The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard

circle around him but talked with each other instead of screaming. While they inspected him he crawled around their legs. He saw me but didn’t make any sign. The feeling that I should do something lifted me onto my toes. I wanted to but when the time came to do it I lost my nerve. I stood there in the middle of the street.
He had his knees up and his shoulders hunchedand a German gave him one more kick that spun him around. Then he just lay there. I thought a son would go to him or scream at the Germans himself. They exchanged a few more comments with some curious Germans on the other side of the street. Then they all started shoving and haranguing one another and left.
A few people approached him, including me. The sleeves and back of his coat were soaked in mud. “Don’t,” he said when I reached to help him up. He got onto his hands and knees and then his feet, tipping around a little, and then headed off away from our door.
I followed him. His walk got more like his old walk. At the first corner we came to, he turned and I caught up with him. Every so often I looked up at his face. He turned again at the next corner, and then again. When the fourth turn brought us back to our block, he stopped to make sure the Germans were gone. At our door he had me go up the front steps ahead of him.
My mother asked what had happened and he told her he’d been knocked down by a wagon. She got upset and boiled some water to help him clean himself up and said he could’ve been killed. He told her to sew some patches on my coat’s elbows, and that everything was sticking out on me. He washed hisface at the sink for a long time. My mother was also upset about his coat, which was not only muddy but also had lost one of its pockets. She moaned and carried on about the lining and finally my father shouted at her to stop going on and on about the coat , and she was scared and hurt enough that she didn’t say anything else.
Boris’s father poked his head in to ask if everything was okay. When no one answered, Boris called from the hallway, “He got hit by a wagon.” My father went back to washing his face.
For a time afterwards whenever I closed my eyes I saw him on the street. I couldn’t sleep at night, such strange thoughts kept coming into my head. I woke with blood in my mouth and my mother said it looked like I’d bitten my tongue.
He was different after that and didn’t go back to work for a few days. He sat at the kitchen table by the window with his back to everyone holding a wet cloth to his head and nursing a cup of tea my mother made him. She said it was all right and that we just needed to give him some room. He looked at me sometimes as if the Germans had kicked the courage out of both of us. When Boris and I left the apartment and I said goodbye, he gave a little wave.

I N JUNE IT GOT SO HOT NO ONE COULD SLEEP. THEN on the one night it got cooler the Germans decided to move their whole army past our apartment.
All night tanks ground through the streets and over the Vistula bridge. Trucks thundered along behind them. We all went to the window to watch; you couldn’t rest anyway. The whole apartment shook and anything that was loose jingled and rattled. We had to take our teacups down from the shelf. Every few hours my mother exclaimed about how long it was going on. At first my father tried to stay in bed but even he had to get up after a while. Once the sun came up all of us except my mother went down to the sidewalk to get a better view.
The procession went on until noon. All the Germans in Germany were being trucked through to somewhere. Boris’s father said that never in his life had he seen such machines as the Germans had, but I could barely hear him because of the noise. Soldiershung off everything everywhere. No one could cross the street. A stray dog tried it at a run and almost lost its tail.
All sorts of German slogans were painted in white on the tanks’ sides. The one we saw most often was STALIN, WIR