The Warsaw Anagrams

CHAPTER 1

On the last Saturday of September 1940, I hired a horse-cart, a driver and two day labourers to move me from my riverside apartment into my niece’s one-bedroom flat inside the city’s old Jewish quarter. I’d decided to leave home before the official establishment of a ghetto because much of Warsaw had already been declared off-limits to us, and I hardly needed a crystal ball to know what was coming next. I wanted to go into exile on my own terms – and to be able to choose who would take over my apartment. A Christian neighbour’s university-age daughter and her barrister husband had already moved in.

In my best woollen suit, I walked closely behind the horse-cart, making sure that nothing slipped off into the mud. My oldest friend, Izzy Nowak, joined me, hoping to escape his dispiriting home for a little while; his wife Róźa had suffered a stroke earlier in the month and could no longer recognize him. Róźa’s younger sister had moved in to help take care of her.

While Izzy stooped down to collect leaves painted red and yellow by autumn, he kept me talking so that I wouldn’t seize up with despair. I’ve always lost my voice at the worst of times, however, so after only a block, I had to simply wave him off. Still, my feet kept going – a minor triumph – and after a time, as if through the rhythm of walking itself, an ethereal calm spread through me. As we passed the bomb-destroyed tower of the Royal Castle, though, a group of youths looking for a fight began calling us names. To foil their effort to provoke us, Izzy began singing a popular French song in his wobbly baritone; he and I have protected ourselves with the sound of our own voices since we were schoolboys teased by Christian classmates.

Jews from where we come from learn defensive strategies early, of course.

Along Freta Street, we joined a queue of refugees in our own city. Who knew so many of us had samovars, wicker furniture and bad landscape paintings? Or that a young mother with her small daughter clinging to the fringe of her dress would think of carrying a toilet into exile?

I looked at the faces around me, grimy with dust and sweat, and etched with panic. Sensing that the direction of my thoughts was straight down, Izzy hooked his arm in mine and pulled me forward. On reaching the door to Stefa’s apartment house, he took me aside and said, ‘Heaven, Erik, is where the most soft-spoken people win all the arguments.’

Izzy and I often try to surprise each other with one-line poems – gedichtele, we say in Yiddish, a language in which motherly affection embraces the tiny and insignificant.

‘But what becomes of the quiet people in hell?’ I asked, meaning here and now.

‘Who can say?’ he replied, but as we climbed the stairs, each of us lugging a suitcase, he stopped me. Laughing in a joyful burst, he announced, ‘Erik, there are no quiet people in hell!’

Stefa intended for Adam to share her bed so that I could have my privacy in her sitting room, but the boy stamped around the kitchen on my arrival and shouted that he was too old to sleep with her. Izzy – the traitor – handed Adam his colourful autumn leaves as a present and fled for home. I sat by my bloated suitcases as though beside two cadavers, soaked with sweat and humiliation.

My niece marched over to me as I fought for calming breaths. Knowing what she was about to demand of me, I threw up my hand to draw a last line she dare not cross. ‘It’s out of the question!’ I bellowed.

Believing that my bluster might trump her son’s desperation was the error of a man who had given over the raising of his daughter to his wife. Soon, I’d put Adam and Stefa in tears, and the Tarnowskis had come over to see what all the shouting was about. It was a Rossini opera performed in a grotesque mishmash of Yiddish and Polish. And I was the outmatched villain with his head in his trembling hands.

Sooner or later, you’ll make Uncle Erik feel better about everything if you behave like an angel, I heard Stefa whisper to Adam that night while tucking him in, but making the boy responsible for easing me into a life I never wanted only made me embrace my anger more tightly. The irony was that Adam and I had been friends before my move. On weekends, we’d launch paper sailboats at the lake in Łazienki Park, and he’d gabble on about what it was like to be growing up in an era of Hollywood stars, neon lights and automobiles. Smaller than most boys his age, he’d found success as a darter, the incarnation of a little silver fish. I’d given him his nickname, Piskorz.

Yet over those first wretched weeks as roommates, even Adam’s soft breathing kept me up. I’d sit under a blanket by the window, smoking my pipe and gazing up at the stars, an ache of dislocation in my belly. For how long would I be a refugee in my own city? Strangely it seemed, my thoughts often turned to how Papa would carry a folding chair and a novel to Saski Square when I’d fly my kite. Always that same kindly image of him watching over me would steal into my mind – like a silent film stuck on a single frame. One morning at dawn it occurred to me why: his fatherly caring and gentlemanly manners were representative of a way of life that the Nazis were murdering.

Though that turned out to be only one of the reasons why Papa had come to me…

One night during my second week in the ghetto, Adam burst up out of a nightmare and began sniffling into his pillow. At length, he crept to me wearing just his pyjama top, shivering, his arms out for balance – an elfin dancer teetering in the moonlight.

He must have kicked off his pyjama bottoms during the night because he had never let me or his mother see him naked of late; his best friend Wolfi had stupidly told him that his knees were knobbly and that the birthmarks on his ankle were funny looking.

When I asked the boy what was wrong, he gazed down and whispered that I didn’t like him any more.

What courage it must have taken for him to step within range of the Big Bad Wolf!

I longed to throw my arms around him and press my lips to his silken hair, but I restrained myself. It was a moment of sinister triumph over what I knew was right.

Undone by my silence, he began to weep. ‘You hate me, Uncle Erik,’ he blurted out.

At the time I was pleased to see his tears and hear the misery in his voice. You see, Heniek, someone had to be punished for our imprisonment, and I was powerless to act against the real villains in our opera.

‘Go back to sleep,’ I told him gruffly.

How easy it is to lose a hold of love! A lesson that I’ve learned and forgotten half a dozen times over the course of my life. Still, if you believe I wanted to hurt only Adam, you’d be wrong. And I got my wish, since the chilling shame of that night still clings to me.

Stefa would walk her son to his clandestine school on Karmelicka Street every morning at 8.30, on the way to the factory where she sewed German army uniforms ten hours a day. I’d accompany him home in the early afternoon, since my work at the Yiddish Lending Library ended at one, but he refused to put his hand in mine and would dash ahead of me. At home, he’d slump lifeless into his chair at the kitchen table – the posture of an unhappy combatant in an undeclared war.

I’d make him lunch, which was usually cheese on bread and onion or turnip soup – recipes from my days as a student in Vienna. We still had pepper then. Adam would grind away like a demon, flecking the soup’s steaming surface black, then lift the bowl to his mouth with both hands and savour its fire. In fact, he transformed into a fiend around anything spicy, and I once even caught him eating spoonfuls of horseradish straight from the jar, though Stefa would have spanked him if she’d found out.

In the afternoons, he’d play with his neighbourhood gang. His mother had made him swear to stay on our street, since Nazi guards had already shot several children suspected of being black-market couriers, but we now lived on an island of urban caverns and mazes awaiting his exploration, and she had little hope of him sticking to his promise. In truth, he and his friends wandered all over the ghetto.

On stormy afternoons, when he was forbidden to leave the apartment, Adam would sit cross-legged on our bed drawing pictures of animals or practicing his loopy penmanship. Owing to the influence of his Uncle Izzy and his musical mother, he’d often sing to himself, as well. Stefa had begun giving Adam music lessons when he was four or five and had first picked out melodies on her yellowing Bluthner keyboard, which meant that he now had a song catalogue in his head that extended from Zionist anthems like the ‘Hatikvah’ all the way across the Atlantic to Irving Berlin, though his pronunciation of English was nearly unrecognizable and often unintentionally comic.

On those occasions when I demanded absolute quiet, he’d sit dutifully on our bed and do his beloved mathematics calculations, seeking silent comfort in his own love of precision and detail. I can see now that he tried to tiptoe through those first weeks with me. Maybe he had faith that I would eventually hear what he couldn’t say.

On Saturday, 12 October, the inevitable came, and the Nazis ordered all Warsaw Jews inside the ghetto. The caravan of despair along Franciszka ska Street started at dawn. In the late afternoon, while I was watching from the window in Stefa’s room, a Gestapo officer ordered a group of bearded Orthodox grandfathers to remove their prayer shawls and clothes, and do squat thrusts on the street.

‘Bastards!’ my niece mumbled to herself, but just a few minutes later she assured me we were better off this way.

‘You must be joking!’ I told her.

‘Not at all!’ she declared. ‘Now we know we can depend on no one but ourselves.’

Heroic words they were, but I could see nothing positive in the panting desperation of those naked old men, much less in my humiliation for not running out to defend them.

Our spirits began to flag badly, so to cheer us up, Stefa invited some new friends of hers over for Sabbath dinner on 25 October: Ewa Gradman, a shy young widow who worked at the bakery in our courtyard; Ewa’s seven-year-old daughter, Helena, a watchful little girl whose diabetes had left her with the gaunt cheeks and light-filled eyes of a saint in a Russian icon; and Ziv Levi, a saturnine, pimply seventeen-year-old orphan from Łodź whom Ewa and Stefa had adopted as their pet project. He had just begun an apprenticeship at the bakery and had moved his cot into one of the storerooms.

Ewa baked a sweet-smelling kugelhopf for our party, and Ziv brought along four fresh eggs and a single red rose. The young man presented his gifts to Stefa with such chivalrous formality that Adam started to giggle and I had to chase him out of the room.

As always, our building manager Professor Engal, rapped three times on our door at sundown to indicate the start of the Sabbath.

After our banquet of carp and kasha, Stefa dug a straw hat out of her wardrobe, tilted it at a jaunty angle on her son’s head, and whispered in his ear. He grimaced and squeezed out a hesitant No, but she replied For me, baby in a pleading tone, sat down at her piano and eased into the sugary opening bars of Maurice Chevalier’s ‘Valentine’.

Cowed by his mother’s insistent glare, Adam began to sing. Unfortunately, he was too nervous to find his true voice, which was unstudied but beautiful.

The boy loved music but was terrified of performing; he only felt comfortable revealing his inner life – and his gifts – to those he loved. Stefa sometimes forgot that he wasn’t a secret cabaret star like her.

I saw in my nephew’s eyes that he was barely treading water, so, after the first verse, I jumped up and shushed him with whirling hands. ‘Piskorz, it’s way past your bedtime,’ I told him, adding to our guests that we ought to call it a night.

Stefa, furious, looked back and forth between her wristwatch and me. Faking a laugh, she said, ‘But you can’t be serious – it’s only nine!’

‘The boy needs his sleep,’ I told her. ‘And in point of fact, so do I.’

Adam looked at me with a face compressed by fear, his straw hat in his hands.

Stefa jumped up, glaring. ‘If you don’t mind, Uncle Erik, I’ll make the rules in my own home! Especially when it comes to my son.’

‘Very well, make all the rules you want – but without me!’ I snapped back, and I took a first step towards the coat rack, intending to walk off my anger, but Adam burst into tears and bolted into his mother’s room.

I rushed to him, but when I caressed his cheek he turned away from me. I assured him that I didn’t want an angel for a nephew. ‘Especially since I’m an atheist, and I have no intention of going to heaven,’ I joked.

Pity an old man with little experience of children; my attempt at levity only made him cry harder. While I was apologizing to him, Stefa appeared in the doorway, her hands on her hips. ‘Now you’ve done it!’ she began. ‘As if the boy didn’t have–’

‘He shouldn’t have to sing for me or anyone else!’ I cut in. ‘You know he doesn’t like it.’ Hoping to ease the tension between us with a little humour, I added, ‘Besides, I think we can do without him singing chansons d’amour in Yiddish-accented French, at least till we get a bit more desperate for entertainment.’

‘All you do is bully him!’ Stefa yelled vengefully. ‘You scare him half to death!’

She was right, of course. ‘All that ends now,’ I told her, and I surprised myself by adding, ‘I’m through punishing him.’

Tears welled in my niece’s eyes.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been difficult, Katshkele,’ I told her, using the pet name everyone in the family had for her.

She nodded her acceptance of my apology, unable to speak. I took Adam in my arms and kissed his brow. Stefa eased the door closed on the way out.

Adam and I talked together in whispers, since it made our friendship more intimate. I dried his eyes and spoke to him of the journeys I’d take him on when we got out of the ghetto. New York was the city that crowned his dreams, and he stood on his toes when we talked of riding up to the top of the Empire State Building, showing me how he’d look out across the widest horizon in the world.

Lying with my arm around Adam that night, I saw that my father had been haunting my mind to remind me I was failing his great-grandson. And myself, of course.

CHAPTER 2

I’d come to the ghetto planning to read all of Freud one more time, and eager to write up several case studies, but within two months I’d given all that up. It was strangely easy. As if all I had to do was hop on a tram headed into the countryside instead of the city centre.

One minute, a man can think of nothing but leaving behind seminal works that will be read in London and Vienna for decades, the next he is waiting outside a soot-covered grammar school for his nephew, examining a ripped seam on one of his two pairs of trousers and wondering if he still knows how to use a needle and thread.

Now that Adam and I were friends again, he’d tell me about his day as we walked home from school. He’d start in a cautious monotone, testing my interest, but each of my questions would encourage him to pick up his rhythm, so that his account would soon be zooming downhill at top speed. Sometimes he’d launch himself across a bridge of thought where I didn’t know how to follow. His words would whizz past me like honeybees.

To have a buzzing little nephew telling me stories that I didn’t have to understand or interpret was to be in a state of grace.

Adam and I soon got into the habit of visiting Izzy after school and having lunch with him. My old friend had had his elegant clock shop in New Town closed by the Nazis and was repairing watches in a dank, dungeon-like workshop at the front of a stationery warehouse on Zamenhof Street. What Adam loved most about our afternoons there was watching Izzy perform lengthy surgery on a watch or clock. The boy would kneel on his chair and lean across the worktable, his chin propped on his fists, entranced by how his uncle-by-affection could tweezer even the most microscopic gears, cogs and springs into place. And bring what was dead to life.

In a way, Izzy became the wizard in the story of Adam’s life inside the ghetto. Just as Ziv was soon to become the awkward genius…

One Saturday evening in early November, the baker’s apprentice stopped by with an alabaster chessboard under his arm and challenged me to a game. As if he was a schoolboy unable to dress without his mother’s help, the tail of his white shirt was sticking out and one of his shoelaces was undone. His stiff ginger hair fell sloppily over his ears.

I thought I might have a chance against such an oddball, but within twenty minutes he had taken my queen, both bishops and a rook. Worse, the upstart had chosen his moves with lightning speed, making it nearly always my turn. A few minutes later, he had my king cornered.

When Adam asked how he could play so quickly, Ziv replied, ‘I’ve always been able to think many moves ahead – up to ten or twelve, of late.’

After that, my nephew began to look at the older boy with eager curiosity, and late that night, he trudged over to me from out of his sleep, while I was lighting my pipe at our window, and asked if I thought that Ziv was smarter than other people.

‘Maybe, though there are different ways of being smart,’ I told him.

‘Is that why he’s always quiet, and so… so strange?’

Sighing, I took his shoulder. ‘Wait till you’re seventeen, young man, and you’ll see it isn’t an easy age.’

While he was humiliating me at chess, Ziv had mentioned that Ewa’s paediatrician father had started giving medical check-ups to children in an inter-school chorus. An opportunity for Adam? The boy enjoyed singing as long as no spotlight was on him, and when I asked him the next morning if he’d permit me to talk to the music director, he eagerly agreed.

That afternoon, I found out his name – Rowan Klaus – and paid a call on him at his small office in Adam’s school. An earnest young man in his early twenties, he had olive skin and intelligent black eyes – handsome in a mysterious, Sephardic way.

Rowy – as he preferred to be called – told me he’d studied violin at the Vienna Conservatory until the Nazis added Austria to their bag of goodies. He wore a homemade splint on his right index finger, and when I asked him about it, he replied that he’d just returned from a labour camp where the Germans had forced him and twenty other Jewish men to dig ditches along the Vistula. ‘The goons knew I was a violinist, so when they decided I wasn’t digging fast enough, they held me down and broke it with a hammer.’

Now, he was terrified he’d fall victim to another labour round-up. ‘I pay regular bribes, but they don’t give out guarantees,’ he told me morosely.

Over the next half-hour, Rowy spoke of music as a noble pursuit, emphasizing his opinions with German slang and exuberant hand gestures. Adam would be charmed by him, so I signed the boy up for an immediate tryout, and later that afternoon he successfully warbled his way up and down his solfeggio exam.

He would still have to pass the medical check-up, however.

Dr Mikael Tengmann, Ewa’s father, was a cheerful, duck-footed Charlie Chaplin look-alike. In his fifties, the lucky physician still had a crest of wild black hair and a youthful glimmer in his deep brown eyes. He and Ewa lived above a broom-maker’s workshop on Wałowa Street, and they’d converted one of the bedrooms into his medical office and the dining area into a waiting room.

The next morning, he weighed Adam and jotted down his height, poked and prodded him in various sensitive places, and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. While he noted down Adam’s measurements, I studied the pictures of the Alps on his walls; the deep shadows and surges of sunlit stone made the mountains look like entwined torsos. All but one bore the physician’s signature; a small photograph of a white-glowing Matterhorn had been signed, ‘To Mikael from Rolf.’

When I asked about it, the doctor replied that he and a university friend had shared what he called ‘an interest in how and why we seek out the human form in nature’.

An answer that pleased me. And to my relief, Mikael soon concluded that Adam was healthy – though too skinny – with no sign of scabies, tuberculosis or any other disease he might spread to the other miniature Carusos. Before we left, he went to his kitchen and offered Adam a big jar of horseradish as a present, since the little traitor had told him that he’d eaten the last of our supply weeks earlier and that it was the bland food we forced on him that had sent his appetite packing. Electric with excitement, the boy grabbed the jar and hopped around the room like a kangaroo.

I decided it was time for my nephew to learn English as well, especially since Polish and German no longer seemed to have a future tense for Jews. We started with the lyrics of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ and it became the anthem he and I would sing every Sabbath. But they did fence us in, of course, and on Saturday, 16 November, we were sealed inside our Jewish prison. Our universe was reduced to little more than one square mile.

Right away, residents began hoarding flour, butter, rice and other essentials. I bought half a dozen black ribbons for my Mała typewriter just in case I got the urge to put some thoughts down on paper. Prices rose so high that Stefa would sneer at the absurdity of buying potatoes at 95 złoty a kilo or asparagus one stalk at a time for 1 złoty each. And the queues – wrapping around entire city blocks – were worthy of a biblical census day. To buy new shoes for Adam, I waited two and a half hours in one of those dismal Warsaw drizzles that always made my father promise to move us to the desert.

Over that first week, we all came out into the street as though shipwrecked, gazing at the perimeter of brick and barbed wire shutting us in as if someone had written us into a Kafka short story. We had become four hundred thousand outcasts corralled in our own city.

How is it possible? A question that makes no sense now that we know what we know, but at the time astonishment – and unspoken dread – widened nearly everyone’s eyes, even the old Hasidic rabbis, who were used to seeing strange and impossible visions descending upon them from out of the firmament of their prayers.

Thankfully, Christians could still come inside with authorization, and Jaśmin Makinska, a former patient of mine, brought us fresh fruit and vegetables – as well as delicacies like coffee and jam – a couple of times a week. She was in her early sixties and worked nearby, at an art gallery just off Market Square. She brushed her hair into an aristocratic crest of white and wore exuberantly feathered hats, which both awed and amused Adam.

Jaśmin visited us for the last time at the end of November. When I opened the door to her, she fell into my arms. Her cheeks and hair were streaked with mud, and her tweed coat was ripped at the collar. Her ostrich-feather hat was in her hand – and ruined.

‘My God, what’s happened?’ I asked, steering her to the sofa.

Jaśmin told us that German guards had discovered half a dozen bars of Stefa’s favourite lavender soap in her handbag and had confiscated them. When she’d protested, one of the Nazis grabbed her, threw her down and dragged her into the guardhouse. Adam wasn’t in the room, but the terror-stricken woman wouldn’t tell us exactly what had happened next.

I went to the kitchen for vodka and came back to find Stefa whispering to Jaśmin while cleaning her cheeks with a towel. When my niece looked up, her eyes were darkly hooded, and I realized then what should have been obvious: the German guard had raped her.

Without Jaśmin’s supplies, we would need a good deal of cash to bolster our rations of coarse black bread and potatoes, and I decided to look into the possibility of selling off some of the jewellery and silverware I’d brought with me into the ghetto. Through Jewish smugglers who ventured regularly into what we had begun to call Sitra Ahra – the Other Side – I was able to make enquiries at the antique shops and galleries along Nowy Świat in early December. Unfortunately, the owners – friends, I’d once believed – offered only a small fraction of what my treasures were worth. So I held on tight for the time being.

Shortly after that, Adam began foraging with the other members of his gang for chestnuts, dandelion leaves and nettles in the bombed-out lots and abandoned fields throughout the ghetto, turning their afternoons into urban safaris. He usually spent the tiny allowance I gave him on the molasses gloop that passed for candy in our ramshackle Never-Never-Land, though he managed to come home once with half a chocolate cake, earned, he beamed, by teaching a new friend in the chorus to ride a bicycle.

Adam rehearsed with Rowy and the other singers two afternoons a week. Just before Christmas, he also started taking chess lessons from Ziv in the young man’s room at the bakery.

The weather had turned bitter cold by then, and it became common to see shivering beggars and even stone-frozen corpses on the street. The German guards must have hated being so far from home throughout the winter, and they started beating Jews at random to keep themselves entertained. In consequence, Adam’s extensive wanderings left Stefa in a state of nervous exhaustion. She scolded him often, but he’d simply disappear with Wolfi, Feivel, Sarah and his other friends whenever we left him on his own. By this time, he and his playmates had demonstrated that they were able to avoid the Gestapo and the Jewish police far better than any adult, so after a while Stefa and I stopped worrying ourselves sick.

Still, I began to suspect that he and his friends might be up to no good – maybe even smuggling – when Adam came home late one afternoon smelling like manure.

‘Wolfi pushed me into a rubbish heap!’ he told me.

By then I’d heard of kids crawling through sewage tunnels to reach Christian territory and offered him a sceptical look.

‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘You know Wolfi is meshugene! And he’s getting worse!’

‘All right, I believe you,’ I told him, since Wolfi was indeed a handful. I took him by the hand. ‘Anyway, let’s get you clean before your mother comes home or we’ll have no peace tonight.’

Mail was still being delivered, though we had to pay weekly bribes to the postman, and a first letter from Liesel reached me in early January. The photograph she sent showed off what she called her ‘Mediterranean tan’. Her new friend Petrina had short needles of black hair and watery eyes. Her arm was draped over my daughter’s shoulder in a comradely manner, but I could see from the solemn way Liesel looked at her that she had fallen in love.

Liesel had posed that way to tell me what she didn’t dare write.

My daughter asked what we needed, so I scribbled a long list beginning with pipe tobacco for me, pepper for Adam and bitter chocolate for Stefa.

Keeping secrets between us seemed pointless now. ‘May you and Petrina enjoy a happy life together in the land of Homer,’ I ended my letter. ‘Inside this envelope is a kiss from your silly old father, who hopes you forgive him.’

For years, I had feared giving up my expectations for my daughter, but when I posted that letter I felt a lightness of spirit that left me giddy – as if I’d repaired what had been broken. When I later told Izzy about what I’d written to Liesel, he congratulated me – which I knew he would – and I surprised myself by confessing to him that I was only now becoming the father I’d always hoped to be.

That evening, after supper, my nephew and I went for a long happy walk. Our last.

Know this: Adam was a child born under the signs of both the sun and moon. When he was sad, his unhappiness swept over Stefa and me like a desolate wind, turning our spirits to dust. But when he was happy – dancing by himself to a tango on the Victrola, or stretching his little fingers across Bach arpeggios on his mother’s piano, or just sitting at my feet multiplying numbers – we were certain we would be able to outlast the Nazis.

CHAPTER 3

Adam carried Gloria home inside a shoebox during the third week of January of 1941, and the lesson I wish she hadn’t taught us was that even fairy-light creatures can tilt the balance of several lives.

On lifting the lid off his box, my nephew told his mother and me that the manager of the Roth’s Pet Shop had given him the budgerigar free of charge. As to the reason, all the boy had to do was point; Gloria’s left foot was a lumpy grey mass hanging by a thread – a textbook illustration of the ravages of cancer.

‘God in heaven,’ lamented Stefa as she stared at the poor creature, ‘what the hell are we going to do with a crippled budgie?’

Gloria limped into the far corner of the box, gamely trying to put some distance between herself and my niece. The bird was pale blue, with a bright yellow beak and slender black and white wings. She’d have been pretty, but her breast was gouged with raw-looking empty patches.

‘She can’t fly,’ Adam informed us glumly. ‘One of her wings doesn’t work. So I’ve adopted her.’

‘She’s going to leave droppings everywhere!’ Stefa declared, her hands on her hips.

‘She can’t leave anything if we don’t feed her,’ I joked.

The boy glared as if I was a traitor, then stuck out his tongue at me.

I stuck out my tongue back, then tried to pinch his ear, but he ducked away.

‘Adam, my darling,’ Stefa snapped, and her darling was a clue that he’d better run for cover, ‘this poor bird is undoubtedly crawling with lice and is going to spread disease, and I want you to get rid of it this minute and then scrub your hands!’

My niece had begun to rely on run-on sentences to outduel her son. Hoping to broker a truce, I said, ‘I’ll build her a cage.’

‘Oh, like you built those lopsided bookcases of yours!’ Stefa observed, pointing to my rickety constructions. She showed me that sneer of hers that was like a boot on your chest.

‘We’ll buy a cage,’ Adam interjected, and the little imp produced two złoty from his pocket with a cheeky smile.

‘Where’d you get those?’ his mother demanded, certain he’d become a criminal.

‘Gambling on horses!’ he shouted. His true wish, perhaps.

‘How really?’ I asked.

‘I do maths homework for Feivel, Wolfi and some of the other kids.’

A few days later, Gloria moved into a conical cage that Izzy made for us out of a wood base and wire spokes. He soldered a swastika to the finial, since provoking Stefa was the key to the vaudeville routine they’d developed over the years.

‘Izzy, that’s not funny at all!’ she told him, which made him grin in triumph.

‘What you don’t understand, Stefa my sweetheart,’ he told her, ‘is that madness and magic are inseparable. The swastika will prevent the Nazis from confiscating Gloria when they pass a law against Jewish pets.’

By then, Adam was in love. Gloria’s repertoire was limited to eating, chirping, defecating and tearing out her breast feathers in a neurotic frenzy, but my nephew would put her on his shoulder and carry her around as if she were the bewitched form of a princess. When Stefa wasn’t home, he’d even sit her on his head. Gloria seemed to enjoy riding on a bouncy perch made of blond hair and smelling of our last bar of lavender soap, but does anyone know what a budgie is really thinking in between meal times?

For Adam, joy had feathers. And after a while, I realized there was something affecting and encouraging about Gloria – maybe because her total, irremediable uselessness was proof that we could still afford at least one luxury.

Adam’s chorus gave its first concert on 28 January, at Weisman’s dancing school on Pańska Street. A water pipe had burst that morning, and despite some frantic mopping by the organizers, puddles were still scattered around the room.

