I’ll have to be more wary on my excursions. Early this afternoon, Heniek, while you were working at your factory, I crossed the bridge to the Praga district to make sure my old friend Jaśmin was still alive. Unfortunately, the entrance to her apartment house was locked. I waited outside, watching the passers-by, until, finally, after a couple of hours, she appeared at her window, gazing at the powdering of snow that had begun to fall. I stayed there a long time after she went back to whatever she was doing, grateful that Izzy and I hadn’t caused her death. But on the way home, feeling my strength renewed and wanting a small adventure, I decided to go to the Little Ghetto to see what wonders were gracing the shop windows of Sienna Street. A mistake.
I never made it there; I found a crowd swarming out in front of All Saints Church, and at its centre was a burly butcher hacking away at the emaciated, mud-brown carcass of an old mare. Hot blood kept spurting on to his grimacing face. I could tell from the way the poor beast’s ribcage stood out that she’d been an underfed, work-damned tram horse. A poisonous-looking steam was rising from the wormy ravine of her open belly.
The ghetto devours itself and will never die, I thought.
I’d never seen a horse without a head and backed away slowly.
‘You’ve grown silent again,’ Heniek tells me.
‘I thought I was telling you about a dead horse,’ I reply.
‘No, you haven’t said a word in twenty minutes.’
Heniek says I can go an hour or more without speaking, even though I can hear my voice clearly and am sure I’m talking to him. He says my silence scares him, because my edges begin to darken, as though I’m being engulfed by a greedy shadow.
Though he tries to wake me from my trances by calling my name, I show no sign of hearing him.
It is our fourth day together by my count. My seventh, according to him. I do not know how so many days disappear.
After Stefa’s husband Krzysztof died of tuberculosis in 1936, my niece would shut herself inside her bedroom and sob. Adam was five then. The little boy once told me that the scrape and click of her turning her key in the lock made him feel like crying out for help, but whose name would he have called? Hearing his mother’s weeping, he’d plead with her to let him in while squatting on his heels by her door. He’d scratch like a cat and jiggle the door handle but nothing could convince her to open up.
After confessing these details, he added, ‘But it’s not so bad. I don’t even cry any more. Though I keep scratching. Or else Mama might forget I’m there.’
Amazingly, he didn’t show any resentment; he was proud of his ability to cope on his own.
Had Stefa been a good mother? Is anyone always a positive influence? All I know is that Adam adored her.
When she finally let her son into her room, she’d pretend nothing had happened. They would sit cross-legged on her bed and nibble bread and cheese, and play cards. My goodness, how the two of them could live on cheese. They were like giant mice!
After the boy had won all his mother’s coins, she would open a novel and read aloud to him. Or they’d nap together; her fits of sobbing always exhausted them both.
Ever since she was a teenager, Stefa had devoured detective novels – books by Zangwill, Gaboriau, Groller… ‘It’s like this, Uncle Erik,’ she explained to me once, just after her Krzysztof’s death, ‘mysteries have solid endings. When you finish the last page, a door locks behind you. So people like you and me and Adam, we can’t ever get stuck inside.’
Jumping to the courtyard must have meant that not enough doors had closed behind her over the course of her life; she’d become a prisoner in a story she could no longer go on reading.
Two Pinkiert’s men came for her in the morning. It was drizzling. As they picked her up, the world receded. I was encased in thick glass.
Outside, as their cart trundled away over the cobbles, the tense, grinding sound of the wheels gave me the impression we were fighting a losing battle. Upstairs, I got out my list of the dead and chanted the names of everyone I’d ever loved.
I drank vodka and chanted until my voice was gone.
I wanted my parents to come for me. And I wanted out. So I closed the curtains and crawled into the frozen arms of my blankets. I’d promised to go to Pinkiert’s headquarters to schedule and pay for the funeral, but it was my turn to go on strike.
Turning on my side, I stared at the window through which Stefa had left our world. To die seeing the sky – even if it was heavy with coming rain – would be comforting. Would it be too much to hope for that my niece had looked up instead of down as she fell?
I slept a drugged sleep and awoke unsure of where I was. Sitting over the side of the bed, I let my pee slide down my legs on to the floor. I suppose I needed to feel I still had a working body.
Maybe that’s why the inmates of sanatoriums sometimes soil themselves – to remind themselves they are alive. Pee and shit as the only mirror they have left.
I exist.
While gazing at myself in the real mirror in the bathroom, I repeated that small incitement to life over and over, but in truth I seemed to be just a vessel for one more breath and then another, an instant in time receding towards a quiet so deep it would never end.
Our thoughts don’t make us alive. Something else does. But what?
The ghetto taught me to ask that question but never gave me the answer.
If you want certainties then I’m afraid you’ll have to read about a different time and place. And different men and women. In Warsaw in 1941, we had none to give you.
A knock at the door woke me to myself. I found Izzy standing on the landing.
‘I just heard about Stefa,’ he told me.
He embraced me so hard he nearly knocked me over. Afterwards, we sat together on my bed. I couldn’t speak. But there was nothing to say.
We were old men exiled from the lives we’d expected to have.
When I could talk, I told him where to find money for Stefa’s funeral. He promised he’d organize the ceremony. He put me back to bed.
I awoke on and off all day. He was there watching over me the whole time. Then night fell. I awoke once just after midnight. Fearful, I shouted for Izzy, but he’d gone home. I went to the window. Standing in the darkness, I imagined that if I offered up my life to God, he might spare someone who wanted to live – a child with decades of life left in him. But even if I could convince the Lord to make that bargain with me, how could I decide who was most worthy?
I awoke the next morning to a young woman in bare feet bringing me breakfast in bed. A fried egg looked up at me sceptically from the centre of one of Hannah’s Chinese dessert plates.
‘Time to eat!’ the girl said cheerfully, throwing open the curtains. The light caught the floor and travelled up the blankets to my eyes, making them tear.
The girl had dark hair cut in a pageboy, and an olive skin tone. She wore a man’s coat that fell to her knees. She walked with an upright posture, and gracefully, like a ballerina.
‘Bina – is that you?’ I questioned.
‘That’s right,’ she replied, beaming at me as though I were her prize patient.
‘You can’t be here,’ I told her in a tone of warning.
‘Why not?’ she asked, her eyebrows knitting together theatrically.
‘For one thing, you’ve let in too much light,’ I said, shading my eyes.
She tugged the curtains together but left them open a crack. ‘A little light will make you feel better,’ she suggested.
‘You can’t really think the sun can bring back the dead.’
‘No,’ she agreed, gazing down, adding timidly, ‘not even our prayers can do that.’
‘Just leave,’ I pleaded, but she stood her ground.
‘Will you at least drink some tea?’ she asked in a small voice.
I changed tactics. ‘How on earth did you get in here?’
‘Izzy gave me the key.’
‘You know Izzy?’
After stooping to pick up one of my socks, she replied, ‘I met him yesterday evening when he left your building. And this morning, when he came back, I asked him what was the matter with you. We talked. He’s a nice man. He bought some gherkins from me and my mother.’
She picked up another sock and an undershirt. Without looking at me, she said, ‘I wanted to tell you I’m very sorry about your niece.’
‘Did Izzy come by this morning?’ I asked, passing over her sympathy, since the last thing I wanted was to discuss what had happened.
‘Yes, he brought coal for you. When he came out to the street, he told my mother and me that you slept through his visit.’
It was only then that I noticed that the room was warm for the first time in months.
‘Where the hell did he get coal?’ I questioned.
‘He didn’t tell me.’ She folded my trousers neatly and draped them over the back of the armchair. ‘You need nourishment,’ she observed.
‘My God, girl!’ I snapped. ‘How could you think hunger is my problem?’
She ran into the kitchen. I was sure I’d achieved my goal of making her burst into tears, but I didn’t hear any sobs. When she returned, she sat down in the armchair, on the front edge of the cushion, and looked at me as if ready to wait for me to tell her what to do. Her eyes were so needful that I turned away. After a while, I noticed her staring at my breakfast plate. I didn’t want to be kind to a girl who didn’t have the courage to ask for food when she was famished, so I said nothing.
‘Do you mind if I eat your egg?’ she finally asked in a fearful voice.
‘Be my guest.’
After she’d gobbled it down, she licked the plate. Then she realized how she must have looked and blushed.
Imagine living like an insect for the last six months and worrying about etiquette. Only Jews could raise such absurd children.
I threw off my blanket and kicked my legs over the side of the bed. My feet found the puddle of urine I’d made. Good for me.
I asked her to turn away from me while I dressed. While I was buckling my belt, I said, ‘Bina, for the love of God, find someone else.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking at me with a puzzled face.
‘Go earn some points with God where you’re wanted!’ I told her.
But even my bullying didn’t make her cry. Tightening her lips, she did her ballerina walk to the front door and left. She never looked back, thank God.
Leaning back against the wall for support, I told myself I had saved her from wasting her time on me, but in truth I’d wanted to slice one more wound into the only enemy I could reach.
Izzy came over again late that afternoon. I was sitting in bed with my dream diary, scribbling a list of all the cities I would have wanted to visit if I weren’t where I was.
‘You’re up!’ he exclaimed, astonished. ‘What are you writing?’
‘I’m deciding where I’ll go when I get out of here.’
Only after that reply popped out of my mouth did I realize it was true. I went over what I’d written. Genoa seemed my best option – a former colleague of mine from Vienna was living there, and I could probably catch a steamer to Izmir. Or England. Hannah and I had spent our honeymoon in London – and two other vacations there – and we’d always loved it.
‘A man from the Jewish Council came over last night,’ Izzy told me, sitting down at the foot of my bed. ‘He said his name was Benjamin Schrei.’
The mattress sagged towards Izzy. I felt I was made of broken and rusted metal, and all those useless pieces inside me were sliding in his direction.
‘I told him you were sleeping, but he wants to talk to you,’ Izzy continued, and then he poked around his mouth with his tongue and spat something into his hand.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘A tooth,’ he replied. ‘They’ve been falling out.’
‘Open your mouth,’ I told him.
I looked in. His gums were bleeding and his breath was putrid, like mouldy bread.
‘What the hell is happening in there?’ I asked.
‘Scurvy,’ he replied. ‘I managed to buy some oranges, but they haven’t helped yet.’
