THE TRUTH BETWEEN THE LIES 

A Novel

By Boni Lev

“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

“The truth is lived, not taught.” — Hermann Hesse

BOOK I

CHAPTER ONE

Lowicz, Poland, 1933

And if it rained, the sister said: “The skies and we are weeping together.”—Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Brother and Sister

I was nine years old when I first met my mother.

All I knew about my mother was what my father had told me: that she left when my brother and I were babies. My father said that they had made this agreement: If my mother left, she would not see the children again—not ever. There would be no contact—no visits, no letters, no gifts. I questioned my father about this strange agreement, but he said, “It’s just what we decided.” He said I would understand when I was older, but I never did understand. Who makes such an agreement? What kind of woman leaves her two infants and agrees to never see them again?

My brother Zev and I had been living at a children’s home in Lowicz for about four years when Danuta, who was our caretaker there, brought us into the kitchen. She said she had big news: Our mother had found us and was eager to meet us and wasn’t it just wonderful?

Zev and I just stared at her.

I thought: How do you lose something if you know exactly where you left it? 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Before the children’s home, Zev and I lived in a small apartment in Lowicz with our father and our stepmother, Klara.

Klara was ‘Mama’ to me, but even as young as I was, I remember thinking of her as an impostor. She drifted around the house like a shadow. When I spoke to her, she would turn to me vaguely, as if she had forgotten I was there. She spent most of her time lying on the sofa.

But Zev and I had no sympathy for Klara’s ennui. Especially after she let our kitten drown.

Zev and I had decided that Orpheus, the little black kitten our father had gotten us, needed a bath. We didn’t want to bother Klara, so we filled up the bathtub ourselves. Once the cat hit the water, it went crazy—clawing, scratching, yowling. We tried to pull him out, but the bathtub was deep, the cat was slick with water, and our small hands couldn’t get a grip on him. To our horror, he sank to the bottom of the tub. Desperate, I ran to Klara, and tried to convince her to get up off the sofa and come help. I pulled at her arms until she finally got up. When we got to the bathroom, Zev was standing in the tub, holding the dripping, lifeless animal in his arms.

Klara took the cat from Zev and laid it on a towel on the floor. She examined the cat briefly while we watched, breathless.

“He’s dead,” she said. “You should not have tried to bathe him.” She stood up, shrugged, and went back to the sofa.

I stared at the cat.

Zev took charge. “We will bury him,” he said. “We will say the mourner’s kaddish for him.”

“But where do we bury him?” Our apartment house had no yard or garden.

Suddenly, the cat began to cough, harsh guttural sounds. He was alive! We cried with joy. We rubbed him gently with the towel until he was dry and warm and told him over and over how sorry we were.

When our father came home that night, Zev and I ran to him to tell him what had happened. “Orpheus drowned! Orpheus drowned! And Mama didn’t care!” My father calmed us down. He seemed happy the cat was alright but unconcerned about Klara’s reaction. I thought: What kind of Mama doesn’t care if a kitten drowns right in her own bathtub? Who takes so much time deciding to get off the sofa?

I was angry with my father for his lack of concern about Klara, but eventually, I forgave him, because I always forgave him. Papa was my world. Klara may not have loved us, but Papa did.

He was a cheerful man. He sang songs, read us storybooks, chased my brother and me around until we squealed with delight. He was the puppeteer, and we were the puppets. Even on the sunniest days, the house seemed dark until he came home. But he was rarely home, so the house was dark a great deal.

Once in a while, to our great delight, my father would take Zev and me with him to the tavern where he played guitar and sang. Whenever my father finished singing, the men always shouted “More, more!” and banged their beer mugs and I would feel proud. He would play late into the night and I would fall asleep on one of the wooden benches, the air musty, the music loud and heavy in my head. My father would carry me home, my head on his chest. The musky smell of his leather coat… the deep vibrations of his voice…the crisp chill of the night…the soft glow of streetlamps…and then, the warmth of our fireplace, where he would lay me down gently on the hearth rug and cover me with a blanket.

One morning, after one of those wonderful nights, I woke up and went into the kitchen. My father sat at the breakfast table with eyes that were red-rimmed and puffy.

He told Zev and me that Mama had left.

“When is she coming back?” I asked.

“No, bubbeleh. She isn’t coming back.” He turned his face away.

I began to cry, not because Klara had left, but because she had made my father so sad.

He thought I was crying for her. “Don’t cry, angel.” He took me into his lap. “I should have told you this before…but Klara,” he cleared his throat, “she wasn’t your real mother.”