In the audience were a few friends and acquaintances, including the renowned jazz pianist Noel Anbaum, and Ewa, whom Stefa – ever the matchmaker – had hooked up with Rowy after sizing up the young man at a chorus rehearsal. According to my niece, the two had already had three extremely successful dates, and the knowing look she gave me as she pronounced her assessment made it clear just how far they’d already journeyed together.

Soon, the lights flickered for the audience to take its seats. Eight girls and four boys filed up the stairs at the side to the stage, fidgeting and pushing, which made me fear a descent into musical hell. Under Rowy’s raised baton, however, the children’s faces grew serious, and they harmonized their Bach chorales like brothers and sisters. Closing my eyes, I felt as if I’d stopped hurtling through my own displacement for the first time in months; I was just where I wanted to be. I’d landed.

The first encore was Rowy’s own solemn arrangement of ‘El Male Rachamim’, which left the more religious among the audience in tears. The second was ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ – Adam’s suggestion.

As he took his bows, my nephew looked at me with such adult earnestness that I was overwhelmed with admiration. For the first time, I had the feeling he’d accomplish magnificent things in his life, and I knew then that protecting him was the most important job I could have been given for my time in the ghetto.

The next day, a blistering cold front swept over the city. Adam stumbled around stiff-armed inside two sweaters and his fur-lined coat – a full-fledged member of a corps of Jewish penguins marching through the ghetto to their secret schools. I purchased two stoves powered by sawdust; by now, coal had vanished – hoarded by the Germans. The new stoves proved criminally inefficient, however, and for several nights in a row the temperature in our apartment rose to only seven degrees.

By now, some insidious avian disease had turned Gloria’s left eye milky white, and Adam was sure that the cold front was at fault. He moped around whenever he thought of her being summoned to budgie heaven, and nothing we could do could cheer him up.

I started going to bed with a scarf wound around my head into a Thousand-and-One-Nights turban. The sheets were ice caves, so to warm them up for my nephew I’d lie on his side of the bed for fifteen minutes, then slide over and summon him under the covers. He’d rush into my arms with his teeth chattering. I held him close all night.

The seventeenth of February 1941, was a Monday. The morning was bitter cold – 14 degrees below zero. Stefa had a sore throat and fever, and she’d developed an acne-like rash on her chest. She finally agreed that Adam could stay home from school. Not that she would join us in taking the day off. She drank down some aspirin and, despite my threats to tie her to her bed, pushed past me to work.

I bundled Adam under a mountain of blankets and, on his insistence, moved Gloria’s cage closer to the heater at the foot of our bed. After the cabbage soup I made for lunch, which he and I ate with our gloves on, Adam put on the Indian headdress his mother had made for him out of chicken feathers and announced he was going out.

‘The hell you are!’ I countered.

‘But I’m bored!’

‘With only a crippled budgie and a whining nine-year-old as company, you think I’m not?’

He gave me his devil’s squint.

‘Nice try, Winnetou,’ I told him, using his Indian name, ‘but the Cohen evil eye doesn’t work on other members of the tribe. Go read.’

‘I’m sick of reading!’ Tears of blackmail appeared in his eyes.

‘Look, Adam,’ I said more gently, ‘when we manage to find some coal, you can go out again.’ Enticingly, I added, ‘I’ll start teaching you algebra today, if you want.’

‘Algebra is for stupid people!’

‘Then go feed Gloria. She looked hungry last time I looked. And I’m sure she’s even more bored than you.’

In point of fact, Gloria looked like she needed a hot bath followed by a couple of shots of Scotch whisky, but then so did nearly everyone I knew.

He sneered at me and started away, so I grabbed him. When he squirmed free, rage surged through me like molten metal and I smacked him on the bottom, harder than I’d intended, knocking him into the cabinets. His headdress tumbled off and lost a feather in front. We looked at each other, stunned, as if a meteor had fallen between us. I slumped down to the floor. My tears frightened him. He wriggled his way on to my lap and told me he was sorry. I whispered that he wasn’t responsible, then picked up his headdress. I told him he could go out and play if he dressed as warmly as possible. When he fetched his woollen hat and asked me to put it on him, I made him promise not to leave our street even if Martians landed on the Great Synagogue and asked by name to meet up with him to negotiate a peace treaty.

After I realized that the sun had set, I put down my book and looked at my watch: 4.27 exactly. I’ll never forget that time.

Adam had been gone more than two hours. I left a note for Stefa on her bed saying I was out looking for him and tacked another note to the front door, telling Adam to fetch the spare key from Ewa at the bakery if he got home before me.

Adam wasn’t on our street, and I couldn’t find him in any of the weedy lots he usually played in, so I went to Wolfi’s parents’ apartment, but my knocks went unanswered. I managed to locate Feivel and two of Adam’s other friends, but they hadn’t seen him. The local shopkeepers all shook their heads at me.

On the way home, I pictured how I’d find Adam warming his hands by our heater, with Gloria crowning his head. I’d tell him I’d never let him out of my sight again, which was the moral to this story as far as I was concerned.

But the apartment was empty. To calm myself, I took the last of my supply of Veronal. I’d have kept trying Wolfi’s parents, but the Nazis had turned off our telephones by then.

When Stefa arrived, she was furious with me for letting her son leave the apartment. Despite her fever and my pleading, she marched out to find him.

Adam’s clothes were always strewn about our room, so I gathered them up. As I was folding his pyjamas, I held the flannel top over my face and breathed in the lavender scent of him. The panic that gripped me was like drowning.

I put his clothes away in his chest of drawers, then made onion soup for supper. When the meal was prepared and the table set, I sat with his sketchbook and traced my fingers over his drawings of Gloria till my fingertips were smudged blue and yellow.

In one of his sketches, he’d drawn Gloria with a long brown pipe in her beak and a scruffy grey tuft of feathers on her head. I stared at the page, trying in vain to dispel the nightmares my mind was scripting: Adam beaten by a Nazi guard, run down by a horse-cart…

Stefa came home alone shortly after midnight. Her eyes were ringed by pouches of worry. ‘He’s vanished,’ she told me, dropping down next to me on my bed. Panic hovered around her like a cold mist.

I rubbed warmth into her hands. ‘Listen, Katshkele, did you speak to Wolfi?’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t know anything.’

‘Adam probably snuck out to Christian Warsaw and couldn’t make it back tonight.’

‘Has he been smuggling?’

‘I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that many kids his age are. He probably lost track of the time, and it gets dark so early now. He must be in hiding till morning. You’ll see, he’ll turn up here first thing tomorrow. He’s smart – and resourceful.’

I’d practised that little speech until I believed it. And by promising to go out again and look for Adam, I was able to get Stefa to eat some hot soup.

A man clomps through empty streets as if through his own childhood fears, searching across curtained windows and mounds of snow for a way to travel back in time. Take me instead. The words whispered by all the parents of missing children. And even by granduncles, I was learning.

A Jewish policeman whose breath smelled of mints stopped me on Nalewki Street. When I explained why I was breaking the curfew, he said matter-of-factly, ‘Kids go missing every day. Just go home and wait till morning.’

‘I can’t,’ I told him.

He told me that I’d be arrested by the German guards if they spotted me. I walked away from him before he could finish his warning.

I thought it was just possible that Wolfi had lied to Stefa to protect Adam, so I headed to his apartment again. A stinking smell was now coming from the courtyard, and I traced it to a pushcart stored there for the night that must have been loaded with rotting fish during the day. Two bony, desperate-looking cats were tied to one of the wheels, and they stared up at me suspiciously from what looked like a mush of entrails and rice. One of them hissed. I guessed that they were there to keep away rats.

Wolfi’s father answered my knocks in his bare feet and pyjamas, but wearing a woollen coat. Mr Loos was a carpenter from Minsk with coarse, powerful hands, each finger as thick as a cigar. When I told him Adam was missing, he embraced me. For just an instant I went limp in his arms, as if I were a child myself.

After stealing into Wolfi’s bedroom, he carried the boy out to me still asleep, setting him down gently in an armchair of faded brocade. Mrs Loos kissed him awake. The boy gazed up at me with drowsy, blinking eyes. I kneeled to be less threatening.

‘Adam’s gone missing,’ I told him softly. ‘So even if he made you promise not to say a word to anyone, you have to tell me if you saw him yesterday.’

‘Just… just for a minute,’ he stammered. ‘Outside your apartment house.’

‘Thank God. What time?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe one-thirty or two.’

Mr Loos brought me a chair. I sat down and leaned towards the boy. ‘What did he tell you, Wolfi?’

‘That he was going to buy some coal. And not… not to let you or his mother know.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘That Gloria was freezing to death.’

I hung my head; I should have known that Adam would act recklessly to save her. ‘Do you know where he was going to buy the coal?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘Listen, son, I’m not angry. But you must tell me if you have any idea where he might have gone.’

‘Just one.’

CHAPTER 4

Wolfi explained to me that the apartment house at 1 Leszno Street shared a cellar with a building on Rymarska Street, in Christian Warsaw. Passage across the clandestine border cost five złoty, payable to a guard. Poles carrying goods into the ghetto put on the Jewish armbands with the Star of David that we were forced to wear. Jews heading the other way removed theirs.

Adam had crossed the cellar only once that Wolfi knew about. He’d been paid ten złoty to smuggle out an ermine jacket and bring back a mahogany jewellery box from an antique dealer living near the university. He’d told Wolfi that he had been chosen because of his blond, Aryan looks, which made him less likely to be arrested. That had been about a month before. Wolfi didn’t know who’d hired Adam or the identity of the dealer. But he added that my nephew had been given half a chocolate cake as a reward for executing his mission so quickly.

It had begun to snow – big soft flakes falling atop the wild panic throbbing inside my head. At 1 Leszno Street, I rapped at the front door until the light went on in the caretaker’s apartment.

‘Stop that goddamned banging!’ he hissed.

He opened the front door a crack. ‘What’s the problem, old man?’ he demanded. A blanket was drawn across his shoulders and he carried a candle in his fist. As he moved the flame towards me, to better see my face, his shadow seemed to fold around us.

I recognized him: Abramek Piotrowicz, the attorney; his daughter Halina had been a high-school friend of Liesel’s.

‘It’s me, Erik Cohen,’ I told him.

‘Erik? My God, I wouldn’t have recognized you! But you look pretty good,’ he rushed to add, so as not to offend me.

When we shook hands, Abram tugged me inside and said, ‘Get out of that damn wind!’ He shut the door and scoffed. ‘This weather… I’m going to Palestine as soon as we get out. And I’m never coming back!’

I explained the reason for my visit and described Adam, but Abram told me he hadn’t seen any boy fitting his description.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to question the guard who was on duty yesterday afternoon.’

‘His name is Grylek Baer,’ Abram replied, adding that he’d be back only at 1 p.m. ‘But I’ll get word to him at dawn. Leave it to me. Let’s speak in the morning.’

I found Stefa still up when I returned home, seated in the kitchen over half a bowl of cold soup. It was 1.40 a.m.

Two condemned prisoners wait for sunrise. The man slumps into his chair by the window, where he can watch a dark street emptied of life. Later, when the sky clears, he steals glances up at a dome of stars that seems too distant to provide any orientation to him or anyone else.

Our exile will never end he thinks. He lets his pipe go out and his feet grow numb.

The woman sits on her bed, one hand on a homemade birdcage she hates, staring into the milky eye of all she has ever feared.

At dawn, Stefa disregarded my pleading and headed for Leszno Street. I waited at home in case Adam made it back to us. Just before eight, three sharp knocks on the front door made me drop the book I’d forgotten I was holding.

Two men stood on the landing, the shorter one in the black uniform and cap of Pinkiert’s, the ghetto funeral service. The other, tall and distinguished-looking, held his hat in his hands.

‘My nephew… have you found him?’ I asked in a rush. Inside my voice was our future – Adam’s and mine.

‘Are you Dr Erik Cohen?’ the Pinkiert’s man questioned.

‘Yes.’

‘We found your nephew’s body at dawn. I’m sorry.’

I don’t remember anything else from our conversation. Maybe it was as we walked down the stairs to the street that the men told me how Adam had been identified by a secretary in the Jewish Council who was an acquaintance of Stefa’s. Or maybe they told me that only later. My next memory is of standing outside our apartment house. The Pinkiert’s cart – wooden, drawn by a brown mare – was shrouded in shadow. The undertaker – a slender man with a pinched face – spoke to me in a kind voice about catching a chill and did up the buttons on my coat. But I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel anything but the sense that I’d been tugged far out to sea and would make it all the way back to land.

A single trauma can cripple a person for ever, and when I saw Adam lying in the back of the cart, I knew my life was over.

A coarse blanket covered his body but left his face exposed. It was turned to the side, as if he’d heard someone call out from the left just before death. His eyes were closed and his hair was mussed. His skin was pasty and yellowish.

Was it then that the Pinkiert’s man told me how he had been found?

I climbed into the cart and kneeled by my nephew. The dark gravity of all that had gone wrong drew my lips to his. The stiff chill of our kiss made me shudder.

I took out my handkerchief and started wiping the grime off his face. I whispered, You’re home now, as if he could hear me – and as if that news would comfort him.

Whatever made Adam Adam is gone, I thought.

Six small words, but they couldn’t fit inside my head. They spilled out of me inside a hopelessness so deep and wide that it might have been everything I’d ever felt or thought.

As my craving for him to wake up dripped down my cheeks, I apologized to him. I didn’t want him to think he’d done anything wrong; a child shouldn’t meet death with guilt in his heart.

I intended to embrace the boy and carry him upstairs, but when I lifted his blanket away, I gasped; he was naked, and his right leg had been cut off from the knee down.

CHAPTER 5

The universe was turning around Adam’s missing leg, and I was freefalling through a life that seemed impossible. Do you know what it’s like to see a mutilated nine-year-old? You realize that anything can happen: the sun may blacken and die before your eyes; a crack may open in the earth and swallow the street… Each heartbeat seems proof that all you see and feel is too improbable to be anything but a dream.

A mad revelation: Adam’s death and the fate of the Jews were linked. I stitched that conclusion together out of my panic, wondering how many months were left to us.

I looked frantically around the cart for what had been cut from Adam, as if my heart were on fire. ‘What have you done to my nephew?’ I demanded of the undertaker.

Talking to you, Heniek, helps me recall details I’d long forgotten. I see now how the tall man who’d knocked on our door stepped in front of the undertaker to answer my question. In his white scarf and black trilby, he looked like the ghetto’s answer to Al Capone. He introduced himself as Benjamin Schrei and he told me he was a representative of the Jewish Council. ‘Why don’t we go up to your apartment, where we can talk calmly,’ he suggested.

‘Calmly?’ I bellowed. ‘Do you really think I can talk calmly at a moment like this?’

I tugged my arm from his grasp. He showed me a hard look, as though he’d already concluded I was going to be difficult. Leaning close to me, he whispered, ‘The Jewish police found Adam in the barbed wire by the Chłodna Street crossing. The Germans must have discarded him there in the night. We cut him free. We need to talk.’

I assumed the police had been unable to extract Adam from the greedy metal coils without cutting off his leg. Of course, snipping the barbed wire would have been easier and quicker, but any Jew who attempted that would have been executed by the Nazis for tampering with our border.

Maybe I flinched on picturing what had happened, because Schrei’s face softened and he said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk of such matters.’

Was his sympathy genuine? In those first few hours after Adam’s death, everyone seemed to be reading lines in a play.

‘Give me five minutes and then I’ll talk with you,’ I told him.

Heniek, could you have left Adam lying next to you without touching what had been done to him? You look away, as though to say I’ve no right to ask you, but all I mean to say is that I had to know the shape and scope of what had happened.

I reached slowly under the blanket. His skin was hard, like rawhide, and when a sharp edge jabbed into my palm – bone – I jerked my hand back. Sickness lodged in my gut, then rose into my chest, and I leaned over the side of the cart. Afterwards, I drank water out of a tin cup handed up to me by a neighbour.

Looking around at familiar faces in the gathering crowd, I wanted to vanish, but I also wanted to stay in the cart for ever, so that I wouldn’t have to rejoin my life.

Each passing day would now lead me further away from my nephew. I didn’t think I’d survive the growing distance between us.

I’ll never measure Adam’s height again.

So many nevers came to me that first day, but I remember that one most of all.

Adam’s right arm was scratched from the sharp metal and twisted at nearly a right angle, the way it must have dangled when he was discarded. His left knee and foot were bent to the outside. His hands had formed fists, but when I tried to uncurl one of them, I heard a crack and stopped tugging.

He must have fought back. I imagined him punching and kicking, and shouting my name.

The death of a child is a single event, but the memory of it expands to cover a lifetime. Nothing I’d ever done – not even as a young man – was free of his loss: not my schooldays with Izzy, not my marriage, not Liesel’s birth.

Ewa appeared out of nowhere. Later, she told me she rushed out to the street when she heard a shriek, but I don’t remember any shouting. Nearly everyone on our block had known Adam since he was a baby; one of them must have let out a cry on seeing him.

Ewa began to wail. Women neighbours rushed to her. I must have entered their group at some point or summoned her to me. I must have asked her to find Stefa and told her where she had gone, but I don’t recall any of that.

Had I thought of our exile into the ghetto as a dream and interpreted it correctly, I’d have lived more cautiously, since I’d have known they moved us on to an island to make it easier to steal our future – and to keep the rest of the world from knowing. I ought to have been among the first to understand!

And I should have guessed that Adam would race across all the forbidden bridges in the world to save Gloria.

I will have to warn Stefa not to lift his blanket or she will be as damned as I am.

When I saw my niece running towards me, I put my hand atop Adam’s head, because his hair was the only part of him that was still soft, and I was terrified I’d forget its silken feel, and I knew I’d have to give up possession of him to his mother now.

Stefa crept forward, hugging her arms around her chest. She looked at her son and then at me with a puzzled expression, as though asking me to explain a great mystery. She didn’t cry. She was enveloped by a dark spell of silence. Her nose was running and her eyes were red. She was panting.

Ewa helped her up into the cart. Stefa kissed my brow and squeezed my hand. It was unlike her to express her affection so openly, but I didn’t think of that till later.

Taking off her mittens, my niece brought Adam’s hand to her cheek, then put it over her mouth and pressed her lips to his palm. She stepped his fingertips over her closed eyelids, and that’s when her first tears came, along with a choking sound.

‘Stefa…’ I began, but my niece’s moans covered my words.

When she embraced Adam, his blanket slid down to his waist. I had to tell her now not to look any lower, but my voice had been swallowed by the terrible strangeness of this moment – the sense that the entire future of the earth and heaven was turning around what was taking place here.

Stefa rocked Adam back and forth as if he were a baby. When she reached down to lift the blanket over his chest again, she saw what had been cut from him and began to howl. The sound was like an animal having its womb cut out.

CHAPTER 6

I’d put Stefa’s woollen hat back on her head, but she was still shivering as though she’d fallen through the ice of a winter lake. She agreed to talk with Mr Schrei, the Jewish Council’s representative, on the condition that her son remain covered and guarded until we’d agreed on funeral plans. Ewa helped me prop up my niece as we trudged upstairs. On our landing, she began coughing as if her lungs were packed with grit.

Behind our closed door, I sat my niece on the bed and smoothed a shawl over her legs, then brought her a cup of the coffee I’d made earlier, lacing it with a little vodka, but she kept her hands knitted together and refused to touch her drink. She bent her head over her lap like an old widow curled around her loneliness, protecting herself from a world where she no longer had a home.

I think she had already vowed that her thoughts would never leave her son again – and was on strike against a world where a child could be murdered.

I took Adam’s Indian headdress off our faded leather armchair – I’d been planning to sew on the fallen feather – and invited Mr Schrei, who’d been standing by the door, to sit. Ewa brought him coffee. Taking a first sip, he leaned back with a long sigh, hoping, I think, to convince us of his exhaustion, which irritated me until I realized how awkward this must have been for him. I sat up as straight as I could to fight the urge to hide, and I tried to fill my pipe, but my hands proved too clumsy. Ewa leaned back against the windowsill, watching Stefa with motherly concern. She kept the loop of her amber beads in her mouth. When our eyes met, she shook her head as if to say, I’ll never believe it.

Mr Schrei told us that Adam must have been grabbed by the Nazis outside the ghetto and executed. ‘They tossed him into the barbed wire because they intended for us to find him,’ he said authoritatively. ‘I expect his death was a message.’

‘A message about what?’ I asked.

He leaned forward, his hands propped on his knees. ‘As a reminder of what’s in store for kids caught smuggling – a deterrent, if you will. The Germans have recently begun exercising pressure on the council to curtail illegal commerce. I believe that’s why they… why they cut off Adam’s leg – to frighten us into passive acceptance of our fate.’

‘But I thought that was the only way the Jewish policemen could free Adam from the barbed wire.’

‘I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. In point of fact, Adam was found that way.’

I looked at Stefa. Her lips and eyes were shut tight, and she was swaying gently from side to side, as if imagining Adam in her arms. I wanted to be alone with her, and for night to fall quickly. In the darkness, floating free of all our previous expectations, my niece and I just might find a way to talk to each other that could be meaningful. Maybe she, at least, could find a way forward.

Ewa’s hesitant voice broke the silence. ‘Mr Schrei, how… how did the Germans execute him?’

‘I’m not certain,’ he replied. ‘There are no other injuries that our doctor could see.’

‘We’ll have to find out,’ I told him.

‘Why?’ Stefa asked, opening her eyes.

‘I think we ought to know what the Germans did to him,’ I told her.

‘It makes no difference now,’ she observed. Gazing down, she added, ‘I don’t want anyone but me to touch Adam.’

I knelt by her. ‘No one will touch him,’ I assured her, but I already knew I was lying, and I silently asked for her forgiveness.

My niece pressed her hand to my cheek by way of thanks, then took off her muffler and placed it neatly on the bed behind her. Her gestures – overly precise – gave me gooseflesh.

Perspiration had glued her hair to her neck. I reached up to remove her hat, but she stilled my hand. ‘No! I have to keep my thoughts inside!’ she said sharply. Anxious to flee from my intrusion, she got to her feet and took a deep breath. I stood up beside her but didn’t dare touch her. ‘I need to boil some water,’ she said. With a quick look at Ewa, then at Mr Schrei, she added, ‘Please excuse me.’

After a first step, her eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled. I caught her, and Ewa helped me lay her on the bed.

I pressed a cold compress to Stefa’s brow and called her name softly. As she came round, Mr Schrei fetched a glass of water, and Ewa held it to her lips. My niece drank in tiny sips, gazing around the room, surprised to find herself at home.

Ewa helped her sit up. ‘Come, I’ll put you to bed now,’ she said.

‘No, please,’ Stefa pleaded, her brow ribbed with worry. ‘Take me to the kitchen.’

‘She needs air,’ I observed. ‘Sit by the window, Stefa. I’ll open it a crack. You need to sit quietly for a few minutes.’

‘No, I need two towels – one small, one large. Uncle Erik, bring them to me from my wardrobe… the bottom shelf.’ She pointed to her room.

I understood what she intended, but Ewa must have showed her a puzzled look; Stefa took her hand and whispered, ‘I need to wash my son and make him ready for… for…’

She stopped there, unable to say the word burial.

While Ewa led my niece into the kitchen, Mr Schrei stood up. Stepping to the mirror by my desk, he put on his hat and tilted it at a stylish angle. I could see he was proud of being handsome, and I imagined it would be difficult for him to grow old. Like me, in other words, though I’d been vain without the benefit of good looks. Turning to me, he said, ‘Please accept my condolences and those of the council.’ At the door, he added, ‘Just one more thing. We would be most appreciative if you were to refrain from speaking to anyone about your nephew’s missing leg. It could create problems. Please tell your niece and the other woman. I’m sorry, I don’t know her name.’

‘Ewa. What kind of problems?’ I started filling the bowl of my pipe again; I was desperate to smoke.

‘You know how superstitious some of the rural Jews are, about burying a body that’s incomplete… forced to walk the earth as disembodied spirits and all that rubbish.’ He rolled his eyes at the very notion. ‘Spreading news of what’s happened could cause panic. And since this is an isolated case, it’s best if we just… well, I think you know what I mean.’

‘No, actually I don’t,’ I told him.

‘A little discretion will go a long way in keeping things under control,’ he observed.

When he shook my hand to take his leave, I snarled, ‘Do you really believe that keeping things under control is of any importance to me now?’

Outside, the undertaker, whose name was Schmul, told me that I would need to go to Pinkiert’s headquarters to pre-pay the funeral. And that he really ought to get going. I gave him five złoty to have him stay with us until Stefa had had a chance to wash her son. He helped me carry Adam into the courtyard. Then I took a couple of swigs from the vodka bottle I’d carried downstairs, put on my reading glasses, kneeled beside my nephew and adjusted the blanket so that it concealed only his face. You see, Heniek, I had only one purpose left.

CHAPTER 7

Adam was badly scratched from the barbed wire, particularly on his belly and chest, which was where he must have been gripped by the coils. But none of the scratches were bloody, which seemed to indicate that he’d been dead for an hour or so – with his veins and arteries dry – before being discarded.

I was unable to find any bullet hole or puncture wound, but button-sized, reddish-brown bruises marked the skin over his ribs, all of them between the sleek rise of his right hip and his sternum: a handprint.

I conjectured that the largest corresponded to where a thumb had pressed down, and I tried to match my fingertips to the marks but couldn’t quite spread my hand far enough. Whoever had severed Adam’s leg had been almost certainly a man, and probably larger than I was.

The killer – or his accomplice – must have used his left hand for leverage while he sawed with his right. To have made such deep bruises, he’d have to have pressed down hard on the boy’s chest.

When I imitated what I imagined he’d done, a small shift inside Adam, like a latch opening, made my heart tumble. Leaning down and pressing again, I heard a click – a rib was broken.

I closed my eyes to keep from being sick again. I realized that whoever took Adam’s leg must have leaned over the boy hard enough to crack bone. Why the need to apply so much force? Perhaps his saw had been dulled by age or overuse, and he’d required leverage to cut through bone. Or maybe he had worked in feverish haste and had been careless – either because he risked being spotted or disliked what he was doing.

Had a Nazi ordered a Polish Christian or even a Jew to mutilate Adam?

Anguished by the sweaty confinement of my clothing, I wriggled out of my coat and threw down my hat. Knowing what I had to do next, I gulped down the rest of my vodka.

Peeling the blanket off Adam’s face, I discovered a tiny cut on his bottom lip. A scrape from the barbed wire? With the tip of my finger, I touched it, then gently prised his lips apart. The end of a white string was caught between his teeth. Holding my breath, I pulled at it but it wouldn’t budge.

I couldn’t risk breaking his jaw or scarring his lips. I covered Adam’s face and asked Schmul how long it would take for the boy’s body to become malleable again.

‘Up to three days,’ he replied.

Stefa was more religious than I was and would never wait that long to bury Adam, which created a dilemma. ‘I need for you to get a message to a friend right away,’ I told the undertaker, handing him all the złoty I had left in my pocket, which he refused, saying I’d given him enough. I told him where to find Izzy and what to say to him.

