The Stars and the Cookie Jar

This is the blending of what I wanted to retain from the first draft, and what I learned from Ms. Simaite. Does it work? Or does it have the fictional equivalent of mange?

"Leave me alone, Fayge," she mumbled, half into her own hair. "Tired."
            Fayge let the heel of bread drop onto Raissa's notebook, but Raissa did not move to take it until a red curve of currant jam slid over the crust's edge. She swiped at the page, licked her fingers and raked back her hair.
            "My pages are going to stick," she said, and lied, "I can't eat all this."
            "It's –"
            "Half?"
            "Half." Fayge agreed. They managed entire arguments in six words, these days. She could not take her eyes from the coarse white of crumb, the jewel-red of jam, as she broke the bread. Hunger without shame made her spear fragments of sharp-browned crust on one finger; Raissa had already crammed down her share, and winced a little for the raw, rancid taste of preserves left too long in the heat.
            "White bread," gulped Raissa. "Jam. Where did you get it?"
            "He gave it to me," she said, and Raissa looked away, out the window.
            “Hirshke!” 
            He had only half lowered himself over the sill; the cry made him scrabble and stiffen and drop the rest of the distance into a bone-rattled heap.  Raissa was across the green room, with her arms around him, so quickly her chair smacked back-first onto the floor.
            “What did you do to your hair?” Raissa’s glad cry trailed off into dismay.
            “Peroxide,” he said, instead of hello.
            “Or something.” Fayge winced.  “My God, your feet.”
            “Never mind his feet! Look at his hair!”
            Hirsh straightened, one hand covering the white-bleached wreckage. An old man he looked, or a spirit long leached, but not a Pole. Rags crossed the insteps of his boots, and the straps of his rucksack had cut into his army coat. He wore a small-caliber rifle, badly.
            “What are you doing here?”
            “Where have you been?”
            “…Water?”
            Fayge came to him, with the bucket and dipper; he took the bucket, and drank.
            “You’re out of your mind,” she said, to the upturned bucket. “Coming here in daylight! Armed! Where did you walk from? Where did you cross? How in hell do you intend to get back to the frontier?”
            “Listen,” he said at last, gasping around the last mouthful of liquid. “Listen to me. They’re taking everyone. Whatever money you have, it’s not enough.” 
            "Upstairs," Fayge cautioned. "Everyone will hear you!"
            "Let them. They should." Hirsh stuck a hand into his coat, and drew out a greasy and much-folded sheet of paper. It was typewritten, and no one had used the margins. Clear black at the top of the page was the cruel-beaked eagle of the General Government.
            Raissa touched it first. She put on her eyeglasses one-handed, using her teeth on the earpieces, as if something sealed her right hand to the paper. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t know what it means. To liquidate?”
            “How old is the order?”
            “More than a week already,” Hirsh looked apologetic. “I walked from Siauliai, and I lost two days playing hide and seek with some snipers across the river.”
            “Stay here,” ordered Fayge. “Out of sight. I have to – I have to..."
            “I’ve been to the Judenrat. I’ve spoken to Herr Kruk. They already know. And I’ve seen the trains – trains enough for thousands – from the southwest.”
            “Kruk? What about Jakob Gens?”
            “No one can find Herr Gens.”
            “Then he’s not alive,” said Fayge, “and no help’s going to come.”
            Raissa had been sitting silent, her fingertips in her mouth; now she hauled upright. “You’re talking over my head,” she said simply. “But I’m still here. Why would Hirsh have walked miles and miles, if there’s no hope of help?”
            “To get you out,” he replied, with no mention of hope at all.
            “But the Russians,” Raissa persisted. “They can’t be far. You can’t lie down at night, for the artillery!”
            “That’s why they’re in such a hurry.” Fayge gave a vicious little smile. “Read for yourself. They don't mean to leave us alive."
            “And we just walk out? We pay our bribes and leave, right now, just leave?”
            “Rais’le,” Hirsh hushed her.
            “What happens to everybody else?”
            Fayge never flinched. “Treblinka happens. You want to stay here and wait?”
            “Your daughter –“
            “…is safe out of their reach.” She frowned for a moment, passed a hand through her hair, and was calm. “Hirsh, here’s ten – fifteen thousand. Take her to the north gate. Time enough to get out that way, before the light goes.”
            “What the hell am I? Potatoes in a sack?!” Raissa’s cheeks were bright with rage. “We have to warn people! We have to –“
            Hirsh took her hand.  His eyes, darkened green-gray with tears, held shouts of pain and anger, but his mouth was shut. After a moment Raissa fell silent, under his silence. Her throat worked and trembled, but the words had fled with his.
            Because she could think of nothing else to do, she took the last sticky corner of bread and jam, and put it in Hirsh’s hand. “You’ve not eaten.”
            “No,” he said. “Thank you.”
 