“I know, Papa,” I said.

“You know?”

I felt like I had always known. “Is the real Mama coming back now?”

“No, angel. It’s just us now.”

But I learned quickly that a simulated mother was better than none. Without a woman around, our father was rudderless. Dishes piled up in the sink, bedding and clothing went unwashed. There was never any food in the house. And if our apartment had been dark before, now it haunted me with its quiet void. Spiders and insects crawled down the walls towards me in my bed, the scent of my fear drawing them.

My father instructed us to get our dinner at the end of the day from the widow Mencher. The widow lived in another part of town, but Zev knew how to get there; he was excellent with directions and finding places. My father would pay the widow at the end of the week. Zev and I did not like the widow Mencher. She was mean and muttered bad things about our father under her breath. And she was ugly, too, with murky eyes and stringy gray hair that she tied up with a rag. Her nose drooped like candle wax, and her stubby, crooked fingers were always dirty. Her dress and apron, both torn in places, were always dirty, too.

But it was summer and Zev and I played outdoors until dinnertime, occupying ourselves with games we invented. Zev made swords from twigs and twine and we thrusted and parried until Zev decided that he had won. But he praised my skills. “You’re as good as any boy,” he said proudly, and I held the words close to my heart.

Zev taught me not to cry when I was hurt or angry, but to clamp my teeth together.

“If you cry, everyone knows you are weak,” he said.

Zev claimed an older boy he knew made good money in town shining shoes, so we took our father’s battered shoeshine box and went to make our fortune on Zdunska Street where the shops were. We didn’t know much about shining shoes but even we could see that our father’s supplies were quite old. The shoe polish was dry and cracked, and the brushes were very worn. Men still left disgustedly without putting any coins into our box.

Zev and I were often hungry during the day. We skulked around the back door of the bakeries, looking through the trash for stale bread and rolls. Our faces were dirty, our clothes dirtier. Wary, pitiless eyes watched us everywhere we went. But if any of the shopkeepers yelled at us or chased us away, we came later when they were closed and threw rotten garbage at their windows. Young mothers drew their little ones close as we passed by. Vilda chaya, they called us. Wild animals.

But we loved being wild animals. We scorned the other children with their chores and scolding mothers. We were free!

We were supposed to show up for dinner at the widow Mencher’s house before sundown. But we sometimes lost track of time—as children will do—and certain days, the sky seemed to grow dark all at once and we would fly down the street, pulling up short and breathless at Mencher’s gate.

She’d be standing on her porch, wagging a grimy finger. “Neyn! No dinner for you now, you lazy children! You are too late. Now, you get nothing.” And she went inside.

We were afraid to tell our father that we had been late and made the widow Mencher angry, so we went without dinner on those days. The widow had a large vegetable garden with tidy rows of cabbages, beets, and potatoes. We were tempted to steal a few of those lovely vegetables, but we resisted. If she caught us, she might never feed us dinner again.

On the way home from the widow’s, Zev and I would pass by a small farm owned by the Bartek family. There were two women living there and nineteen children between them. We knew that there was a man in the house, but he was ill and bedridden, and we never saw him. Both the house and yard had fallen into in a bad state. Meager vegetables struggled in the garden and skinny hens pecked at the unyielding soil. There was one horse, but he was an old piebald with a scabby coat and a milky eye. The wooden house had taken on a gray weather-beaten sheen that on certain days blended seamlessly into the overcast sky. The windows had no curtains, and we could see thin, dirty mattresses piled close together in dark rooms. Several children were always scattered about the yard, working listlessly at various tasks. There was a small barn that had a flat roof. The Bartek children would climb a ladder and sit on the edge of that roof with their legs dangling over. They’d stare sullenly at Zev and me as we passed by.

I wanted to go up to that roof. I wondered if any of those children imagined what I did: falling over that little wall and hurting myself on the hard ground below, but not too badly—just enough to break a bone or two. I imagined kind doctors carrying me off on a stretcher, strange but comforting men in white coats whose duty it was to care for injured children.

Zev and I were easy prey for the neighborhood bullies. We were tormented, chased, threatened with beatings. One day, Zev, with a rush of bravado, jumped one of the older boys, climbing onto his back like a monkey. I watched, terrified, as the older boy took hold of one of Zev’s fingers and flipped Zev over his back like a sack of rags. The boy let go of Zev and according to his creed, Zev clamped his teeth together and did not cry. We both ran home. Zev wrapped his hand in a towel and wouldn’t look at it.