Stefa might appear at any moment, so as Schmul headed off, I turned my attention back to Adam. I could find no bloodstains on his belly, chest, or behind, which was another indication that whoever disfigured him had let the boy’s blood coagulate before starting his work. Yet the murderer or his assistant hadn’t waited very long, for if he had, the capillaries on Adam’s chest wouldn’t have released any blood at all on being pressed and no bruises would have been visible.

Of course, it was possible that Adam had been mutilated right after being killed and had bled profusely but had been carefully washed afterwards. Yet it seemed unlikely that anyone would spend so much time cleaning a Jewish boy soon to be discarded.

A right-handed man – larger than me – who worked as fast as possible because he disliked what he had been made to do or feared being caught.

By now, the vodka was starting to turn my thoughts to mist, so I eased my head back on to the flagstones. And amidst the ceaseless flow of clouds, I saw that Adam’s murder had taken away my terror of death; nothing worse could ever happen to me.

Izzy and Schmul helped me up when they arrived.

‘Any sign of Stefa?’ I asked.

‘None,’ Izzy replied. ‘You want me to check on her?’

‘No, don’t go. If she hasn’t come down yet, it’s because Ewa managed to convince her to try to get some sleep.’

When I told Izzy what I wanted him to do, he shook his head and held up a hand between us like a shield. ‘I’m sorry, Erik, I can’t – it’s impossible.’

‘Please, look at what they’ve done to Adam. We need to find out what happened.’

After I pulled the blanket off the boy, Izzy reached behind him for the stability of a wall that wasn’t there and nearly tumbled over. We looked at each other across fifty years of friendship; two old men realizing there were no words in any language to describe a loss – and crime – like this.

I held him while he cried. The way he shook pushed me deeply into the past.

He brought me into the present again by standing back from me and wiping his eyes. ‘Erik, I don’t think I can touch him,’ he told me.

‘Please, Izzy, it has to be someone who loved him. I can’t let anyone else do this.’

He lifted his hands to explain himself, then lowered them, hopeless.

‘No one else will be as careful as you,’ I told him. ‘I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone.’

Sitting on the ground, he took a tiny pair of tweezers from the small leather case he’d brought with him, then turned to me. ‘For pity’s sake, Erik, don’t watch me.’

Schmul and I waited in the hallway of Stefa’s building. Izzy soon came to us with a two-inch length of white string pinched in his fingers. It bore no traces of blood.

‘Any idea where it’s from?’ he asked, dropping it into my palm.

‘None.’

‘How do you suppose it ended up in Adam’s mouth?’

‘Maybe whoever killed him put it there to tell us something about himself,’ I theorized. ‘A kind of calling card.’

‘You think a Nazi is challenging us to find him?’

‘Maybe. Though it’s just possible that Adam managed to secretly put the string in his mouth – knowing it could somehow identify who did this. He was a smart boy.’

Schmul had overheard us. ‘But Dr Cohen,’ he said, ‘what about his leg? What does that mean?’

‘That? That means whoever did this is not like you or me,’ I replied, ‘or anyone we’ve ever met.’

Stefa and Ewa came to the courtyard a few minutes later, carrying towels, soap and a bucket of hot water. My niece’s eyes were so red that they might have been bleeding.

‘I’ll go to Pinkiert’s and organize everything,’ I assured her. ‘But first tell me if you were able to find out anything at 1 Leszno Street.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.

‘At the place where Adam may have crossed over. Had anyone seen him?’

‘No.’

I left for Pinkiert’s headquarters, which were next to the Jewish Council building on Grzybowska Street, and scheduled a funeral for the next morning at 11 a.m. At 1 Leszno Street, Abram Piotrowicz invited me into his apartment and repeated to me what he’d told Stefa at dawn: the guard, Grylek Baer, hadn’t seen Adam the day before.

‘Then I’ll need a list of secret border crossings,’ I told Abram.

‘Grylek will help. I’ll have someone bring the list to you this afternoon.’

‘And ask him if he knows who hired Adam to smuggle out an ermine jacket.’

I managed to speak to all of Adam’s neighbourhood friends that afternoon. Wolfi swore that he knew of only the Leszno Street crossing, but Sarah, Felicia and Feivel were able to give me the locations of four other places where my nephew might have snuck out. The little mop-haired boy wrung his hands like an adult when we spoke, and through his tears of misery, he bravely confessed that Adam had twice accompanied him ‘overseas’, which made me realize that my nephew had led a double life. Speaking to me with his stunned mother standing behind him, Feivel explained that they’d wanted to steal food, but their nerve abandoned them at the last minute and all they managed to get were handouts of bread and jam from shopkeepers. I kissed the top of his head to reassure him that I wasn’t angry. Still, the mind can be cruel; I wished that he’d died instead of my nephew.

I showed a photograph of Adam to the guard on Krochmalna Street where he and Feivel had passed through to the Other Side, and though he remembered my nephew, he hadn’t seen him in weeks. At the other crossings, no one recognized the boy. I received only one lead: at the last place I tried, the cellar of a dingy restaurant, a tough-looking teenaged smuggler named Marcel suggested I make enquiries at a warehouse on Ogrodowa Street where a tunnel leading to the sewer system had been dug. ‘The passageway is so cramped that only kids can squeeze through,’ he noted. ‘Try to speak to the owner, Sándor Góra.’

I remembered the time Adam came home stinking and thought I now knew why.

As I neared my destination, four youths standing on the roof of an apartment house on the Christian side of the ghetto wall began calling me names and throwing stones at me. Only a moment after I started to run, I took a blow on my shoulder that brought me down to one knee.

The hooligans shouted – laughing – that I made too easy a target. Luckily, nothing seemed to be broken, and my anger gave me strength. Getting to my feet, I rushed on with my coat shielding my head until a woman coming the other way was hit. Shrieking, she toppled sideways, crashing on the pavement.

‘Die, Jew-bitch!’ one of the louts yelled at her in Polish.

Kneeling, I took out my handkerchief and staunched the blood spilling from a deep gash below her ear. A fist-sized chunk of cement lay beside her. She was dazed from the impact. Getting her breath, moaning, she said, ‘I think my collar bone is broken.’

Polish meteorites continued crashing around us. I held my coat over the woman’s face. ‘Can you stand?’ I asked, wanting to lead her closer to the wall, where we couldn’t be hit.

‘No.’

‘I’ll get you to a doctor,’ I assured her, and to test her mind, I asked her what year it was.

‘I should care about the date with my bones broken by Goyim?’ she shot back.

I grinned at her outrage. So did she, then she groaned and bit her lip from the pain.

A tall young man appeared beside me from out of nowhere. Cradling the woman in his arms, he lumbered off. We found safety in an optometrist’s waiting room.

A half-hour later, after the hoodlums had grown tired of target practice, I got on my way, and I soon reached Góra’s office. He was a paunchy man in too tight a suit, with a polka-dot tie and a pink carnation in his lapel. He made his living these days managing an import-export business, he told me with a big noisy laugh. I thought he looked like a circus barker. He reeked of musky-scented cologne.

After I explained my purpose, I handed him my photograph of Adam. As he studied it, he picked his front teeth with the mandarin fingernail on his little finger. Handing the picture back to me, he said, ‘Sorry, never seen him. But there are other tunnels leading into the sewer system. He must have gone through one of them.’ Anticipating my next question, he added, ‘No, I don’t know where any of them are.’

Back at home, I found a stout, pale-skinned young man standing beside the armchair in my room, a hostile look in his small dark eyes. His hands were locked behind his back, and the smoke from his hidden cigarette was ribboning up into the harsh yellow light of the ceiling lamp, where moths had piled up in the cup of glass below the bulb. His camel-hair overcoat was threadbare and the collar of his white shirt was stained. His thick brown hair was chopped short – it looked like porcupine needles. He was good-looking in a hard, Slavic way.

‘You must be Dr Cohen,’ he began, speaking Polish.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m Grylek Baer.’ He spoke gruffly, as if I’d offended him.

‘Ah, so you’re the guard at Leszno Street,’ I said, compensating for my apprehension with a welcoming tone, hanging my coat on its hook.

‘That’s right.’

‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

‘Your niece opened the door. She went to bed a little while ago.’

When we shook hands, he gripped mine hard, as though to prove his greater strength. His fingers were heavily callused. I’d have guessed he was twenty, but the sureness of his stance made me believe he might be a good deal older.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I told him.

Grylek’s jaw throbbed and he took a greedy puff of his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the clay ashtray that Adam had made for me and that I kept on the tea table next to my armchair. He took his time, as though considering what he needed to tell me.

More and more I divided the Jews of Warsaw into two categories – those who’d outlast the Nazis and those who’d join Adam. In my mind, Grylek elbowed and shoved his way right to the front of the first group.

‘Were you able to put together a list of border crossings for me?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but before I give it to you, I have to explain how it works.’ He looked at me as though I’d made trouble for him before. ‘You’ll have to be patient, because there are some things you need to know before I can give you what you want.’

‘What things?’

He took off his coat, folded it neatly and placed it on the chair. His shoulders were broad and powerful, as though he’d been a boxer before our exile, and he seemed a man who enjoyed making others wait. He opened and closed his right fist as though testing his own capacities. He wants to let me know he’s capable of violence, I thought.

‘You’re not to mention my name to anyone,’ he began, his tone of warning obvious. ‘And you are not to tell anyone in the Jewish Council about me. Or let on to anyone, in any way, that I was here. I can’t take chances. And if you ever mention who gave you the list that I’m going to give you, I’ll come back for you. Are we clear?’

‘But surely the Jewish leadership all know about what you do,’ I replied.

‘Maybe yes, maybe no. For the time being, they leave me alone. But if they hear too much about my activities, especially from a man like you, they’ll make my life hell.’

‘Like me how?’

‘Spare me the false modesty,’ he replied, annoyance coarsening his voice. ‘You used to be important and you know it. So are we clear or not?’

‘I’d never inform on you,’ I told him, offended.

‘Maybe not on purpose, but Marcel, the young smuggler you met… he told me you’d mentioned me by name. You can’t do that. So, do I have your word?’ He looked at me coldly. I had the feeling he demanded absolute loyalty from those around him.

‘I promise I’ll never use your name,’ I told him.

‘Good. Now,’ he said in a softer tone, ‘if you’ll forgive me some advice, don’t use anyone’s real name or address. You’ll end up in the barbed wire yourself if you do.’

‘But why?’

‘Haven’t you noticed all the big machers at the Café Hirschfeld?’ he said, switching to Yiddish. ‘They’re becoming King Midases on our imprisonment. And when their gold is threatened…’ He drew a finger across his throat.

He spoke Yiddish to convince me I could trust him despite his hostility, but such a ploy only irritated me. ‘Still,’ I told him, ‘I have to find out what happened to Adam.’

‘And I want you to!’ he assured me. ‘That’s why I’m here, and why I wrote out my list. Where can we sit together?’ he asked eagerly.

‘At the kitchen table,’ I replied, gesturing for him to follow me.

‘Sorry for speaking to you harshly,’ he said, and when I turned to him, he smiled generously; his fever of anxiety had broken. ‘It’s like this, Dr Cohen,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I’m not naive. Things will go wrong for me sooner or later, but I want to put off that day as long as I can. You see what I’m saying?’

‘Absolutely,’ I replied. Sitting opposite him, I felt as if I was his opponent in a game that only he knew how to play.

‘Your friend Abram made a mistake giving you my real name. Stupid risk. I’ve already had a long talk with him.’

‘Abram was upset. I’d just told him about my nephew.’

‘Upset?’ Grylek raised his eyebrows questioningly and added, ‘Wouldn’t you say all of us are upset? Look, Dr Cohen,’ he said in a more friendly tone, ‘let me explain how it is. Everyone in my world uses false names. So if you need to refer to me, call me Rabe – an anagram for Baer.’ He lifted out a square of paper from his shirt pocket and started to unfold it, then stopped. ‘You know, if you’re serious about investigating your grandnephew’s murder, you should adopt an anagram too. I thought about it on the way over here. Try Honec – I once met a Czech novelist with that surname.’

‘I’ll consider it,’ I replied – at the time, simply to please him.

Grylek unfolded his paper and handed it to me. I put on my reading glasses because his letters were tiny and irregular. As I scanned the seven addresses of border crossings he’d jotted down, and the names of their guards, he took out a tin of German cigarettes – Muratti Ariston – and offered me one, which I accepted.

‘Smuggled?’ I asked.

‘You got it!’ he replied, grinning proudly. He lit my cigarette with a theatrical flare to his hand movements, then set the flame to his own and drew in deeply. I had the feeling he’d had dreams of being a Hollywood star when he was younger – and even today enjoyed a dramatic role.

‘Did you learn who asked my nephew to smuggle out an ermine jacket?’ I asked.

‘No luck, though I asked around.’

In my nightmares, Heniek, I have seen Rabe as two men, one of them with a murderous glint in his eyes, speaking Polish, the other a ghetto Puck on the lookout for mischief, and who talks to me in a lilting, happy-go-lucky Yiddish. Still, I’m grateful to him; he made me understand the stakes we were playing for were high.

‘About the list – the names are all anagrams,’ he explained. ‘I’ve altered the street numbers as well.’

‘But I’ll never find the crossings this way!’ I moaned, holding my head in my hands.

‘You will!’ he replied cheerfully, like a magician happy to teach a protégé one of his tricks, ‘because I’m going to explain how it works.’ He opened his right hand to show me numbers written in pairs on his palm. The first coupling was 7-2. ‘When you see seven in an address, change it to two in your head. You got it?’

‘I think so.’

‘And once you know the code, you’ll know all the ghetto’s secrets,’ he joked.

‘I wish,’ I replied.

‘Just memorize the pairs now, and the street names, too. You’ll be able to rearrange them into their real names if you just sit down with a pen and paper for a few minutes. I guarantee it.’

‘I’m not so sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘Look, I’m in no rush. When you tell me you’ve got everything safely in your head, I’ll wash my hand.’

Committing his list to memory proved more difficult than I’d have imagined; I kept thinking of what delight Adam would have taken in this cloak and dagger work. Only after I’d finished – and as Grylek was scrubbing his palm at the sink – did I realize the obvious: my nephew had entered this underworld long before me.

CHAPTER 8

I do not dream that I am aware of, and I don’t believe I even sleep, though I wish I could; there are times when I am so weary of mind and body that I could cry for not being able to disappear into nothingness. Worst of all, blackness never welcomes me when I close my eyes. Instead, sepia afterglows float and jiggle across my vision – of Heniek’s face, his furniture, and all I have seen during the day. It is as if the barrier between outside and inside has faded.

Sometimes I think I may be dispersing slowly into everything I see and hear. I will end as nothing and everything – as the wind, the sound of a dog barking, the concerned gaze of the only man in Warsaw who can see me…

Though perhaps that’s just my hope. Who wouldn’t want a way of leaving the one life we have on earth without disappearing entirely?

Still, there may be benefits to my new nature; now that I am what I am, maybe the past can be bent around to meet the present… As dawn rose this morning, I pictured Adam and myself as childhood friends, flying our kites together in Saski Square, and the deeper I moved into the embrace of all that might have been, the stronger my certainty that it was, in fact, a memory.

Heniek insists on taking down my every word since he says that scribes are not editors, though he promises to add some annotations where necessary and to let me make as many cuts and modifications as I want when I’m finished.

‘I’d like a happy ending, even if there really isn’t one,’ I’ve told him.

‘We’ll see,’ he says, which means, naturally enough, that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe he suspects I have an important favour to ask him when we’re done and is trying to keep his options open. An intuitive man, our Heniek – perhaps even a minor prophet. After all, if he can see and hear me…

By now – judging from his questions – I suspect that his real reason for being so meticulous is that he’s convinced a life-altering, kabbalistic moral to my story is going to burst out of one of my recollections, like a jack-in-the-box manufactured in Gerona or Jerusalem, and he doesn’t want to miss that heart-stopping moment. Isn’t that true, Heniek? (He’s shaking his head, but I can tell from the twist in his lips that he’s lying.)

In times past, I’d have said his neurosis takes the form of hallucinations meant to diminish his sense of powerlessness, but I no longer make such judgements.

I dictate and Heniek writes. It’s our private cabaret act.

Our growing closeness makes me miss Izzy. More and more, I feel as if we were two halves of something that has no name. Will I ever see him again? And could it be that I’ve returned to tell not just my story, but his as well?

Heniek undoubtedly has his own ideas about why I’ve returned, but he doesn’t share them with me. ‘Secrets are my private blessing,’ he told me just this morning.

As you can see, my host is also something of a poet, and before he retires to bed he sometimes reads me one of his recent verses. The soft, hushed sound of his voice is like wind over stone, which is just as it should be for poems written in a thousand-year-old city that is dying.

Yesterday, at the end of my first day back in Warsaw, after telling Heniek about Adam’s death, I found it difficult to go on speaking. Craving the reassurance of human warmth, I reached out to take his hand. It was my first attempt to make physical contact with him, because I’d been worried that my touch might prove dangerous to the living.

To my disappointment, my fingertips did not meet his flesh but instead eased an inch or so into him. To me, this overlapping of our borders felt pleasant – as if I was immersing my fingers in warm water – but not to Heniek. With a shriek, he drew back from me, nearly tumbling off his chair.

He told me the pain was excruciating, as though his skin were being peeled away.

After I apologized, I was silent for a long time, wondering if even talking to him could prove dangerous – if I might be turning him away from a better and safer path.

‘Please, tell me what you’re thinking, Erik,’ he requested, and his tone was so gentle and respectful that I did.

With a smile of solidarity, that generous man then assured me that there was nothing he wanted more than to help me tell my story.

‘I feel sometimes I was born for this,’ he confessed. ‘After all, why have visions of the dead, if you cannot be of any assistance to them?’

CHAPTER 9

The evening after my nephew’s death, I apologized to Stefa for allowing Adam to leave the apartment. She received my words with her head down, unable to look at me. Unsure of what next to say, I started to tell her about having spoken to his friends.

‘Stay away from me!’ she hollered as if I were a criminal bent on corrupting her. ‘And for the love of God, don’t tell me anything about Wolfi and the others!’

Climbing into her bed, she hugged Adam’s sketchbook to her chest and closed her eyes.

‘Forgive me for being so inept, Stefa,’ I told her, and I sat down next to her. At length, she took my hand and gave it a squeeze. I said nothing more, but the silence was filled with all my unspoken regrets.

After tucking Stefa in to sleep, I changed Gloria’s water, then covered her cage and turned off the light. The darkness seemed my true home now. I sat by my niece, my hand on her shoulder so that even inside her dreams she would know I was beside her. I thought of her father and mother, who had adored her, and then my parents, and slowly, one by one, the room became peopled with everyone I’d ever loved. Adam brought my wife Hannah to me as though leading her towards a bed of wild flowers, and she was laughing at his merry insistence. Hannah had died just after Adam’s birth, but in my dream the boy was about five years old. He climbed up on to my lap when I summoned him forward. My tears of gratitude dripped on to his hair.

‘How’s Gloria?’ he asked me.

‘Not so good,’ I replied, and then I awoke and Adam’s death seemed to fill my mouth with blood.

In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face. Removing the towel that Stefa had draped over the mirror, I stared at the skeleton-sockets I had for eyes, and at my cumbersome, blue-veined hands. Who was this useless man? How had I fallen so far?

I knew that an emptiness with exactly Adam’s size and shape was awaiting me in my bed, so I fetched a woollen blanket and made a nest for myself in Stefa’s armchair.

At dawn, I set out for the addresses I’d memorized. I showed my nephew’s photograph to seven guards and a dozen smugglers, but no one recognized him.

At the funeral that morning, dread paralysed me, pounding so loudly in my ears that I barely heard the rabbi’s condolences. The ground was stone-frozen, too hellishly hard to make a ditch, though two gravediggers had used their picks to chip away an inch down as a symbolic gesture. Seventeen homemade coffins made of bare planks of wood – the smallest being Adam’s – were stacked around our quiet group, waiting for the spring thaw to be lowered into the earth. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon were six bodies wrapped in rough cloth; their families couldn’t afford coffins.

Ewa, Rowy, Ziv and several other friends stayed close to Stefa during the ceremony. She had the frantic eyes of a lost child, but I didn’t go to her.

Withholding oneself as a way of feeling the pain even deeper.

When Stefa finally looked at me, I saw that she wanted to keep some distance between us as well. Perhaps she was thinking – like me – that it would be impossible to ever forgive me for failing to protect Adam.

Stefa insisted on standing between the pale winter sun and the gravesite. I didn’t understand why until I noticed how her shadow stretched into the soil that would receive Adam this spring. Maybe she imagined that her dark embrace would accompany him into his resting place.

A belief in magic can offer solace, even if we know it is a lie.

I am with you – that’s what she was telling her son in the language of shadows.

At a discreet distance behind Stefa and her closest friends stood a middle-aged woman in a brown headscarf, with a searching, foxlike face. She carried a book, which I found curious. When she noticed my gaze, she turned away quickly.

Adam’s friend Sarah shuffled up to me leading her parents. A merciless wind from Russia was buffeting our little group, and the girl’s hair was swirling in her eyes. I put down the bag I’d brought with me and lifted her up. As I smoothed her hair back, she let her head fall against my chest, then shivered. I kissed her once and thanked her for coming, then handed her back to her father.

Feivel’s mother soon came to me and told me – ashamed – that her son didn’t understand that Adam was dead. ‘He refused to come to the funeral. God forgive me, I couldn’t even get him dressed.’

I kissed her cheek. ‘He’s better off at home.’

She handed me a sketch that her son had done of Adam and Gloria a few weeks earlier. Drawn with scratches of wild colour, the budgie was riding on my nephew’s head. She was nearly as big as Adam.

Feivel understood my nephew better than I did, I thought bitterly.

Wolfi and his father then joined us, and the boy was crying silently. When I embraced him, his emotions loosened my own and I had to let him go. Izzy had guarded my back ever since our schoolyard snowball fights, and he hooked arms with me and took Feivel’s drawing. Turning me round, he had me face away from the grave, which must have seemed scandalous to some, but for me it was a godsend.

Distance was my raft that day.

Izzy whispered prayers to himself in Hebrew, and after a time I hung on to the sound of his voice. Still, I was angry with him, because he’d seen my pain and helped me, and I didn’t want to share my despair or diminish it.

A psychiatrist who can’t cope, and who knows it. I’d fallen off a cliff, and the cliff was everything that Adam and I would never now do together.

After the rabbi delivered his sermon, two Pinkiert’s men carried Adam’s coffin to where gravediggers had fought hard to chip down into the soil. When my turn came to shovel earth atop the casket, I took my nephew’s Indian headdress out of the bag I’d brought with me. On seeing it, I moaned; I’d forgotten about the feather I’d knocked off.

I held it up to Izzy. ‘I should have fixed it. I wanted to put it on his casket.’

He kissed my cheek. ‘Go ahead, Erik. What’s perfect has no place in the ghetto.’

At the funeral of a child, the ground opens underneath you, and you tumble down, and you put up no resistance as the darkness throws its welcoming arms around you, because you cannot imagine sending a young boy or girl alone and naked into the underworld. If you have someone to live for – another son or daughter, a wife or husband – maybe you climb back out of the grave. Or maybe not. After all, people give up all the time.

I used to say they were irresponsible, but I’d been an arrogant fool.

I climbed out of Adam’s grave. Stefa didn’t. In a way, our destinies were as simple as that.

If they don’t see that I’m under the ground with my son when they look in my eyes, then what’s the use of telling them? I imagined Stefa was thinking that over the rest of the afternoon, and over the next days as well, because she refused to talk about her son ever again. That afternoon, around 1 p.m., her fever reached 39.2, and I discovered flecks of blood on her pillowcase. I’d sent everyone home by then and was sitting at the foot of her bed.

‘I’ll be right back,’ I told her, getting to my feet.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked worriedly.

‘To get a doctor. This has gone on long enough.’

A mother and her teenaged daughter were seated behind a pushcart outside our apartment, selling pickled cucumbers and carrots. The girl wore a Basque beret and a man’s coat, which made me understand we were raising a generation of Jewish children living under the weight of their dead parents. I offered her three złoty to carry a note to Mikael Tengmann. Jumping up, she slipped out of her coat, kissed her mother’s cheek and ran off.

The girl knocked on my door a half-hour later, sweat beaded on her forehead, her beret in her hands. ‘Dr Tengmann says he’ll be here at six sharp,’ she told me.

I gave her a one-złoty tip. Thanking me, she took a pale blue calling card from her pocket and handed it to me. Her name – Bina Minchenberg – was scripted in elegant calligraphy imitating the lion’s-paw shapes of Hebrew letters.

‘Who’s the artist?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid it’s me,’ she replied, making an embarrassed face.

‘You’ve got talent.’

‘I’m also a very good cook,’ she told me, ‘and if you’ll pay me to prepare a meal for you on occasion, I’ll clean your apartment for no extra charge.’

‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Fourteen.’

Her big brown eyes were full of hope, but she quickly realized I was going to turn her down and reached for my hand. ‘Dr Cohen, I know what men need – even good men like you.’ She pressed my palm to her breast and, when I tried to jerk it away, gripped it with both hands. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. And I won’t tell anyone. I swear!’

‘Oh, God,’ I groaned, and my shuddering made her finally release me.

‘Our savings have run out, Dr Cohen,’ Bina told me, tears caught in her lashes.

I wanted to shake some sense into her, or simply walk away, but what right had I to judge her? ‘Listen closely, Bina,’ I told her. ‘You’re a brave girl. And you should do whatever you need to do to stay alive. But I’m not who I was. I don’t know if I can–’

‘All I’m asking is a chance!’ she interrupted desperately.

‘Very well, I’ll send for you whenever I need a message delivered or a meal cooked.’

I thought I was lying, but how could I be sure any more of my own intentions? Or the consequences of even my most seemingly harmless actions?

We stared at each other for a long time, and because of what I now knew was possible between us, our solidarity terrified me. I don’t know what she saw, but I saw a girl crawling through the trenches of a long slow war, and whom I was powerless to protect – and whom I resented because of that.

I handed her ten złoty, which made her rise up on her toes and give me a popping kiss on the cheek – transformed into a young girl again.

‘Now go,’ I told her. ‘Your mother must be worried.’

As soon as Bina left, I headed to the bakery in our courtyard. Coming in from the arctic chill, the heat seemed tropical, and the workers were in their bare feet and shirtsleeves, with paper bags on their heads. Ewa wasn’t there – she was at home with her daughter – so Ziv agreed to look after Stefa.

In the hour I had before Mikael Tengmann’s arrival, I intended to search for more border crossings, but when I reached the sidewalk I heard my name called from behind me. Turning, I saw the fox-faced woman I’d spotted at the funeral, still carrying her book. Her ears and nose were red.

‘Dr Cohen, excuse me for interrupting, but I need to speak with you,’ she said.

Looking at her closely, I realized I’d seen her prior to the funeral, but I couldn’t remember where. ‘Why didn’t you knock on our door?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t want to impinge on your grief.’

