Jonatan Aldersflügel did not know anyone but himself who was ashamed of the service medals kept in a cupboard. Then again, he mostly knew Americans, and their medal-cupboards had glass fronts to display their contents more clearly. His sat at the back of the tiny cabinets above his fridge, wrapped in a washcloth too threadbare to wash his hands with, and gathered dust.
When he fought in the war, he’d know that the Führer was wrong. He’d known it since he was fifteen, when Gluke had run away without telling him where. But he hadn’t actually known how wrong the man was until after the war ended, when the camps were revealed. Suddenly, he understood why she had to go, why her bird-boned, thin hands shook so much when the click of boots sounded so close.
After that epiphany, he gave up on her, too – or maybe he gave up on himself. He couldn’t quite tell.
Yet here he stood, stooped under the weight that pictures of somehow living skeletons piled on him, in a suburban area of Brooklyn, waiting for a cream door to open in front of him. The sea nearby smelled of salt so strongly that he itched to taste it, so he licked his lips for a morsel of flavour. Goodness knew he had little enough now.
“You’re Mister Aldersflygull, right?” a woman’s voice echoed. It penetrated his thoughts, and he looked over to her. She was short but not slight, and her body curved and bulged like women used to, when he was a child. He realised that she was staring at him expectantly, and shook his head quickly to clear away the memories.
“Aldersflügel, yes,” he added, hoping that the correction ended up as subtle as it felt, without actually missing her altogether. The woman nodded, then stepped back and to the side, waving her free hand to invite him in.
She practically chirped out, “The living room is right this way, if you wouldn’t mind following me. I’m afraid…well, you’ll see if she comes out. You had something you wanted to talk about?”
Nodding, he explained, “I was a friend of Gluke’s, back before she left.”
? ? ?
Jonatan rubbed his eyes open, scraping away the sleep crusted on the lids, as soon as the clock struck eleven. It rested in the hall, a grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum that his father had made two years ago. Back then, it had been destined to be sold, but by the time Vati finished, the man who ordered it had been shuffled into the ghetto. Jonatan rode past it once, on a bike he’d borrowed from a friend, and saw the large, empty lots. Envy sparked in him from a moment, but then a soldier barked an order out to someone and it disappeared.
In the light of that memory, he shuddered and busied himself with gathering a pack. Everyone knew how the guards there kept their weapons, and everyone knew that they nearly wanted something to go wrong, so long as they were the ones who got to fix it.
The floor chilled his feet immediately, and Jonatan slipped on thick woollen socks, muttering to himself the list of what he needed to bring that night. Every week, Gluke gave him a list of what the people in her ghetto lacked the most, and he brought the items a little at a time.
“Bread,” he reminded himself, “soap and washcloths, cheese, eggs.” His shoes got caught under his heel, and he wedged a finger into the crack to pull it back up, barely wincing at the pain that pressure caused. “A wooden airplane, socks, and thread, any colour.” Before leaving the landing just in front of the door to his room, Jonatan checked the door to his parents’, half a floor down, for the tell-tale crack of light that peeked through when his father stayed up late to fix someone’s watch or alarm clock.
Darkness met him, and he slipped down the stairs with only the barely-audible crunch of carpet, one side facing down so that he could feel for every step before going. When his eyes adjusted, he would need to move quickly, but in his house he had all the time he needed.
Slipping out of the door, Jonatan reached one hand down to his pocket, where a stolen skull cap waited to hide him. Grass whispered against itself under his feet, and he dropped into a low stance, half a crouch, where he could drop to the shadows in an instant. His breath floated away in a white cloud, so he bound a cloth around his mouth. Immediately, his face became uncomfortably hot and wet, but now his presence was confined to the blood pumping in his veins.
It took him half an hour to get to the edge of the ghetto, chain-linked and grimy. At that point his head ached from the frown on his face and tension in his neck, but he moved quickly and kept his eyes wide even against the light that burnt.
A mile away, the clock on the high church steeple chimed the half hour, late as usual, and Jonatan parted the loose edges of the fence. Right where a shed and a house stood together, the cut in the links passed under the guards’ watchful gaze every time. The points of every area left tiny scratches in his skin, which swelled red like a bug bite. He worried about those marks, the first few moments, in case his parents would notice, but they always disappeared by morning.
On the other side of the fence, Jonatan slipped the skull cap onto his head, sliding two pins along his scalp to pin it in place. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, backpack bouncing along the small of his back, and ducked his head down so that the cloth fell down to look like a necktie.
“In here!” a voice whispered harshly from an alley to the side. Although it was dark and Jonatan barely heard the voice, he turned sharply and entered the narrow space without bothering to look up toward the area.
