surprised: there had been little chance of us finding food so late in the day, let alone food that someone would barter for a simple slip of soap. Dawidek and I had passed a store that was selling eggs, but they’d want zloty for the eggs, not a tiny scrap of soap.
“Wait here a minute,” I murmured to my brother, who shrugged as he sank to sit on an apartment stoop. I might have let him follow me, but even after the depths our family had sunk to over the years of occupation, I still hated for him to see me beg. I glanced at him, recording his location to memory, and then pushed through the last few feet of people mingling on the sidewalk until I reached the street vendor. She shook her head before I’d spoken a word.
“I am sorry, young man. I have nothing to offer you.”
“I am Samuel Gorka’s son,” I told her. It was an oversimplification of a complicated truth, but it was the best way I could help her place me. “He fixed your tooth for you, remember? A few months ago? His practice is on Miła Street.”
Recognition dawned in her gaze, but she still regarded me warily.
“I remember Samuel, and I’m grateful to him, but that doesn’t change anything. I have no food left today.”
“My brother and I...we work during the day. And Samuel, too. You know how busy he is, helping people like yourself. But the thing is, we have a sick family member who hasn’t—”
“Kid, I respect your father. He’s a good man and a good dentist. I wish I could help, but I have nothing to give you.” She waved to the table, to the empty wooden box she had packed up behind her, and then opened her palms toward me as if to prove the truth of her words.
“There is nowhere else for me to go. I can’t take no for an answer. I’m going to bed hungry tonight, but I can’t let...” I trailed off, the hopelessness hitting me right in the chest. I would be going home without food for my mother that night, and the implications made me want to curl up in a ball, right there in the gutter. But hopelessness was dangerous, at least in part because it was always followed by an evil cousin. Hopelessness was a passive emotion, but its natural successor drove action, and that action rarely resulted in anything positive. I clenched my fists, and my fingers curled around the soap. I pulled it from my pocket and extended it toward the vendor. She looked from my palm to my face, then sighed impatiently and leaned close to hiss at me.
“I told you. I have nothing left to trade today. If you want food, you need to come earlier in the day.”
“That’s impossible for us. Don’t you understand?”
To get to the market early in the day one of us would have to miss work. Samuel couldn’t miss work; he could barely keep up as it was—he performed extractions from sunup to curfew most days. Rarely was this work paid, now that money was in such short supply among ordinary families like his patients, but the work was important—not just because it afforded some small measure of comfort to a group of people who were, in every other way, suffering immensely. Every now and again, Samuel did a favor for one of the Jewish police officers or even a passing German soldier. He had a theory that, one day soon, those favors were going to come in handy. I was less optimistic, but I understood that he couldn’t just close his practice. The moment Samuel stopped working would be the moment he had to perform an honest reckoning with our situation, and if he did that, he would come closer to the despair I felt every waking moment of every day.
“Do you have anything else? Or is it just the soap?” the woman asked me suddenly.
“That’s all.”
“Tomorrow. Come back this time tomorrow. I’ll keep something for you, but for that much soap?” She shook her head, then pursed her lips. “It’s not going to be much. See if you can find something else to barter.”
“There is nothing else,” I said, my throat tight. But the woman’s gaze was at least sympathetic, and so I nodded at her. “I’ll do my best. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As I turned away, I wondered if it was worth calling into that store to ask about