‘You must be frozen. Let’s go upstairs.’

‘No, your niece may react badly to what I have to say. Where else can we talk?’

‘The Café Levone. We’ll get you something warm to drink.’

As we started off, she said, ‘I felt I had to be at the funeral. I’m sorry if I seemed out of place. I didn’t know your grandnephew.’

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ I replied.

She looked at me gratefully. ‘My name is Dorota Levine.’

When I asked what she was reading, she turned the cover of Stefan Zweig’s Marie Antoinette to face me. ‘I take a book with me whenever I know I’m going to wait.’

It was then that I recalled that she’d come to the Yiddish Library a few weeks earlier and asked me to help her find books on butterflies for her son.

‘I think we met briefly a couple of weeks ago,’ I told her. ‘At the library where I work.’

She smiled. ‘You were very kind to help me.’

She grew silent then, and she rubbed her hand over her lips as if to keep from making further revelations. My curiosity about her made me fail to spot a puddle in time and I stepped through its ice sheet into the mud below. Sopping, cursing under my breath, I trudged on. Once seated inside the café, I kicked off my shoes, which were as ugly as two dead bats. My toes had been stained brown by my wet socks and my nails were yellowing daggers. A waiter fetched me a towel and then produced a dry pair of socks, insisting I take them, which was so unexpected that I was struck dumb.

The café smelled of cheap beer and cigar smoke. While we waited for our coffee, Dorota told me her cousin Ruti was married to the son of a university acquaintance of mine. The young man’s name was Manfred Tuwim, and although he was stuck in Munich, far away from lonely Ruti… Dorota launched into one of those wordy explanations that Jews cobble together to prove that they’re all part of the same club, linked through enough upstanding friends and relatives – and maybe even a rabbi or two – to fill up a bar mitzvah reception at the Berlin Sports Palace. My father had called this tiresome tradition Jewish knitting.

I cut her off. ‘Why did you want to talk with me?’ I asked.

She took a black-and-white photograph from the pages of Marie Antoinette. ‘Because of my daughter, Anna,’ she replied, handing it to me.

A slender girl stood by a fruit tree turned by springtime into a cloud of white blossoms. She wore a pleated skirt – dowdy and old-fashioned – and a dark, high-collared blouse that looked as if it reeked of mothballs. Their antiquity seemed to embarrass Anna, and she’d pulled her long tresses around to her front and was holding on to them for dear life. It was a pose that troubled me; children who cling to themselves generally have no one they can trust.

Putting on my reading glasses, I spotted fierce resentment in Anna’s eyes, and saw, too, that she was leaning towards the right edge of the picture, anxious to flee. But the photographer’s finger had clicked the shutter too quickly, sending her image into the future – and here to me. Beside the girl was a figure that had been cut away except for the small hand that held hers. I guessed that the missing person had been her brother, and that he had been the anchor keeping Anna from dashing away.

‘That was a year ago,’ Dorota told me. ‘My husband took the picture in Bednarski Park – in Kraków. We were visiting my in-laws.’

I’ve learned from my patients to pay close attention to the first offering they give you. Keeping the photograph with her was clearly Dorota’s way of proving to me that she’d never leave home without a reminder of her daughter – and that she was devoted to the girl. Yet why had she chosen such an unflattering shot?

‘Anna didn’t like being photographed,’ I observed.

‘No, she hated it – at least when my husband took the pictures.’

Dorota seemed keen to convince me that mistrust characterized the relationship between Anna and her father. ‘Her clothes were an older sister’s?’ I asked.

‘No, but the blouse had been mine.’

‘Who was with her – holding her hand?’

‘Her brother, Daniel. He was seven then.’

Our coffee had just arrived, and I was eager for the clarity of thought it would give me, but it was as bitter as acorns. Dorota was gazing away from me, and fidgeting with her collar. She seemed a woman who knew she was passing through life largely unseen. Under normal circumstances I’d have said she was leading a smaller life than was necessary, but inside our enclave, being overlooked could prove an advantage.

‘Does Anna get along well with Daniel?’ I asked, catching the waiter’s eye and motioning for him to return.

‘They used to fight like devils when they were little,’ Dorota told me, ‘but they’d become friendlier of late.’ She gazed down, as though she’d already said too much.

Her retreat into silence – and use of they’d instead of they’ve – made me wonder if one or both of her children had died, though with any luck they’d merely been smuggled to Christian friends outside the ghetto.

The waiter came to me, and I asked for a shot of schnapps. As he left, a pigeon flew in the door. Landing on an empty table, he began pecking at crumbs.

I faced Dorota again. ‘So your son is a fan of butterflies,’ I told her, testing whether she’d use the present tense when discussing him.

‘Yes, he thinks they’re the most wondrous creatures in the world,’ she replied, beaming as if I’d made her day.

So it was her daughter who resided inside the past. I handed her back the photograph. ‘What’s happened to Anna?’ I asked.

Dorota looked around the café to confirm that no one was eavesdropping, then shifted her chair towards mine. ‘She’s dead,’ she confided. ‘The Nazis murdered her. She was tossed into barbed wire. Just like your nephew.’

Stunned, I raised my hand over my eyes as though to protect myself. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I told her. ‘When did this happen?’

‘A little over three weeks ago.’

‘And you came to the funeral because you think there’s a connection between Adam and her – from the way they were found.’

‘Not just that. When she was brought to me, her right hand was missing.’

CHAPTER 10

‘How did you find out that Adam had been disfigured?’ I asked Dorota.

She took a quick sip of her coffee. ‘I’ve a cousin in the Jewish police who saw your nephew after what the Nazis did to him.’

‘So your cousin already knew about Anna.’

‘Yes, I’d told him, but he warned me not to discuss her with anyone. A man from the Jewish Council also made it clear that I was not to tell anyone about how Anna died. I almost didn’t come to talk with you.’

‘Was it Benjamin Schrei who spoke to you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, do you know him?’

‘Unfortunately,’ I replied, furious; Schrei had known that Adam’s death had not been an isolated killing and had lied to me. How many more children’s bodies had been defiled? I gulped down the last of my coffee, savouring the burn of the schnapps I’d poured in. While I filled the bowl of my pipe, considering how best to confront Schrei, Dorota gave me a hard look.

‘I’m listening,’ I told her.

Leaning over the table, she circled her arms together, as though around a stash of secrets she’d accumulated since her daughter’s death. ‘Anna didn’t return home on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth of January,’ she began. ‘It was a Friday, and she was supposed to help me prepare our Sabbath dinner. She was found by the Jewish police the next morning.’

‘Excuse me for asking this, but was your daughter naked when she was found?’

‘Yes.’

‘And was there anything special about her hand that was taken?’

She looked at me as if I was insane. ‘It was a girl’s hand,’ she told me resentfully. ‘I’d say that was special, wouldn’t you?’

I lit my pipe, eager for the comfort of an old vice. ‘Were there any wounds on her body?’ I asked from inside the swirl of smoke around me.

‘None.’

‘Was anything in her mouth?’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.

‘I found a piece of string in Adam’s mouth. I think the murderer put it there.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t look. But why in God’s name would the murderer put string in the mouth of the children he kills?’

‘I don’t know.’

It occurred to me then that Adam might have been returning to the ghetto with valuable goods. Wanting to know whether robbery could have been a motive for Anna’s murder – and the theft of her hand – I asked, ‘Did your daughter wear a ring – maybe one she’d worn since she was tiny and could no longer remove from her finger?’

‘No. She had a pretty garnet ring, but she stopped wearing it in the ghetto because she’d lost so much weight that it would slide right off her finger.’

‘How about a bracelet?’

Dorota shook her head. ‘She only ever wore pearl earrings. They were a gift from me – pink pearls dangling from a silver chain. But she didn’t have them on when she was found. They must have been stolen from her. Though they weren’t worth very much – I mean, if you’re thinking that a thief may have killed her. The only thing that anyone might have found valuable was her hand itself.’

‘What do you mean?’

She leaned towards me, her head low to the table, and whispered conspiratorially, ‘The killer may be using parts of our children’s bodies to make something inhuman.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A golem,’ she mouthed, her eyes fearful, as if saying the word aloud might summon one from its hiding place.

‘But why?’

‘To protect us!’ she declared.

I felt cornered by Dorota’s beliefs. ‘My God, woman, your daughter has been murdered! And a real person killed her. Don’t you want to find out who it was?’

‘All right, Dr Cohen,’ she replied with controlled anger, ‘maybe you don’t believe that making such a creature is possible, but what if there’s a lunatic out there who thinks he can?’

She showed me a challenging look, and I had to admit that madness might explain what had been done to Adam. Except that there was a problem with her argument. ‘If a Jew killed my nephew,’ I told her, ‘then how could he have tossed the boy’s body into the barbed wire from the Christian side of the border?’

She tapped her chest. ‘I only know what I sense in here. And I know that there’s more to these murders than we think.’

Eager to steer our conversation towards rational ground, I returned to the details of Anna’s disappearance. ‘Do you know if your daughter had snuck out of the ghetto before being murdered?’ I asked.

Dorota leaned back in her chair. ‘Yes, I’m fairly certain she went to see her boyfriend.’

‘He doesn’t live inside?’

‘No, he’s a Pole.’ Sneering, she added, ‘An Aryan.’

If Anna hadn’t fallen in love with the wrong young man and refused to give him up, she’d still be alive. Although Dorota never spoke those words over the next half-hour, her resentment turned nearly all she said to accusations against her daughter. As we talked, it seemed to me that she would polish her grudge for years.

‘And what makes you feel certain she went to see her boyfriend?’ I asked.

Breathing deeply, as if she were entering dangerous territory, Dorota replied, ‘Let me explain about my daughter.’ She took off her headscarf and held it in her lap. ‘Anna turned fifteen in June, and at her birthday party I looked at her and I realized my little girl was gone. But make no mistake, over the next few weeks, she proved she was still just a wilful child. Belligerent and selfish – that’s how my husband always described her.’ Dorota patted her thinning hair, as though putting her thoughts into place. ‘And he was right – though you must think I’m heartless for saying so.’

‘Not at all,’ I told her, beginning to suspect her husband of ruining his daughter’s life. ‘Children can be difficult in desperate situations. They need our reassurance.’

‘People who only met her once or twice – they didn’t understand what she was like,’ Dorota continued in a frustrated voice. ‘Life was never easy with her – never! I can assure you of that. No punishment could make her do what she didn’t want to. And she believed she was in love with a Polish boy. She couldn’t live without him.’ Dorota shook her head, clearly regarding her daughter’s affection as absurd.

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘Paweł Sawicki. Dr Cohen, how could my husband and I approve? The daughter of a Jewish tailor and the son of a Polish judge? I saw heartbreak ahead. Was I wrong?’

‘I no longer know how to answer that,’ I told her, holding back my criticism; by now, I realized that Dorota had chosen a photograph that would give me an idea of how difficult her daughter could be – and possibly, too, to help convince me that the measures she and her husband had taken to break the girl’s will were necessary.

‘When you told Anna you disapproved of Paweł, what did she say?’ I asked.

‘She shouted that I was a mean-spirited witch.’ In a resentful voice, she added, ‘My daughter used to call me Fraulein Rottenmeier.’

‘Who?’

‘The hideous housekeeper from Heidi. That was Anna’s favourite book.’ Dorota sighed. ‘If only… if only I could talk to her just once more – make her understand.’ The impossibility of that made Dorota gaze inside herself. ‘Anyway, she refused to give up Paweł, so we quarrelled, and when my husband joined in…’ She shook her head at the troubling memory. ‘He threatened to use his belt on her. Which was when Anna promised she’d never see her boyfriend again. And maybe that really was her intention. I can’t say. But if it was, then she changed her mind because she started leading a double life.’

‘In what way?’ I asked, concluding that if Anna had given in without a longer quarrel then it was probably because she’d felt the stiff leather sting of her father’s belt before.

‘You know the sort of thing girls do,’ Dorota replied. ‘She’d tell me she was going roller-skating with a girlfriend, then meet Paweł at a cinema. After we moved to the ghetto, I searched her dresser and found photographs of the two of them at a picnic in Saski Gardens.’ She produced another picture from the pages of Marie Antoinette and slid it across the table to me as though pushing an evil talisman out of her life.

Anna was laughing freely in the photograph. Paweł was embracing her from behind, though only his hands were visible – his face and arms had been cut away. Given how Anna and Adam had been disfigured, it seemed dangerous for Dorota to have cut away pieces of the young man’s image.

My uneasiness on holding the photograph seemed a bad sign for my own mental state; it was as if the ghetto were compelling me to believe in the power of amulets and spells, like Dorota and so many others.

‘Did Paweł’s parents approve of Anna?’ I asked.

‘My daughter told me they adored her, but I checked on the family and learned that the judge had become a vicious anti-Semite since the Nazi occupation.’

I asked if I could keep the photograph while I hunted for Anna and Adam’s killer, and Dorota agreed. She went on to tell me that Paweł and his family lived at 24 Wilcza Street. ‘He promised to visit Anna in the ghetto. At least, that’s what she told me. He never came or even called that I know of. Then Anna announced that she wouldn’t eat again until she saw him – announced it like a decree! That’s why she lost so much weight and couldn’t wear her ring. My husband started forcing her to eat supper, but after bed she’d sneak off to the bathroom and make herself sick. It took me two weeks to realize that’s what she was doing. By then, she was a living skeleton. Dr Cohen,’ Dorota said, opening her hands as if to make an appeal to reason, ‘her wilfulness was killing our family.’ She hunched forward, circling those secrets of hers again, though this time I sensed it was to hold something back. ‘This will sound strange, but I felt I was living in a house that was falling to pieces. Every shadow was menacing. And Anna’s appearance – it scared me. Once, I stood her in front of the mirror in my bedroom and showed her how gaunt she was, but she insisted she was disgustingly fat. Can you believe it? Of course, she blamed my husband and me for everything – for insisting she eat, for keeping her apart from Paweł. She put us through hell.’

‘Did she ever succeed in speaking with him?’

‘Not that I know of. When I called Paweł’s mother, she told me she’d sent the boy to a boarding school. I told Anna, but she screamed at me that I was lying. She wrote letters to him. I allowed that in exchange for her agreeing to eat again. But she never received any replies – at least, not that I know of.’

I went on to question Dorota about her daughter’s schooling and friends, hoping to chance upon a connection to Adam, and for once, Jewish knitting proved helpful; she soon told me that Anna had been very close to her maternal grandfather, whose name was Noel Anbaum.

‘The musician – he’s your father?’ I questioned.

‘Yes, do you know him?’

‘I saw him perform when I was much younger. Dorota, Anna wasn’t in a chorus, by any chance?’

‘No.’

‘How about your son?’

‘No, why?’

‘Adam was, and I saw your father at the concert.’

When I asked Dorota for her father’s address, she looked at her watch and replied, ‘If you hurry, you’ll be able to catch him playing outside the Nowy Azazel Theatre.’

CHAPTER 11

The fingers of Noel Anbaum’s black leather gloves had been cut away and his crocheted blue muffler had a corner that was unravelling in a payot curl, but he still cut a slim, dashing figure – a grey-templed, Roman-nosed Casanova – in his wine-red zoot suit and black gaucho hat. Standing on Nowolipie Street in front of the Nowy Azazel, his right foot up on a fraying green and gold brocade chair that looked as if it had been nicked from a local bordello, he was playing an undulating blues song on his accordion, bellowing the roller-coaster chord changes in and out with his left hand, the wizened fingers of his right coaxing a sensual vibrato out of the chipped and yellowing keyboard. He doubled the melody in his gritty voice, braving an English that was twisted into absurd shapes by Yiddish vowels. One line he must have improvised stuck in my head because he sang it with the provocative bravado of a gunslinger: If I cabaret on Saturday and curse Herr Hitler all day Sunday, ain’t nobody’s business if I do…

On the high notes, Noel’s voice sounded like sandpaper being scratched, and its raspy imperfection made me fear he’d teeter off the melody, but he never did. His singing was a kind of high-wire act, which was probably why so many złoty had been tossed into the slate-grey velvet of his accordion case; after all, if his performance were effortless, would it be worth paying for? He himself kept his eyes closed, swaying luxuriously, as though his music were a slow tide carrying him deep into himself.

I threaded through the crowd towards a clearing that had formed around a bearded beggar sitting on the sidewalk about ten paces to Noel’s left. The ribs of the bare-chested man jutted out dangerously, like a galley with its construction exposed, and his caved-in belly was criss-crossed by bloody scabies tracks. The stench of his having soiled himself made me cup my hands over my mouth and nose.

After Noel had finished his song and bowed to his audience, I went to him. ‘My name is Erik Cohen. My wife and I used to see you play at the Esplanade. You were amazing.’

‘That was during a previous lifetime,’ he replied, laughing merrily. ‘As you can see, I’m paying for my past sins in this one.’

‘No, you’re still wonderful!’ I told him.

Smiling gratefully, he shook my hand. His trembled badly. Laying his hat on the seat of his chair, he picked up a Źywiec beer bottle from the ground. As he took a sip, he spotted me eyeing his shaking hand. ‘Damn thing has a life of its own these days,’ he told me. ‘Except when it gets near a keyboard.’

‘I need to talk with you.’

He cupped his hand behind his ear with sweet-natured eagerness and leaned so far towards me that he started to fall over and I had to prop him up. He was a bit drunk.

‘Let’s go somewhere warm,’ I proposed.

‘No, if I get comfortable now, I won’t want to come back out. Let’s stay here.’

‘Listen, Noel, your daughter Dorota came to see me. She told me about Anna.’

His expression darkened.

‘You see why I’d prefer to be alone with you,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, but talking about Anna does me no good,’ he replied.

After he showed me the smile of a man excusing a frailty, he put down his beer, lifted his accordion and started to play, but I grabbed his wrist.

‘Why do you want to torture me?’ he asked glumly, looking at me with so solemn a wish to be understood that I felt ashamed.

‘Please, Noel,’ I pleaded, ‘my grandnephew, Adam, he was also murdered – just like Anna. All I need is for you to tell me why you attended a choral concert at the end of January. Twelve children sang Bach. Adam was one of them. It was–’

‘I remember the concert,’ he interrupted. ‘I was there because of Rowy Klaus – the conductor. He studied piano and music theory with me when he was a boy.’

‘So Rowy invited you?’

‘Yes, we’ve stayed in touch all these years.’

‘Thank you, Noel. I’m grateful.’

As I started away, he called my name and said in a resonant voice, ‘“May the angel who redeems me from all evil bless the children.”’

After I’d nodded my agreement, his eyes fluttered closed and he entered the tide of another song. Its melody rose ghost-like out of my childhood, and though I was unable to identify it at the time, I later recalled that it was Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92, which reads, ‘My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries; my ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes.’

A marketplace had formed behind Noel, taking advantage of his popularity, and I zigzagged around shoppers until I was brought to a halt by a group of ghetto mushrooms: shoeshine boys sitting on wooden stools, their soot-smudged faces hidden in shadow by the peaks of their woollen caps, their hands stained black. One waif had a shaved head and a crone’s joyless face. Cuttings of an old rug were tied around his feet. He looked at me with dull, lifeless eyes.

I ought to have led him off to buy boots or simply smiled at him, but I didn’t – a measure of how far I’d let exile draw me away from myself.

Passing a small pyramid of cauliflowers in a pushcart, I realized they’d make a tasty supper. My heart soared to have happened upon one good and generous thing.

The seller was a miniature sphinx, of a kind common in Warsaw: though barely five feet tall, and surely in her sixties, she had the coarse, big-boned hands of a locksmith. ‘Two,’ I told her, showing her the smile I’d withheld from the shoeshine boy, but she chose a pair from near the bottom of her pile that were covered with a nicotine-yellow ooze. She held them out to me, asking for four złoty each, as if they were the models of perfection she kept on top.

Frowning, I waved them away. I knew I ought to have simply eased my ten-złoty note and my disappointment back in my pocket and headed off, but I wanted to give her a chance to reconsider – a chance for grace. Though maybe I really just wanted to start a quarrel. ‘Eight złoty for those meiskeits?’ I questioned.

‘That’s the price.’

‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’

‘What do you mean?’ she replied, outraged by my implication, raising a cauliflower triumphantly in each gnarled hand.

Taking a giant step towards her, I thrust up my thumb and index finger. ‘How many fingers do you see?’ I demanded.

She leered at me, sensing a deception. ‘Two,’ she replied hesitantly.

‘So you’re not blind, after all – which means you chose the worst ones on purpose! Tell me, what’s it feel like to try to cheat a hungry man?’

Even as I spoke, I was aware that I sounded like a Dostoevsky drunk, but I couldn’t stop myself.

‘You old fool, get the hell out of here before I call my husband! He’ll punch your face in!’

Her contempt backed me into a tight corner, and – stupidly – I chose the easiest way out. ‘Impossible!’ I scoffed at her. ‘Whores don’t have husbands!’

Her cheeks turned red and she leaned her head back, henlike. When she spat at my feet, I charged her, eager to get my hands around her throat and squeeze, but just as I grabbed the collar of her coat I flew forward on to my knees, crying out from the pain.

As I came to myself, I found I was lying on my side, my hands up by my face – a protective position I must have learned as a kid. The burly young man who’d knocked me over was cursing me in Yiddish. Was he her son? I never found out.

‘Ver di kapore!’ I snarled at him. That had been my mother’s way of saying drop dead! I hadn’t used it in half a century.

My attacker continued cursing me, but now in Polish, as if one language wasn’t enough to express all his disdain. I stood up with difficulty and limped away, holding my wrist, which was very tender. Just past Pawiak Prison I stopped at a produce shop and purchased potato skins for soup and three wormy cabbages. I had a good cry in a bombed-out, ground-floor flat, sitting on the rim of the soil-filled bathtub that some clever soul must have been planning to use for planting vegetables in the spring.

Self-hatred stalked me home, though it comforted me to find Ewa and Helena watching over my niece, who was sleeping with her arm over her eyes. Helena looked at my torn trousers and dashed to me as I stood in the doorway, needing reassurance. I lifted her up and pressed my lips to her ear, her favourite spot for kisses.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked.

‘I tripped on a cauliflower,’ I replied, forcing a smile.

After I put the girl down, Ewa asked her to watch over Stefa, then led me into my room as though on a mission, easing the bedroom door closed behind her.

‘I don’t want Helena to hear our conversation,’ she whispered.

‘Very well,’ I agreed. I tossed my bag of potato skins and my cabbages on the bed.

‘Listen,’ she said, brushing a tense hand back through her hair, ‘my father says that Stefa has typhus. And she’s had it a while – maybe too long.’

Ewa continued speaking, but frantic wings of panic were beating at my ears, blocking out her voice. ‘Give me a moment,’ I told her.

She helped me out of my coat and opened my collar. I sat down on the mattress.

‘Over the next few weeks, Stefa will need nursing,’ she told me. ‘I can take over in the evenings, but you may have to quit the Lending Library. Her clothes were infested with lice, of course. To be safe, I had her sheets taken away to be washed. And Papa will have your apartment sprayed with carbolic acid later today. By all accounts, you should be under an order of quarantine, but he managed to avoid that. Listen, Erik, you may be infested, too.’

Her efficiency disoriented me. Ewa – with her small, determined eyes – now seemed one of those timid and reticent women who turn into Joan of Arc when their loved ones are threatened. A useful person in a war.

‘Are there medications that will help?’ I asked.

‘Some ghetto physicians say that a Swiss serum has produced good improvements in patients, but it costs a thousand złoty a vial.’

‘My God! Can your father get me some?’

‘Yes, though I don’t know how long it will take him.’

‘I’ll go and see him. I’ll sell Hannah’s engagement ring to raise the money.’

‘No, please, don’t do that!’ she said sharply. Then, sensing she’d only heightened my sense of guilt, she added, ‘I only meant there must be something else you can sell.’

‘Not if I need to raise a thousand złoty in a hurry.’

Sitting on the floor in front of the clothes chest I’d shared with Adam, I opened the bottom drawer, clawed my way past his tangle of underwear and socks, and unhooked the ring from its hiding place. Holding it in my hand made me feel faint. My mouth was as dry as dust.

I held up the ring for Ewa to see. ‘It’s a two-carat diamond with a gold band.’

I got to my knees but was too dizzy to go any further. Ewa helped me up and fetched me a glass of water. After a long drink, I sat down on my bed again.

‘I’d appreciate it if you would sell it for me,’ I told her.

‘Me? My God, Erik, I don’t know anything about selling jewellery.’

‘Neither do I, but you’re a pretty young woman, so you’ll get a better price. You can say it’s yours – for sympathy.’

When I held it out to her, she moved her hands behind her back. ‘No, don’t make me,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll get nervous and ruin things. Please, Erik…’

Tears appeared in her eyes and her shoulders hunched; she had transformed back into her usual self, so I didn’t insist.

When I asked if she knew where Rowy Klaus might be, Ewa glanced at her watch and told me he was giving a piano lesson on Sienna Street, which was in the Little Ghetto, a relatively well-off section of our territory that was separated from the bigger – and poorer – section by Chłodna Street. In fact, Sienna Street was the most elegant address in the ghetto.

I left right away; I needed to question him about Anna and could elicit his advice on selling my ring at the same time. On the way, I got myself deloused at the disinfection bathhouse at 109 Leszno Street.

What unlikely marvels I saw in the shop windows that afternoon while waiting for Rowy! – six big fresh trout lying in a tub of ice; a burlap bag brimming with coffee beans from Ethiopia; and a bottle of Sandeman port from 1922. In the window of M. Rackemann & Sons, Tobacconists was a Star of David made out of twenty-four mustard-coloured packets of Gauloises cigarettes. The design had the unexpected, peculiar beauty of a Dadaist collage.

A blonde young prostitute with caved-in cheeks and frantic eyes soon caught my attention. She stood outside the Rosenberg Soup Kitchen, rubbing her spidery hands together, gazing around nervously, as though waiting for an unreliable friend. Had she been an art student? She dressed like the subject of an Otto Dix painting, with red stockings on her stick-figure legs and a lumpy, fox-headed stole slung around her neck.

When she asked me if I was looking for some affection, I thanked her for her interest but told her she’d have better luck with a younger man.

By the time Rowy emerged, the sun was going down. He was dressed in grey except for a crimson woollen scarf, which coiled around his neck and ribboned behind him in the wind like a banner proclaiming his youth. His walk was eager and untroubled – as though he were bouncing along on daydreams. I hailed him with a wave.

His face brightened on seeing me, which pleased me.

‘Greetings, Erik!’ he said as he approached.

‘I like your scarf,’ I told him, and we shook hands.

‘Ewa – she knitted it for me,’ he replied.

From the way he smiled, I could see he was deeply in love – and that his new way of walking was meant to let the world know. Maybe this was his first great passion.

‘I just found out that you studied with Noel Anbaum,’ I told him.

‘Man, that was years ago!’ he replied in jaunty German, adding in Yiddish, ‘I hope you didn’t come all the way across town just to confirm that.’

‘No. What I really need to know is if you knew his granddaughter Anna.’