‘Lemons would be better,’ I observed.
‘So find me a lemon.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when I eat or talk,’ he replied dryly. ‘So what do you think Schrei wants?’
‘Who gives a damn!’ I replied, and I realized that that was what Stefa would have said. Was that how I would go on – by imitating the sound of her voice in my head? After I’d drawn one tight circle around Genoa, and another around London, I added gruffly, ‘You shouldn’t have told Bina she could help me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she can’t!’ I declared.
‘You know, a little solidarity right now might help,’ he advised me, examining his tooth keenly, as if it were a precious artefact from the Dead Sea.
‘But what could Bina possibly do for me? I don’t want anything to eat, and she doesn’t know who murdered Adam or Anna, and…’
He threw the tooth and hit me on the side of my head. ‘I meant you could show a little solidarity towards her, you nincompoop! The girl is starving to death under that big coat of hers.’
Izzy made turnip soup while I worked on my list of escape routes. A half-hour later, while we were slurping away, I jotted down the names of the places I’d go if I could live out my fantasies of reaching a tropical paradise – Bangkok, Rangoon, Mandalay…
I wanted to wake up to warmth every day, and green, luxuriant life creeping through every crack in the sidewalk, overgrowing rooftops, walls and barricades. I wanted to eat red and yellow handfuls of tropical fruit for breakfast and spit the seeds into the moist soil of my garden, and watch them sprout, and go swimming in an ocean where fern-tailed seahorses and puckered moonfish peeked out at me from their hiding places in coral thickets. I wanted to wake up to the finch-like cries of boys and girls playing naked on the beach. I wanted to be where no one had ever heard German.
I couldn’t know when I was fifteen or even fifty what would break my heart, could I? I ask that because it often now seems as if I’d always known that Hannah, Adam and Stefa would die before me.
Imagine black dye running off into every memory. Nothing survives that isn’t grey.
Rowy, Mikael, Ziv, the Tarnowskis and other friends came by to check on me over those first days following Stefa’s death, but I remember very little of what they said. The only conversation I remember clearly was Rowy telling me he’d obtained funding to buy new musical scores, as well as cheap fiddles, recorders and other instruments; he’d decided to organize a youth orchestra.
The Adam who resided inside me now made me listen to his plans clearly.
With his eyes focused on a brighter future, Rowy also told me that Ziv had generously volunteered to help him search for talented street performers throughout the ghetto on his day off.
Curiously, Ewa and Helena never visited me.
I tossed words back and forth with all my guests, but most of the time I was thinking of how I’d have preferred to be alone. And how I wished I’d taken Stefa and Adam to be photographed. So many lost opportunities rattled in my head after my niece’s miracle, but I didn’t want to ever free myself from them.
Do I need to tell you why, Heniek? Maybe it’s not a bad thing to risk being too clear on occasion: they were proof of all my niece had meant to me.
Sunday was the funeral. I refused to go. I smoked my pipe and watched the rain pelting my window.
Izzy came over afterwards. He collapsed on my bed, face down, the crook of his arm over his eyes. He was sopping wet. He smelled like mud.
I dropped down next to him and held his shoulder. ‘I’ve decided to help Bina,’ I told him; I wanted to please him.
But he wouldn’t look at me.
I took off his shoes and socks, dried his face and arms, and got him under the covers.
While he slept, I retrieved my dream diary, turned to my list of the dead and added Stefa’s name, shivering with relief. I’d almost forgotten to do that. It scared me how we could forget our most important duties.
That night, I woke with a start and lit my carbide lamp, unsure now whether I’d really added her name. Staring at Stefa Liska, I wondered about the power of our names to alter our destiny, until the letters lifted off the paper. Soon, all the names of the dead – my dead – were floating in the pearly blue light, like butterflies kept aloft by a wind made of my own thoughts. The effect was pretty, but I knew it was only an optical trick; and yet the longer I kept my eyes on them, the more Stefa’s and Adam’s names seemed wrong – misspelled or mistakenly given to them. So I started rearranging their sequence of letters, which was when it occurred to me that this must have been why I’d made the list in the first place: to find the new names we ought to have given ourselves to protect us from the Germans and all the evils they’d brought with them.
I spent most of the next five days in bed. I slept in and out of twisted half-dreams, and their incompleteness gave me the troubling impression that Adam had wanted to tell me more about his thoughts and feelings – things only I would have understood.
I told all my visitors I felt abandoned and fragile, which had the advantage of being both true and what they wanted to hear, since it gave them the chance to offer me sympathetic looks and words of comfort. They also wanted to be reassured that I’d never give up so that they could believe in the quiet heroism of men and women – and more particularly, of the Jews.
I don’t mean to sound cynical about my friends; they were caring people, and they were under no obligation to give up their hopes for a happy ending.
To myself, however, I made the promise that I’d take Stefa’s way out after finding Adam’s killer.
That week, couriers delivered three letters smuggled in from the Other Side – from Christian friends to whom Stefa had written about Adam’s murder. Among them was one from Jaśmin, my former patient. At the end of her long and moving letter, she told me she was talking about the wretchedness of the ghetto to whoever would listen – even foreign journalists – and that I mustn’t give up hope of getting out.
She worked only a few blocks away but it was clear by now that we inhabited two separate countries, and that mine would one day disappear from the face of the earth, leaving nothing but a crater of memories for those few who managed to survive.
Sunrise would wake me every morning as if I’d been thrust from a moving train. Sitting up, watching the roaches making zigzag journeys across the cracks in the walls, I’d put myself in the killer’s place. He’d obviously wanted a piece of the lives he’d destroyed – as trophies, perhaps. But why a hand and a leg?
And the string – had Adam put it in his mouth or had the killer?
Izzy brought me bread every morning before work, and made me breakfast. Once, standing by the window, he spoke in a hesitant voice of how desperate he was for a chance to apologize to his wife for creating problems in their marriage. Rising to the challenge of his honesty, I confessed all I’d done wrong as a father – a last chance to make amends, I suppose. And a last chance for both of us to reveal secrets we’d kept deep down in our pockets for decades.
Izzy was convinced that he’d made a wrong turn early in his life, when he came back to Warsaw from France. ‘I never found my way back to myself after that,’ he told me.
Opening an envelope he’d brought with him, he took out four sepia-toned photographs of young men posing in front of a ship’s railing. ‘My lovers during the six years I worked on the Bourdonnais,’ he explained, handing them to me.
As I looked at each of his old friends, Izzy’s eyes grew worried. I realized he needed to show me all he was, and for me to give him my blessing; there was no time left for waiting.
‘You travelled far,’ I told him. ‘That was a very good thing.’
But his error-of-a-lifetime would give him no peace. Through a surge of tears, he whispered, ‘I married Róźa to prove to myself I could be the man everyone wanted me to be. I could have had another life – a truer life. Róźa, too.’
‘One thing I learned from my patients,’ I told him, ‘is that we all spend our lives living beside the people we could have been.’
‘Not like me, Erik. I hurt the people I cared for most.’
‘Do you still hear from any of your old lovers?’ I asked, a plan forming underneath my words.
‘One – Louis. Another steward. We write to each other for New Year’s.’
‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Very much.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in Boulogne-Billancourt. That’s why I sent the boys there. He found them jobs. He used to work as an airline mechanic. The boys even stayed with him for a while, though they aren’t aware of what he and I once meant to each other.’
‘When the ark comes for us, you’ll go to him,’ I told him as if it were an order.
‘Erik, I’m too old,’ he replied. ‘And all of me is unravelling. Besides, there’s Róźa. I can’t leave her.’
‘Izzy, she’s had a major stroke. She’s not going to get any better, and she doesn’t know who you are. Let her stay with her sister. Or if you have to, take her with you and let her move in with the boys. You’ve punished yourself long enough, don’t you think?’
One evening, Rowy finally told me why Ewa hadn’t visited me; Stefa’s suicide had shaken both her and Helena badly, and the little girl had suffered a diabetic shock. She’d nearly died. The young man added that he and Mikael had kept the bad news from me during the worst of my grief so as not to make me feel any worse. Helena was better now, but still weak.
On the afternoon of Friday, 28 February, eight days after Stefa’s death, a ghetto courier brought me a note from Gizela, the young woman who was looking after my home. She informed me that a lieutenant in the SS had requisitioned my flat a few days earlier. Gizela and her husband were back living with her in-laws. She asked me not to write to her, since she was convinced that all her mail was being read.
Thinking of a Nazi in my bed made me storm out of the apartment, shaking with rage. I ended up only a block from Weisman’s dance school, which started me thinking… Checking my watch, I realized I could make Rowy’s afternoon chorus rehearsal.
The young musician made a fuss over me as soon as I arrived, introducing me to all of his little singers as a great friend of the chorus. I was impressed with his ease with them and how they tugged at his shirtsleeves for his attention.
When I explained my purpose, he asked, ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’
‘Yes, it won’t take long. But I’ll need to see each kid separately – and alone. I don’t want them influencing one another.’
That was a lie: in truth, I was afraid that if any of the children had anything unusual to say about Rowy, his presence would intimidate them.
I talked to the eleven youngsters one at a time, behind the closed door of a dressing room. Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about Adam’s smuggling activities, and the most damning secret they could tell me about Rowy was that he ate half a chocolate bar after each of their performances.
The next day, Saturday, Anka came to my door early in the morning. She refused my invitation for ersatz coffee. ‘I’m in a rush – I make house calls on Saturdays,’ she told me, standing in the doorway. ‘Listen, I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. My nurse friend has been off with dysentery, but I went to see her yesterday and she told me that Anna never showed up for her procedure. She said that she doesn’t know if Mikael keeps records of the abortions. She wasn’t sure of the date Anna was scheduled for, but that the twenty-fourth of January sounded right.’
So Mikael had been telling the truth. Perhaps Anna had gone to see Mrs Sawicki hoping to get more money to pay for her abortion, and on the way home she’d been attacked – except that her mother said there’d been no signs of a struggle on her. Just like Adam. Which meant that the two children had either been caught completely by surprise or had known – and trusted – their killer.
Could Rowy or Mikael be working secretly for the Germans and have obtained authorization to cross the border on a regular basis? After all, if Anna or Adam had met one of them on the Other Side, they would have suspected nothing.
