The Shed

Petras could build a cupboard without a single nail. Few could boast the same. Even Regimantas reinforced his chests with steel brackets on the sly. He hid them under wood panelling, of course, but Petras knew there was metal underneath. Things were easier that way, no doubt. Regimantas’s chests  were snapped up as fast as he could make them. But Petras had his pride. He never turned out shoddy work. He felt his own superiority. He had nothing to envy Regimantas for—he despised him.

Petras stepped back. The cupboard would take a week to sell. Perhaps two, actually. If he went into town he’d flog it in two days. He didn’t want to go into town. That meant borrowing Jonas’s horse again. He was always borrowing it. He heaved the cupboard onto his back. Heavy, as always. Spreading his legs for balance like a sailor on a plunging deck, he made it over to the shed and wrestled it in sideways. Right. He called to Neris. She came out of the house, tossing her wet locks like a mare. “Tell Herschel to get himself into the shed.” He wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers. His wife looked at him wide-eyed. Daft woman, he thought. And she goes around proud her old man’s a clever Pole. She turned on her heel and went indoors without a word. Petras picked up the padlock off the ground. Should’ve oiled it ages ago. He went behind the shed and waited.

Herschel came out, glanced about him, scurried over to the shed and darted inside. Petras watched him through the gaps between the boards. The shed needed redoing. Those gaps—a rat could squeeze through them. Fat man Herschel—funny, seeing him legging it like that. Must’ve worked up a proper sweat. He was decent enough with his hands, but precision work really wasn’t his strong suit. He never managed it the way Petras did. The two of them together, though, they’d well-nigh left that corner-cutter Regimantas in the dust . . .  Benches—now benches Petras had a gift for. One an hour, he could make. Plungė was chock-full of ’em. Rokiškės too. Well, that was Herschel’s connections for you. Kin everywhere. Though what were they worth now, his connections. Bugger all, that’s what. Now things’d swing Regimantas’s way. Seven years, and he and Herschel had all but worn him down. He’d even considered upping sticks to Kamajai—workshop and all, the whole bit. He’d a sister there. Who’d give him a second look in Kamajai, though? Now times were tough for Petras too. How was he meant to manage on his own, without Herschel? As for Herschel himself, well . . . Half a year he’d been holed up here. And what’d he brung with him? Their workshop? His uncle Berl had put up the cash for it back in the day. It would’ve ended up Petras’s anyhow, whichever way you slice it. As for money, what money did Herschel even have? Forty years and next to nothing saved. He did have those necklaces, true enough. They’d need checking, though—them diamonds could be fake. Dab hands at forgeries, that lot. Still, Herschel wasn’t a swindler. Couldn’t say that about him, no. Neris, daft old bint that she was, had gone and given it all to her old man. But of course, he knew everything, that wise old Pole did. He was lying, though, about being a Pole—a tuteišiai (a local man), probably. The bloody nerve of it. Psia krew, he says. Psia krew (dog’s blood) yourself, damn you. Neris, that old cow, could’ve gone to church wearing the necklaces and Jonas and Regimantas would’ve been green with envy. But no, it all had to go to her old man and no one but. Clever-clever know-it-all. 

Petras pressed his face to a crack and peered through. Herschel was standing in the middle of the shed, turning his head this way and that and sweating buckets. “Lard-arse,” he murmured to himself. He looked out at the village. No one in sight. All asleep, like. Not a sound, he thought, a proper paradise. But he knew no one was asleep. The village was waiting.