‘Sure did. She auditioned for the chorus. Noel set it up for her. Why?’

‘She’s dead – murdered just like Adam. And her hand was cut off.’

Rowy gasped, then swept his gaze across the rooftops behind me. He was likely trying to get a glimpse of his future, because he told me in a solemn voice, ‘Makes you wonder if any of us will get out of here alive.’

‘You’ll make it. You’re near the top of my list.’

He fiddled with the splint on his finger. ‘You could be wrong.’

I grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t predict your own death – I won’t allow it!’ The clenched force behind my words made him draw back. I let him go. ‘Sorry, forgive me,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ he replied, and I saw in the depth of his dark eyes that he would have embraced me had we known each other better.

‘I’m not quite myself of late,’ I told him.

‘How could you be? Erik, I…’ He struggled to find the right words, then shrugged defeatedly. ‘I’ve wanted a chance to talk to you, but you left the funeral so quickly, and…’

‘Rowy, I can’t talk to you about my nephew just now. It would end any chance I have of doing anything useful. Now listen, I don’t remember Anna singing at the concert. Was she there?’

‘No. She passed the solfeggio exam, but she never showed up for any rehearsals. A few days later, I went to her home, but her mother said she wasn’t well and was asleep in bed.’

‘So you never talked to her again?’

‘No, I did.’ Rowy put on his gloves. ‘I went back again a few days later because she had a soprano voice worth training, and she’d have added some needed balance to the upper end of the chorus. This time I saw her, and I begged her to go for her check-up with Ewa’s father, but I never heard anything more about her.’

‘How did she seem to you?’

‘Unhappy. And fragile. The poor girl was just skin and bone.’

‘She didn’t by chance mention Adam when you saw her?’ I questioned.

‘No. Did they know each other?’

‘That’s what I have to find out. Rowy, listen, I’ve got something else to ask you that requires a little privacy. Let’s go inside.’

The young man hooked his arm in mine as we walked towards a nearby apartment house. I imagined he was close to his father. The psychiatrist in me would have bet he was the youngest child in his family.

Once we were hidden on the stairwell, I took out Hannah’s ring. ‘Know anything about selling jewellery?’

‘Just that you’ll get a better price outside the ghetto.’ He took the ring and studied it, then handed it back. ‘Inside, it’s become a buyer’s market. I sold Papa’s flute the other day and got next to nothing.’

As I’d guessed, that left me only one choice, but it was too late in the day for an excursion to the Other Side; I’d go in the morning.

I passed Rackemann’s Tobacconists after Rowy left for home, and the French cigarettes in the window gave me the idea that the owner might be able to help me with an important request – or know someone who could. A woman in her fifties, with short, hennaed hair and too much rouge on her puffy cheeks, sat crocheting behind the counter. ‘Is Mr Rackemann in?’ I asked.

She laid her crochet work in her lap. ‘My husband passed away in ’37.’

‘Then you must have made the Gauloises star in the window.’

‘Yes, that was me. How can I help you?’

‘Maybe you can put your hands on something unusual for me,’ I told her. ‘Two things, as a matter of fact.’

I waited an hour for my first request to be fulfilled by Mrs Rackemann. She told me then that my second item would require a great deal more work and would cost me the astronomical sum of 1,300 złoty if I wanted it by the next morning, as I’d indicated. I agreed to that fee, and since I couldn’t pay her the full sum right away, I gave her as a deposit all the cash I had on me – nearly 200 złoty – as well as my gold wedding band.

It was just after five in the afternoon – morbid darkness in the Polish winter – by the time I made it to Mikael’s flat, which doubled as his medical office. In the waiting room, the tiny, quick-moving nurse whom I’d met briefly when Adam came for his check-up sized me up from her desk in the corner, and her disapproving look told me I’d failed whatever test she’d conceived for me. She told me in a stern voice that Dr Tengmann was with a patient, but she poked her head into his consultation room to let him know I was here. Too jittery to sit, I stood by the window and watched a water-seller accosting passers-by on the street below. A wooden bar was stretched horizontally across his shoulders, with a tin pail hanging from each end. He wore galoshes wrapped in what looked like birch-tree bark.

We were back in the Middle Ages, and the Nazis had dragged us there – which meant that the question we now needed to ask was: how far back in time would be enough for them?

A young woman with a plaster cast on her wrist soon came in and whispered to the nurse, who instructed her to sit and wait on the green velveteen couch to the side of the window where I was standing.

‘Excuse me, but would you like to sign my cast?’ she asked me after a minute or two, smiling hopefully. She held it up to show me it was covered with signatures.

She wanted to be nice to an alter kacker with grey stubble on his chin and dead bats for shoes, so I did as she asked, except that I wrote the name Erik Honec in extravagant Gothic lettering – what I imagined a professional writer might do.

She told me her name was Naomi. ‘Are you Czech?’ she asked me.

‘Originally, but I’ve lived in Warsaw for twenty years now.’

My lie was a key clicking open a lock – the rusted one imprisoning me in myself. I felt as if I’d escaped a trap whose existence I’d failed to notice until now.

Mikael Tengmann saw Naomi and two more patients before coming out to see me. It was a few minutes before six. By then, the nurse – Anka – had warmed to me and made us a pot of tea. I was on my second cup and was sipping it – as I’d learned from a Russian friend in Vienna – through a sugar crystal I kept between my teeth. The crystal was a gift from Anka.

‘Hello, Erik!’ Mikael exclaimed, shaking my hand exuberantly. He wore a white medical coat but kept woollen slippers on his feet. ‘Sorry to have made you wait.’

‘That’s all right,’ I replied. I took out what was left of my crystal and sealed it in an old receipt I had in my pocket as though it were a precious gem, which made his eyes radiate sympathetic amusement.

‘I expect you want to talk about Stefa,’ he said.

‘Yes. I’m very grateful you came to see her. I want to buy serum for her. How long will it take you to get some?’

‘A day or two. I know a young smuggler who specializes in medications. I’ll get him right on it. But, Erik…’ Mikael grimaced. ‘It’s expensive – a thousand złoty.’

‘I know – Ewa told me. I promise I’ll have the money for you tomorrow – the day after, at the latest.’

He waved away my concern. ‘I trust you. The important thing is for Stefa to get well.’

Turning to his nurse, who was writing in the office appointment book, he said, ‘Anka, I’m sorry to have kept you so late today. You can get going whenever you want.’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she replied, smiling warmly. ‘Thank you.’

‘Listen, Mikael,’ I said, ‘I also need to talk to you about a girl named Anna Levine. Rowy Klaus told me she might have come to see you.’

‘Anna Levine? I can’t recall her.’

I took out my photograph and handed it to him. Mikael put on his tortoiseshell glasses, and I noticed now they were on a chain made of linked paper clips.

‘Classy chain,’ I commented.

He laughed brightly. ‘Helena made it for me.’

Jealousy surged inside me, but I hid it as best I could. He studied the photograph. ‘I remember this girl,’ he told me, ‘but Anna wasn’t the name she gave me.’ He handed me back the picture. ‘And she never mentioned any chorus.’

‘That seems odd.’

‘Erik, I think we’ll be far more comfortable in my office,’ he said, gesturing me towards the open door at the back.

I sensed he didn’t want Anka to hear any more of our conversation.

Once we were in his office, he offered me the chair in front of his cluttered desk. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

Behind Mikael were his sensual photographs of the Alps, and I speculated now that they were to remind himself that a monumental natural world – far beyond the control of the Nazis – still existed. And was waiting for him.

Sitting down, I asked, ‘So what name did the girl give you?’

‘I don’t think she even gave me a name,’ he replied, taking off his medical coat and hanging it on a hook. ‘Whatever the case, I didn’t write it down.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she asked me not to take any notes about our conversation.’

He took a cigar from the box on his desk and offered me one, but I was feeling too tired to make the effort. ‘If I remember correctly,’ he continued, ‘she came here without an appointment.’

‘So you’d never seen her before?’

‘No.’ Kicking off his slippers, he sat down and leaned back with a grateful sigh. ‘How do you know her?’ he asked.

I told him about my conversation with Dorota, focusing on Anna’s relationship with Paweł Sawicki. Mikael lit his cigar, sucking in so hard that his cheeks hollowed. He looked like the eccentric doctor in a children’s story – off-kilter and endearing. Or was he making a great effort to appear that way and was someone else entirely? I again felt as though I’d wandered on to the stage set of a play, and that everyone had his lines but me.

When I finished my account, Mikael said in a horrified voice, ‘This place, this time we’re living through, it defies description.’ He stood up, went to the window and opened the pane, taking in a bottle of vodka that had been chilling on the outside ledge.

‘May I pour you a drink?’ he asked, carrying the bottle to his desk.

‘No, thank you. If I had any vodka, I’d fall right to sleep.’

He laughed sweetly. ‘Still, you should have a smidgen.’ He held his thumb and index finger an inch apart to indicate how much – the gesture of a man used to coaxing children to take their medicine. ‘It’ll help you relax,’ he added. ‘And keep you warm.’

Why are you being so nice to me? I wanted to ask. It should have been obvious to me that everyone sensed that I was barely hanging on, but it wasn’t.

‘I’ll have a drink in a little while,’ I told him.

Sitting down again, he took an amethyst-coloured shot glass from the bottom drawer of his desk and poured himself a drink. After gulping it down, he licked his lips like a cat. Added to his kindness, the intimacy of that gesture – as if we’d been friends for ages – undid me. ‘Please help me, Mikael,’ I pleaded, and hearing my suffocating tone of voice made me want to run.

‘Listen, Erik, I’ll help you any way that I can, but I can’t tell you why the girl in your photograph came to me – at least, not precisely. I promised her that what we discussed would be kept secret, which is why I didn’t keep a file on her. All I can really tell you is that she had a problem for which she needed a physician’s help.’

‘Did her mother know what was wrong with her?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘Was she very ill?’

‘Erik,’ he said gravely, pressing his palms together in a beseeching manner, ‘don’t make me lie to you.’

‘She was very thin – her mother said she’d stopped eating. But maybe she couldn’t eat because of dysentery. Was that it?’

‘Erik, please stop!’

Despite Mikael’s plea, speculations as to the source of Anna’s troubles kept scattering through my head, though nearly all of them seemed ridiculously improbable. I even imagined that she was being slowly poisoned.

‘Could she have gotten pregnant?’ I finally asked. ‘Was that why she was so desperate?’

‘No,’ he replied sourly.

He took a long puff on his cigar, then picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue. His gestures were quick and sure – the movements of a confident man who practised a valued profession, and whose grandchild was still alive.

I slapped his desk. ‘Damn it! Someone must have known what was wrong with her! Please, Mikael, the Nazis cut off her hand!’

I knew I was making a scene, but I couldn’t help myself. I wished I hadn’t ever given him my real name; having a false identity would have enabled me to plead more desperately – or even threaten him.

Shaken, the physician put on his spectacles and refilled his glass slowly.

‘Just tell me if she said anything about my nephew. I’ve a right to know that.’

He looked up, astonished. ‘So they knew each other?’ he asked.

‘I can’t be sure. Though there’s one link between them – the chorus.’

‘I see what you mean. But in that case, Rowy would be the person to talk to.’

A knock on the door interrupted us. It was Mikael’s nurse. ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ll be going, Dr Tengmann,’ she said.

‘Thank you, Anka. Goodnight.’

‘Have a good evening, Dr Cohen,’ she added.

‘Thank you – and thanks for the tea,’ I told her.

After the door was closed, I faced Mikael again. ‘Rowy assured me that Anna never spoke of Adam to him. And my nephew never mentioned the girl to me.’

‘So it seems we’re at a dead end.’

He downed his second vodka, then pressed a troubled hand to his brow.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Just a momentary… what? I don’t know how to describe it.’ He lowered his hand. ‘Despair comes to me when I least expect it. It’s as if I’m in mourning.’

‘For whom, if you don’t mind my asking?’

‘That’s just it – I don’t know.’ He showed me a surprised look. ‘It’s like a new form of grief – for nothing and everything at the same time. I don’t know any word for it.’ He shook his head, displeased with himself. ‘Though I have no right to talk of grief in front of you. I’m sorry.’

I saw I’d misjudged him; Adam was very much on his mind. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ I told him. ‘I’m grateful for your sensitivity to my feelings. And I realize you won’t reveal any more about Anna than you’ve already told me, but do you know of anyone else who might be aware of what was wrong with her?’

‘I’m afraid the girl hardly told me anything about her life. And now…’ He took a second amethyst-coloured shot glass from his desk drawer and poured me a drink.

When I knocked back the vodka in one go, Mikael grinned in admiration.

‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Few subjects could be less important than how I feel,’ I replied, choosing honesty over politeness. ‘But thank you just the same.’

Before leaving, Mikael handed me Adam’s file. In his precise handwriting, in German, the physician had written: ‘Excellent reflexes. Alert. No signs of any disease, but needs to put on weight!!!’

I’ll never forget those three exclamation marks.

He had also written APPROVED FOR THE CHORUS in big letters.

I searched the page for a statistic I’d wanted to check and found it scribbled near the bottom. Adam had been four feet one and three-quarters of an inch in height at the end of November 1940, a quarter of an inch shorter than the measurement I’d recorded for him two weeks prior to that date.

In my mind, I saw myself tilting my pencil in a favourable direction; I hadn’t realized I’d cheated.

‘You can keep it if you want,’ Mikael told me, and when I looked up to thank him, I discovered his eyes were moist. ‘Adam was beautiful,’ he told me.

I was back on the street when I heard my name called. Anka, Dr Tengmann’s nurse, came hurrying towards me, her determined face wrapped tightly in a white headscarf.

‘I could lose my job for this,’ she told me in a rushed voice, ‘but that girl, Anna, she never came to the office – at least not while I was here. And we kept no file on her. Ask yourself why!’

‘But Mikael said that was because…’

Before I could say anything more, Anka turned and hurried away. She looked back at me once over her shoulder. I didn’t see fear, as I’d expected. I saw anger.

CHAPTER 12

Before going home, I went to speak to Dorota. Clutching a floral shawl tightly over her shoulders, she tiptoed out into the hallway to speak to me. ‘I’m sorry, but my husband won’t let anyone come in,’ she whispered.

I explained what I’d learned from Mikael.

Dorota shook her head sceptically. ‘Anna refused to discuss her health with anyone. I can’t believe she would have spoken to him or any other stranger.’

‘So why would Mikael make up a visit from her?’

‘I don’t know.’

When I asked for a list of Anna’s closest friends, along with their addresses, she slipped back inside to fulfil my request. A minute or so later, she slid an envelope under the door.

Dorota had written down two names in her precise script. Both lived across town in the Little Ghetto. I looked at my watch – ten minutes to seven. I’d have to return home to make supper. There wouldn’t be enough time before curfew to question Anna’s friends that evening.

On returning to Stefa’s flat, I discovered that the ghetto health service had sprayed carbolic acid on everything except her bed, since she hadn’t force enough in her coat-hanger arms to get up by herself and had adamantly refused assistance. I found her forehead burning. Her feet, however, were ice. As I covered them with an extra blanket, she said, ‘No, don’t, I have to wash Adam’s white shirt in the tub. Help me stand up.’

‘Why would you need to wash his shirt?’ I asked.

‘He’s being photographed in the morning.’

‘What are you talking about?’

From deep inside the delusion that had overwhelmed her, she replied, ‘All the kids are being photographed for the start of school.’

Offering her the truth at that moment might threaten her fragile stability, so I told her that she was far too ill to do any washing, and that if I got Adam’s white shirt wet now it wouldn’t be dry by morning. ‘But he has other nice shirts he can wear,’ I added, trying to sound cheerful. ‘I’ll iron one after supper.’ I intended to do just that if it would calm her.

‘You’re a bastard!’ she snapped.

‘Stefa, please don’t say that. I’m doing my best.’

‘But you’re always criticizing me!’

Being thought of as an unfair uncle made me frantic, so I took the shirt she wanted out of the hamper in my room. When I brought it to her, she fought to sit up.

‘For the love of God, stay put!’ I ordered. ‘I’ll wash it right after supper.’

She began to cry in silence. Sitting down beside her, I told her I’d hang the wet shirt next to the heater in my room so it would be dry by morning. ‘Don’t worry – Adam will look like a prince for his photo.’

She gazed away. Her lips moved, and twice she mouthed her son’s name. I imagined she was doing calculations about her own life and had discovered that nothing she could do in the future would ever even add up to zero.

‘Stefa,’ I began, but I couldn’t finish my sentence; I couldn’t think of how to phrase my wishes for us without seeming to betray the depth of our grief.

I sat alone at the kitchen table, feeling as though the walls of the room might collapse on me – and that it would be a fitting end. Then I practised Erik Honec’s signature until I settled on a highly ornamented script, with aristocratic flourishes on the E and the H.

The very movement of my hands gave me solace. It meant: I still have options.

At 7.30, Ewa arrived with Helena in order to check on Stefa before curfew. I had only just started on my cabbage and potato-skin soup, and all the people I needed to interview about Adam’s death crowded in upon me as I stood over the stove. Helena stayed with me while Ewa talked to my niece. At the kitchen table, the little girl drew jagged pictures of needle-nosed aeroplanes flying over Warsaw. She told me they were Russian bombers. The city – a confusion of steeples and towers – was empty of people.

‘But where is everyone?’ I asked, fearing they’d been killed.

‘On vacation,’ she replied. ‘It’s summer.’ She pointed to the big yellow sun at the top of her drawing.

I smiled at her, grateful for the warm days and nights in her imagination.

My niece must have told Ewa the nature of her quarrel with me; on hearing the taps in the bathroom running, Helena and I went in and discovered Ewa washing Adam’s shirt in the bathtub. She hung it on a cord we strung across my room.

At just before eight, Ewa kissed me goodnight and led Helena to the door. I tried to give her money for a rickshaw – one of the bicycles mounted with a seat in front that had become common on our island by then – but she refused.

I propped Stefa up with pillows and spooned soup into her mouth, but she ate with inner-turned eyes and said nothing to me.

Then – God knows why – I sat at my desk and wrote a list of all the people I had known who were dead, starting with Adam and Hannah. I counted them when I was done: twenty-five. I spent another hour working on the list and came up with two more. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

Only then did I remember that my mother became a frenzied list-maker after my younger brother was born. Papa and I would find her numbered inventories everywhere around the house. Years later, I asked her about it, and she told me it was the only way she could keep her head above the high water of having two children to raise.

On a whim, I inserted Erik Honec after my mother’s name, and it was a relief to see my alter ego there; it meant I would escape the ghetto one way or another.

I settled into Stefa’s armchair for the night. She stirred only once, some time after midnight, needing to pee, and her fever was down a little in the morning. She thanked me in a strong voice when I handed her a cup of hot tea sweetened with molasses and the sugar crystal I’d saved. I felt she’d returned home and kissed her cheek in welcome. After smearing rhubarb jam on her toast, I fed her pieces on the end of a fork. She joked about my aristocratic table manners, which seemed a very good sign, but while I was in the kitchen making myself some ersatz coffee, she called out, ‘Is Adam’s shirt dry yet?’

I went in to her. Maybe something in my expression reminded her of the truth; her eyes opened wide in horror and she brought her hands to her mouth.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she whispered timidly.

‘Let’s talk,’ I said, rubbing her feet through the covers. ‘You’ll tell me whatever you want, and I’ll make no judgements. I promise.’

I made that vow because I couldn’t bear the thought of being remembered as an unfair uncle after I was gone.

‘No,’ she told me firmly. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

I stood up and retreated to the kitchen. There was a knock on the door while I was staring mindlessly into my coffee. I found Wolfi, Feivel and Sarah looking up at me from the landing. Their little faces were fearful; I suppose they thought that Adam’s death might have turned me against them.

‘Hello, Dr Cohen, we… we came to see Gloria,’ Feivel told me hesitantly.

‘She’s not doing so good,’ I replied. ‘But you can come in and feed her if you like.’

While Feivel and Wolfi spilled seeds into her dish, Sarah carried the budgie’s water cup back from the sink in both her hands, determined not to spill a drop. Her clenched determination gave me an idea.

‘Maybe one of you could adopt Gloria,’ I suggested. ‘Adam would want that.’

Wolfi said, ‘My dad hates pets. And he says birds shit all the time.’

Feivel gazed down, swirling his foot. Sarah bit her lip, looking as if she wanted to dash away.

‘Forget what I said,’ I told them. ‘I was being thoughtless.’

‘No, I’ll take her!’ Feivel announced, and he nodded hard when I looked at him, as if to convince us both.

As the two boys carried the cage downstairs, Sarah looked back at me for a moment, as though to fix me and the apartment in her memory, and I realized – with despair clutching at me – that I’d never see her or any of Adam’s other friends ever again.

At 9.15, I left Stefa alone to visit Mrs Rackemann. She let me into her shop and locked the door with a firm twist of her hand.

The forger she’d hired – who went by the name of Otto – had typed me a document on Nazi stationery identifying Erik Honec as Sub-Director for the Warsaw District of the Reichsministerium des Innern, the Ministry of the Interior. I’d suggested the Reich Census Office, but Mrs Rackemann informed me that Otto had advised something more general, in case I ever embarked on another escapade demanding a slightly different government posting.

She grinned cagily on telling me that – she plainly adored trying to outwit the Nazis.

I tilted the stationery towards the light from her desk lamp. At the top of the sheet of off-white paper, the Nazi emblem – an eagle perched on a wreath centred by a swastika – looked sinisterly impressive. And the embossed stamp at the bottom seemed to be the real thing. As I ran my finger over its surface, Mrs Rackemann said, ‘Otto’s pretty damn good, isn’t he?’

‘A real pro,’ I agreed.

‘He produced papers for the Polish Interior Ministry for several years. He knows what he’s doing – though he wished you’d supplied him with a photograph.’

‘I might have lost my nerve if I’d gone home to get one. Besides, a Pole won’t know what to expect, and I’m not planning on identifying myself to any German officials.’

After I promised her the rest of her payment the next day, Mrs Rackemann handed me a pen for the last detail. I signed my new name with the decisive flourishes I’d practised – a vow of revenge turned to ink.

Having had hundreds of Christian acquaintances before being forced into the ghetto, I’d decided that a change of appearance was in order before I ventured into the Other Side; after all, if someone recognized me and denounced me, I’d be executed on the spot. So before going home, I bought hair dye at a beauty parlour on Nalewki Street.

The homemade concoction turned into a frothy, milky-brown cream when I mixed it with water, and it tickled my scalp. I had my doubts about its effectiveness, but when I washed it off, my hair was black and shiny. The contrast with my ghostly skin and deep wrinkles made me look like an aged flamenco dancer clinging desperately to youth. My eyes seemed smaller, too, as if the I inside me were trapped in a deep cave.

Taking off my clothes and sitting close to my heater, I sponged off weeks of grime as best I could with our mushy ghetto soap. Then I shaved carefully, and dabbed my chin and cheeks with Stefa’s rosewater perfume.

I dressed in my chestnut-brown woollen suit, which I hadn’t worn since the day I’d moved into Stefa’s apartment, but the heavy fabric sagged clownishly off my shrunken shoulders, so I put on a jumper underneath. I didn’t wear my overcoat because it looked like a rag. Better to freeze than risk ruining my disguise.

As a last touch, I went to see Izzy to borrow his Borsalino. He’d recently moved his old army cot into his workshop because three newly arrived cousins of his were living in his apartment and he was feeling cornered.

On opening his door to me, he grimaced. ‘Gottenyu, Erik!What the hell happened to you?’

‘I needed a new identity,’ I explained, stepping inside.

‘And it involves putting a dead crow on your head?’

‘I’m a zookeeper in a Yiddish farce,’ I quipped.

‘They keep typecasting you!’ he observed gleefully; even in grief – especially then – Izzy thrived on repartee.

‘Tell me the truth – could I pass for the me I used to be?’

He sized me up, having to choose between humour and honesty. ‘That depends on which you you intend to impersonate,’ he replied. ‘But why would you want to?’

‘Never mind that. I’ll need your Borsalino. Where is it?’

‘So you’re trying for the romantic lead, after all?’ A lecherous spark went off in his eyes.

‘Listen, if I don’t come back, take any clothing of mine you want. And take my books.’

‘If you’re up to something dangerous, I want to know what it is.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Tell me the condensed version or you can forget my help.’

After I told him about Anna, and showed him my Interior Ministry papers, he made clicking noises with his tongue – Izzy’s code for a risky adventure – then slipped into the stationery warehouse behind his workshop to fetch his Borsalino. I needed to pee and went to the lavatory, which was a tin bucket hidden behind a folding screen. Hanging from the ceiling were paper arrows pointing towards Moscow, New York, Rio de Janeiro and the North Pole. A bigger one, facing southwest, read: Boulogne-Billancourt: 1,300 kilometres; Izzy’s two adult sons – Ryszard and Karl – both worked as aircraft mechanics in that industrial suburb of Paris.

Back in his workroom, he handed me his hat. He already had his muffler on and was buttoning his coat.

‘So, what’s your problem, Dr Freud?’ he asked when he was done, lifting those furry eyebrows of his; I must have been showing him a puzzled look.

‘Nothing,’ I replied; by then, I’d realized that having him join me was the real reason I’d come over.

‘Watch this!’ he said, and he pulled a white silk handkerchief from out of nowhere – a trick from his days of performing magic shows aboard the Bourdonnais, the French ocean liner on which he’d worked as a steward in his youth.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

Folding it in a square, he put it in my breast pocket. ‘Now you look a man not to be taken lightly!’ he observed triumphantly.

‘Or maybe just a well-dressed zookeeper,’ I retorted.

Rabe hadn’t yet arrived at 1 Leszno Street. We paid our ten złoty to a teenage guard wearing diving goggles; the cellar had recently become a rickshaw assembly plant and he doubled as a welder. About twenty men and boys – bare-chested and dripping with sweat – were hammering bicycle wheels, filing fenders, patching tyres… Izzy and I headed past them to the back, as we’d been instructed. The smell of burnt rubber and axel grease packed my nose. We climbed up a set of stairs to a scarred wooden door.

‘Could it be this simple?’ he asked.

I turned the brass handle and pushed open the door. We were in a dimly lit hallway. The guard we’d been told about had a grim moustache and dull eyes. He was eating an apple. Looking us up and down, he said in a gruff Polish, ‘Take off your Jewish armbands.’

Once they were safely hidden in our pockets, he pointed to a rickety wooden staircase at the end of the hallway. ‘One flight up,’ he grumbled.

We came to a door giving out on a courtyard with a marble fountain at the centre: Pan balancing on one leg and playing his flute. Crossing over the flagstones, we entered the front hallway. Empty wooden crates were scattered around. We pushed through the front door into a sunlit street.

Izzy and I stopped right away, staring at the buildings around us like dazed insects after a thunderstorm.

The biggest difference was the smell, though I didn’t realize that until we’d walked for twenty minutes and were standing under the spires of the Holy Cross Church. The pet-shop stink of the ghetto had disappeared.

We whispered our amazement in Polish; we dared not speak Yiddish outside our own territory.