How important is personal geography to our destinies? I ask, Heniek, because the only reason I chose to follow Mikael first was that his apartment on Wałowa Street was closer to Stefa’s.
I got to his front door just after nine, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I stood vigil down the block. An elderly man rented me a chair for one złoty an hour.
Mikael came out near noon, dressed smartly in a tweed overcoat and carrying a black leather case. He hailed a rickshaw right away. Rushing into the street, I was able to flag one down myself. I told my driver to follow at a safe distance behind his colleague.
A short time later, Mikael got out on Nowolipki Street and entered the door to a five-storey apartment house. I had my driver drop me fifty paces away and knocked at one of the ground-floor apartments. A boy of thirteen or so, wearing a knitted yarmulke, came to the door. At the back of the room, two old women in dark shawls and headscarfs were working over a stove. The place reeked of boiling cabbage.
‘Are there any clinics in this apartment house?’ I asked the young man; I was guessing that Mikael was carrying medical supplies in his case.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Why would a doctor come here?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied, scowling as if I were a beggar.
I went back outside, stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the façade of the building. A hand-lettered sign in a second-floor window made immediate sense of Mikael’s visit: Jerusalem Photo Studio – Develop Your Own Pictures.
I knew nothing about photography, but the case Mikael was carrying must have held his plates or film, or maybe even a camera. He’d probably spend a few hours there developing his negatives.
Realizing that it could take weeks to learn something damning about him or Rowy, I headed off through a fog of self-doubt.
On reaching home, the silence of Stefa’s apartment pressed down so hard on me that I fled right away. I ended up at the Café Levone. A middle-aged woman with shoulder-length silver hair, intelligent eyes and silver lily-of-the-valley earrings approached me shortly after I was served my tea. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said with an apologetic smile.
She wore an old black jumper whose fraying sleeves she’d accordion-bunched at her elbow, which I found both comic and attractive.
‘Why is this so difficult?’ she asked, irritated with herself. Her sensitive green eyes drew my sympathy.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ I told her, reaching into my pocket for a złoty.
She waved away the coin I held out. ‘Oh dear, what a ridiculous sight I must be in these old clothes!’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just thought you might like some real sugar.’ She held out to me a handful of brown crystals. ‘I find it’s the only way to keep the ghetto tea from making my taste buds want to run and hide.’
Smiling appreciatively, I picked up a crystal and thanked her. Next to her slender pink hand, mine seemed ungainly and hairy, like an orangutan’s, but that was all right with me because it was a reminder that I was a man and she was a woman. ‘Please, sit,’ I told her, since she, too, looked as if she could use some company.
Once seated, she dropped her crystals into a white linen handkerchief, folded each corner towards the centre, tied it together, and stowed her treasure in her leather bag. Her gestures were quick and practised, which charmed me. When she looked at me again, I put my crystal between my front teeth and took a sip of tea across its smooth surface. She watched me with a serious look, and neither of us turned away for far longer than would be considered appropriate for two Jewish dinosaurs.
Who can explain the ways of the body? My dormant, undernourished shmekele began to grow. And my thoughts turned to hopes long extinguished.
What kind of man would long for sex after the death of the two people he most loved in the world?
The woman introduced herself as Melka Wilner. She told me she knew who I was because her niece Zosia Kleiner was married to Dawid Kornberg, the son of a former neighbour of mine, who just happened to be in Amsterdam on business when we were ordered into the ghetto…
To play by the rules of Jewish knitting, I listened patiently before steering us towards more interesting topics. The rest of our conversation was filtered through the sensual feel of the sugar crystal melting between my teeth.
We ended up talking of travel. I spoke of my honeymoon in London and she told me she had lived in Palestine for five years, from April 1902 to December 1907. She’d married a judge named Timmermann on returning to Poland. ‘He always knew right from wrong, which seemed a good thing until I realized he was always right and I was always wrong!’ She laughed in a burst, and light radiated from her eyes.
I envied how she talked so easily of the events around which her life had turned.
The deed was done in her slender bed, behind a rose-patterned curtain strung from wall to wall; it separated her side of the room from her cousin Zosia’s. Melka sensed my nervousness and took control. She was gentle with me, and her kisses were so passionate that she left me disoriented – as if outside my body. Our acrobatics themselves proved painful, limited by the demands of bodies that had been given bony angles by cramped hunger and age. Still, to our credit, we managed to make a pleasant mess on ourselves and the sheets.
God knows why she chose me.
I floundered like a wounded animal afterwards, in a dim grey twilight between waking and sleep. I was giving Adam a bath, and he was splashing. I knew it wasn’t real, but I wanted to stay with him. I wanted to become sopping wet with the very sight of him.
‘When was the last time you made love?’ Melka asked me, tugging me fully awake.
She was sitting at the foot of the bed. Sensing my confusion, she caressed my leg and repeated her question.
I sat up, already so far from Adam that it petrified me. Trying to disguise my feelings, I replied, ‘As best I can recall, Nero was emperor in Rome.’
She laughed, which made me feel a little better. ‘And you?’ I asked.
‘Three or four days ago,’ she replied. ‘I’ve a… a friend.’
I examined my feelings and couldn’t find bitterness or jealousy. What else had I a right to expect?
‘I’m sorry, Erik,’ she said, rubbing my foot.
‘It’s all right.’
I noticed now the smell of mildew in the room. It seemed to be coming from beneath the bed. I decided not to look.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Melka requested, smiling encouragingly.
‘Do you really want to know?’ I asked in a tone of warning.
‘Yes. At the very least, we can help each other by listening.’
As I explained about Adam and Stefa, and all the detective work I’d done that had led me to Rowy and Mikael, which now seemed like nowhere, Melka got up and went to the window, peeking through a crack in the curtains. I had the impression she was listening to her own inner voice rather than me, but I needed to confess myself to a person who hadn’t known all the people I’d failed, so I kept on talking.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked after I’d finished.
‘I don’t know. I suppose after I find out who killed Adam, I’ll go back to work at the Lending Library and wait for the Germans to shovel our skinny corpses into the river.’
Melka opened a chink in the curtains again. ‘God, I hate the Polish winter,’ she said, sighing despairingly.
‘We’ll hope for an early spring,’ I replied, trying to sound encouraging.
‘Maybe you need to let your niece and nephew go,’ she said without turning round. ‘You still have a chance to make a new life.’
‘You can’t be serious?’ I replied.
‘Sorry, what I said was thoughtless,’ she told me, smiling sweetly. ‘Forgive me.’
When she slipped on her pullover, I recognized my cue. After I was dressed, I pressed a slip of paper with my address into her hand, but her easy thank you and friendly peck on the cheek meant that we would never do this again.
My guilt that afternoon and evening was crushing. I drank vodka until I passed out.
Ewa finally came over the next day, Sunday, 2 March, while I was napping off my hangover.
‘I want you to know I think of Stefa and Adam every day,’ she told me, moving her worried gaze over the floor between us. ‘They will be with me always.’
Ewa seemed to speak to me from out of a deep thicket inside herself. I didn’t think it was fair that she should have to lug my dead behind her, and I wanted to tell her that, but her air of defeat angered me. You have your health and your daughter, so you don’t have the right to give up! I wanted to shout.
She sensed my ambivalence towards her and started to cry. After handing me a note she’d meant to send me earlier, she rushed out the door.
The note read: Everything has gone wrong. The happiness we once all had now seems so distant. It’s as if we never had a chance. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…
Perhaps it was my irritation at seeing Ewa so withdrawn – and at my selfish reaction to her – that awakened me to all I still needed to do. After putting her note under Stefa’s pillow, I brought back to my bed the books on child abuse by Ambroise Tardieu and Paul Bernard that I owned; I was looking for what would motivate a killer to take a boy’s leg and a girl’s hand.
I read until nightfall about kids who’d been raped, beaten and starved – usually by their parents or other relatives – but I couldn’t find any who’d been mutilated like Adam and Anna.
Of the unfortunate children I read about that day, I remember a French girl named Adelina Defert most of all. Her parents had locked her in a small wooden box from the age of eight to seventeen. They’d tied her down, whipped her and burned her with red-hot charcoals, and to torture her further her mother had washed her wounds with nitric acid. When Adelina was finally rescued, her straw mattress was teeming with insects, and the rags she used for blankets were soaked with pus.
Reading about Adelina gave me the idea that her parents would have adored running the ghettos across Poland. An insight? Maybe Adam’s murderer wanted nothing but the pleasure of disfiguring what was beautiful.
Gratuitous cruelty… We have to admit it never goes out of style, and the Nazis had raised it to the level of a philosophy.
All temples are metaphors for the human body; and it was the body that gave birth to the notion of holiness. A professor of mine had told me that in Vienna, but I’d been too young to understand. Now, I realized he’d been right, and what that meant to me now was that the murderer wanted to sever all holiness from the world.
Ziv knocked at my door that evening. He’d come over a few times after Stefa’s death but he always looked as if he was about to burst into tears and only stayed a couple of minutes. Since her suicide, he’d become as pale as ivory, and so gaunt that his pimply forehead jutted out over his eyes.
Under his arm he held his alabaster chessboard. ‘How about a game before bed, Dr Cohen?’ he asked, trying to sound cheerful.
‘I don’t think so. My mind… it’s all over the place.’
He looked so forlorn that I invited him to talk with me in the kitchen. I offered him one of the potato pancakes that Ida Tarnowski had made for me, but he turned me down. Looking at his unhappy face, I said, ‘All right, let’s see if I can beat you this time.’
His reply was a glorious smile.
As we played, I pretended not to notice he was losing on purpose, but not even the village idiot in a Russian novel could make such numbskull moves.
To Ziv, losing on purpose must have meant that we could be generous to each other – why else make such a sacrifice? I guessed that not many people had ever treated him well. And that he’d been building up his courage to give me the gift of his loss since Stefa’s death.
Early the next morning, I took a rickshaw to Ogrodowa Street to question the father of the girl who had died after her abortion; I had to make sure she hadn’t been disfigured.
Mr Szwebel had oily black hair falling over his ears, wild green eyes and a scruffy beard. He wore long flannel pyjamas and a stained old prayer shawl over his shoulders – a Jewish Rasputin. I told him that Mikael Tengmann’s nurse had given me his address, but that he must never tell that to anyone, and he agreed.