Even Herschel’s long johns were soaked through. God, why am I sweating like this? he said to himself. But his thoughts leapt and skittered all feverish-like, and before he could answer his own question he was asking it again, mule-stubborn. Petras, well, he was a decent fella. Neris was a right bitch, though. And that father of hers was a dirty szlachta (Polish nobleman). Seven years with Petras and never once had the man done him over. Though he might’ve, easily enough. Six months he’d been hiding him now—his father-in-law must’ve been chewing his ear off about it. Though the workshop alone was worth a king’s ransom. A gift like that . . . ought to’ve thanked Berl on his knees for it. Good thing he’d passed on, Berl, before all this started. He’d told Herschel back then, Schlimazel, we’ve never had down-and-outs in this family. And you won’t be one either, even though you’re doing your bloody best to be. I’m doing this for Khaya-Sura, not for you. She ain’t giving birth to paupers, my sister, not if I can help it. Take a Lithuanian—Petras, say. Poor as dirt, but he knows his trade. You’ll work together. Already on his way out by then, Berl. Consumption gnawing him hollow . . . Would Mother’ve been pleased to see her little Herschel drenched in sweat like this? He was so soaked he thought he’d pissed himself. Trousers: feel, have a sniff. No, just sweat. What was giving him the shakes? Kadokhes. Maybe he really had caught a fever. He’d been right, Berl had. Right call to throw in his lot with Petras. Where’d he be now if it weren’t for him? And where was everyone else? No one knew for sure. Neris, bitch that she was, kept mum. No one’d tell him. Half a year since he’d clapped eyes on a soul. Only through the window, when they let him indoors. Petras knew, though. He knew and all. And yet it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Everyone, caught in the samenet? If push came to shove, God wouldn’t allow it. What God, for God’s sake! Where was God now, with Herschel sweating buckets? What was he afraid of? Perhaps Neris’d been feeding Petras some story? When Petras was in town she was always flouncing about half-naked. She didn’t do it for him, though. Lithuanian women of that ilk—no, he’d never liked ’em. She looked the dead spit of a cow. Give it six months, though, and even cows start looking screw-worthy. Specially one working her backside like that. Maybe she’d told Petras? No, not likely. She wasn’t that stupid. So what was he afraid of? Everything was theirs already. Necklaces and all. A heap of money, that. . .  Maybe that was why—’cause everything was theirs. He’d been trickling it out nice and slow. They didn’t know how much he had. Not the faintest about the necklaces. He hadn’t had the faintest either. Not before Mother’d thrust ’em into his hands at the last minute. Run, she’d said. Straight to Petras’s. He should’ve stayed. Why had he run? He should’ve stayed. He’d be with them now, all of them. Where, though? He didn’t believe they’d been sent west. Someone else was saying the Russians’d exchange them. Rubbish. What in hell did the Russians need them for? Why had he run? But he’d thought—he’d thought they were being sent out to work. Everyone thought so back then. Not just him. They couldn’t’ve killed them all. Rubbish. Bloody rubbish. Why call him out to the shed now? He only slept there. In the workshop by day. Take on a Lithuanian, Berl’d said. If anything, he was the hired hand now. Still, it was a stroke of luck and no mistake. Everything hinged on Petras. After the war (“after the war?”—what did that even mean?) he’d find them all (if they were still alive, that is). He’d find them and go to Yisroel. And he’d say a prayer for Petras. And even for that bitch Neris.  

He hadn’t even noticed Petras come into the shed. He’d gone over to the cupboard with an axe in his hand and begun rough-hewing the door. Herschel felt it at once—something was off. He stopped sweating. He went cold. Winter-cold. Snowstorm-cold. The door had been rough-hewn already. Neither of them spoke.

He’s going to arse up the cupboard, Herschel thought. Petras kept hacking away. He was so cold now, Herschel, that his teeth were actually a-chatter. “Basically. . .” Petras started to say, without looking up. Then he turned his way and laughed. “You gone on yourself, or what?” he said (in Russian, which made it sound even funnier). All at once the tension left Herschel’s body. He stopped shaking. He could breathe again. Breathe and guffaw.

“I haven’t,” he stammered through his laughter. “I haven’t.” Still chuckling, Petras said, “They know you’re here.” Herschel didn’t follow. The laughter died in his throat. “Who?” he managed to ask. Petras lowered the axe. “Everyone,” he said. “The whole village . . . I gave ’em one necklace.” Liar, thought Herschel. “Let ’em scrap over it now,” Petras smirked, then ran a hand over the cupboard. “They still don’t want you, though. Reckon if the Germans find out, it’s curtains for the lot of ’em, Lithuanians and all. So they’re scared stiff . . . Even threw in a horse. Don’t need to tell you about Jonas,” he said, flicking his eyes upward. “Tight little bastard won’t give his horse anymore.”

Something had happened to Herschel’s face—his lips were refusing to obey him. “A horse?” he stammered. “In exchange for what?”

“For you,” said Petras. “Gauleiter’s ordered searches everywhere. That’s what’s got ’em rattled.”

“Will you let me get away?” asked Herschel, his voice no bigger than a whisper.

Petras sighed. “Where to, though?” he asked, plucking a sliver of wood from the cupboard. “The Russians’re too far away. And they wouldn’t open the door to you anyhow. Stay local and you’ll get caught. Folks hereabouts’ll rat you out. ‘Where’ve you been the past six months? At Petras’s, natch.’”