            "Look out! Murer!"
            Fayge shoved Hirsh in the stomach, toppling him like broken bricks, and bundled the black woolen fire drapes around him.
            "What the holy –"
            "Be still," Raissa whispered, "be still, Hirshke." She stepped over his legs, managing to look as if nothing more than an oddly-angled set furnishing was in the way, and moved beyond his sight.
            Below, in the aisle, Leyb the runner sprawled just above the dress circle. He was silent, and the words of his warning had spilled in a dark, gleaming halo that seeped into the crimson carpet; no one of the company, up on the stage, waited for him to stand again.
            "Give me house lights! House lights, you fucking talents! Am I supposed to think you're working, in this dark?"
            There were no lights, because there was no electricity. There was half a cheap candle, fixed in its wax on Raissa's small desk; she lit it, as quickly as Fayge could hand her a match. It showed her three musicians, two actors, a singer and a seamstress who had all become accustomed to things worse than a bit of the dark. It showed out into the secondary darkness of the house, ghosted over the prone boy and the seats. Something came down toward the light like a great black-winged moth, something striding and without fear.
            There was blood on Murer's boots. They all saw it, even the seamstress with her sore eyes; it flashed when he leaped – the gesture of an unstarved man – from the railing of the pit to the stage.
            "Which of you is Katriel?"
            He took Fayge's hand in his; hers was small, and very white, with darker lines where dust had stuck to the currant jam. His fingernails were finer. He raised Fayge's hand as if to carry it to his heart, and no one spoke.
            "Tell me, who is Katriel?"
            Into the long silence, a scream; Fayge's forehead damp and rain-colorless, and no other sound from her, no moan, no whimper, but he had snapped her smallest finger.
            "Is Katriel here?" He asked again.
            Raissa looked at the desk, and at Fayge, and then at Murer. She pushed back her chair, and stood up. "I have been known by that name, sir," she said.
            Murer threw Fayge to one side, and the desk to the other. It skidded over the lip of the stage and crashed in the dark of the pit. Nothing was between them, now, and Raissa stood in her patched jacket, barefoot, and tried not to flinch.
            "Do you have a real name, Jew-girl, or would you rather die as Katriel?"
            There was a low sound, like wind over stones, as the actors and the orchestra heard him speak. Raissa heard a bird beating against a window, a mouse broken by the kitchen cat; a noise from her lips, or Fayge's.
            "My name is Gellerman," she replied. "Raissa Sylvie Gellerman."
            He caught her one simple, stunning blow to the shoulder, and she landed on her back with an inkwell crushed beneath her. Lying amongst ink and glass and paper she groaned.
            "Get up, girl," said Murer, "and bring me a box."
            