When we shook hands, I noticed his fingernails were long and filthy. I feared that his answers to my questions would become manic rants, but throughout our conversation he spoke to me in a quiet and well-considered voice. We sat at his kitchen table, and he poured mint tea for us into slender glasses.
‘I’ve come about your daughter,’ I said to him.
‘I figured that’s what it was.’
‘I understand she had an operation.’
‘Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about what took place,’ he replied.
‘But you know that Mikael Tengmann performed it?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told. He denied it.’
‘You don’t seem angry about that.’
‘Anger is of no help where we live, Dr Cohen.’
‘His nurse, Anka, said you knew your daughter Esther had been pregnant.’
‘Yes.’ He stood up and took a bowl of stewed prunes from the counter, then grabbed a tarnished spoon and handed it to me. ‘Eat something,’ he told me, putting the fruit in front of me. ‘You’re way too thin.’
‘So are you,’ I observed, smiling.
‘That’s because I don’t want to leave the ghetto with anything weighing me down,’ he replied. ‘But it’s different with you. Your time hasn’t come yet.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Let’s just say that traumas can sometimes improve our vision.’
To please him, I spooned up one of his prunes, but its burst of sweetness only served to distress me; I didn’t want to let myself believe that I could one day return to a life of small delights.
‘Did Esther ever say if anyone had threatened her in any way?’ I continued.
‘No.’
‘What did she tell you about Dr Tengmann?’
He took a thoughtful sip of his tea. ‘We’d only heard of him – of the procedures he performed. We hadn’t been to see him. In fact, we’d agreed that she would continue with the pregnancy – at least that’s what I thought we’d agreed. Esther went to him without telling me.’
‘And do you know who the father of her baby was?’ I was testing for anyone who might have known Adam or Anna.
‘Her fiancé, Felix Perlmutter.’
I didn’t know him. I explained briefly about Anna and Adam. Mr Szwebel looked away, revealing emotion only in his frequent blinking. In answer to my subsequent question, he shook his head. ‘No, nothing was cut from Esther,’ he told me. ‘At least nothing outside her body. She haemorrhaged badly on her inside.’
‘Do you know if she could sing?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Had Esther a good singing voice?’ I clarified.
‘I’m not sure. She wasn’t a musical girl. But I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.’
‘I’ve a friend who started a chorus for boys and girls. I’m wondering if she ever met him. His name is Rowan Klaus.’
‘No, she never spoke of him. Though I suppose it’s possible she was keeping one more secret from me.’
It started to snow as I made my way home, and the moonlit cascade of those cold blossoms endlessly falling on to me and the rooftops and streets, covering all the muck and disorder, was so wondrous and complete that for one moment everything in the world seemed to be united against a common enemy.
The flakes stuck to my gloves – crystalline and perfect – then melted for ever.
I was moved.
Except that when my feeling of transcendence vanished, I hated all the beauty around me as one can only hate what one has loved as a child.
I spotted Bina and her mother down the street, selling their pickled vegetables, but I didn’t dare go to them.
Izzy was waiting for me in my apartment, seated on my bed. He’d taken down a figurative print by Kokoschka that Stefa had kept over her bed – a no-nonsense young woman with her hand on her hip, ready to vanquish any and all opponents. I’d bought it for her because the woman reminded me of her. He was polishing the glass.
‘Was it very dusty?’ I asked.
‘Filthy!’ He held up his rag to show me the yellow-brown grime he’d removed, then stood the print in his lap and sat up straight. ‘I’ve just heard that the Jewish Council is assigning tenants to move into the apartments of people who’ve died – to cope with the thousands of new arrivals from Danzig and everywhere else. So before you have someone move in that you can’t stand, I suggest you take in Bina and her mother.’
‘Izzy, you’re obsessed with that girl!’
‘You’d prefer she starve to death under our very eyes?’ he demanded.
‘But she’s like too soft a pillow. She irritates me.’
I made that silly criticism because I couldn’t think of a real reason to dislike her.
He eyed me angrily. ‘You’re behaving miserably! We have to help.’
I sat down beside him and took off my shoes. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘how can anyone move in? All of Stefa and Adam’s things are still here. And I won’t pack them up. I couldn’t bear to look at them.’
‘I’ll take care of that,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll put them in my workshop. Nothing will be lost.’
‘Very well. Make a copy of your key for Bina and tell her that she and her mother can move in as soon as they want.’
‘There’s a slight problem – I think she also has an uncle living with her,’ he told me warily.
I gave a little laugh at the absurdity. ‘Well, I guess one more passenger won’t make much difference.’
He embraced me gratefully.
After Izzy left, I looked into Adam’s chest of clothes, to feel my pain as deeply as I could before giving it up. Afterwards, while splashing water on my face, there was a knock on the door.
Benjamin Schrei stood on the landing. He wore a pinstriped grey suit, and shimmering on his lapel was a golden Star of David that meant: I represent authority!
I stank to high heaven, and I hadn’t shaved since Stefa’s death, but I was glad for it; I wouldn’t have wanted to be anything but a rumpled, smelly eyesore.
‘What the hell do you want?’ I demanded, tossing my towel behind me on my bed.
‘I was sorry to hear about your niece,’ he told me, taking off his hat.
‘Sure you were,’ I replied with a sneer, more than anything else because his slicked-back hair was Hollywood-perfect. Imagine a man preparing for a grievance call as if he had a date with Carole Lombard!
‘We need to talk,’ he told me, which meant, you need to listen!
‘No, I need to talk and you need to shut up!’ I retorted, gratified by the snarl in my voice. ‘You told me that Adam was the only child who’d been mutilated, but a girl named Anna had her hand cut off – and you knew it!’
‘How did you find out?’ he demanded.
‘None of your business!’ I snapped back.
‘Everything that happens in the ghetto is my business.’
‘Oy gewalt,’ I replied, rolling my eyes. ‘Did some Hollywood rabbi make you memorize that line for your bar mitzvah?’
‘What makes you think that I was under an obligation to tell you about Anna?’ Schrei retorted, seething. ‘Because you were once an important man? You assimilated Jews make me sick!’
So, Schrei’s playing Clark Gablewitz in the Yiddish gangster movie of his own making was all about turning the tables on the Jewish elite. Didn’t he realize that his pinstriped suit – even if tailored by a Hasidic hunchback – implied assimilation? ‘You don’t need to remind me that I’m nothing in here,’ I told him, ‘or that the man I was outside the ghetto has vanished. I’ve no illusions – the Germans will grind up my bones and make glue out of me. But I’ll tell you this, Schrei – before I’m sold for four pfennig a jar in Munich, I’m going to find out who murdered Adam! So why don’t you just save us both some time and tell me if any other kid has been killed.’
I saw from his throbbing jaw that my brutal honesty had unnerved him. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what you want to know,’ he said in a voice of restraint, ‘but only if you tell me what you’ve found out about Adam and Anna.’
‘Why should I bargain with you?’
‘Because,’ he observed, eager to prove we were playing on the same team, ‘we both need to know who killed your nephew.’
‘Why do you need to know?’ I questioned.
‘To keep order in the ghetto.’
‘Is there an order in the ghetto?’
‘There is, even if you can’t see it!’
‘So the God of Moses and Abraham isn’t the only invisible being you believe in.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’
‘Probably because I don’t trust you.’
‘The council doesn’t pay me to be trusted.’
I laughed maliciously. ‘There you go again with your bar-mitzvah lines. So you consider yourself a martyr to the Jewish cause? Do you often dream you’re on Masada holding off the Romans, by any chance?’
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re too clever by half?’ he asked.
‘Just my wife. But I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten dumber since she died – especially over the last few months.’
‘Look,’ he said, sighing with exasperation, ‘I know you don’t like me, and I know I don’t like you, but I’ve had a hell of a day and I need to get off my feet.’
‘That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense,’ I told him admiringly. I gestured for him to step inside. ‘Take the armchair,’ I told him.
He dropped down and undid his coat as if he might not move again for quite some time. I sat on my bed.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, taking out his cigarette tin.
‘Not if you give me one.’
He lit mine – a gentleman even to his enemies, I had to give him that. I fetched us the clay ashtray Adam had made and plonked it down on the arm of his chair.
‘Well?’ he prompted.
‘Well, what?’ I replied.
‘What have you found out about your grandnephew?’
‘For one thing, he led a double life, as you suspected. Though I haven’t found out yet where he used to cross to the Other Side. He left the ghetto on the day he was murdered to try to find coal. What else he was smuggling, I’ve no idea – probably cheese. He and his mother could live on cheese. We come from a long line of mice.’
‘And Anna?’ he asked, unamused.
‘The way this works, Mr Schrei, is you ask a question, then I ask one. That can’t be too hard for you to understand even if you’re too pooped to punch me in the face.’
He grinned, since I’d read his thoughts accurately.
‘Have any other kids been mutilated?’ I asked.
‘One, a boy – ten years old. Just three days ago.’
‘What was missing – a hand or a leg?’
‘It’s my turn, Dr Cohen,’ Schrei told me. ‘What did you learn about Anna?’
‘She had a boyfriend outside the ghetto – a Pole named Paweł Sawicki. By the way, when you found her body, were there any signs of her having put up a struggle?’
‘No.’
‘So maybe she knew whoever killed her. Or whoever betrayed her to a murderer living outside the ghetto. Maybe Adam did, too.’
‘That seems possible,’ he agreed.
‘So what was missing from the murdered boy?’ I asked.
‘The skin over his right hip – it was sliced away.’
I cringed. ‘How much skin?’
‘A lot.’ He held his hands half a foot apart. ‘Tell me about Paweł.’
‘A nice boy, by all accounts. Went to the cinema with Anna, took her on picnics. Only one problem: his mother is a Jew-hating witch who banished him to Switzerland to keep him away from Anna. So was there anything special about the skin that was taken from the boy?’
‘We can’t find anyone who knew him well enough to say. Was there anything special about Anna’s hand?’
‘Her mother didn’t think so. What was the boy’s name?’
‘Georg.’
‘And where was Georg found?’
‘Chłodna Street – in the barbed wire, just like Adam.’ Schrei smoked thoughtfully and disregarded my next question. ‘So maybe Paweł’s mother had Anna killed,’ he conjectured in a slow, cautious voice. ‘Anna knew her, so maybe she could have been lured somewhere to be murdered by her, or by someone helping her.’