“So where does that leave me?” Herschel asked. No: mouthed. All but soundlessly.

“Well,” said Petras, working the words round his mouth. “They told me they wouldn’t rat. On me, I mean. They, er, they’ll say you just happened to drop by, you know. Roaming about, flitting, and then, you know, for old times’ sake . . .” Herschel still wasn’t following. Petras was getting sick of this—why did he have to spell everything out? “Right, so here’s how it is. Say it’s ‘dunno where he’s been six months,’ however hard they question. Well, the Germans’re brutes, you know. A man’s nothing to them. We’re kinder to pigs.” 

“Are you going to turn me in?” Herschel said at last. He could hardly believe he’d had to ask.

 Idiot, thought Petras. I’ve already explained. And they call ’em clever. “No,” he said.

“R-i-i-ight.” He was all at sea, was Herschel. It all felt like a game, this. Some daft game with rules he didn’t know. It was like being a child again: you’re already playing, but no one’s bothered to explain the do’s and don’t’s.

“What’s so hard to understand?” Neris screeched. He hadn’t even noticed her materialise in the doorway. “He can’t let you go, can he—they’ll catch you. And he can’t turn you in either—they’ll hang him. He’s been hiding you six months! Come on,” she snapped at Petras. “Stop dragging it out!” Bloody chattering magpie, Petras thought. Why did I go and marry her? Herschel’s on the money—she’s a right bitch.

Herschel backed away deeper into the shed. And then it hit him. What was what, the truth of it. But no: he knew it already. Had known it since that afternoon, from the way they looked at him. And when they called him to the shed—yes, he’d known then, too. All at once he realised he knew about his mother, as well. His mother and the rest. They’d not taken them anywhere—they’d shot them outside town. He knew the trench where they’d done it, too. He’d dug it with his own hands. They’d all dug it together, before the war. That’s where they’d laid them down, he could feel it. . . Petras came lumbering towards him, swaying a little as he walked. There was a daft grin on his face. Herschel wanted to scream at him—scream the way he did when they were kids, saying, “What, are you stupid?”  

Petras didn’t know how to get this over and done with. Herschel was turning his head this way and that, scanning the shed, trying to find something, anything that’d halt Petras in his tracks. No, there was nothing here. He should know—he’d built this shed himself. Those gaps in the boards—a rat could squeeze through . . . Petras was advancing on him slowly, axe held at arm’s length. A single stupid thought kept pulsing through Petras’s head: this is no harder than splitting timber. “Come on,” Neris screeched from the doorway. “Get it over with!” Herschel felt a trickle down his leg. Well, there it is, he thought, I’ve gone on myself, as Petras put it. He was numb. Completely numb. Berl’d been mistaken . . . He glanced at Petras, two paces away now. Fat man Herschel, Petras thought. And: So quiet in the village. Everyone’s gone to ground. Like mice. It was then that Herschel screamed. He screamed with all his lungs, screamed like he’d never screamed before, and lunged at him. Petras brought down the axe. Its blade sliced clean through Herschel’s skull. Herschel went down hard, collapsing onto him as he fell. Fear took hold of Petras, thick and wild and sticky, like the panic he’d felt as a kid when someone dropped a viper down his trousers. “Get him off!” he roared. “Get him off!” Neris was there in an instant. She seized Herschel—or what had been Herschel moments earlier—and set to dragging him . . . it . . . away. Petras was struggling for breath under the body. He couldn’t work himself free. Neris was pulling it by the legs, and then she looked up, and saw the axe driven halfway into its skull, and she began to puke. She puked over Herschel, over Petras. She puked without end. No, there was no stopping it. Underneath her somewhere, Petras writhed and thrashed and gasped. But there was nothing she could do. She puked it all up—everything she’d ever felt for the pair of them. Petras finally scrambled to his feet. He looked like a fish. A hooked-and-reeled fish. “Stupid bint!” he yelled. She’d stopped heaving. Her guts were empty. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and stared at the sprawling heap that had been Herschel. “He stinks,” she said.

Petras slumped against the doorframe. Evening was falling. A chill blew in from the lakes. The village had gone still. They were waiting. He closed his eyes and pictured himself loading the cupboard onto the cart, cracking his whip, and easing his own horse past Jonas and Regimantas, both of them aflame with envy and resentment.