the corporal called down in his guttural singsong. He was attempting—to no effect whatever—to twirl the rope with which he’d lowered Toyti into the chimney. Braced against the warm walls of the flue, the boy ignored Corporal Luther’s efforts at sabotage; he was after all harmless, the corporal, a laughingstock among his fellows, and his lame jokes and taunts were merely the way he tried to disguise his fear of scaling the smokestack. It was on account of his cowardice and generally unfit condition that Untersturmführer Stroop had assigned him repeatedly to this exercise in humiliation. Then other guards and even kapos would gather to observe his fat rump toiling up the iron rungs behind his charge, whose nimbleness was a torment that the tub-of-guts Luther took as a personal offense. The little yid should by all rights have been dead already—hadn’t the corporal lost a small fortune in wagers on that score? The shelf life, so to speak, of climbing boys in the camp was ordinarily measured in minutes, but this one had survived, even thrived at the task; which was why Luther, smug in his use of a Jewish locution, had christened him Toyti.