‘Maybe. I mean, that’s what witches do – kill children. But I’ve no reason to believe that Anna ever met Adam, and in any case, it’s nearly impossible for me to believe that Mrs Sawicki knew anything about him, so why would she have had him murdered?’ I went to the window and gazed down into an image of Stefa lying under the Berlin Morgenpost. Schrei tossed me his next question, but I let it fall between us. ‘You know what Mrs Sawicki told me?’ I said to him. ‘That our story is over – the Jews, I mean.’
‘She may be right,’ he replied glumly.
Schrei closed his eyes and angled his face up, as though trying in vain to recall the warmth of summer sunlight, and just like that we were on the same team – fighting to keep The End from being written into our four-thousand-year-old autobiography.
‘You want something to drink?’ I asked him in a conciliatory tone. ‘I’ve still got a little schnapps left.’
‘Any coffee?’ he asked.
‘Some chicory substitute that isn’t too bad.’
On the way to the kitchen to boil water, I patted his shoulder. Surprised by my gesture of friendship, he stood up and accompanied me.
‘Georg – did anyone see who left his body in the barbed wire?’ I asked.
‘No. Was Anna smuggling?’ he shot back, leaning against the cabinets.
‘I don’t think so. She left the ghetto to see Paweł, but he was already in Switzerland.’ To keep my word, I refrained from revealing she’d been pregnant. ‘She never made it back inside,’ I added. ‘Not that she had much to return to.’
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘There’s a second witch in her story.’
‘Who?’
‘Her mother forbade her to date Goyim,’ I replied, ‘and she beat Anna when she refused to give up her Polish Prince Charming. Do you know if Georg had ever met Adam or Anna?’
‘No, I’ve no idea,’ Schrei replied.
‘And you know where he lived?’
‘He’d been in the Krochmalna Street orphanage, but he’d run away.’
‘The orphanage run by Janusz Korczak?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. Have you discovered anything that Adam and Anna had in common?’
‘They had the ghetto in common,’ I replied.
Thinking I was trying to be funny, he grinned – a tough guy’s grudging smile – and took a quick, determined puff on his cigarette. He was starting to like me and getting his energy back.
‘And what else?’ he asked.
‘Being half-starved… becoming adults before their time… wanting to get to a warmer climate.’ I refrained from mentioning Mikael or Rowy just yet; I didn’t entirely trust Schrei and couldn’t risk him alerting my suspects that I’d be following them. ‘How long a list do you want?’ I asked him.
‘I meant,’ he said, sighing mightily, ‘have you found anything specific they had in common?’
‘Not yet,’ I lied.
‘Were Anna and Adam friends with any of the same kids?’ Schrei asked.
‘Not that I know of. Was there any string in Georg’s mouth when you found him?’
‘String?’
‘Adam had a small piece of white string in his mouth. Did anyone look in Georg’s?’
‘No, but he might have been keeping a tiny square of gauze in his fist.’
‘Might have? What’s that mean?’
‘We found a piece of gauze in his fist. But maybe it had been in the barbed wire and got stuck to him when he was tossed there. It had been raining – the gauze must have been wet and clingy.’
‘What kind of gauze?’
‘The kind used in wedding veils, that sort of thing.’
‘Did you save it?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘It didn’t seem important. Look, Dr Cohen, hundreds of Jewish kids die each month in the ghetto – should we save everything they’ve got in their hands?’
‘Was the gauze bloody?’
‘No, it was clean.’
‘Which means it may have been put in his fist after he was murdered. Or he may even have snatched it up.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Schrei questioned.
‘I don’t know. What was Georg’s surname?’
‘If I tell you that, you have to promise not to go public with anything you find out.’
‘Whatever you want,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll even leave you my first editions of Freud in my will. You can read, can’t you?’
‘This is serious, Dr Cohen. You’re already in trouble.’
‘With whom? Besides God, I mean – for being an assimilated Jew.’
I thought that was witty, but he glared at me as if I’d gone too far. ‘With… me,’ he said slowly and darkly, and he took a long and greedy puff. He had fantastic lungs – I’d give him that.
‘Mazel tov! ’ I told him sarcastically. ‘God and Benny Schrei regard me as too clever by half. Do you and He perform together often?’
‘This is useless,’ he concluded, frowning. ‘You’re useless. And I’m too sick of my life to go on hitting verbal ping-pong balls back and forth with a crusty old bugger like you.’ He strode past me, chin high and elbows swinging, just like the cowboy hero in a Karl May Western.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, and when he faced me at the kitchen door, I said, ‘I really am, but what can I do?’
I saw in the willingness of his eyes that he’d wanted someone to apologize for a long time – for what, I didn’t know, but every Jew in Poland woke up with an urgent need for someone, even a stranger, to tell him he was sorry.
‘You want me to follow your orders,’ I went on, ‘but I’m exhausted, and underneath my exhaustion is an anger so deep it’s probably bottomless. And besides, I’ve always been bad at doing what other people want.’
The water was boiling by now, but I’d used up all my strength bantering with him. I sat at the table and propped up my head with my hands.
‘When was the last time you had a good meal?’ he asked me.
‘Define good.’
‘I’ll make the chicory,’ he told me.
‘It’s in there,’ I said, pointing to one of the cabinets.
‘So what are you going to do when you find out who killed Adam?’ he asked me, taking out the tin. He also found a wedge of cheese that Stefa must have hidden for an emergency.
‘Have you ever been to London?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘How about Paris?’
‘Once, why?’
He took a paring knife from the towel on which I’d let the washed silverware dry and started scraping the outside of the cheese.
‘Was Paris exactly as you thought it would be?’ I questioned. ‘I mean, when you were walking along the Seine did you feel just as you thought you’d feel?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So how can I know what I’ll do when I reach the final page of this mystery?’
He scowled as if my comparison was silly. ‘Do you have any bread?’ he asked.
I pointed to my stash of matzo on Stefa’s spice shelf. He took a rectangle and cut two reasonably mould-free slivers of cheese on top. ‘Eat this,’ he said, putting it in front of me.
It was comforting to be given an order. While he made our ersatz coffee, I nibbled away – the third mouse in my family, and the only one who hadn’t yet had his neck snapped in two.
We let silence settle the quarrel between us. I was grateful for that.
‘I want you to come to me when you find out who murdered Adam,’ he told me, putting a steaming cup of chicory in front of me. ‘Before you do anything stupid, I mean.’
‘All right, but I’m prone to doing stupid things. It’s a personality flaw.’
Sniffing, he said, ‘No offence intended, Dr Cohen, but are you aware you smell like a dog’s behind?’
His no offence intended made me laugh. I liked him more and more.
To give ourselves a rest, we talked about the wretched weather for a time – a favoured subject in Warsaw for at least nine months every year. Then he asked about Stefa, and I told him how she’d given me back a belief in miracles. When I spoke of her Moroccan slippers falling off, and of the sores I discovered between her toes, he closed his eyes as if he might give up his Hollywood gangster persona and turn back into the softer man he undoubtedly was in the Before Time.
‘Hey, give me some more cheese,’ I asked, to move us beyond our impasse.
He cut me a big slice, pulling the knife towards his thumb like a peasant, which made me realize how far he’d come.
‘Got a pen and paper?’ he asked while I was licking the crumbs from my palm.
‘What for?’
‘I’m going to write down what I know about Georg.’
I told him to fetch my dream diary from under my pillow and my inkstand from my desk. In the thirty seconds he was gone, I realized the obvious: he was too overworked to solve the murders of Adam, Anna and Georg; he wanted me to do that for him. And I also realized that he must be sure a Jewish accomplice inside the ghetto was at least partly responsible for Adam’s death or he wouldn’t be worried about what I’d do.
‘Who are the letters under your pillow from?’ he asked when he returned.
‘My daughter. She lives in Izmir. She’s an archaeologist. She likes old things.’ Except for her father, I almost added, but I hoped that was no longer true.
‘Thank God she’s safe,’ he told me.
‘Yes, that’s a very good thing. Listen, Schrei, after I find out who killed Adam, Anna and Georg, what’ll you do with me?’
‘Do with you? I won’t do anything with you.’ He was offended by my implication.
‘If the murderer turns out to be a wealthy smuggler who’s collaborating with the Germans, you won’t put a bullet in me?’
‘Not if you keep his identity to yourself.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Dr Cohen,’ he replied wearily, ‘if I were a betting man, I’d wager you’ll never find out who the murderer is. But if you do, you can be sure I’ll take care of him – even if he turns out to be Keranowicz.’
‘Who?’
‘Sorry – it’s my anagram for Czerniakow.’
Adam Czerniakow was the head of the Jewish Council – and the most famous man in the ghetto.
‘You too?’ I exclaimed.
‘Me too what?’
‘Rearranging things to fit the new world we’re living in.’
‘What else can I do?’ he replied, shrugging. ‘Anyway, I’ll take care of the murderer – if you find him. That’s my job.’
He spoke so matter-of-factly that I believed him. He wrote a name in my dream diary – Georg Mueller – then the address he’d lived at before being orphaned: 24 Brzeska Street, which was in the Warsaw suburb of Praga.
He also wrote down his own address. When he handed me my diary, he said, ‘Get in touch with me if you find out anything more – any time, day or night.’
‘You’re sure Georg’s parents are dead?’ I asked.
‘That’s what the boy told the people at the orphanage. And we managed to send someone to his home address, but none of his neighbours knew of any relatives in the area.’
‘He must have someone – an aunt, an uncle…’
‘He said he had cousins in Katowice.’
As I wrote that down, I asked, ‘And how did his parents die?’
‘The Nazis sent his father away on a labour gang and he never came home. Pneumonia killed his mother.’
‘Do you have a photo of him?’ I asked, and when Schrei shook his head, I added, ‘How about an identity card?’
‘Nothing. He was thrown naked into the barbed wire.’
‘From the Christian side?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said he’d run away from the orphanage. So where was he living?’
‘On the street. A nurse who worked at the orphanage said she used to see him juggling outside the Femina Theatre. But listen, Mueller may not be his real name. That’s the name he used, but he might have made it up. Apparently, he was that kind of kid.’
‘What kind of kid is that?’
