Of Silence | completed

THE TAILOR

LILLE, FRANCE. 25 DECEMBER 1940

Johannes Klein was a simple man. At least, he thought it better to describe himself as simple rather than small-minded, which was what people called him behind his back. He was also exceedingly short-tempered, sniveling, and all kinds of other unpleasant things that he was aware of but could not do a thing about.

He also liked to think something was wrong with him; that something had muddled the very foundation of his brain and made him a terrible person, but he knew with absolute certainty that nothing was. Johannes Klein was just the way he was because he - and the man in the sky - had made a series of irreparable decisions.

His mother had always told him he was weak. 'Coward,' she would hiss, and send him out, when he could not do what he was expected to do. Because he was weak, and something was indeed wrong with his body, even though his mind was sound: his right leg was permanently stunted, shorter than his left, and he walked with a swipe and a heavy limp that was only accentuated by the hunch in his back.

The people of his town would jeer when he walked past, and God forbid if someone were to be in a particularly unpleasant mood - they would trip him and laugh when he stumbled into walls and storefronts, into tables loaded with produce that would then go flying to the floor. The shopkeepers would only glare and demand he pay for the damage, and when he could not, because he was poor, they told him he was a nuisance, a disgrace, and that he was better off gone from the town and from their lives.

It became worse when Klein was almost thirty-five and had not yet married. Nobody was surprised: how could the hunchback, the runt, ever find a woman who could love him? And it was true. Until he was forty Klein remained obviously, painfully, alone.

So he left the town. He did not imagine that anybody missed him when one morning he was not shuffling around the streets. His old mother would be sitting in her wicker rocking chair, maybe humming, maybe even singing. The father of the family next door would pick up the newspaper at seven in the morning, like he did every day, and smile when he did not see Klein pulling weeds in the garden or sweeping the front stoop or hanging the clothes to dry.

It was by pure chance that he found himself at the border, and pure luck that he managed to cross it. Not once, but twice, first from Germany into Belgium and from there into France. When he came from the Ardennes on a rickety horse-cart carrying scrap metal and stone he found himself in a town called Lille, and he decided that this was where he would spend the rest of his miserable life.

Life went well enough in Lille. Barely anyone ridiculed him for his disability, and he made a living doing odd jobs here and there. Despite his ungainly appearance Klein had very deft fingers and very keen eyes, and people would give him their clothes and their small music-boxes and pocket watches for him to fix with little screws and bits of thread he salvaged from other shops.

Soon his 'business' grew - it was not so much a business as a way to keep himself busy - and he became well-known around the town as a tailor and a tinker. He was neither, but he did the work nevertheless. He had enough money within a year and a half of arriving to rent a room - it was a small one, and more of a closet than a room, but it had one cot and one desk and one solitary cabinet in the back that was always empty. And it was enough.

In spite of being able to rent a room (or maybe because of it), Klein never had enough money, never enough food, and it became worse this year when the Germans came. Now they imposed upon the residents of Lille the carte individuelle d'alimentation, and he did not have one, because of many things - because he was a Jew and an illegal German immigrant, because he was poor, because his body was grotesque in a way that should not be. And when he could no longer buy food he had to resort to the one thing that made him want to curl up and wither more than all his other faults.