Walking ahead, I tried to regain the confident gait of the Before Time – as I’d come to think of the time prior to the German occupation of Warsaw – but I kept lapsing into the hunched shuffle we’d all acquired. The ghetto paso doble, Izzy called it.

A dozen or so drunken German soldiers were singing disconnected harmonies on a melody I didn’t recognize while wavering along the sidewalk in Zbawiciela Square. Hunching our shoulders, we made ourselves as compact as possible and rushed the other way around the traffic circle.

‘We must look like two fucking matzo balls!’ Izzy whispered to me.

In more favourable circumstances, I’d have burst out laughing.

Disappearing into the crowds on Marszałkowska Street made me shudder with relief. And good memories cheered me, too; Hannah and I used to come shopping here when we were courting – safe from our nosy parents and their gossip-greedy spies.

Feeling safe, I punched Izzy on the arm – hard enough to stun him but not to hurt.

‘What’s that for?’ he asked, feigning anger.

‘For trying to make me laugh in front of German soldiers.’

‘So, what other choice do I have?’ he asked, giving a Yiddish lilt to his question.

I turned in a circle to take in the dimensions of our temporary escape – and to gauge our vulnerability. No one was staring at us. A good sign.

‘The thing that troubles me,’ I told Izzy, ‘is that I don’t think anyone on this side of the border knows yet that Adam is dead. They probably don’t want to know anything of what we’re going through.’

Izzy spoke to me then about how my nephew’s murder had damaged his faith, using his idiosyncratic clockmaker’s metaphors – bent springs, wayward escape wheels… I listened closely to his stop-and-start confessions because I sensed he’d never reveal his heart to me like this inside the ghetto, and I was touched that he would risk talking to me of God, since I’d always been such an obstinate atheist. When he was done, I stared into the despair of his eyes, and it seemed that our friendship was the only way either of us would make it out of the frigid ocean we’d found ourselves in.

I whispered to him the one-line poem I’d been saving: ‘Children are transformed into adults on passing through the threshold of Gehenna.’

‘And what about adults themselves?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have to think about that.’

As we walked on, I realized the time had arrived to broach a subject that had come close to drowning our friendship forty years earlier. ‘Listen, Izzy, I’m sorry for disappointing you all those years ago. I was awful to you. Forgive me.’

He came to a halt, stunned.

‘I should have apologized years ago,’ I continued. ‘I was a fool.’

It was good that we were speaking Polish; it was easier to venture out of my usual self in a language that wasn’t the one I’d been living in of late.

He gazed down, unsure of how to reply. His jaw was throbbing. ‘You didn’t know what damage you could do. We were both too young to behave like men.’

For men, he risked using the word mensch, and its Yiddish nuances implied that we hadn’t been ready to be good and generous with each other – let alone, with everyone else.

He and I stepped a little lighter across the rest of the journey that day, and I realized it no longer mattered that we’d never shared a bed; we were together now. Our renewed closeness was the one thing for which we owed the Nazis our thanks.

Soon, a troubling question came to me, however: might Adam’s killer also have been freed from previous taboos by the German occupation?

Paweł’s building was in the Stary Mokotów neighbourhood, an elegant section of the city guarded by broad, bare-limbed linden and birch trees. Two marble caryatids with smashed noses flanked the entryway. The tile floor – a checquerboard pattern – was sticky. The post box for 5B was labelled Sawicki.

‘I really hope Paweł’s mother will be as intimidated by Germans as most Poles,’ I told Izzy.

He and I had reasoned that the boy’s father would be at work.

‘Growl at her every now and again – like you do at me,’ he replied, grinning. He gave me a little shove towards the staircase – one soldier to another. ‘Festina lente’ – hurry slowly – he added, shaking a teacherly finger; it was what our Latin professor, Dr Borkowski, used to tell us when the bell rang at the end of class.

Izzy waited downstairs. On the fifth-floor landing, I untied my scarf, took off my gloves and put on the Nazi armband that Mrs Rackemann had managed to secure for me. The swastika raised gooseflesh, but it also freed my imagination – the paradox of a good deception.

An attractive woman in a pink, floor-length nightgown – with silly carnation-like tufts of fur on her cuffs – answered my knocks. I’d have guessed she was forty, though her chestnut-brown hair was cut in a long fringe, which had the effect of making her look girlish. She had an intelligent face, but hard.

‘Mrs Sawicki?’ I asked, taking off Izzy’s Borsalino.

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Honec. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m from the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

I gave my voice the shading of an Austrian accent – I’d decided that, like me, Honec had lived in Vienna for a time.

We shook hands. Hers was cold but soft, and her long fingernails were painted cherry red; she plainly didn’t need to do housework, even under German occupation.

‘Is your husband in?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m sorry, he’s at work, but perhaps I can help you. Is something wrong?’

‘Nothing terribly important. It’s just that we’ve lost track of a young woman – Jewish. I’m told that you might know her.’

‘Unlikely – I don’t socialize with Jews.’

‘Very wise,’ I observed. ‘But I’d still like to speak with you a moment.’

‘I’m not yet dressed, as you can see.’

‘I have my orders,’ I replied stiffly, ‘and I wouldn’t want you to have to come down to our office. It’s way across town.’

‘Do you have some identification?’

I took out Otto’s handiwork and handed it to her. She scanned the text quickly – too quickly, as though trying to convince me she was absolutely fluent in German.

‘All right, come in,’ she said, handing me back my forgery but not bothering to hide her frown.

One test passed. I stepped inside. The floor was handsome, dark parquet, and the scent of fresh paint made my nose itch. I was evidently ready to embrace any clue, no matter how small; I pictured the blood from Anna’s severed hand splattering against the walls, which had been given a concealing coat of whitewash.

Mrs Sawicki wore gold slippers tipped by tiny pom-poms of fur, exactly like the ones on her sleeves. It seemed so ludicrous a fashion that it could only work in the movies.

‘Come this way,’ she told me welcomingly.

Passing an antique wooden dresser and secretary, we reached a large sitting room in the centre of which lay a plush red rug the exact shade of Mrs Sawicki’s fingernails. On opposite sides of the rug were a white leather sofa and three Art Nouveau armchairs whose backs were shaped like lyres and painted gold. The seats and legs were black.

I was dealing with a woman eager to go well with her furniture and decorations, but it was the space between and around things that put me on edge; having become used to our cramped clutter, this planet of comfort and wealth seemed menacing.

‘Sit here, Mr Honec,’ Mrs Sawicki told me, gesturing towards her sofa, which faced away from the windows. The buildings across the street crouched beneath the leaden sky, seeming to shrink away from winter. It was the tropics in here, however; the stove in the corner of the room – adorned with pink and white tiles in a geometric pattern – was radiating more heat than I’d felt in months. As I sat down, I thought bitterly of Stefa, one mile west and shivering under a mountain of blankets. Dislocation – heavy and hopeless – was the feeling that pulsed at the back of my head.

I was already hot, but I kept my suit coat on to appear more authoritative. I placed my hat beside me.

Mrs Sawicki sat opposite me in one of her small golden thrones. It was obvious by now that she was royalty in her own imagination, and not at all intimidated by me.

‘So, how is life at the Ministry of the Interior?’ she asked, the amused twist to her lips telling me that she regarded my work as unimportant. Leaning forward, she took a cigarette from an ivory box on the glass table between us.

‘With all the shipments of Jews coming in, we’ve been busy,’ I replied, standing up and offering her a light. She brushed my hand as she took it – a studied gesture, and a cliché, but the twinge in my gut, like a bolt opening, meant she had achieved her effect. She funnelled the smoke towards the ceiling and crossed her slender legs.

I’d purchased a pack of Gauloises cigarettes to enhance my deception. Before sitting down, I stuck one in my mouth and lit it, then surveyed the room.

On the glass coffee table between us I discovered a stack of Film Kurier magazines. The cover on top showed Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor leaning towards a passionate kiss. I remembered how disgusted Dorota had been that Anna and Paweł had had secret trysts at the cinema.

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you speak wonderful Polish for a German,’ Mrs Sawicki told me.

‘My family moved to Warsaw when I was thirteen,’ I replied.

‘How nice for you. Where did your family live?’

She was probably testing for the ghetto. ‘Tamka Street,’ I answered – it was where my uncle Franz had lived. ‘So my father could walk to his classes. He was a professor at the university.’

‘I see. Honec – that sounds Czech.’

‘My father was from Prague and my mother from Vienna – which was where I was born.’

‘An interesting upbringing, no doubt,’ she observed generously, and yet she smoked with abrupt, irritated gestures.

Having repulsed her first attack, I grew bolder. By the entranceway to the bedrooms I’d spotted a Japanese watercolour of a yellow finch sitting on a tip of bamboo. Behind the exuberant little bird was a mist-covered mountain. I asked Mrs Sawicki if I could take a closer look.

‘By all means,’ she replied, energized by my interest.

As I stepped up to the watercolour, I brushed my hand against the wall, which proved to be completely dry – as it would be if Anna had been killed here on 24 January.

‘It’s by Sakai Hōitsu,’ Mrs Sawicki told me. ‘Japanese, late eighteenth century – Rinpa school.’

She was happy to show off her knowledge of Eastern art. I watched her smoke. She watched me watching. She adored the small spotlight I focused on her.

‘The finch and the mountain seem to be made of the same substance,’ I observed.

‘And I believe that substance is called paint,’ replied Mrs Sawicki, grinning.

A genuinely witty comment, and to please her I laughed.

All the artwork on her walls seemed to be from the Orient – and to be intended to tell guests that she was a cultured woman who had travelled far beyond the borders of Poland. So I ventured a guess: ‘Was your father in the diplomatic corps?’

‘I’m impressed, Mr Honec!’ she replied, making a small, deferential bow. ‘But it was Grandfather who was the ambassador in the family.’ In perfect German – proving my earlier conclusion about her language skills to be wrong – she added, ‘After finishing his career, he settled in Vienna. Whenever I visited him, he loved to take me out to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, on the Opera Ring. They had the best Sachertorte in all Austria – despite what the owners of the Sacher Hotel would like you to believe. Did you ever dine there, by any chance?’

Mrs Sawicki was trying to catch me out. Was I not acting my part cleverly enough?

‘If you’ll excuse a small correction,’ I told her, emphasizing my Austrian accent, ‘the Imperial is on the Kaerntner Ring. And I’m afraid it was beyond my father’s means.’

‘So it is, Mr Honec, so it is.’ Her lips were pursed with amusement again; she was aware that I knew she’d been testing me. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she told me in Polish, ‘I’ll get dressed so we can talk properly.’

Mrs Sawicki still didn’t seem to regard me as a worthy opponent. As though to prove her wrong, I stubbed out my cigarette as soon as she had swept out of the room and started searching her furniture for anything related to Anna or Adam. In the cabinet below the Victrola, classical symphonies predominated, but I found a record by Hanka Ordonówna with Paweł’s signature on the centre label. Wouldn’t he have taken a favourite recording with him to boarding school?

In the secretary in the foyer were envelopes printed with Mrs Sawicki’s name in gold lettering, along with a dry inkwell and a puckered old apple that must have been hidden and forgotten, possibly by a younger sibling of Paweł’s. On a sudden whim, I took three envelopes and stuffed them in my coat pocket. In the dresser were linens and a set of Jugendstil silverware in a wooden case. Easing it open, I lifted out six demitasse spoons. When I placed them beside the envelopes, the rest of my visit with Mrs. Sawicki was destined to beat with the damning evidence of thievery concealed in my pocket.

I’d needed to take something of value from her. I didn’t know or care why. My belly was aching with hunger and anxiety, and that seemed far more important.

I sat back down when I heard Mrs Sawicki’s footsteps approaching and lit another cigarette. She entered in a tightly fitted long blue dress. Her high heels were black and her lipstick blood red. Her eyes were thickly shaded with dark brown mascara, so that they looked bruised. She’d become the dramatic heroine of an Erich Maria Remarque novel.

Walking to the coffee table in front of me, she straightened the Film Kurier I’d noticed so that it was flush with the others and then sat opposite me again, joining her hands together in her lap as if afraid to be too expressive; perhaps my presence was worrisome, after all. Maybe her beloved Paweł had murdered Anna – or had been witness to a tragic accident – and she was worried I’d learn the truth and bring scandal on the family.

I took off my coat because I was sweating heavily. ‘I’ll get to the point,’ I told my host. ‘The missing girl’s name is Anna Levine. I believe she might have come here. Her mother says that your son was her boyfriend.’

Mrs Sawicki forced a laugh. ‘Paweł would never take a Źydóweczka as a girlfriend.’ She pronounced Jew-girl as if spitting out dirt. I’d have liked to drag her back to the ghetto and leave her to fend for herself for a few weeks.

‘Still,’ I told her, ‘I know she came here on the twenty-fourth of January.’

She pinched a piece of lint from the hem of her dress. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘She’d needed to talk to Paweł,’ I observed. ‘She was ill, and she wanted his help.’

‘I told you, my son didn’t know any Źydóweczka named Anna.’ Noticing the curl of ash at the tip of my cigarette, Mrs Sawicki moved the crystal ashtray closer to me.

‘I’d prefer to keep our talk friendly,’ I told her. ‘Are you sure you never met Anna?’

‘Absolutely.’

I tapped the ash on to the rug. She gave me a murderous look but didn’t move. I had the feeling she could have held her hand over a candle flame to spite me.

‘I have a reliable witness who told me Anna was here,’ I challenged her; my anger was giving me a kind of reckless courage.

She stood up and walked to the window, her steps precise, barely controlling her rage. When she turned, her eyes targeted me. ‘Paweł and the girl went out a few times,’ she told me, ‘but as soon as I found out, I put a stop to it.’

‘And Anna came here on the twenty-fourth of January.’

‘How could I possibly remember the exact date? In any case, when she came to my door, I told her that Paweł was at boarding school, but the silly girl didn’t believe me. She insisted on coming in – she even had the nerve to search his room without my permission.’ Mrs Sawicki grimaced. ‘She stank up the apartment – for a week it smelled like a stables in here.’

Because we have no hot water, and we have run out of proper soap, I wanted to shout at her. Instead, I said, ‘Jews are filth.’

‘No, Mr Honec, if they were just filth,’ she replied in a lecturing voice, ‘they wouldn’t represent such a danger to us. I’m afraid they’re much more than that.’

‘Then how would you describe them?’ I asked.

‘As a subversive story that has finally come to an end.’

Her words rattled me, and I nodded my agreement to cover my unease. ‘If only you’re right,’ I told her. ‘Now, do you know where Anna went after she left here?’

‘Back to her stables,’ she replied, grinning as if she’d made another witticism.

‘Did she say if she was going to meet a friend?’ I asked.

‘She told me nothing. She was only here a minute – less than that…’

‘Did you see anything special on her hands – a ring or a bracelet?’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘Think back, if you can.’

‘What are you implying?’ she bristled. ‘You can’t possibly think she was wearing anything my son had given her! Mr Honec, this was just a minor fling for Paweł. It meant nothing.’

I stood up and handed her my photograph of Adam. ‘Have you seen this boy?’

She shook her head.

‘His name was Adam. Did Anna mention a boy with that name, by any chance?’

‘No.’

‘Did she give you anything? A letter?’

Mrs Sawicki glared at me over her nose as if I was trying her patience. I took a last puff on my cigarette and crushed it out on the windowsill. Tears welled in her eyes.

‘If you’re holding something back from me,’ I threatened, ‘then your husband will lose his job.’

‘Mr Honec, it’s clear to me that you don’t understand the Poles. We’re a proud people who have been oppressed for centuries, and we don’t like being given orders by foreigners.’ She was sitting up straight – she regarded herself as heroic and was posing for later recall.

‘Who’s giving orders?’ I asked in an amused voice. ‘I’m just asking questions.’

‘Questions can be orders under certain circumstances.’

‘You’re a clever lady, Mrs Sawicki.’

‘You better believe it!’ she exclaimed, as if she were giving me a warning.

‘But I don’t need to be clever,’ I told her. ‘Because I make up the rules as I go.’ I knocked my dead cigarette on to the parquet with the back of my hand.

The tendons on her neck stood out threateningly. ‘You are, I suppose, aware you have no manners?’ she demanded in an aristocratic voice.

‘I’m only rude when my patience is being tested,’ I retorted.

‘The Jewish slut gave me a photograph for my son,’ she admitted. ‘She’d written something on the back, but I burned it.’

‘What did she write?’

‘I don’t read Paweł’s correspondence!’ she snarled.

It was my turn to laugh.

‘I don’t appreciate being ridiculed by old Austrians!’

‘Then who do you enjoy being ridiculed by?’ I asked with a provocative smile.

‘Who or what I enjoy is not your concern.’

‘That’s true – nothing about you concerns me,’ I shot back with deadly contempt, ‘except what you know of Anna Levine.’

‘I didn’t read what she wrote!’ she shouted.

‘Mrs Sawicki,’ I said more gently, ‘if we banter back and forth, we’ll just keep offending each other. Just tell me what Anna wrote to Paweł.’

She straightened the shoulders of her dress, considering her options. At length, she said, ‘She wrote that she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called. She had important news for him. She begged him to call her or at least send her his new address.’

‘Which he never did, because you never told your son that Anna had come here.’

‘Of course, not. Why would I help her trap my son?’

‘So you were worried he really was in love with her,’ I observed.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Do you really think a fifteen-year-old knows what love is?’

‘Do you?’ I asked pointedly.

‘Mr Honec, you can be very annoying.’

‘In any case, it’s curious that Anna disappeared just after visiting you,’ I told her.

‘I know nothing about what happened to her after she left here.’

‘Write down Paweł’s new address for me.’

She went to the secretary in the foyer, took out a sheet of paper and scribbled quickly. Paweł’s boarding school had an address in Zurich. Folding the paper in four, I put it in my pocket, and on a hunch, I said, ‘Did you think you’d fool me so easily?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Paweł is still here in Warsaw, isn’t he?’

‘Wait here.’ She disappeared through the door at the side of the sitting room and returned with an envelope bearing a Zurich postmark. Taking out the letter, which was written on thin blue paper, she handed it to me. ‘If you look at the date and signature, you’ll see Paweł wrote it two months ago.’

She lit another cigarette as I confirmed what she said. Her contemptuous stare gave me an exaggerated sense of being nowhere close to where I wanted to be. I had the feeling the world was speaking to me, but at a pitch so high that I couldn’t hear the message. I handed her back her son’s letter, though, like Anna, I wasn’t convinced that everything was as it seemed.

‘Now get out of my apartment,’ she ordered harshly, ‘or I’ll call my husband and have you arrested. He’s an important judge, and Governor Frank is a family friend. So if you think you will ever do anything to hurt my Paweł, then you are…’

‘If Governor Frank were such a friend,’ I cut in, ‘then why did you tell me the truth about Anna? You have to know that I suspect that you might be behind her disappearance. Or is it your son who’s responsible?’

Mrs Sawicki shot me a hateful look. ‘I only told you about the girl because she means nothing to me or my son – dead or alive.’

‘I never said she was dead!’ I declared.

‘Hah!’ she sneered. ‘If you think you’ve caught me out, then you’re a fool, Mr Honec. You must suspect she’s dead or you wouldn’t be here. In any case, I can’t imagine why she means anything to the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

‘That, Mrs Sawicki, is no concern of yours,’ I told her with poisonous calm, and before she could come up with a reply, I went to retrieve my coat and hat from the sofa.

When I returned to the foyer, it was clear from her contemptuous face that we had nothing more to say to each other. I nodded by way of goodbye and reached for the door handle, turning away from her. A mistake. I felt a burn near my elbow. She’d pressed something through my sweater into my skin. Stinging with pain, I swung out my arm and caught her on the mouth with the back of my hand, knocking her into the wall. Righting herself, she dropped her cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with the toe of her shoe. Reaching up to her lip, which was cut, she took some blood on to her fingertip and licked it.

Tears of shock and pain had welled in my eyes. I wiped them away roughly.

‘Now you’ll never go anywhere again without a scar from me!’ she told me, and she laughed in a triumphant burst.

Mrs Sawicki was treacherous enough to have murdered Anna, and she was obviously given to violent outbursts, but why would she have taken the girl’s hand?

Might Paweł have been so passionately in love with Anna that he gave her a precious family heirloom – a bracelet – without thinking of how angrily his mother would react? After all, Mrs Sawicki had become particularly defensive when I’d mentioned Anna’s jewellery. Maybe Anna had kept the gift concealed from her mother and friends. On the day she ventured out of the ghetto, she somehow sealed the clasp so that it couldn’t be taken from her without also taking her hand.

And yet with a judge for a husband, Mrs Sawicki would have found a legal way to recover any keepsake that Paweł had given Anna. She would have claimed, in fact, that the girl had stolen it. No government official would have believed Anna’s word against hers.

Furthermore, it seemed impossible that Mrs Sawicki could have had anything to do with Adam’s murder. How would she even have known of his existence?

In the lobby, I took Izzy’s arm and rushed him away, sure that we’d be in danger as long as we remained nearby. Despite myself, I’d begun to fear that Mrs Sawicki could stop my heart with a single, well-directed thought.

She was gazing down at us from her balcony as we crossed the street. And all that day she would wheel above my thoughts like a bird of prey.

We made it to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street at just past one in the afternoon. I recognized the balding shop manager who’d sold me a floral pin for Liesel two years before, but he didn’t know me, which was a relief. Still, Mrs Sawicki had unnerved me and I fumbled Hannah’s ring when I took it out of my pocket. It crashed on to his wooden desk.

He snatched it up with an agile hand. ‘Got ya!’ he exclaimed.

‘Thanks,’ I told him.

‘You needn’t have worried,’ he observed. ‘Diamonds are a lot harder than people.’

A surprising comment. Izzy looked at me sideways, which meant don’t let him trick you into saying anything about yourself.

The jeweller put a loop in his eye and turned the ring to catch the diffuse winter light from his window. At length, he said, ‘I’ll give you two thousand seven hundred for it.’ His toothy smile meant that he was giving me a great deal.

‘It’s worth three times that,’ I stated for the record.

‘Not to someone in your position,’ he retorted.

The moist chill at the back of my neck was my fear that he did remember me – and knew I was a Jew. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, figuring I might try to intimidate him.

‘You badly need cash or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Three thousand five hundred,’ Izzy said, ‘or we go elsewhere and you lose big.’ He spoke with a Jimmy Cagney snarl to his words.

‘Your bodyguard?’ the jeweller asked me, smirking. His comment was meant to put Izzy in his place, since he wasn’t quite five foot four even on his best day.

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been his bodyguard for sixty years,’ my old friend replied.

And then he took a gun out of his coat pocket.

‘Shit!’ the jeweller exclaimed, jumping up from his stool.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ I whisper-screamed at Izzy.

‘Protecting us,’ he replied calmly.

‘Don’t shoot me!’ the man pleaded. Taking a step back, he held up both his hands as if to stop an onrushing carriage.

The pistol was bulky and black – and stunningly dangerous. ‘Does it work?’ I asked.

‘You bet,’ Izzy told me happily. ‘It’s German, and I just cleaned it the other day.’ He jiggled it: ‘Very sensitive – might even go off accidentally…’ Here, he targeted his vengeful eyes on the jeweller – ‘and kill the rudest person in the room. Now who do you think that might be?’

‘There’s… there’s no need for violence,’ the man assured him in a trembling voice.

‘Glad we agree,’ Izzy replied. He kissed the barrel of the gun, then held the tip to his ear, pretending to listen closely. ‘Right, you got it, baby,’ he said, as if he were a hitman speaking to his girlfriend. He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘Marlene wants to know if we get our three thousand?’ he asked. ‘She’s concerned. And when she’s concerned, it’s best to pay attention. You got that?’

‘I understand. I’ll give you… two thousand nine hundred.’

The jeweller still wanted to bargain? This was craziness! Izzy caught my glance and raised his shoulders to prompt my reply. I could see he was looking forward to bragging about his performance.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

‘It’ll take me at least an hour to get the money,’ the jeweller told us. ‘Come back at two-thirty.’

‘Why in God’s name did you bring a gun?’ I asked Izzy as we hurried away. I was stomping over the cobbles, worried that someone had seen his weapon through the shop window.

‘You should be thanking me,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘I’ve cured your paso doble!’

I scowled at him, which made him flap his hand at me as if I was being a pest. ‘Look, Erik, ‘Did you really think I was going to venture into a city run by anti-Semitic cavemen with just Yiddish curses to defend us? Sorry, but I ain’t that meshugene.’

‘Where’d you get it anyway?’ I asked, conceding his point.

‘It was Papa’s. It’s an 1896 Model 2 Bergman – five millimetre.’ Whispering, he said, ‘Feels damn good in my hand. Maybe I was born to be a gunslinger!’

‘Do you really know how to use it?’

‘Erik, it doesn’t require a doctorate from the Sorbonne,’ he replied, snorting. ‘It takes a five-round clip – couldn’t be easier. Besides, you learn a lot about a pistol when you take it apart and give it a cleaning. It’s a lot simpler to put back together than a Swiss cuckoo clock, I can tell you that!’ He took my arm. ‘I thought it was a good touch my kissing the pistol – and calling it Marlene. Nobody would think a Jew would do that.’

As we walked down Spacerowa Street, Izzy and I debated whether the jeweller would keep up his end of our bargain. We could easily believe that his greed would win out over his anger – and whatever suspicions he had about us – but we also knew he might simply pick up the phone and call the police. So we decided to keep watch on his shop from a fabric store down the street. We chose that particular locale because Izzy was eager to buy a few yards of tweed for a warm pair of winter trousers.

If no police showed up, we’d go back to get our money at 2.30.

I wanted to wash the burn on my arm with cold water, and the shop owner was kind enough to let me use the sink in his loo, where I inspected the damage. Mrs Sawicki was right – there’d be a scar. My skin was throbbing. Splashing water on it did little good.

Back at my post by the front door, I discovered that the coast was still clear. As the minutes clicked past, I began to believe that I’d been needlessly apprehensive. Hope that one has chanced upon the road back to the way things used to be is apparently a strong desire in those who’ve been locked outside their previous lives.

Izzy was looking at different herringbone patterns on the counter, delighted with his range of options. The mystery of Anna’s connection to Adam was still nagging at me, and after a couple of minutes I went to him.

‘Imagine you’re fourteen years old,’ I whispered. ‘You’re in trouble, and you need your boyfriend’s help, but he’s in Switzerland and his mother has just treated you like an insect. You can’t talk to your parents, because you’re a prisoner in their home. So where do you go?’

He closed his eyes to consider my question. ‘I’m not sure, let me think about it,’ he finally replied. A couple of minutes later, after he’d picked out the fabric he wanted, he called me over and said, ‘Erik, Anna would have gone back to the one person who’d treated her well – Mikael Tengmann.’

‘That’s what I figured,’ I replied, ‘except that Mikael’s nurse told me she was never at his office. But let’s assume he did see her, and that she wanted to talk to him again, where would she have gone to see him?’

‘At his home.’

‘No, I don’t think so – his office is in his home.’