‘The kind who lies to adults.’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ I told him. ‘In here, all kids lie. That’s one more way we can be sure we’ve been exiled to Gehenna.’
A barber at a makeshift stall near the Femina Theatre confirmed to me that kids often performed there starting at noon and, sure enough, five boys and one girl, all in homemade black leotards, arrived only a few minutes after the hour. A crowd formed as they spread a worn red rug along the sidewalk.
They performed flips and handsprings to much delighted applause. Only one of the kids – a boy with a shaved head who was maybe ten or eleven years old – seemed to be a trained gymnast, however; he did a twisting handspring into a back flip that made everybody gasp. But he never smiled; he seemed to be embarrassed.
For a finale, the children formed a three-tiered pyramid. An imp with a shaved head stood at the top. He wore a gold papier-mâché crown and gripped a sceptre in his fist – a metal bar painted silver, with a blue light bulb fastened at the top. Surveying the onlookers, he held his head high, as if they were his subjects. He tried his best, but the whole amateurish spectacle only revealed to me how far we’d fallen.
As soon as the show was over, the capable gymnast walked through the crowd with a black derby, asking for donations. I dropped a złoty in and asked if he’d known a young street juggler named Georg. He told me that he hadn’t, but the miniature king who’d reigned atop the pyramid overheard us and hollered, ‘I knew him!’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Zachariah Manberg,’ he replied proudly.
‘He’s Tsibele!’ the slightly older acrobat beside him shouted with malicious glee.
‘’Cause he smells like an rotten onion!’ another shouted.
‘We all smell like onions!’ I challenged them.
‘Not you, Reb Yid!’ yelled the girl acrobat, hoping to win some coins in exchange for flattery.
‘True,’ I acknowledged. ‘I have it on good authority that I smell like a dog’s rear end.’
She was too shocked to laugh. And Zachariah was too curious of me.
‘Come here,’ I told him, motioning him over. He had merry green eyes – intelligent and wily – and I imagined from the serious way he stared at me that he was trying to assess whether I was a hundred, or maybe even a thousand, years old. I felt an immediate affection for him.
‘My name is Erik Cohen and I’m sixty-seven,’ I told him. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seven and a half,’ he answered proudly, puffing up his chest like a rooster.
‘Do you know if Georg was smuggling?’ I asked.
He held out his palm, stuck the pink tip of his tongue between his lips and gave me a cheeky look. I reached into my pocket and took out a one-złoty coin, then gave it to him, which made his eyes pop. The four other boys and single girl in his troupe circled around us.
‘I’m sure he was smuggling,’ Zachariah told me.
I squatted to his level so he’d trust me, but my knees were so sore that it felt as though broken glass were sticking into them. I dropped down on to my bottom to relieve the pain. When I asked my little friend to sit with me, he dropped down and crossed his legs.
‘Where’s your coat?’ I asked him.
‘My sister is holding it.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She went for food.’
I took off my muffler and twirled it twice around his neck. ‘There, that’s better,’ I told him. ‘Now, what kind of goods did Georg smuggle?’
He held out his hand again. I gave him another złoty. He inserted both coins into his sock, then told me happily, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I paid you so you could tell me you don’t know?’ I made an exaggerated, silent-movie frown. ‘You’re taking advantage of an alter kacker!’
He giggled and squirmed. The ghetto hadn’t yet murdered his sense of humour, which was worth paying for. But more than that, I realized I’d found the child I wanted.
When I learn who killed Adam, take me, but let this boy survive, I whispered to God – or maybe to Satan. It didn’t seem to matter which, as long as my wish was granted.
‘Do you know which secret passage Georg used to get out of the ghetto?’ I asked.
He held out his palm for more money. I snatched his hand. ‘Listen, Zachariah, this goes beyond money – I need to know very badly.’
‘Georg went right through the wall,’ he answered. ‘He and some other boys knocked out some bricks one night.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘On Okopowa Street, near the cemetery,’ an older boy with a scab on his chin told me. ‘I was with him.’
I motioned him over and he squatted down beside me.
‘Did he ever speak about meeting anyone dangerous or threatening?’ I asked.
‘No.’
Zachariah agreed with that. He rubbed his eye with his knuckle. I noticed a louse crawling in his eyelashes. I took his shoulder. ‘Don’t move,’ I told him.
I pulled out the wretched parasite between my thumb and forefinger, then crushed it with my nail.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘Just a bug,’ I replied, tossing it away. ‘Listen, did Georg ever say why he didn’t go back to the orphanage?’
‘He hated being cooped up!’ Zachariah exclaimed, as if that answer might win him a ticket to the cinema.
‘And do you know where he was living?’
‘On Nowolipie Street.’
‘What number?’
Zachariah made a face and hunched up his shoulders to indicate he didn’t know.
‘Georg was kind of secretive,’ the older boy said solemnly.
‘What did he look like?’
‘He had big ears – like an elephant,’ Zachariah told me. He tugged on his earlobes.
‘Did you ever see him naked?’
‘Naked how?’ he asked, puffing out his lips in puzzlement.
‘I need to know if he had any identifying marks on his hip.’
As soon as I finished my question, a jolt of understanding made me gasp. I realized now what might have made Adam’s leg special.
‘No, I never saw his hip,’ the older boy told me.
‘Me neither!’ Zachariah chimed in.
I got to my feet. The two boys did, as well. I continued my questioning, but I felt as if I’d crossed an invisible portal into a myth, in which the only way to identify brothers and sisters separated at birth was by a telltale sign on their skin. And Adam’s telltale sign was on his ankle – his right ankle: a line of four birthmarks. But of what value could they have possibly been to anyone? And could something so small and insignificant really have summoned Death to my nephew?
‘How about Georg’s clothing – anything unusual?’ I asked the acrobats.
‘I know the answer to that one!’ Zachariah exclaimed, his eyes brightening. ‘He had newspapers stuffed into his shoes!’
‘That’s all?’ I asked.
‘And he wore a chain around his neck,’ the older boy told me.
‘What kind of chain?’
‘With a little Virgin Mary at the end. He said his mother was Jewish, but that his father was Russian. His father had hung that necklace around his neck when he was just a baby. He never took it off.’
‘And Georg juggled, right?’
Zachariah nodded.
‘Did he do anything else to earn money?’
‘No,’ the little boy replied, but the older acrobat added, ‘Georg sometimes sang while he juggled. Mostly Yiddish folk songs. He said it got him a bigger crowd.
‘Was he any good?’
‘Pretty good, but he wasn’t the best juggler in the world. He could do only four pairs of socks. And sometimes one would fall.’
‘Socks?’
‘That’s what he juggled – he rolled each pair into a tight ball.’
By now, I’d realized that Rowy or Ziv was sure to have noticed him sooner or later while looking for new singers. Was it possible that they were both involved in Adam’s murder? Rowy was terrified of being conscripted again into a labour gang, and perhaps he had exchanged the lives of three Jewish children for a guarantee of safety. As for Ziv, what did I really know about him, other than that he was shy and awkward, and an exceptional chess player?
‘Did Georg ever talk about singing in a chorus?’ I asked Zachariah and his colleague.
‘He said something like that once,’ the older boy replied. ‘He mentioned to me that a man told him he could sing at a concert he was going to organize.’
‘Did Georg tell you the man’s name or what he looked like?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’
I gave him a złoty with my thanks, and he ran off.
‘Where’s mine?’ Zachariah whined.
‘If I give you more money, I need you to do something for me,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘I want you to get disinfected at the Leszno Street bathhouse. You know where it is?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good.’ I dropped two złoty – one after the other – into his excited hands. I wanted to tighten the scarf I’d given him around his neck – as an excuse for holding him once more – but he dashed off before I could, one hand securing his crown.
Dorota refused to let me into her apartment once again. ‘My husband isn’t home,’ she confessed, ‘but if he ever learned that a man asking about Anna had been here…’ She shook her head as if dealing with his temper was a constant burden.
‘Just tell me about your daughter’s hand,’ I told her gruffly.
She drew back her head like a surprised hen. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Did it have any birthmarks?’
‘No.’
‘Anything else that would make it identifiable to someone who’d never seen her before?’
‘I don’t know – just a small patch… a discoloration on the back,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But why are you–?’
‘What did the patch look like?’ I interrupted.
‘It was tiny and red – like a stain. On the skin between her thumb and index finger. People were always trying to wipe it clean when she was little.’
‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me that before?’ I demanded angrily.
‘It was so small. And it seemed so unimportant. Besides, Anna was ashamed of it.’ She reached for my arm. ‘The poor girl hated it!’
Outside Dorota’s apartment house I took my first steps too quickly and slipped on the fresh snow. The trunk of a beech tree saved me from a bad tumble. Embracing it, standing apart from the people hurrying past, I saw that Adam and Anna had both been marked at birth. And if I was right, then Georg had been, too. Someone had wanted their skin blemishes and birthmarks. But why?
Everything pointed to their having been murdered outside the ghetto and then dumped in the barbed wire. And it seemed clear now that Georg was recruited by either Rowy or Ziv. One of them must have identified the children to the murderer – a German or possibly Pole – who had had the kids followed and snatched.
I was anxious to question both men, of course, but doing that would do little good, I reasoned; if one or both of them were guilty, they’d try to cast the blame on someone else – probably on Mikael, since there was no reason why they wouldn’t be able to make the same deductions I had. Or would they simply tell me that they couldn’t have known that Adam and Georg had any skin blemishes? After all, it was unlikely that they’d seen either boy naked or – during our frigid winter – in short pants. Only one person could have – Mikael.
Maybe Anna had threatened to denounce him for his abortions and he had asked whoever was working with him on the outside to kill her when she left the ghetto. In that case, the murderer had waited until she visited Mrs Sawicki, then lured her away.
I hailed a rickshaw, sure of only one thing: I’d resume following Mikael as my most likely suspect. But as soon as we set off for his office, a fact I’d overlooked made me call out to the driver that we needed to change our destination.
I discovered Stefa’s apartment door open. A squat young Gestapo officer with his cap in his hands was gazing out the window. Another Nazi, older, his hair turned to silver by the light from my carbide lamp, was reading.
They’ve learned I was on the Other Side and did nothing to prevent the murder of a colleague of theirs, I reasoned.
