“Yes, I know,” Aharon said futilely. The old fool was going to insist; what could he do?

“We had lice, we had bedbugs, and we had typhus. Food we didn’t have. Water we didn’t have. A place even to wash ourselves—soap, just plain soap—we didn’t have. You think I didn’t mind because I was fifteen? Had I ever had as dirty a day in my life before that? Never!”

Aharon felt a burning swatch on his back where the light from the bottom of the window struck him, scorching like a brand. “Rabbi Kobinski’s work…”

“Some thought he was mad, you know. There were two kinds: the kind who thought he was mad and the kind who thought he was a saint. Myself, I went for the saint. Why not? What else did we have to hope for? In the evenings, he would pray and people would gather to hear him. The capo got tired of beating him for it—he never seemed to mind being beaten. He scared the capo—a nasty Schwein named Gröding. The rebbe scared a lot of people.”

“Scared them? What do you mean?”

“Walking around immune to it all. You cannot imagine how frightening this is. Because the reality,” Biederer held his fingers together in a strong gesture, “the reality…” He bounced that hand, looking for words. “It was like walking on a tightrope. You had to be alert every second. You let down your guard for an instant, and you’re dead. And here was someone who was oblivious! It was a miracle or a terrible danger; no one knew which. And he did this chanting. The first time I noticed Kobinski he was chanting under his breath and making signs all around the room—first on the wooden posts of the bunk where he and Isaac slept, then in all four corners of the room, in the center, on the doorways leading out.”

Biederer stopped deliberately and took drag after drag on that stinking cigarette.

“The capo barks at him, ‘What are you doing there! Stop it at once!’ and Kobinski ignores him. Gröding tries to pull his arm, to pull him away, but Kobinski is a tree. He doesn’t budge, not even his arm, not even a little. And Gröding was not a weak man! So everyone whispers—’the rebbe has magic,’ ‘he’s got supernatural strength,’ ‘God won’t let Gröding disturb him.’ Gröding gets red in the face, says loudly to everyone that the man is insane—a simpleton—and then he leaves like he can’t be bothered.

“After that, you couldn’t see those letters Kobinski had written with his bare finger, but everyone knew they were there. People rubbed the posts of his bunk, the doorways, anyplace he’d marked.” Biederer smiled. It was a brittle, miserly thing. “I’m telling you, it didn’t always go so easy with Kobinski as that bit with Gröding, but many people believed he had magic.”

“He was a kabbalist,” Aharon said, clearing his throat.

“Yes, a kabbalist. Of course, typical Jews, some of the men pooh-poohed kabbalah, even some of the religious. But not to his face they didn’t!”

“What did he say to people? Did he just make marks in the air or what?”

“Say?” Biederer looked at him as if the concept were foreign. “He talked to his followers, but I never dared go over. I was afraid of being noticed. But I did hear him say—and people would quote him—he’d say, ‘The world is a balance of good and evil. It is a physical law. So it can only get so bad before things have to get better.’ Of course, they made sure to teach him otherwise.”

Aharon wiped his forehead. So hot! “What about his work? Did he ever mention a weapon? Or talk about physics?”

Biederer glared at him dully. He finished his cigarette and lit another. “He was writing a book. His followers would bring him anything they could find: toilet paper, butcher’s paper, even dry leaves he would write on. This, too, the men in the barrack fought about. Some thought he endangered all of us with such things. But his followers would always defend! There was one—Anatoli, a Russian Jew. The man was a fanatic. He followed Kobinski around like a dog.

“As for myself, I thought they should leave him alone, let him write. Even though he didn’t have the strength, who did? He worked all day, and in the evening he would write, always, like a madman, as if all day he had been writing in his head and this was his only chance to put it down on paper. If there was moonlight, he would go sit by a window or the crack of a door after lights-out, long after I fell asleep. I don’t know why, but Gröding always turned a blind eye to this.”

“What happened to the book?”

Biederer shrugged. “Anatoli was in charge of that. I think he buried it; I don’t know. Only he and the boy knew where it went.”

“The boy?”

“Kobinski’s son, Isaac.”

Aharon took a breath, wanting to get it over with. “Isaac died in Auschwitz, too.”

Biederer nodded. For some reason this, specifically, brought tears to his eyes, incapacitated his voice. Aharon waited. Biederer dragged on his cigarette.

“In the end,” Biederer said at last, “not magic, not kabbalah, not the greatest rabbi in Europe meant this against the Nazis.” He snapped his fingers.

“Well,” said Aharon weakly. “If there’s nothing you can remember about his work…” He got up.

“Siddown.” Biederer’s voice was menacing. “You started this.” He pointed at Aharon with his cigarette. “Now you listen.”

“But if there’s nothing more specific about—”

“You don’t know what I know,” Biederer said, tapping his temple. The frail old man had suddenly become very hard, dark with anger and other undefined emotions. Aharon found himself shaking, not out any real fear, of course, but from a sense of impending ruin that hovered over him, as it had at Yad Vashem. He felt confined, harried, like a turtle being poked with sticks. Weakly he sat.

“You think this is bad, this little nothing?” Biederer’s watery lips hardened in disdain. “You people! You’ve heard makkes, my friend, nothing! This story…” he trailed off, as if not able to find an expletive large enough. “You wait.” He pointed again at Aharon with his cigarette. “You wait.”

Biederer stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, lit another. By now the room was not only hot but also hazy with smoke. The six-inch gap in the window was not letting the smoke out fast enough. He had a fuzzy cast to him, as if viewed through Vaseline. This only added to the impression that time was becoming thinner, that the past was closer. Even the taste of smoke in Aharon’s mouth could have been any smoke, even that of the ovens.

“There was this guard; Wallick was his name. He and Kobinski… it was a battle between them, a battle to the death.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because Wallick took it as a challenge to break Kobinski, that’s why—to bring him down into the dirt and horror with the rest of us pishers. If Kobinski’s saintliness intimidated Gröding, it only made him the special target of Wallick. And let me tell you—you didn’t want to be a special target of any of those demons, but particularly not Wallick.”

“Wallick killed Kobinski?” Aharon asked, glimpsing an end to this story.

“Killed him? He wanted to break him. Can you break a dead man?”

“I really don’t need to—”

“He beat him, often. Every time he saw him. With a stick he beat him—sometimes just a little, sometimes a lot, till there was blood covering his face. Even in a place like Auschwitz, where you saw everything, it was still upsetting to see such a great rebbe covered with blood like this.”

“I think I—”

“Then there was mealtime. Wallick would come through after we’d been served our nothing soup of water and potato peelings, and he’d always time it just so. Anyone else in the same situation would have gobbled the soup in line, as soon as they got it, but Kobinski never did. Can you imagine it? Day after day he stands in line, gets his soup, smiles at the inmates handing it out, waits for his son, walks calmly to find a place to sit—never hurries, never acts as if anything were wrong. Then as soon as he sits—bam—Wallick comes along and knocks the bowl from his hands. And Kobinski just sits there, looking at the spilled soup while everyone else goes after it on hands and knees, eating the wet dirt trying to get a little nutrition.”