            Fayge cried.
            Blood was on her coat, on her hands and Hirsh’s. She let him into the apartment, let the key crash on the floor, and stood and cried. There was half a kettle of water, rust-tinged, on the unlit stove; Hirsh poured two inches into the basin on the windowsill and the rest into a glass from which she did not drink. He took her hands, very awkwardly; something was wrapped around the stiffened left hand and the broken finger. He unwound it carefully, because the cloth was so fine and thin.
            It was Raissa's shirt.
            He took it from her, somehow, without letting go her hands, and while she wept the water in the basin turned pink.
            “Here,” she said, coming back to herself, and he dropped his handkerchief in the water. Hard enough to press a blood-bruise into her palm, though he had not seen her take it, she held Raissa’s ring.
            He wondered if she had gone under the lash to get it, wondered the cost she had not mentioned. He tried to imagine how it must have felt, Raissa's slick and cooling hand.
            “I didn’t think the snatchers should have it,” she explained.
            “My brother made these.” Hirsh was hoarse, though it was high August, and his eyes stung, though the rest of his skin was numb. “Made them look like silver, I don’t know how. It’s just iron, just a bit of pipe –“
            She stared straight out at nothing, her lashes thick and dark with salt. As she had let Hirsh take her hands, she let him take the ring, and tears dripped off her chin.
            Hirsh shifted, foot to foot in his cracked patched boots, and to keep from looking at her face, he looked at the apartment. In the corner to the left, the bedstead, and the bed was made; there was a trundle made from an orange box, but in the summer light from the window, dust dully furred its sheets. To his right, Raissa’s studio couch, not made up, coverlet trailing the floor, pillows squashed. The cold stove, the empty cupboard, the desk Fayge gripped at one edge, that was all, and it felt empty. The windows were half open, so he could hear the shelling, and Fayge’s sobs. The sulfurous smell of the river in summer, the sharp lemony edge of lavender water; and all beneath it, the ink-and-dust scent of Raissa’s papers, her books.
            “You don’t have much time.” Fayge startled him. Hirsh thought, belatedly, of the edict in his pocket, of the eagle in its folds; he felt the weight of the rifle on his back. He carried his death, he wore it plain, and the sun was setting; in that close, cluttered room he began to feel cold.
            She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her great coat. Then she took the coat off, and laid it over the desk. Her shoulders shook, a  breath slammed from her hard enough to stir the forgotten pages of a book, and she went still.
            In a summer dress of white flowers on blue, she might have come from free Vilna, might have been dropped here by God’s white hand, except her cheeks were red from crying and bruises trailed down her bare arms. Something in her face had changed, to Hirsh’s eye, something made him remember that she was the youngest of all of them, the last. He could not see her, with her freckled cheekbones and fair plaited hair, with a pistol in the forest; he did not want to see her as a rag, crumpled, staring sightless, under the arch on Strashun. She was something like Raissa’s sister.
            “Come with us,” he offered. “Please.”
            She was not young, anymore, as she looked. “No,” she said.
            “What?”
            “Thank you.” Fayge smiled. “No. I have to see my daughter. You go, while there’s still light, and I’ll catch you up.”
            Because he stood there staring, empty-handed, with the rifle biting his shoulder, she touched his arm.
            “Come on. I’ll take you by safer roads than you know.”
 
            Sunset, as they crossed out of the Ghetto, and a body hung at the Strashun gate.
            Fayge sounded muffled, though they walked side by side. "God in Hell, could they not let her be?"
            Raissa's eyes were closed. Naked to the waist, and lash-marks standing out even on her stomach, she dangled above their heads and her blood stained the golden stone of the ancient wall; Hirsh could see the ropes at her wrists, and her shoelaces, and the faded thread-marks on her trousers where the button had been lost and lost again
            They had hung a piece of stiff card around her neck, placed so that her breasts were mostly covered. Its edges were beginning to soften and crease where red dried to black. The words, in block German, were still legible, standing out from her like another wound.
            Vor Dem Welt, Der Wort
            "What does it say?" Hirsh asked. He could not look at Raissa, any longer, but he could only stand to look at Fayge sideways, from the blurred corner of his eye; broken blood vessels bloomed purple and black where Kittel's truncheon had caught her, from temple to chin, and Hirsh could not imagine speaking around pain like that.
            And when she did speak again, translating the placard aloud for him, he trembled and stood still in the middle of the street, one foot banked against the trolley track. She was telling him what the rhyme said, in worn-throated whispers that must have tasted like blood in the back of her mouth; but he heard her screaming, please, please, she cannot count so high and he was in the wings with a fold of moldy wool curtain blocking his eyes and his words but not his ears. Someone had taken up the count, when Raissa could not…
            "Fayge?" Hirsh blinked a little, and she touched his arm; he stopped hearing those numbers, high, clear and cold from the lips of a woman already dead. Her voice now did not hold such courage. It only went a little hoarse, as she repeated herself.
            "In the beginning was the word."