A half a minute or so later, when I peeked out the door, a Gestapo officer was standing outside Jawicki’s, about fifty paces away. He was putting on black leather gloves. Parked next to him was a black Mercedes.

I realized we’d been fools not to simply leave this part of town and offer Hannah’s ring to another jeweller. We were colossal amateurs at this life of subterfuge.

‘Is there a back door that leads to some other street?’ I asked the owner, who was ringing up Izzy’s purchase.

He frowned at me, and I could see he thought that we were up to no good.

Grinning in what I hoped was a charming way, I told him I’d spotted someone I owed money to walking down the street; a stupid lie, but what could I say?

He told me there was only the front door, so I made Izzy pay quickly and then steered him there. ‘The Gestapo are on to us,’ I whispered. ‘When we get outside, don’t look towards Jawicki’s. Just walk slowly to the right.’

Stepping on to the sidewalk, we heard no screams or whistles, but after twenty or so paces, when I looked back to see what was happening, the Gestapo officer had his gun drawn and was staring at me; the jeweller must have told him what we looked like. My turning round had only confirmed that we were the suspects he was after.

I must have groaned or given away my panic in some other way; Izzy looked back.

‘We’re fucked!’ he whispered.

‘We’ve got to run!’ I told him.

We took off west on Szucha Street and made it to Rakowiecka before Izzy’s arthritis made him double over. Panting, he pushed me off. ‘Get going!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll shoot the Nazi when he gets close.’

I felt as if everything I’d ever lived for were turning slowly around this one moment, but I wasn’t about to let Izzy sacrifice himself for me.

‘I’m too tired to run,’ I replied. ‘You’re stuck with me.’

By now, the Gestapo officer had turned the corner – no more than sixty yards from us. He was in good shape, and young. A sense of doom pounded in my chest.

‘Erik!’

Izzy had stumbled forward into the doorway of an apartment house and was waving me towards him.

I joined him in the dark hallway. My throat felt as if it had been scraped with a rasp. The burn on my arm was aching.

‘You think he saw us come in here?’ Izzy asked in a whisper.

‘Probably. And anyway, people on the street noticed and will denounce us. Come on,’ I said, grabbing his arm, ‘let’s get out of here!’

We pushed through the rear door into the courtyard, which had been dug up to make a garden, though winter had starved it to a barren tangle of skeletal vines and brambles. A strongly built, middle-aged woman in a dark headscarf, plaid overcoat and frumpy woollen slippers was bent over in the far corner, pulling out metal stakes around which clung the withered tendrils of dead sweet peas. Behind her, the remains of tomato plants tortured by the wind and cold crumpled against a rusted trellis. The woman’s torn gloves dangled from the rim of her lopsided wooden barrow, which looked like a relic from the Iron Age.

Today, in my mind, I see her as though she were symbolic of all the women who bear misery with lips sealed to silence.

She looked up at Izzy and me, staring at my armband.

‘We mean no harm,’ I assured her in Polish.

She picked up her spade, but not in a threatening way. She stood with it, her posture rigid, as though she were posing for a portrait. I threw down my armband. ‘We’re not Nazis,’ I told her, opening my hands. ‘We’re in the Resistance and we’re in trouble.’

The woman’s face showed the indifference of stone. After leaning her spade against her barrow, she bent over, pulled out another stake and tossed it with a harsh clang into the pile she’d made.

Izzy and I were still gasping for breath. To be sixty-seven years old in the Polish winter is to know the limits of the body.

‘Thank God we didn’t go far away from Jawicki’s,’ Izzy told me.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘If we’d come back only when we were supposed to, the Mercedes would have been hidden around the corner. We’d have never known that that son-of-a-bitch called the Gestapo until it was too late.’

A brick wall, five feet high, separated us from a second apartment house at the back. A cane-work chair had been put there – for kids to hoist themselves over the wall and take a winter shortcut to the next street, most likely.

‘Come on!’ I told Izzy, pointing to the chair. ‘Let’s try our luck.’

We’d just started forward when the door behind us opened. Out stepped the Gestapo officer who’d been chasing us. He was holding a pistol.

CHAPTER 13

‘Don’t move!’ our assailant ordered in German.

He was no more than twenty years old, with copper-coloured hair shining under his cap and long blond eyelashes. He’s just a rabbit of a boy, and if I don’t lose my nerve…

‘I’m from the Reich Census Bureau,’ I told him, ‘and this man is helping me.’

He looked at my swastika armband on the ground and frowned. ‘I know who you are, so shut up and put up your hands!’

We did as he said, but Izzy gave me a sideways look, as if he was about to pull the cord of some mad plan.

‘Not yet!’ I whispered to him in Polish; I thought I could still talk my way out of this.

‘Shut your snout!’ the German yelled.

Below my frantic heartbeat, I heard the metallic scratch of another stake landing in the woman’s pile. She was still gardening – it might have been comic under other circumstances.

‘Stay still!’ the Nazi ordered Izzy. ‘And you, get on your knees!’ he told me.

‘If you let us get on our way,’ I told him, ‘I’ll give you five hundred złoty.’

‘If you want a bullet in your head, keep talking!’ he growled.

I thought he was going to search me for the pistol that the jeweller must have warned him about, but when I was kneeling he jabbed the muzzle of his gun into my ear. Panic surged through me from my legs up to the top of my head. My bladder opened, and in a trembling voice, I said, ‘You’re too young to want my death on your conscience.’

‘I told you to shut up!’ he shouted. ‘And don’t move!’

‘You!’ he snarled, turning to Izzy, ‘throw down your gun! And do it slowly.’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy lifting it out.

‘That’s it… Toss it near my feet.’

The pistol landed by the German and made a little hop. It’s over for us now, I thought.

Behind us, a window squealed open. I closed my eyes, and a deep silence opened around me. I imagined I was falling into it, and I wanted to keep falling – for each second to stretch towards the infinite. Who wouldn’t want more time?

‘You!’ the Gestapo man called to the woman behind us. ‘Get over here!’

I opened my eyes to find the Nazi sneering at her. ‘Who gave you permission to dig up this courtyard?’ he demanded.

I realized that boys holding guns were brutalizing women all over Europe.

She made no reply. She clutched her thoughts deep inside her – as though they were children she’d never give up to an enemy.

‘Do you speak a little German?’ the young man demanded of her.

‘Ja,’ she replied indifferently, wiping her runny nose.

He licked his lips. ‘Go to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street. You understand?’ When she nodded, he added, ‘Tell the Gestapo officer there to come right here. And don’t dawdle. If he’s not here in two minutes, I’ll put a bullet in your friend’s head!’

She took two steps, then swivelled around with quiet grace. Standing at the centre of a world over which no man had any power, she opened her eyes wide enough to hold all her fury and raised her spade.

The German was staring down at me. He’d already forgotten about her.

In the second before she swung, she drew her lips back over her chipped brown teeth. I’ll never forget her look of spiteful hate; the transformation seemed worthy of a devil in a painting by Bruegel. Then I heard her sharp intake of breath. So did the Gestapo officer. Turning, he caught the blow on the side of his face. With a guttural scream, he fell to one knee. His cap landed several feet away, on a patch of muddy ice. Clamping his hand over his battered and bloody ear, he pointed his gun at her, but before he could pull the trigger, she clouted him again, grunting. It seemed an act of vengeance against years of mistreatment. His nose and cheekbone shattered. I’d never heard bone breaking before, but the crack was unmistakable. An explosion of blood splattered over my face and on to my coat. I wiped the spray off my cheeks as the German fell forward on to his belly, his hands splayed out, his fingers arched like a crab’s legs. His breaths came in desperate gulps. While trying to raise himself, he groaned. He spoke in a low grumble, as well. I made out the word unrecht – wrong.

Did it seem wrong to him that an illiterate Polish woman hadn’t followed his orders?

I stood up. The German’s right hand had curled around his gun. I stepped down hard on it, and the crunch of his fingers was the sound of the new identity I was making for myself. Shrieking, he collapsed forward. ‘God, no!’ he shouted.

Bending down, I took the pistol. I pointed it at his head. I expected him to look at me, but he pressed himself down into the ground. His lips moved. Maybe he was praying to the earth – or to whatever god he hoped was watching.

We’ll never know if I’d have fired; carefully, patiently, as though all of nature were on her side and nothing could go wrong, the woman put one foot on each side of the Nazi’s legs. I knew what she was about to do, but I didn’t stop her. Instead, I took a step back to give her room.

Regret for that comes to me only infrequently, and only when I think of his parents.

It isn’t that hard to murder a man. A silently enraged Polish woman taught me that.

And yet it must have seemed impossible to the German. How could he meet death in a rusted curve of Slavic iron, five hundred miles from home?

The brutality of her strike made Izzy gasp, then reach for me.

She opened a gash so deep in the Nazi’s forehead that I saw a white flash of bone before blood flooded the wound. His life sluiced down his cheek and spilled on to the earth. With a gurgling sound, he tilted to his side and his jaw fell open.

Heniek, what do you suppose young men think of when they know that they will never again see their home, and the fifty years of future they’d counted on is gone?

What could I have done differently…?

Ask my parents to forgive me for dying young…

No, I don’t know either. I went to my death already an old man. The expectations are different.

The youth’s head sagged. His eyes were open but saw nothing.

The woman was alone in the world with Izzy and me. We three shared the fractured skull of a young man whose name we would never learn. With our eyes, we passed the finality of his death between ourselves like a crust of hard bread.

Izzy picked up his gun.

It was the puddle of blood spreading beneath the young German’s head that made me want to run. I imagined the brown icicles that would hang from his chin that evening. I reached into my coat pocket and handed the woman the demitasse spoons I’d stolen from Mrs Sawicki. She took them in her dirt-encrusted hand and nodded her thanks.

‘Był she grumbled – ‘He looks heavy – I’ll need the wheelbarrow.’ Those were the only words she ever spoke to Izzy and me – the woman who saved our lives.

CHAPTER 14

Izzy had done business for years with Wysocki Jewellers on Elektoralna Street. Though just a small neighbourhood shop, it had the advantage of being on our way home.

To avoid being spotted, we walked a mile east to the banks of the Vistula and made our way north along a tangled path towards the medieval-looking towers of the Poniatowski Bridge. From there, we headed west into the city centre. We went slowly, stopping often, too exhausted and troubled to exchange more than a few words.

It was nearly two hours later when we finally made it to the jewellery shop. Only then did I notice that Izzy no longer had his tweed fabric.

‘I tossed the bag away while we were running,’ he told me, shrugging off his irritation.

Inside the shop was a wiry young man sitting behind a bulky, old-fashioned desk, hunched over a book, lost to the world. Despite the cold, Izzy and I were sweating heavily, and his arthritis had him close to tears.

‘That’s Andrzej,’ he told me, ‘the eldest, and a good boy, but’ – here, Izzy tapped his temple and added, ‘not much up here – der shoyte ben pikholtz.’

Andrzej looked up on hearing the bells on the door tinkle. ‘Mr Nowak, what a surprise!’ he exclaimed gleefully, coming around the counter with his arms open.

After hugging Izzy, the young man remembered that nosy neighbours might be watching. Locking the door with a decisive click, he invited us into his storeroom. Once we were safely out of view, I introduced myself and shook his hand.

Andrzej’s hair was a brown skullcap, but he’d left a four-inch whip in front that dangled between his eyes. In his thick, black-rimmed spectacles, he looked like a cross between a Talmud student and a jazz musician.

‘So, tell me about the ghetto,’ he said to us in a fearful tone. ‘Is it bad?’

I deferred to Izzy. He was already seated in the armchair in the corner and was pressing at the shooting pains in his right hip. ‘Don’t ask,’ he replied wearily. ‘Listen, Andrzej, we’re in a hurry. We need to sell a wedding ring. Show him, Erik.’

While the young jeweller examined the diamond, I dropped down on the bench along the wall. After a minute or so, he lowered his ivory-handled magnifying glass. ‘Times are hard, Dr Cohen, so if you’d be willing to accept two thousand, then…’

‘Where’s your father?’ Izzy cut in.

‘Papa’s got a cold. So I’m not sure I can…’

‘Get him on the phone.’

‘The phones are down. I think that…’

‘It’s worth eight thousand and we won’t take less than four!’ Izzy announced, using a jabbing finger to intimidate Andrzej.

‘Papa has set a two-thousand-złoty limit for me,’ Andrzej replied sadly.

They began to haggle, and their words became needles poking into my fragile composure. When Izzy began to plead, I told them I’d wait in the shop. Seated at the desk, with the door to the storeroom closed behind me, I eased open the top drawer and found a handsome silver letter opener on top of a ledger book. I slipped it in my pocket. I lit a cigarette, then leaned down to undo the laces on my shoes. The smoke made my eyes tear, which gave me an excuse to shut them. To never open them again seemed my best option.

Izzy was sputtering curses in Yiddish and French when he hobbled out. Andrzej trailed behind him like a punished puppy. He came to me and apologized for not being able to offer a fair price, desperate for forgiveness, and I gave it to him, but I curled my fingers around the letter opener in my coat pocket as though its theft were my real reply.

After I’d done up my laces, Izzy handed me a stack of notes – two thousand four hundred złoty. ‘Let’s go,’ he told me, and after twisting the deadbolt, he pulled open the door as if he was ready to clobber the first person we met on the street. I faced Andrzej and asked if he knew of a nearby crossing point back to the ghetto. He said no, but Izzy didn’t believe him. To shame the young man, he tried to stuff a ten-złoty note into his coat pocket, saying, ‘Here’s what you Christians need to make you charitable!’

Andrzej pushed the money away. ‘For the love of God, Mr Nowak, stop!’

Outside, shivering, the young man pointed towards a bakery down the block. ‘I’ve seen delivery men loading sacks of flour on to wagons. I’m not sure, but try there.’

Izzy marched off without shaking Andrzej’s hand. When I caught up, he snarled, ‘I know I behaved badly, but don’t you dare start with me!’

At the bakery, the owner’s wife advised us to go to a garage on Freta Street. ‘Ask for Maciej.’

Maciej came to the door reeking of gasoline, his face streaked black with grease. ‘No, no, no,’ he told us when we asked after a crossing point, shooing us away like mosquitoes, but Izzy held up two ten-złoty notes and said, ‘Abracadabra!’

Maciej and another mechanic pushed a black Ford into the corner of the garage, revealing a two-metre square of corrugated iron on the cement floor. Sliding it to the side gave us access to a hole the size of a wagon wheel.

‘What’s down there?’ I asked, peering in and seeing only sandy earth at the bottom.

‘A tunnel. And despite the rumours, I haven’t spotted a single albino crocodile inside – though I can’t guarantee you won’t find frogs.’

‘Frogs?’ Izzy asked.

‘A smuggler came back with a handful the other day. They must breed somewhere down there in the dark. Our theory is that they’re a bit shy when it comes to fucking.’ Grinning, he added, ‘Like Jewish girls.’

I expect he thought that was witty. Izzy and I failed to laugh, so he apologized. He seemed a good man, but I didn’t trust him; he was a Christian, after all – with a wholly different destiny from ours, whether he wanted it or not.

‘How far do we have to go to reach the ghetto?’ I asked him.

‘After twenty-five metres you’ll reach another hole leading up. Just call out – the women will open the trap door.’

‘Women?’

‘They sew children’s clothing for the Germans.’

A candle cost us fifty groszy; use of a ladder was free. Izzy climbed down while I showed Maciej my photos of Adam and Anna, but he didn’t recognize either of them.

The tunnel’s entrance was only a few inches wider than our shoulders. The candle succeeded in pushing the darkness back just four or five metres. Wooden beams held up the ceiling; it looked like a tiny mineshaft. And it didn’t look like it had been built to last very long.

‘We’re going to have to crawl,’ Izzy told me morosely.

‘Listen,’ I replied in an urgent whisper, ‘we have no proof this even leads to the ghetto. We could be buried alive.’

‘Why the hell would Maciej want to trap us?’ he asked.

‘Why wouldn’t he? There are rewards for catching Jews.’

Izzy scoffed, but then climbed back up and talked to Maciej. I stood on the second rung of the ladder and watched, but they kept their voices down, so I couldn’t make out what they said. At one point, Izzy took out Marlene. The burly mechanic patted his shoulder and smiled, as though they were old army comrades.

‘What did you tell him?’ I asked Izzy after he’d climbed back down.

‘That if we had any trouble I’d come back and blow his brains out.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘That I was sure as hell one angry Jew, but that he didn’t mind, because it was about time the Jews got fed up.’ He grinned boyishly. ‘He also said that my Jimmy Cagney imitation was excellent.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘No, but I could see he wanted to!’

I laughed – and for a few moments all that mattered was Izzy’s unstoppable sense of humour. Then his face grew grave. ‘I’m going to tell you a secret, Erik,’ he told me.

‘What?’

‘When you laugh, your eyes twinkle and you look like you did when we were seven years old and planning adventures in our neighbourhood. It’s the best thing about you, your laughter, and the thing I’ve always loved, and that Hannah most loved, and though you probably think other things about you are much more important and profound, they aren’t. Because the way you can switch from grief or dread to absolute joy in an instant… like there’s a spring always ready to push you towards what’s best… It says something significant about the way you are – and it makes people side with you. And one other thing,’ he added, taking my arm, ‘it’s what Adam adored about you more than anything else.’

I wanted to say something equal to my feelings, but the words wouldn’t come.

Izzy came to my rescue, as always. ‘I’ll go first, Dr Freud,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Why you?’

‘Because I want to play the lead for a change! Besides, I’ve got the candle. You take Marlene.’ He handed me the pistol. ‘If you see anything furry that resembles Mickey or Minnie, pow – right between the eyes!’

Izzy started ahead. I followed close behind. The tunnel was filthy with scum, and the rotting-wood stink was nauseating. The scabs on my knees opened. The air became stale and the heat grew stifling. Hearing a metallic clang behind us, I looked over my shoulder. Blackness pressed against my eyes like a blindfold. We were sealed in.

With my pulse racing, I tried to slip out of my suit coat, but there wasn’t enough room. Panic covered me like netting. I pushed out on the wooden planks of the tunnel. ‘I can’t go on!’ I announced.

‘Erik, if we aren’t there in two minutes, we’ll turn back.’

Water dripping from the ceiling stepped its fingertips across my neck as I edged forward. My ears seemed stuffed, and I felt dizzy. The air became too thin to fill my lungs. Izzy’s candle grew dim and sputtered out. By my count, we had crawled thirty metres.

Purple and red shapes floated around me. My thoughts were arrows flying out in wild directions. ‘Maciej tricked us!’ I said, sucking in air, then sucking again, because my lungs weren’t filling.

‘Give me your lighter!’ Izzy ordered.

‘No, I’m going back,’ I answered between gulps of air. I must have looked like a fish tossed on land. I tried to turn around, but it was too tight.

‘Erik, hand me your goddamned lighter!’ he repeated.

I found only the letter opener in my coat pocket. ‘It’s gone,’ I said, panting. Get out of here now! was what the booming against my ribs meant.

‘You’ve still got it – try in your other pockets!’ he told me.

I found it and held it out. ‘Take it!’

His fingers groped along my arm and snatched it, but he couldn’t raise a flame. Fighting for breath, he whispered, ‘It doesn’t matter. I saw the exit just ahead.’

I could tell he was lying, but before I could say so, my hands gave way and I slipped on to my belly. I was too weak to move and I was falling into darkness.

I awoke pierced by light. Izzy was staring down at me, and his face seemed too big. A young woman with pretty brown eyes was also gazing down at me. Her eyelashes were long and delicate – like fern tendrils.

‘Yes, you’re alive,’ Izzy assured me. ‘We pulled you out with a rope.’

‘Out of where?’ I asked; my memory of the last hour was gone.

‘The tunnel.’

‘And where are we?’

‘Where would you like to be?’

‘London – the British Museum.’

‘Good choice! Anything I can get you?’ he questioned.

‘Some tea. And a scone. And maybe a thunderstorm.’ Strange things to ask for, but I was thinking that there was a lot to be said for English clichés when one has been crushed by German ones.

‘Sorry, we took a wrong turn somewhere near Brussels,’ Izzy replied. ‘We’re back home. How about a week-old sheygets and some ghetto water?’

He sat down beside me and lifted a cup of water to my lips. I drank gratefully. My head was pounding.

‘So, how are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘That I wish I’d gone first. I wouldn’t have made a wrong turn near Brussels.’

Smiling with relief, he helped me sit up. The woman beside him took his cup and held it to my lips again. I felt bruised and tender, as if I’d been stepped on. I looked around the room. Five women sat at sewing tables, pedalling like demons. I held up my hand and waved. Two of them noticed and smiled. They had sympathetic eyes and the same gaunt features we all had – starvation would make us all cousins before the Germans were through with us. Still, the whirring sound of the sewing machines was reassuring – a noble percussion that meant: we Jews are fighting on.

I was lying on a lumpy couch, covered by a woollen blanket. I lifted it up. I was in my underwear. My knees were crusted with blood. And my arm was throbbing – I looked again at the angry burn Mrs Sawicki had given me.

‘Checking on your petzl?’ Izzy asked, raising his eyebrows.

‘I thought it might be prudent to make sure it’s still there,’ I told him.

The women laughed.

The air had become warm and full. My trousers were folded neatly on the seat of a chair by my head. My coat and shirt were hanging over its back. When I reached for my pants, an old season ticket for the omnibus fell out of my pocket. And just like that, I seemed to have entered one of Papa’s jokes: a skeleton crawls out of his grave five years after burial and finds a receipt in his coat pocket for the trousers that he’d been having altered when he died, so he goes to his tailor, presents the receipt to him and says, ‘So, Pinkus, are my pants ready?’

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the punchline of the joke, but I giggled anyway. Izzy looked at me inquisitively.

‘Too little oxygen,’ I told him, which must have been partially true, but I was mostly giddy at finding myself still alive.

At home, Izzy and I found that Stefa was still unable to leave her bed. After I slipped into fresh clothes, I emptied her chamber pot, and she asked me what had happened to my hair. I reached up to check it was still there. Then I remembered. ‘I needed a disguise,’ I told her.

She sighed as if I required great patience. ‘I’m sore all over,’ she moaned. ‘And my feet are still frozen. Could you make me some hot tea with lemon?’

We had no lemons, so I trudged over to the Tarnowskis’ while Izzy massaged Stefa’s shoulders. As I stood in the doorway, Ida Tarnowski asked about my hair as well. ‘I’m up for a part in a Yiddish production of Don Juan in Hell,’ I told her, which I thought was witty, but she asked me when I’d know if I’d passed the audition.

‘Sorry, I was just kidding,’ I replied, and I asked her for a lemon, but she told me she couldn’t even remember what one looked like.

I tried several other neighbours without luck. When I returned home, Stefa was snoring and Izzy was flat on his back in my bed, in all his clothes, his mouth open – an ancient cave with hidden gold. I chopped off most of my hair at the bathroom sink and ended up looking like a prisoner of war, which seemed right. Then I left a cup of hot water on my niece’s night table – sweetened with molasses – and climbed under the covers. The sheets were Siberian ice, but I was too exhausted to care.

I woke up when I heard Izzy clomping around the room. He was munching on a piece of matzo. He sat down at the foot of my bed. ‘Your raven has flown away,’ he noted.

‘Gloria told him that Poland was no place for a bird.’

We talked about our next moves. I needed to make some food for Stefa, so he agreed to go to Mikael Tengmann’s office and hand him the thousand złoty, then head to Mrs Rackemann’s shop, pay her what I still owed her and pick up my wedding band. I put Mikael’s money in one of Mrs Sawicki’s envelopes and asked him to note if the physician showed any unease or surprise on seeing her name; it occurred to me now that the killer – who must have lived outside the ghetto – might have had an accomplice inside. And Mikael was one of only two people I knew of who had known both Adam and Anna, the other being Rowy. Maybe one of them was conspiring with Mrs Sawicki.

An hour and a half later Izzy was back. I was frying up some wild onion to add to the borscht I’d made out of two withered old beets.

‘Mikael is getting the anti-typhus serum tomorrow,’ he told me. He stuffed the money in my coat pocket, since my hands were busy, and he put my wedding band down on the counter.

‘You could have paid Mikael already,’ I observed.

He took a long sip of ersatz coffee out of my cup, then said, ‘He told me not to – not until he had the serum. So he hasn’t seen the envelope yet.’

‘What are you two talking about?’ my niece called out from her room.

When I explained to her that we’d soon have the serum, she announced, ‘No one is injecting me with anything!’ Her voice was strong, but she gave herself a coughing fit and got bloody phlegm on her sheets.

‘I didn’t risk my life so you could put up a fuss,’ Izzy told her as I fetched a hand-towel from her wardrobe.

‘How did you risk your life?’ she asked, squinting suspiciously.

I glared at Izzy to keep the truth hidden, but he’d already figured that out. ‘Every outing with your uncle puts me in danger of a fatal moral decline,’ he said dryly.

‘Go away!’ she told him nastily. ‘And you, too!’ she added, turning to me.

The next morning, I awoke just after dawn, eager to speak to Anna’s friends before heading to Mikael’s office. Stefa looked fast asleep when I tiptoed into her room, so I turned round, which was when she spoke, making me jump.

‘I’m up,’ she said in a drowsy voice.

She dared open her eyes only a sliver; the light streaming through the window made her head throb. She instructed me to look for a small book with a leather cover in the top drawer of her dresser. Once I’d found it, she had me open it to the first page. Written in her neat square handwriting – in Polish – was the following:

Adam Liski

Birth: 4 August 1932.

Weight: Seven pounds four ounces.

Length: Nineteen inches.

Glued near the bottom of the page was a sprig of her son’s downy blond hair. On subsequent pages, I discovered records of his childhood diseases and medical treatments, as well as drawings of his hands and feet, and a portrait of him that she’d done when he was five. She had artistic talent – who would have guessed? Among a series of old sketches of her husband Krzysztof, I also discovered – to my surprise and delight – that she’d drawn me huddled over a book. I was smoking the meerschaum pipe I’d inherited from my father. She must have done it about ten years before. Had I really ever looked that strong and young?

‘Uncle Erik,’ she pleaded, ‘you have to hold on to Adam’s record book for me.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Just do what I say for once!’

‘All right, I’ll keep it safe. But you’re going to be fine. You just need to stay warm.’

‘Hide it!’ she said in a hushed whisper, as if the Germans would need to know Adam’s height to win the war.

‘I’ll put it under the mattress in my room,’ I told her, but once I was out of sight I slipped it into my coat pocket instead.

I sat with Stefa for a time, smearing schmaltz on her chapped lips and combing the tangles out of her hair. She declined my offer of borscht.

‘Listen, Ewa has been helping me write cards to our friends outside the ghetto,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a courier post them on the Other Side.’

‘Why are you sending notes?’

‘Our friends need to know about… about things with us,’ she replied, unwilling to speak Adam’s name. ‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’

I thought about that. ‘No, thanks. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

I told my niece I had to go out for a while but would ask Ewa to check on her from time to time. Down in the bakery, the young woman promised me she’d do just that.