Before I could slip away, the younger man turned to me with a surprised expression. Sensing a change in the room, the German at my desk also faced me. Putting down his book, he showed me a cat-like grin.
My legs tensed, and if I’d been younger, I’d have raced down the staircase. Instead, I slipped out of my coat and stepped inside. At times, the state of one’s body can determine everything.
‘Are you Dr Erik Cohen?’ the German who’d been reading asked me. He put on his cap and stood up.
‘Yes.’
‘We need you to come with us.’ His Prussian accent made me shrink back.
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Out of the ghetto. I’ll explain in the car.’
I hung up my coat to give me time to take a couple of deep breaths. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ I told him.
He smiled, amused, revealing fine Aryan teeth – the teeth of a man who ate satisfying meals served by starving Jews.
‘We’re not going to kill you just yet – that would be too kind,’ he told me.
Apparently, that was what passed for wit amongst the Nazis; the young German laughed in an appreciative burst.
‘Why do you want me?’ I asked.
‘I’ll explain on the way down the stairs.’
‘Do I need to bring a change of clothing?’ I was trying to learn if I’d be incarcerated.
‘Do you have a change of clothing?’ he replied sarcastically, looking me up and down as if I were a peasant, and the two men had another good laugh at my expense.
I waited for the Nazi comic to give me a real reply, but none came.
‘I need to check one thing before we go,’ I told him.
‘We’re already late.’
‘I’ll only need a minute.’
Frowning, he gave his permission with a patronizing twist of his hand.
I rushed to my desk and got out the medical folder on Adam that Mikael had given me. My heart was thumping, and I fumbled my reading glasses. Once I had them on, I discovered that at the bottom of the second examination sheet, Mikael had written in his neat script: ‘Four birthmarks at the base of his right calf muscle, the largest 1.5 centimetres in diameter and hard-edged.’ He’d also drawn them.
Birthmarks – Geburtsmale – was in German, but the rest was in Yiddish.
My intuition had been right; as chorus director, Rowy could have had access to this examination sheet, and it was just possible that he might have mentioned something to Ziv about the peculiarities on Adam’s leg – in passing, thinking nothing of the consequences. Indeed, Stefa might also have made some innocent remark about them to either man. So neither of them would have had to see Adam naked to know he was marked for death.
The Gestapo comedian and I rode in the back of a Mercedes down Franciszkańska Street. He carried the book he’d been reading. It had been Adam’s: a German edition of The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that I had bought for him. He held the book with the title facing out, undoubtedly eager for me to protest in an outraged voice so that he could laugh in my face. But his thievery didn’t concern me; by now, I believed that Rowy – maybe with Ziv’s help – had betrayed Adam and Anna to a Nazi murderer; after all, if Mikael were guilty, he wouldn’t have let me keep Adam’s medical file, which was clear evidence that he had noticed the boy’s birthmarks.
I’d have to follow the young conductor to try to learn whom he was working with on the outside.
We exited the Okopowa Street gate, with the Jewish cemetery on our right.
‘They start with the eyes and lips – anything soft,’ the Nazi beside me told me lazily, as if in passing.
He pointed to a group of crows huddled on the cemetery wall, probably waiting for mourners to leave a frozen burial site.
‘They’ll tear their beaks into anything, and they’ll wait hours if need be,’ he added. ‘I’ve even seen them tug the lid off a casket. Admirably intelligent creatures.’
I said nothing; I’d learned in my work that there are people who are barren inside – who feel no solidarity for anyone. The amazing thing was that they looked just like the rest of us. And now they had the world’s most powerful armaments and their very own empire.
‘I suppose in the long run the mass graves are a blessing,’ he observed, giving me a playful nudge. ‘The grass will grow better with all that fertilizer. What do you think?’
‘Me? I don’t think anything,’ I replied, refusing to look at him.
Outside my window, dismal apartment houses and grubby streets zoomed by. Both Germans tried to bait me several more times, but their comments soon decayed into centuries-old clichés. I played with the coins in my pocket to keep calm – an old strategy for dealing with Jew-hating colleagues in Vienna.
Still, maybe their antagonism had an effect on me; the bump and tumble of the car, the glide of winter landscape, the musty leather smell in the car – everything soon left me panicked that I’d be killed before taking vengeance. And the further we moved from the ghetto, the deeper my sense of vulnerability became.
As we pulled into the gravel driveway of a three-storey villa with Palladian windows, my travelling companion elbowed me. ‘Get out,’ he growled.
A handsome, middle-aged woman met us in the foyer, which was floored with black and white marble squares, as in a medieval Italian painting. She was tall and slender, with a man’s closely cropped blonde hair. Her healthy face was red-cheeked, and her blue-blue eyes were the stuff of Aryan mythology. Scandinavian, I’d have bet. And eating three square meals a day, just like my German escorts.
I will always remember the first lingering look she gave me, her eyes moistening, as though she had been hoping to meet me for years, and the way, too, that she breathed in slowly, filling herself with this moment.
‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ she exulted in French-accented German, and she reached out for my hand with both of hers. ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Dr Cohen. I’ve heard so much about you. My name is Sylvie Lanik.’
The Gestapo men stood stiffly by the door, which meant that my host was a powerful woman.
‘J’aimerais savoir pourquoi vous m’avez convoqué,’ I asked her.
I tried my rusty French because I preferred the Germans not to know that I was asking why I’d been summoned.
‘It’s Irene… it’s my daughter,’ Mrs Lanik answered, also in French, embarrassment reducing her voice to a whisper. ‘She’s not well. I’m hoping you can help her.’
‘Send the Germans away,’ I told her.
‘Yes, whatever you want.’ Mrs Lanik summoned her elderly housekeeper and asked her to give the men coffee and cake in the kitchen. The Gestapo comedian showed me a predatory smile as he strode off, no doubt envisaging the revenge he’d take. The only question was whether I’d survive.
‘You must be important,’ I remarked in German as soon as they’d left.
She flapped her hand. ‘My husband is the important person around here.’
‘Is he a Nazi?’
‘Yes, though he and I both know that what Hitler says about Jews is all lies.’
Did she expect me to thank her for not hating me? I forced a laugh.
‘Have I offended you, Dr Cohen?’ she questioned fearfully.
I despised her for being a traitor to her own beliefs and refused to give her the satisfaction of an answer. ‘Where’s your husband?’ I asked roughly.
‘He left yesterday morning and will be gone until tomorrow.’
‘Does he know I’m here?’
‘I told him we were sending for someone who could help Irene.’
‘But not a Jew.’
‘No, that was my decision,’ she said firmly.
‘Mrs Lanik, I may have been reduced to nearly nothing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a life. I have to get back to the ghetto.’
‘Dr Cohen, please just give my daughter a half-hour of your time. She needs help. I’ll pay you whatever you want.’
I grinned maliciously. ‘Why do you people always think you can buy a Jew with money?’
‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ she replied angrily, but she added in a contrite voice, ‘though I suppose I deserved that.’
‘Look, why should I help you?’
‘Given the unfairness of the world and all that’s happened to your people, maybe you shouldn’t,’ she observed.
Her honesty impressed me. ‘Very well, tell me what’s wrong with your daughter,’ I requested in a business-like tone.
‘A few days ago, she tried to take her own life – with pills. She won’t talk to me about what’s bothering her. She’ll only talk to you.’
‘Me? How does she know about me?’
‘Irene found out you were a well-known psychiatrist before you were…’ She searched for the word; her German was excellent, but she was clearly under an enormous strain.
‘Emprisonné,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, imprisoned,’ she agreed.
I discovered that day that Mrs Lanik stepped cautiously through her thoughts, as though searching for hidden motives in herself and others. As a consequence, all her responses were delayed. It was unnerving. I began to believe she led an isolated life – and conversed with very few people.
‘Where is your daughter?’ I asked.
‘She refuses to leave her room. I’m losing my mind.’ She clutched at the collar of her blouse. ‘If… if Irene should die…’
She loves her daughter as I loved Adam, I thought, and that changed the direction of all my subsequent actions.
‘Mrs Lanik,’ I said more gently, ‘how did you find my address?’
‘My husband is the chief physician for the German forces in Warsaw. It wasn’t hard to locate you.’
‘I don’t have much time. Take me to her.’
On the way up the curving central staircase to the gallery, I told her, ‘I’ll want to bring some things back to the ghetto with me – food mostly.’
‘What would you like?’
‘Find me a dozen lemons – two dozen if you can. I’ll also want cheese and meat, and good bread and coffee. And pipe tobacco – Achmed, if you can find it. And I’ll take you up on your offer to pay me – two hundred złoty per session.’
‘Of course, though it might be difficult to find so many lemons.’
‘If you can’t get them, I’ll need oranges or fresh cabbage.’
Standing in front of her daughter’s door, I faced Mrs Lanik again. To my surprise, I was embarrassed now about my shabby clothing and withered state – suddenly arm in arm with my desire to return to a normal life.
‘I want you to order the Germans to take me home in silence,’ I told her. ‘I won’t see your daughter unless they promise not to speak to me – or hurt me in any way.’
‘Very well. I’ll take care of it.’
‘And tell them not to touch any of the food you give me. You’re going to have to threaten them with reprisals.’
‘Leave it to me,’ she assured me. ‘Can we go in now?’
When I gave my permission, she knocked. ‘Irene…?’ she called softly, but there was no reply. ‘Dr Cohen is here. We’re coming in.’
She tried the door handle, but it was locked.
‘Irene, this is Dr Cohen,’ I began. ‘I don’t have much time. Let me in, please.’
The girl whispered through the door, ‘Only you, Dr Cohen, not my mother.’
Mrs Lanik shook her head violently, as if her daughter was sentencing her for a crime she hadn’t committed.
‘Irene will be safe with me,’ I told her. ‘Sit in the foyer, and when I come out we’ll talk about what I’ve learned. And bring me strong coffee, as well,’ I added, since the efficient heating in the house was making me drowsy. ‘When it’s ready, have your servant knock on the door and leave it on the floor. I’ll come out and get it.’
Mrs Lanik looked back as she crept down the stairs. She gripped the railing hard; I realized she was close to fainting.
I called to Irene through the door in German again, telling her that we were alone. After a few seconds, I heard the latch click. A blue eye peeked in the doorway.
Irene was a willowy girl, and nearly six feet tall, though she had the hunched posture of someone who had been taunted for years about her height.
