warsaw for a while.”
“For a while, but what of it? I can’t go back to where I was living. But no matter,” she said disdainfully, “it’s not important.”
“How is it not important? Listen, what about your father?”
She looked at him briefly.
“He’s dead.”
“So it’s true?” he whispered. “There were rumors to that effect …”
“It’s true.”
He was silent for a while. Finally, forcing himself, he asked:
“And your mother?”
“She’s dead too.”
It was the answer he had expected, but as soon as he heard it, he felt its full weight upon him.
“That’s terrible!” was all he managed to say.
And he immediately felt how meaningless his words were. But Irena, standing with her 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.”