Before they continued to talk, Jonatan and Gluke walked among one narrow alley after another, cobblestoned areas covered with dirt and wet newspapers. The night closed in all around them, but they did not use lights. Disguised as he was, Jonatan was allowed in the ghetto, but they didn’t need to draw any more attention to them, either.
Finally, on a short house’s roof in the middle of the ghetto, Jonatan relaxed, collarbones cracking as his shoulders settled. He took his pack off and set it beside him as his legs dangled off the roof, turning to his friend.
Gluke’s long, black hair blew in the wind, and she shifted into a comfortable seat before asking, “Did you see anyone on the way here?”
“No,” Jonatan answered, “I didn’t.” Under their words lay a current; whether or not someone followed him, whether or not they suspected him, or suspected anything. “How are you?”
She shrugged, and he didn’t press the question. When she tucked a flyaway lock behind her ear, he watched the veins that stood out on her wrist shift under her skin. Two years ago, those veins barely showed themselves as blue streaks on her skin, but now they looked like tree roots over concrete.
“What did you bring?” Gluke asked after a long silence. Jonatan pulled his pack into his lap and undid the clasp, taking out the supplies he had packed one at a time, listing them off for her as he did. She nodded with each item, but her face stayed blank and flat, not even smiling at the quality of the cheese he’d snuck out.
“Thank you, Jonatan,” she murmured when he finished. “You don’t understand how much you’ve helped us.”
He wanted to argue that it wasn’t enough, couldn’t be, because he was just one boy and she was so thin, but instead he answered, “Sure I do.”
“No, you don’t!” she snapped back. Her voice hadn’t gained any volume, but there was the sound of cracking ice and the first peal of thunder underneath the velvet of hush. “You have no idea. You couldn’t!” For a moment, she stared at him with her lips pressed tight, but then she shook her head and rubbed at her eyes with a fist.
Jonatan waited for her to explain, but she just sat there in silence. Both of her hands moved down to grip the roof under their knees, and he tilted her head up, eyes shut and jaw clenched tight.
Finally, she told him, “I’m leaving soon, Jonatan.” After finishing, she sucked in a breath, as if she felt the words like a blow to the lungs as much as he did. His mouth opened and closed while he tried to figure out a question to ask, just because it felt right to ask a question, but he didn’t know anything to ask. He knew why, of course. Everyone knew why, which was why there were guards every night.
“Do you know how you’re getting out?”
“We’re waiting to find out. I know the basic plan, but—.”
Jonatan interrupted quickly. “That’s good. Don’t tell me anything else. I don’t want to let anyone know more.” Gluke nodded, eyes open to the sky. He watched her, and her eyes caught starlight like a crystal of the night on the lower rim. “I brought something else,” Jonatan said, desperate to change the subject to something else, anything.
“What is it?” she asked. Jonatan had never heard her sound so tired before.
“One of the airplanes my father made for me a year ago.” Gluke sighed, eyes closing, and suddenly the words tumbled out in a rushed, stumbling mess. “I thought we could throw it out of here, see if we could hit one of the guards. If we lay down on a roof nearby, no one could see us. Or we could just fly it!”
“Fine,” she agreed. “We can try to get one of the guards.”
? ? ?
When he finished his story, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Gluke’s daughter – she still hadn’t told him her name – looked at him expectantly. He watched her back, twiddling his thumbs and shifting uncomfortably.
“Oh! I thought you were going to keep going, sorry!” she finally squeaked. “You sounded like there was more to tell.” He shook his head slowly, and she arched an eyebrow at him.
“There is more of my story,” he said, “but there is not more of Gluke and my story. I didn’t see her after that night.”
The daughter frowned, then shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Jonatan,” she replied. One hand reached out as if she wanted to pat him on the shoulder consolingly. “She never talked about that time, not to us.”
Jonatan’s mouth dried, and he asked, “She never mentioned me, then?” Gluke’s daughter took a deep breath, and he knew the answer before she spoke. Before she could utter those words and make the disappointment real, he stood and said, “Well, thank you anyway. I am sorry for taking up your time, Miss…?”
“Please, call me Rivka.”
“Thank you, then, Rivka.”
Just as he turned to leave, a pale boy walked through the door. His hair was short and glossy, and his glasses perched low on his nose. A backpack dangled from one shoulder as the glow from his phone screen lit up his face.
“Amichai, look out!” Rivka shouted. Jonatan started back, then looked to her.
“His name is Amichai?” he asked. She nodded, and he swallowed hard before asking, “Did you choose that name, or did she?”
“Mother chose that.”
Jonatan nodded and walked out the door, shivers running down his back when he thought he heard the clink of metal on metal around his neck.