The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch Page A

a coy hand for her smile to hide behind. The capo, great fat Rolak, is busy somewhere else, probably in one of the storerooms either helping herself to whatever delicacies she has hidden there or enjoying a carrot or a stalk of celery that ought by rights to be going to the prisoners.
    Blackbeard takes out his cigarette and purses his lips. “Have you any ideas?” he says.
    “Nothing that you haven’t thought of, I’m sure,” says Zofia.
    He shrugs. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
    “No,” she says.
    “Something conventional then,” he says. “One of the old standbys.” As much as he hates putting off the inevitable, he’s well accustomed to bargaining for everything, both here in the camp and in his prior life. Always let the customer suggest a price, is his belief, because you never know what value he might place on something.
    Zofia reaches out and takes one of the cigarettes from his breast pocket. It’s probably the most daring thing that this poor timid creature has ever done in all her life, a physical act of flirtation, even if it’s only a carrying-forward of something already begun by Blackbeard himself. The cigarette is gray and bent and precious. “I’ll take this one as a down payment,” she says.
    “A down payment on what?”
    But Zofia has vanished, blushing furiously, tearing up the two or three steps into the kitchen and bending over the stove to transfer fire from a stick of kindling to the end of the cigarette. She can hardly breathe and it isn’t the smoke or the exertion of running. Eidel looks over from the chopping block and sighs. “A down payment?” she says.
    Zofia looks up. Her face is red and wreathed in smoke, and with laughter bursting from her she staggers to the chopping block to take up her own knife again. Eidel laughs too. Laughing is something that neither of them has done in a very long time. It seems as if they’ve never laughed before, and together they keep it up for a while, perhaps the better part of a minute, with Blackbeard down in the yard craning his neck and the junkman climbing back onto the wagon and the capo appearing out of nowhere. She trundles down the hallway from the storerooms like a battleship, wiping her mouth on her apron. She’s still chewing something and when she begins to speak tiny bits of it explode from her lips like shrapnel.
    Only the shame at being caught with her mouth full contains her ferocity. It’s a close call, but Eidel and Zofia are both definitely working and the sack of rutabagas on the table alongside the chopping block is surely diminished so she clamps her mouth shut and shakes a finger at them and lets their laughter pass this time. She lets Zofia’s cigarette pass as well, choosing not to ask how she came to be in possession of it. Those men in the delivery commando, no doubt. She wonders what she has given up for it but she thinks she knows. It’s unforgivable, the way these people live.
     
    *
     
    Late Thursday, Jacob is given a new suit of clothes intended to make him more presentable for the senior SS officers he’ll be visiting. His old uniform is taken away and in its place he’s issued a relatively clean jacket and trousers made of a lighter weight fabric, closer to new than the uniform he’s been wearing and showing signs of actually having been pressed at some point during their lifetime. Certain men in his block are envious. Certain men would be envious of anything, of any change, of any attention that doesn’t result in injury or death. “Imagine,” he tells Max, “coveting such a ridiculous thing—when the truth is that my old uniform was heavier and I’ll miss it when the winter comes.”
    “Who believes in winter?” says Max.
    The evening roll call is approaching and Jacob must sew his serial number into the new uniform in time, so he sits working furiously with a needle and thread. Clouds are moving in and the light is dying and he squints. Another prisoner comes by and watches