I was too exhausted to walk anywhere, so I splurged on a rickshaw. My driver was a former chemical engineer named Józef. He wore a red velvet vest under a high-collared russet coat. ‘My daughter made them for my birthday,’ he told me.

When I replied that she was a genius with a needle and thread, he turned away from me as if I’d offended him, but I didn’t ask why; everyone in the ghetto kept a misery on his shoulder that could easily justify odd behaviour.

Though Józef pedalled hard, the younger competition passed us. I spent the journey across town looking through Adam’s record book. Near the end, I discovered lists that Stefa had made of the advantages and disadvantages in the personalities of her friends. I’d never known that she’d been a list-maker, but it didn’t surprise me.

I remember Izzy’s inventory better than all the others because it showed off my niece’s wit.

Advantages: Perfectly manicured hands, delights in his own humour, can fix anything, speaks French, walks as slowly as I do, eyebrows like furry caterpillars, has not an evil bone in his body, hardly ever raises his voice, is easily overcome by my anger, keeps Adam entertained and Uncle Erik out of my hair, has sad eyes (like the surface of a warm lake!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, and is loyal, loyal, loyal.

Disadvantages: Delights in his own humour, is unable to tell when I don’t want to be teased, sulks when he’s yelled at, can hold grudges (despite his denials), walks as slowly as I do, has the table manners of a beagle, will never understand evil people (he excuses my sniping as harmless eccentricity, poor man!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, is too loyal, and encourages Adam to leave his shoelaces untied, lick his plate, play with stray dogs, etc.

Unspoken motto: Once you’re on board, you’re along for the whole ride. Food would most like to have in the ghetto: lox.

Favourite movie star: Jimmy Cagney (his imitation isn’t all that bad, but Cagney in Yiddish sounds a bit meshugene).

Mystery: Was Róźa pregnant when he married her?

Wish for him: May he find a man who appreciates his goodness.

Immediate prospects: Loneliness (given Róźa’s health and the state of the world with regard to his sexual proclivities).

I looked for the list of my own pros and cons, but several pages had been torn out and she must have destroyed it. Most of all, I wanted to know what her wish for me had been.

It didn’t occur to me till much later that Stefa left Izzy’s page for me to see for a reason: so that I wouldn’t take him for granted, which was always what she’d accused me of – and rightly, at times.

She hadn’t destroyed her lists for Ewa, Helena, Ziv and Adam. I read all of them but my nephew’s. I had to close it as soon as I read his first advantage: loves everyone around him, even me.

Józef dropped me near the Chłodna Street crossing to the Little Ghetto; I’d walk from there. As I got out of the rickshaw, he wiped his brow and apologized for being passed by other drivers.

‘We got here in one piece,’ I told him, handing him his payment, ‘which is all that counts at the moment. Besides, my nephew always complained that I moved as slow as a…’

I was about to say tortoise, but Adam – the misery always sitting on my shoulder – held his hand up for me to say no more about our life together. Józef showed me a puzzled look. ‘Some things are best left unspoken,’ I said. I shook his hand and walked off.

Two body collectors cut in front of me almost immediately. They were hauling a dead man wearing only a tattered undershirt. His hair was thick and black, but he had the sunken eyes and cavedin chest of a battered grandfather. His arms were bamboo reeds ending in dirty claws.

Whiskers dusted his chin but his cheeks were hairless – could starvation take away a man’s beard?

The ghetto funeral stretchers were slatted ladders with wheels on one end, but this one also had knotted white tassels – tzitzit – at its corners. That made me curious, and I eavesdropped on the collectors’ conversation. They were talking about a reading a fortune-teller had given one of them.

‘She told me I was going to take a long trip soon,’ the shorter of the two said.

‘Somewhere warm?’ his partner asked hopefully. He wore black spectacles held together by tape; they kept slipping to the end of his nose.

Leaving their cart on the sidewalk, they gazed around, exchanged a few words I didn’t catch, then shuffled over to a wooden stall set up in front of a clothing shop. Inside was a walnut-faced ironmonger sitting on a three-legged stool, surrounded by piles of door handles, keys and rusted junk. On the walls he’d hung hand-sized wire animals – dogs, cats and swans. A naked woman was slumped at his feet, her face angled down and chin pressed against her chest, but he didn’t seem to see her; he concentrated on the wire he was twisting into the shape of a poodle standing on its hind legs.

The woman’s hands – with red, swollen knuckles – were joined together as if she were still holding a beggar’s cup. The spectacled collector spoke to the ironmonger in a whisper. Then, leaning down, he shook the woman, and her head – gaunt and waxy – flopped to the side. He grabbed her ankles. His partner took her arms.

‘Eins, zwei, drei,’ they said in unison.

They lifted her up. Her hips jutted out from around her sunken triangle of sex like shovels.

The ironmonger never looked up to watch her go, but his hands stopped twisting his wire for a few seconds and he closed his eyes.

People go on with their lives the only way they know how. Hannah once told me that and I thought she was being glib, but living in the ghetto convinced me she was right.

As they carried the woman to their cart, the body collectors folded her together, then pulled her apart. Carelessness or a morbid comedy routine?

When they passed, her grey eyes stared at me. I imagined that she wanted to tell me about her life.

If you could say only one thing to me what would it be? I asked her in my mind.

‘I died of thirst for so many things,’ came her reply. Her voice was shadowed by bitterness and regret.

The dead want us to know what killed them, I reasoned – though maybe I only came to that conclusion because it meant that Adam would want me to learn the identity of his murderer.

‘No, she said it would be cold where I was going,’ the short collector told his partner, resuming their previous conversation.

‘She must have meant you’d be heading off to Mogiła Street!’ his partner replied with a quick laugh, since Mogiła meant tomb in Polish.

They dumped the woman atop the dead man they’d previously collected. The bones of her back – jutting fins – crushed his face, and her head dangled back and to the side, threatening to fall off her spindly neck. Her breasts, shrunken, sucked dry by hunger, were wrinkled pancakes pressed against her ribcage.

No one rushed to cover her. Or to claim her.

CHAPTER 15

Janek’s mother invited me in when I explained my visit. She said I looked faint and brought me a glass of water right away.

The studious-looking, wiry-haired young man was uncomfortable discussing Anna with me, but after I told him I suspected that she had been gravely ill, he confessed he’d had a quarrel with her over twenty złoty she’d borrowed from him and couldn’t pay back. They hadn’t spoken since early January.

‘Listen, son, why did Anna need the money?’ I asked.

‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ he replied, which made his mother smack the back of his head. ‘I swear, Mama!’ pleaded the boy, ducking away from her. ‘You know how secretive Anna could be. All she told me was that she was in bad trouble.’

Anna’s other close friend, Henia, lived on Pańska Street, near the Noźyków Synagogue, where my mother and I had attended services on high holy days. She answered my knocks dressed for school, in a pretty burgundy jumper and dark woollen trousers. Her cheerful face was framed by blonde braids, which made her look as though she’d stepped out of a Bavarian children’s story. In her hand was a half-eaten hard-boiled egg.

Her mother called out to ask who was at the door.

‘A friend!’ the girl shouted back. To me she mouthed, ‘Wait downstairs.’

She came rushing into the hallway a few minutes later. ‘I’m late,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk as we walk.’ She buttoned her coat and put on a black leather aviator’s hat with sheepskin earflaps, tucking her braids underneath. She looked like a teenage boy.

‘I have to cross over to the Big Ghetto to get to school,’ she explained, ‘and the German guards used to grope themselves when I passed the gate. A big ugly one even tried to kiss me once. Now, they leave me alone.’

She burst out through the door as if to take on the Nazis and the rest of the world, holding her book bag tightly against her chest – undoubtedly to hide the sleek rise of her breasts.

I liked Henia immediately. And do you know why, Heniek? Because survival was shining in her light brown eyes. I blessed her for that.

‘Do you know what was wrong with Anna?’ I asked her.

‘Wrong?’

‘I have reason to believe she was ill.’

‘She wasn’t ill – the idiot got herself pregnant.’

‘That’s impossible. A doctor who examined her told me she wasn’t.’

‘Then he lied to you.’

‘Why would he do that?’ I demanded.

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she said, irritated. ‘What right do you have to know intimate details about Anna’s life?’

I remembered Mikael begging me not to force him to lie. ‘But her mother said she had gotten dangerously thin,’ I told Henia.

‘Yeah,’ the girl replied, ‘that was quite a feat, wasn’t it? She had everybody fooled.’

I stopped. Henia didn’t. ‘So you’re certain she was pregnant?’ I called after her.

She turned round. ‘Yup,’ she replied casually, walking backwards. ‘Three months along. If you looked really closely, you could kind of tell in the curve right here, even though she wasn’t much more than a skeleton.’ She designed a contour in front of her belly with her hand.

I caught up, then grabbed the strap of her book bag to keep her from rushing ahead. ‘Did her parents know?’

‘No. Anna didn’t trust them. She wanted an abortion. But we didn’t know where to go. We were afraid that if we asked her doctor or any other adult, it would get back to her parents. So she just stopped eating.’

‘But sooner or later, her condition would have become obvious.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Honec, but we have to keep walking – if I’m late for school, the director won’t let me in.’

I let go of her strap. Henia shifted her book bag to her other shoulder and we started off again. ‘Anna read somewhere that starvation can cause a miscarriage,’ she told me. ‘So she could hide her pregnancy and get rid of it at the same time. It was a neat trick – if you don’t mind starving to death, that is.’

‘So did she lose the baby?’

‘No. Though we didn’t talk for a couple of days before she was killed, so I suppose she might have lost it then – or even found someone to give her an abortion.’

‘Do you know if she intended to tell Paweł’s mother?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘And did Paweł ever give her a ring or a bracelet – something valuable?’

Henia shrugged. ‘If he did, she never showed it to me.’

‘Is it possible that Anna got his name tattooed on her hand? Or maybe his initials?’

Henia burst out laughing. ‘Do you think she wanted to look like a sailor, Mr Honec?’

We were crossing the scruffy park in Grzybowski Square, steering around the low-hanging branches of a hazel tree stripped naked by winter. Henia’s expression turned troubled. ‘There’s something that’s been bothering me,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But I don’t know if I should tell you. Anna wouldn’t like it.’

‘She’s been murdered. What else could go wrong?’

‘Plenty! So why don’t you tell me what you want to know about her and I’ll see how much I want to say.’

I spoke of my nephew’s death until she gripped my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she interrupted, ‘but please don’t tell me any more about Adam. Since Anna’s murder… Look, what’s been bothering me is that she refused to tell me who the father was, and that started me thinking. I thought it was probably Paweł, but she wouldn’t confirm that – or deny it.’

‘Who else could it have been?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. But listen, whatever you do,’ she said, grimacing, ‘you can’t tell Anna’s parents about any of this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Mrs Levine has a temper. She drinks. And she used to beat Anna with a wet towel.’

‘Why a wet towel?’

‘It hurts like hell but doesn’t leave marks.’ Henia sneered. ‘Anna always said her mother was clever – ugly but clever. She used to call her Fraulein Rottenmeier – from Heidi.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I replied bitterly; Dorota had fooled me; she’d been protecting herself, not her husband. The unflattering photograph of her daughter had been meant to show me that Anna deserved the abusive treatment her mother meted out.

‘No one knows what I’m telling you,’ Henia continued. ‘I’m not even sure Anna’s father knows how bad things were, though she was furious at him for never protecting her. I don’t know how Fräulein Rottenmeier will react if you let on that you know what she was up to. And if you tell her Anna was pregnant…’ Henia groaned to indicate the disaster that would engender.

I stopped to consider whether Anna’s own mother might have been involved in her murder. It seemed impossible, yet so did Adam’s death.

‘No more questions?’ Henia asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Bye, Mr Honec,’ she said cheerfully, and then she strode away.

After a few seconds, I called out to her. ‘Henia, did you lend Anna money?’

She hesitated, then rushed on.

‘You have to tell me!’ I shouted.

She stopped, unsure what to do. Trudging back to me, as though punished, she took off her aviator’s hat. Her face was solemn. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘I’m beginning to understand more about what you children are going through.’

She bit her lip. ‘I gave her twenty złoty. But you can’t tell anyone!’

‘I understand. An abortion is…’

‘No, you don’t understand, Mr Honec! I didn’t care whether she had an abortion or not. I did something unforgivable, something that…’

‘You stole money from your parents,’ I cut in – to relieve her of the need to speak her crime aloud.

‘No, from my younger brother,’ she whispered, and her eyes moistened. She rubbed the tears away roughly, as if she didn’t deserve them. ‘God forgive me, I took two ten-złoty notes out of his wallet. He’d been saving them for months. Mr Honec, he’d even ironed them to make them perfect. He cried for days when they went missing. And my parents were furious with him.’ Henia shook her head at her own treachery.

‘Anna was desperate,’ I told her. ‘You helped her. You were a good friend.’

‘But I betrayed my brother – badly.’

I gazed into the distance, at the brick wall blocking off Próżna Street, trying to read what to say to Henia in our landscape of confinement. ‘On this island, even a mitzvah can cause harm,’ I told her. ‘Though I wish none of us had to learn that.’

‘Making my brother feel hopeless wasn’t a mitzvah!’ she declared, unwilling to be prised free of the moral trap she’d stumbled into. ‘And I couldn’t ever face my parents or brother again if they found out what I’ve done. Never! So you can’t say anything!’

‘I won’t say a word. I promise.’

Henia put her hat back on. ‘Mr Honec, do you… do you have any idea why the Nazis killed Anna?’ At that moment, she seemed a small girl imprisoned high up in the tower of her best friend’s death.

‘No, not yet,’ I replied.

‘Then I want you to do me a favour. If you find out, don’t tell me – at least, not until we get out of here.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I’d kill myself if I was in any way responsible.’

‘Don’t say that!’ I pleaded.

‘But it’s true.’ She fixed me with a hard look. ‘And my death would only make things harder for my parents and my brother.’

Anna had needed to talk to Paweł because she was pregnant – and possibly for him to contribute to the cost of her abortion. Had Mrs Sawicki found out about the girl’s condition? Maybe Anna had demanded that Paweł marry her, and his mother had murdered her to safeguard his independence.

Or maybe Mikael had performed an abortion on her – one that ended tragically. Terrified of being held responsible, he’d discarded her in the barbed wire, so that we’d assume the Nazis were responsible. But to do so, he’d have had to obtain permission from the Germans to cross over to the Christian side, and they would have surely discovered he had a girl’s body with him. It seemed highly unlikely. And in any case, neither of these scenarios could explain why Mikael, Mrs Sawicki or anyone else would want Anna’s hand.

I headed off to Mikael’s office to speak again to Anka, his nurse, and to see if he’d already secured Stefa’s anti-typhus serum.

At first, Anka spoke to me brusquely, insisting she had nothing more to say to me, but by telling her about Adam and his connection to Anna, I managed to draw her out to the stairwell, where we could talk alone.

‘You don’t approve of abortions,’ I whispered to her as soon as we were hidden.

‘So you found out.’

‘As you wanted me to.’

She crossed her arms as though to defend herself and said, ‘Let’s get one thing straight – I do approve of abortions. These starving girls can’t bring a baby into this goddamned mess! But one girl died after her operation.’

‘And you were there when that happened?’

‘No, Dr Tengmann performs the procedures in the evening. But this girl, Esther… After going home, she went to bed, saying she was feeling a cold coming on, but in the morning her parents found her soaked in her own blood, unconscious. It was too late to save her. Maybe we’d never have found out, but her father came here asking questions. He’d known his daughter was pregnant, though he wasn’t sure she’d come here. He caught us off guard. Dr Tengmann admitted that he’d seen her, but he denied having given her an abortion. That was very wrong!’ At the thud of a door closing somewhere in the building, Anka flinched. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. ‘I can’t forgive him for lying. And I can’t trust him any more. I’ve tried, but I can’t.’

‘If you didn’t help with the operation, how can you be so sure of all this?’ I asked.

‘I know a nurse who assists Dr Tengmann at night.’

‘Then she can tell me if Anna also got an abortion!’

‘I’ve already asked her. She never met any girl with that name.’

‘Anka, I’d like to talk to her myself. Can you give me her name and address?’

‘No, I’m sorry – she wants to keep her identity a secret.’

‘Then would you be willing to show her my photograph of Anna?’

‘Of course.’

I handed her the picture.

‘I’ll send you a message with what I find out,’ she assured me.

‘Listen, was anything… a hand, a leg… taken from Esther?’

‘Her father didn’t mention anything like that. God, I hope not!’

‘Can you give me his name and address?’

‘If you want. But I need my job here – you’ll have to be discreet.’

‘You have my word. Do you know if Dr Tengmann keeps records of his abortions?’

‘If he does, I don’t know about them – or where they’d be.’

Back in the sitting room, Anka wrote me out the name of the dead girl’s father – Hajman Szwebel – and his address. He lived on Solna Street, just two blocks from where Adam and Anna had been tossed in the barbed wire.

I waited a half-hour before I could get in to see Mikael in his office. After shaking my hand warmly, he held the serum up to the light. ‘Here it is!’ he enthused.

Our hopes resided in an amber vial.

‘I’ll go with you now to administer it,’ he told me.

‘But what about your other patients?’

‘They’ll have to wait – typhus is serious business.’

‘Look, Mikael, I’ll never be able to repay you,’ I replied, ‘but at least I can give you this…’ I handed him my envelope of money, making sure that Mrs Sawicki’s printed name was facing him.

Spotting the embossed lettering, he grinned. ‘I see you’re still playing at detective.’

‘I’m not playing at anything!’ I replied gruffly, more aggressively than I’d intended, probably because I’d been secretly hoping that the name Sawicki – and the implication that I’d spoken to her – would disquiet him.

‘I’m sorry – that came out wrong,’ he told me. ‘Forgive me, Erik. It was a stupid thing to say. It’s just that I’m worried about you.’

‘I’ll be fine. The worst has already happened. But listen, you might want to count the money.’

‘There’s no need – I trust you.’ He took his coat down from its hook by the door, tucking the envelope and serum away in an inside pocket. ‘So were you able to speak to Paweł?’ he asked.

‘No. Mrs Sawicki told me he was in Switzerland – at boarding school.’

‘I see.’ Putting his coat down on his desk, he tucked his glasses into their case and rubbed his eyes. ‘Do you understand now why I couldn’t answer all your questions? And why I lied about what was wrong with Anna? You gave me no choice.’

‘Yes, I can see that now. But you no longer have any reason to hide the truth. So I need to know if Anna was certain Paweł was the father.’

He started. ‘Do you have reason to believe he wasn’t?’

‘One of Anna’s friends told me she had her doubts.’

‘All she told me was she was in love with Paweł and that her parents didn’t approve of their relationship. That’s all I know. I help the girls the only way I can. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to know more about their lives. I just can’t take it.’

We took a rickshaw to Stefa’s flat. Mikael gazed away, troubled. Guessing what was on his mind, aware now of how fate had trapped him, I patted his leg and said, ‘Given our circumstances, what you do is a good thing.’

‘You think so? I’ll be honest, Erik. I have my doubts at times, but when the girls plead with me, how can I refuse? And you know what they fear most? That their baby will die of starvation inside their womb. How’s that for something to keep you awake at nights?’ He surveyed the massive, swirling crowds on both sides of the street as if looking for strength. ‘I just want Ewa and Helena to be able to get out of this place alive,’ he added. ‘That’s the only reason I keep going.’

Kids in little more than rags began running after us, shouting for money. Mikael tossed coins to the pavement. The boys and girls, hollering, swarmed upon them.

For the first time, I saw how the youngest among us would lead us into the grave. That was now the meaning of Adam and Anna’s death.

Mikael and I sat in glum silence. The low-lying winter sun was blocked by the tenement roofs, leaving the streets in deep, penetrating shadow. I couldn’t stop shivering.

Finally, I asked, ‘So Anna never confirmed to you that Paweł was the father?’

‘No, I assumed it.’

‘Did she come right out and ask you for an abortion?’

‘Yes. And I agreed to help her, but on the evening of her procedure, she didn’t show up.’ I started to ask a question, but he raised his hand. ‘I have no idea why not. I never heard from her again.’ He shrugged. ‘And then you appeared, telling me she was dead. That’s all I know.’

‘Was her abortion scheduled for the twenty-fourth of January?’

‘It’s hard to recall, though that sounds about right. But how did you know?’

‘That’s the day she went missing.’

The icy wind pushed against our faces. I lifted my muffler over my mouth, so the rest of our brief conversation seems to me now to be textured by thick, dark wool.

‘Have all the girls recovered well from their procedures?’ I questioned, wanting to test Mikael’s honesty.

‘What do you mean?’

‘No complications, infections…?’

He glared at me. ‘All the girls have left my office healthy – tired and upset, but healthy. What happens to them after that, I can’t control. Or do you think I can?’

Ewa was waiting for Mikael and me in Stefa’s apartment, sitting on my bed, her arm over Helena’s shoulder, her eyes red and puffy.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, rushing to her.

‘It’s Stefa,’ Ewa moaned, and she pointed to the window. ‘She’s in the courtyard, but…’

Looking down, I saw a woman’s body covered from the waist up by a newspaper and two men standing nearby – our building supervisor, Professor Engal, and a Jewish policeman. The policeman held Stefa’s Moroccan slippers, one in each hand.

I clambered down the stairs. Two bricks had been placed atop the newspaper to keep it from blowing away. Kneeling, I tossed them aside.

Ewa told me later that on seeing Stefa’s face I immediately let out a cry for Ernst – my younger brother and her father. I have only the most vague recollection of that.

Silver coins covered her eyes. That’s what I remember clearly.

I began shaking. The Jewish policeman helped me to my feet and told me my niece had jumped.

‘No, no, no – she was too weak to do that,’ I insisted.

He pointed to the window of my bedroom. ‘She sat on the ledge and pushed off.’

Turning round, I noticed Ziv sitting in the corner of the courtyard, rocking back and forth like a lost child. I called to him, but he didn’t answer.

I sat with Stefa for a time, holding her hand, whispering to her about when I’d first seen her as a baby. While clinging to the soft, searching sound of my voice, I realized why she had me keep Adam’s medical history and the portraits she’d drawn of him.

I took the złoty coins off her eyes; I didn’t believe in ghostly ferryboats across mythological rivers. Professor Engal told me they were Ziv’s, so I tossed the money by his feet, hoping to get his attention, but he didn’t stir.

While caressing Stefa’s hair, I apologized to her again for not protecting Adam, speaking to her in Yiddish and Polish, because each language had its own nuances of guilt and remorse, and ways of asking for what could never now be given to me, and I wanted her to hear them all. When I trudged back upstairs to try to figure out how she’d managed to end her own life, I found Mikael seated on my bed. He stood up to embrace me, telling me how sorry he was. He said that Ewa had taken Helena home.

On handing me back my thousand złoty, he said, ‘Stefa had to do it now – she didn’t want to waste the serum. I’ve seen that sort of sacrifice before. I should have warned you. I apologize for being thoughtless.’

I understood then why my niece had been so angry with Izzy and me for finding anti-typhus serum. Maybe she hadn’t been ready to meet Death in a Warsaw courtyard, but she knew she couldn’t wait.

CHAPTER 16

Stefa must have crawled out of bed and used all that was left of her strength to drag our armchair to the window. I know that because two parallel scratches from the chair legs marked the wooden floor. The window had been shut tight to keep out the frigid wind. My niece had been unable to lift a spoon to feed herself, but she must have somehow managed to throw it wide open.

Later, when I questioned Ewa, she swore to me that the door was locked the last time she came to check on Stefa. As always, she’d let herself in with her spare key. There was no sign of anyone having been there to help her commit suicide. Stefa had been asleep in bed.

‘Or she looked asleep,’ I noted.

‘Or that,’ Ewa agreed.

Why did my niece put on her slippers before jumping? True, her feet were always cold of late, but she must have known she’d feel no discomfort soon enough. Maybe she didn’t want the person who found her to see the open sores between her toes. I’d known nothing about that small corner of her misery. She’d hidden quite a lot, as it turns out.

In any case, she put on her red and gold Moroccan slippers, climbed up on the chair and eased herself down on the window ledge. Her brittle arms must have been trembling under the strain. One after the other, she swung her legs over the rim until she was sitting on it and facing out – a complex manoeuvre. I know that because I tried it myself, and I’d swear in any court that it required a dexterity and strength that were beyond her.

Ziv was on break and sitting outside the bakery, reading a chess newsletter that had been printed in the ghetto; it had an article on Szmul Rzeszewski, one of his heroes.

Did Stefa hear him call out to her not to move, that she was in danger of falling?

‘I’ll be right up!’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me!’

What did she think as she pushed and swivelled herself closer to the edge? Perhaps that gravity was a blessing.

I hope she imagined she was about to see Adam again, but maybe it would have been best if she was thinking nothing at all.

Ziv told me later that she didn’t seem to hear him or even notice he was there.

‘As soon as she hit the ground, she was dead.’ That’s what Professor Engal told me when I returned to the courtyard, which was what he had heard from Ziv. Maybe they wanted to spare me more anguish. Still, thirty feet is a long way for someone to fall, and maybe he was right.

Ziv rushed to her but couldn’t find a pulse. He dashed into the bakery for help. Ewa and several others tried to revive my niece, but it was too late.

Stefa’s slippers had fallen off. Ziv retrieved them while waiting for the Jewish police to come, then sat down in the corner of the courtyard, his head in his hands. He didn’t move from there all afternoon and slept there that night. I brought him a blanket, and he let me cover him with it, but he refused to speak to me or come inside.

I’d learned by then that going on strike against the world’s injustice was a common ghetto strategy. Not that it ever changed anything.

I’d never previously considered that he’d been in love with Stefa. After all, she was seventeen years his senior. Still, if I’d have been paying attention, I’d have understood that the rose blossom and fresh eggs he gave her on the evening of our first Sabbath banquet represented his opening gambit in what was probably a ten-move strategy. And maybe age differences are unimportant to those who live with queens and rooks dancing through their dreams.

My niece’s corpse waited all night for the body collectors. They only came at ten the next morning, explaining that disease and starvation were taking a hundred residents a day and they couldn’t cope. By then, I’d dragged her into the hallway of our building; it had started drizzling. I’d wanted to hire some boys from the street to carry Stefa up to her apartment, but Professor Engal told me that the collectors would resent having to walk up the stairs – and might even refuse.

Stefa’s miracle…

At 3 a.m. on the morning after her death, standing at the window in my room, I looked down at her in the courtyard, and I noticed Ziv jump up and chase after a vague, darting shape. Fearing it was a feral cat or worse, I threw on my coat, hurried downstairs and sat with my niece. Ziv was back tucked into his corner by then, but now he was whimpering to himself. A little later, I looked up to the window of my bedroom, and in the hazy moonlight it seemed the entranceway to a fairytale world, out of which magic had spilled into this place only a little while before. My wonder at how Stefa had found the strength to open her window, climb out on to the sill and jump now seemed to contain everything I’d ever failed to grasp throughout my life – even how men and women could believe in God. And that’s when I realized that miracles do indeed occur, though – unfortunately – they aren’t always the glorious affirmations of transcendence that we have all been led to believe.