When our father got home, he examined Zev’s finger and said it was probably broken. He made a wooden splint and wound a bandage around it. Zev was proud of his attack on the bully. He boasted of it to anyone who would listen, sticking his bandaged finger in the air like a trophy.

My father was amused by this.

“It’s not funny!” I said.

“Okay, okay.” My father patted me. “It’s not funny.” But he laughed anyway.

After that, Zev got a little respite from the bullies. But if Zev was off somewhere and I was alone, the older boys would catch me and pin me to the ground, three or four of them, their sweaty, pockmarked faces hanging over me like grotesque balloons.

“Little princess,” they taunted. “Where’s your Papa and your Mama, eh? No one at home for you? Ah…poor little princess. We’ll take care of you.”

When they finally let me go, I would run home, mount the stairs two at a time, lock the door and sit with my back against it until Zev came home and pounded to be let in. I didn’t tell Zev about these attacks because more often than not, I cried afterwards, and I didn’t want Zev to know.

Maybe if he had known, he wouldn’t have sent me away. “You can’t come with me all the time, Sarah! Go play by yourself.” And he would run down the street, too fast for me to catch up.

Sulking, I would go home, and push open the heavy door to our building, passing from the bright summer sun into the heavy gloom of our hallway, like passing from one world to another. Cobwebs, like silvery curtains, hung from the bottom of the stairs. An old, dirty pram lay on its side underneath the stairs, wire springs sticking out of the once-white padding. I thought the old stone walls of our building held many ghosts—the ghosts of the people who had lived out their lives there, birthed their children there, died there. The ghosts waited beneath the stairs, crouched behind the dirty pram, watching me as I dashed up, waiting to grab my feet if I wasn’t fast enough.

It was that summer that the unthinkable happened: our father did not come home. Zev and I waited patiently, but he did not come home the next night or the next. We went to the widow Mencher for dinner, but she shooed us away, saying our father had not paid her for weeks.

“But we don’t know where he is!” we cried.

She shrugged.

We hadn’t eaten anything for two days. Zev pleaded with her. “Can’t you please just give us some bread?”

“No money, no food,” she said, and she shut the door in our faces.

We stole from her garden then. We carried the vegetables home, stretching out our shirts to hold them. When we got home, I took a sharp kitchen knife out of the drawer to cut them up. I turned too suddenly and I cut Zev’s forearm. It was a small cut, but the blood frightened me, and I started to cry.

“No crying,” Zev ordered, and he quickly wound a rag around the cut. He took the knife away from me with an angry grunt. “I will cut them up,” he said. “You will get the pot of water ready.”

He had become the man of the house, my six-year-old brother.

“Look,” he said, a few minutes later. He unwound the rag to show me the cut had stopped bleeding.

“What makes it stop?” I asked.

He shrugged.

We discovered that the kettle was too heavy, once it was filled with water, to get up onto the stove. So, we emptied it, then put the empty pot up on the stove first and used cups to fill it up. It took a long time, but eventually the water boiled, and we cooked our feast. We even remembered to put salt into the cooking water as we had seen the widow Mencher do. Once our bellies were full, we sat and contemplated our future.

“He’ll be back,” I said. “He’s working a big job and he had to stay there for—” I stopped. I wasn’t even sure what our father did for work.

“Don’t be stupid. He isn’t coming back.”

“Don’t say that!” I hit Zev on the shoulder. “You’re terrible!”

“Sure, okay. Blame me! I’m terrible.”

Days passed and our father did not come home. We stole more vegetables from the widow Mencher, and from other gardens, too.

There was a young lady named Marta working at one of the bakeries now and if we went to the back door, she would give us rolls that weren’t even hard yet. Sometimes, she even gave us pierogies, savory pies filled with meat and potatoes. I would lay in bed those nights, grateful for my full belly, grateful for Marta, for her sweet, rosy face and her kind eyes. An angel among ogres.

Then, two women came to our house. They told us it was against the law for children to stay alone. A big black sedan stood waiting to take us to the children’s home.

“Go and get your things,” they told us.

There wasn’t much to get, a few items of clothing, our dirty bedding.

“Leave the bedding,” one of the women said when she saw it.

We got into the car. There was a man behind the wheel and both of the women squeezed into the back seat with us. The car had just driven off when I was struck by a horrible thought.

“Is he dead? Tell me if he is dead!” I screamed at the women and thrashed around like a wild thing. “Tell me!”

The woman sitting next to me held my arms. “Stop this at once! He is not dead.”

“How do you know?” I sobbed.

“If he was dead, we would tell you. Now be quiet! You will disturb the driver.