“His name wasn’t Shatka—that’s the name of this woman Warshawski encountered, I suppose the married name of his niece. My benefactor’s name was Zudymas.” Salanter’s rage had subsided. He was leaning back in his corner of the couch, his face pale with exhaustion.
“When the Red Army retreated in the face of the German invasion, my parents had twenty-four hours to decide what to do before the German troops moved in.” Salanter’s eyes were shut, his voice dull. “Rumors abounded about German cruelty to Jews but we didn’t have real information. My parents decided that the most bestial rumors couldn’t be correct, that no one could really be throwing babies into lime pits and laughing at their agonized death screams. My parents believed adult men would be at risk but that the invaders wouldn’t harm women and children.
“So my father and my older brother fled east, into the Soviet Union, where they fought with the partisans, only to perish in Stalin’s gulags after the war—news I learned long after the war’s end, news I learned only after years of seeking their fate. It was easier to recover my grandfather’s paintings than to discover my father’s grave, but in the end I found both.” He broke off, panting.
Gabe left the room; I heard him in the kitchen, finding a glass, running the tap, but, like the other three in the room, I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes from Salanter. When Gabe returned, Salanter sat up to drink some water, then leaned back on the couch again.
“The rest of us, my mother, my sister, and I, stayed behind to be slaughtered, with the eager help of the local populace. In Poland, the ghettos existed for several years before final deportations, but in Lithuania, most Jews were murdered almost at once, before the end of that first summer of the occupation, prodded to their execution by Lithuanian police auxiliaries.”
He squeezed his eyes shut again. “My mother—I suppose every boy thinks his mother is beautiful, so I was like all boys. My mother and my sister were the most beautiful women in the world. In that single way I agree with the cretin Wade Lawlor, when he weeps on television about his beautiful murdered sister. My sister and my mother were beautiful and they, too, were murdered. Marched off to Ponar Forest and shot, on Yom Kippur, dumped into one of the oil storage tanks the fleeing Red Army had left behind.
“But for the three months of the summer, when we were crowded into a ghetto in Vilna, Zudymas helped himself to my mother. Sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight. She submitted, in exchange for extra food for me and my sister, or because she was powerless, or because we all heard the shots of the executions, all summer long, and she thought, sex with this pig will save my children’s lives. And it did. Or, at least, it saved mine. Not my sister’s.”
The five of us had to lean forward to hear him, his voice had grown so low.
“The day of the Yom Kippur massacre—all was confusion. We were ordered to line up, to march, and Zudymas, with his fellow villagers in the Police Battalion, they swaggered along next to us. He had spent the previous night with my mother, but he whipped her along with the rest of the women. She flung herself at his feet, she begged him, if not to save her, then to save my sister and myself.
“I have always been small, and although I was thirteen then, I still looked like a child of nine or ten. When we reached the forest—not far, it was not far enough away—Zudymas suddenly snatched me from the line of marchers. I begged to stay with my sister and my mother, but she—that was the last I saw of her—go, save yourself, live to be a man, she called to me in Yiddish. It was over so fast I didn’t have time to think. I tried to run but Zudymas caught me easily and carried me to his farm. Where he kept me, my benefactor, my savior. Missing my mother, he satisfied himself with me. Locked me in the basement when he reported for his duties, came home at night to my small body. Yes, this is a story that I long for my granddaughter to know.”
His face was waxen. No one could speak, until, some minutes later, Sophy Durango said timidly, “But you managed to escape?”
“Oh, that. Yes.” He brushed the air with his hands, as if the escape were of no importance. “The night came where he was so used to my small, compliant presence that he didn’t lock me in again. While he slept, I took the money from his trousers and fled. He had helped keep me captive by depriving me of clothes, so I took his Sunday suit as well.