Read Online Two Rings by Millie Werber - Free Book Online

should I have been thinking of?
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    Soon after the Yom Kippur “sacrifice,” I had my own encounter with death. It came when I made a mistake I was not allowed to make.
    Zwirek, the Pole who supervised the celownik, came up to me one evening as I started to work at my machine. He had never spoken to me or addressed me in any way before. Sometimes when he passed by in front of my row of machines, I could see that he was smiling slightly, as if he were indicating his approval of my work. But I didn’t want his attention; I wanted to stay hidden.
    He was trim and fit, I remember, and very tall; I reached just below his shoulders.
    â€œI have to speak to you,” he said, quietly and without anger, but firmly, too, with some urgency.

    What could he mean? What could he possibly want to speak to me about?
    He continued, “Do you know what you did?”
    What did I do? What could I have done? I always did as I was told: I stood on my little box in front of the enormous machine and drilled holes, for twelve hours a day, six days a week.
    â€œYou know,” he said, “all the fifteen hundred pieces that you made last night—they are no good. Every one you put in the box is wrong.”
    Out of the fifteen hundred pieces I was required to drill each shift, I was allowed maybe two or three that weren’t right. The rest had to be precise, perfect.
    â€œWhat happened?” he asked. “You know what’s going to be done. You know what this means.”
    What could I say? I didn’t know what happened. I was tired, maybe; I fell asleep at the machine; I was sick. Who knows? I worked vacantly—maybe my hands drilled holes without my head knowing what I was doing.
    I said, “I cannot give you an answer; I don’t know what happened. I can’t even make up an excuse.”
    It was a death sentence. I had seen Weinberg shot for committing sabotage. Zwirek had said to me, “You know what this means,” and I knew precisely what it meant: It meant my execution. Zwirek said these words to me, and I saw in my mind young Weinberg falling to the ground with bullets in his back.
    I don’t think I was afraid. I was numb.
    Zwirek was shaking a little, I remember, staring down at me. I remember wondering for a moment if he was trembling from anger or something else. And then suddenly I could see in his
eyes that he actually pitied me, that he hated this situation that we were in, that he wanted to figure out something to do.
    He said quietly, “I cannot let you die. I cannot let you die. But I don’t know what there is to do.” And then he left. He simply turned away from me and went back to his office, and I turned back to the machine and to my work, trying to drill each hole precisely right.
    Later that night, Zwirek came back and took me aside. I remember I had to bend my neck all the way back to look up at him standing over me.
    â€œI will take these boxes,” he said, softly, almost tenderly, “and I will bring them back to my office. And for every box that you finish, I will take out some good ones and put back in some of these bad ones. And I will substitute these for those until all the mistakes are gone. But you mustn’t make any more mistakes. The rest have to be perfect.”
    Then, without waiting for a reply, he left, and he never spoke to me again.
    For nothing, a man was killed; for nothing, my life was saved.
    Zwirek was a Pole; I was a Jew. That is important.

    How is it possible to discover love in a place like this? I am speaking here not of sex, though surely there was that, too, in the barracks—people fumbling under clothes, softly moaning on the bunks, intertwining, needing not to care that others were around. No, not this, though I think perhaps I understood even then how strong sexual desire can be. But this is
not the love I mean. Or, to be true, not only this. It is more mysterious to me, my love for Heniek. It