After opening the door, she marched to the back of the room, anxious to put some distance between us. She had her mother’s short blonde hair and mesmerizing eyes. Her earrings were tiny silver bells.
She smiled at me fleetingly, standing between the head of her bed and a leather armchair positioned for a view out the window, then turned to the side abruptly, as though having just remembered to withhold her feelings. The oblique light from the afternoon sun made crescents of deep shadow under her eyes. The way she held her hands knitted tightly together seemed a bad sign.
She wore modest, impeccably pressed clothes – a silvery-green woollen skirt and an embroidered Ukrainian blouse. I had the sensation that they weren’t what she liked – that she dressed this way to please someone else.
Her shelves were neatly packed with books and stuffed animals. A Picasso print of a sad-faced harlequin was framed behind her bed.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she told me in an unsure voice. She spoke in German.
‘Thank you for letting me in,’ I replied.
She grabbed one of the blue silk cushions from her bed, took off her furry slippers and sat down in the armchair, folding her bare feet girlishly underneath her bottom. Placing the cushion over her lap, she leaned towards the window and gazed at the lawn below as if concerned about what might be taking place down there in her absence. Whether on purpose or not, she gave me a good look at the bald spot at the crown of her head where she must have been pulling out her hair.
A patient’s initial gestures often indicate how forthcoming they intend to be, and Irene had chosen to show me a symptom of her misery before even saying a word.
I sat down on her bed. Though the girl didn’t speak or look at me, I was at ease; this silence between myself and a patient had been a kind of home to me for many years.
‘Now, Irene, I’m just going to ask you some questions. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
I didn’t have much time, so I tried a shortcut that had worked for me in the past. ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?’ I asked. I was hoping she’d accidentally reveal what was pursuing her by telling me her fantasy of escape.
‘You mean, where in Warsaw?’ she questioned.
She was afraid to dream too ambitiously, which likely meant she felt powerless to flee her predicament. ‘No, anywhere,’ I replied. ‘London, Rome, Cairo…’ Finding my professional voice again gave me confidence.
‘I’d go to France,’ she replied. ‘To Nantes.’
I heard Swiss vowels in her reply, though she was speaking High German.
‘Why Nantes?’ I asked.
‘Because my grandparents live there.’
‘Would you feel safer with them?’ I questioned.
Grimacing, she moved her cushion over her chest and clutched it tightly.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
Straining for breath, looking at me directly for the first time, she replied, ‘There’s a constriction in my chest that comes and goes. And when it’s bad, it’s like a big rough hand is pressing down on me. Sometimes I think I’m going to suffocate.’ She fixed me with a desolate look. ‘Dr Cohen, it’s this house… it terrifies me.’
When tears came, she faced the window again, afraid to see my reaction.
‘What about this house scares you?’ I asked.
For a long time, she made no reply. I took out my pipe and examined the bowl to keep from looking at her and making her more uncomfortable.
‘I often think someone is hiding underneath my bed at night,’ she finally told me. ‘Or in my wardrobe, or in the dining room – a person who wants to kill me. I check everywhere I can think of, but it’s too big a house to be sure I haven’t missed something – or that the killer isn’t one step ahead of me.’
A knock on the door startled me. ‘Your coffee, Dr Cohen,’ a woman called out.
I asked Irene to excuse me a moment. Opening the door a crack, I saw an elderly maidservant walking away. On the floor was a wooden tray on which she’d placed an elegant porcelain coffee pot – white, with a black handle – and a matching cup. I carried the tray inside and put it on the girl’s bed.
‘Irene, this is a mansion, and it must have lots of hidden corners and passageways,’ I told her as I poured a first cup. ‘Our deepest fears tend to hide where we have trouble finding them. But I’m going to help you find them.’
She nodded her thanks, but guilt entered deeply into me; who could say if I’d ever come here again? I stole a look at my watch. It was 2.20. I wondered where Rowy and Ziv were at that moment. I decided to stay with Irene until three.
I took a first sip of coffee, but its dark flavour was so redolent of better times that I wasn’t sure I ought to drink it.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked the girl.
‘Four months.’ She looked far into the distance out her window. ‘Sometimes I imagine that the killer is outside the house and… and trying to get in any way he can,’ she told me cautiously, and with the effort of recall, as though groping her way through memory. ‘I start worrying that my parents might have left the front door open, which would allow him to get inside, so I check that it’s locked before going to my room. And I end up coming downstairs several times in the night to make sure it’s still locked.’
‘Do you think your parents might leave the door open on purpose – or unlock it after you’ve locked it?’
Those were risky questions, since they touched on her relationship with her parents. Irene faced me and held my gaze, wanting to see the kind of man who would ask them – above all, whether I would give up on her if she spoke to me honestly and revealed something of which other people might disapprove. So I looked at her hard and long. It was an important moment – the hub around which our subsequent conversation would turn. She didn’t flinch or even blink. I began to believe she was a courageous girl.
‘Please tell me what you’re thinking,’ I prodded.
‘I never before imagined that the door…’ She raised a hand over her mouth, assaulted by fear. At length, she said, ‘I love my parents. I want you to know that.’
And yet one or both of them is threatening to hurt you, I thought.
‘I believe you,’ I told her, ‘but it’s hard to trust even the people we love most when we find ourselves in a new environment. I learned that when I moved into the ghetto.’
She started; she hadn’t expected me to talk about my own life. Drawing her knees into her chest and hugging them, she asked, ‘Is it… is it very bad in there?’
‘Yes, it’s bad, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it at the moment.’
‘No, maybe there is,’ she declared.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening.’
I was impressed by her solidarity, but at the time she seemed hopelessly naive.
‘Maybe so,’ I told her. ‘But we need to talk about you for the moment. Now, Irene, can you tell me what the murderer looks like in your imagination?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t recognize him, if that’s what you mean. But I sometimes see he has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.’
A sense of déjà vu made me halt as I reached for my coffee cup. Where had I heard her last words?
‘What makes his look so dreadful?’ I asked.
‘Something in his eyes – something dark and purposeful,’ she replied, moaning, and she began twisting the hair on top of her head.
‘And do you have any idea why he would want to kill you?’
‘No, I don’t know!’ she replied in desperation. Taking a deep breath, she tugged out the tangle of hairs she’d twisted around her index finger.
I grimaced, but she said reassuringly, as if I were the one in pain, ‘It’s all right, Dr Cohen, it doesn’t really hurt. And even if it does, it’s a good kind of pain.’
‘Why is it good?’
‘I’m not sure. I only know it is.’
‘Because you’re the one causing it?’ I asked, hoping I’d come near the truth; I needed to build up her confidence in me if I was going to help her.
She thought about my theory. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she told me, but she didn’t sound convinced.
To my subsequent questions, Irene went on to tell me that the killer wasn’t interested in robbing her. She pictured him stabbing her in the heart. She would bleed to death.
‘When did you start believing your life was in danger?’ I asked.
‘Maybe a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Did something unusual happen then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you get ill? Or did you have a quarrel with your mother or father? Maybe it was something that you–’
‘My father is dead to me!’ she interrupted roughly, probably hoping to shock me; perhaps my questions about the timing of her troubles were too threatening, and she wanted to push me away.
‘Dead to you, how?’
‘He’s never wanted anything to do with me.’
‘I don’t understand. I thought you lived here with your–’
‘Rolf Lanik is my stepfather,’ she cut in. ‘My father is a radiologist named Werner Koch. He lives in Switzerland, though he visited us here in Poland – once, two months ago.’
‘How long has your mother been married to your stepfather?’
‘Let’s see, I was six, so that makes… eleven years. He’s a good man. In fact, Rolf is the best thing that ever happened to me.’
She spoke as though I’d obliged her to defend his honour, which led me to believe he might have been her tormentor, though he might not have been aware of the damage he was doing.
‘Why is he so good for you?’ I asked.
‘Because he gets us whatever we need. And I’m in an excellent school for foreigners. He’s kind and generous, and he loves us – me and my mother.’
‘And yet he’s made you move to a house that you hate.’
‘That’s not his fault, Dr Cohen! Or do you think it is?’ she snapped.
I was glad that she felt secure enough to reveal her anger. ‘I’m not in a position to say,’ I told her. ‘But tell me, what does your mother think of your new surroundings?’
‘Mama? She loves it here,’ the girl replied resentfully. ‘She certainly doesn’t say otherwise.’
Irene seemed to have concluded that her mother valued their new house – and her husband – more than her daughter.
Sensing that her father’s sudden appearance two months earlier might have touched off Irene’s current problems, I returned to her mother’s first marriage. The girl told me that it had ended in divorce after six years. She had been four when her parents separated. Her mother had lost everything, and had started a new life in Zurich, where they had relatives. She’d found work as a barmaid in a small hotel.
‘Ah, so that explains your Swiss accent,’ I observed.
Sticking out her tongue and groaning, Irene replied, ‘So you noticed.’
‘Yes, but you don’t sound too pleased.’
‘Should I be?’
‘I don’t know. All I can say is that, in my opinion, your accent is charming.’
She smiled, hesitantly at first, then broadly, and for the first time she looked relaxed. My compliment changed her; in a voice that raced ahead into her emotions, she went on to tell me that she and her mother had lived for two years in a one-room garret that was infested with bedbugs and had a leaky roof. ‘Mama even lost her reputation,’ she told me, outraged.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Thanks to my dear father,’ she said, sneering.
To my subsequent questions, Irene told me that he had spread malicious rumours about an affair that her mother had carried on with a Jewish surgeon, which, in their circle, had sentenced her to ridicule. She told me several stories of how her mother had been made to suffer – and how she’d fought back through guile. It was clear that Irene admired her mother and had formed a close identification with her.
The girl had only seen her father three times since the divorce, the last time in early January when he’d shown up one Friday evening at their home without warning.
‘I have reason to believe,’ she told me, using a wily tone that implied she’d done some eavesdropping, ‘that he came here to get money out of my mother.’
Could he have been blackmailing Mrs Lanik with information about her previous life?
‘Did your mother actually tell you that?’
‘No, she refused to talk about him with me, but he was looking wasted – as if he was drinking again.’
‘Did you have a chance to talk with him?’ I asked.
‘No, he said hello to me, then spoke to my mother for a few minutes, and then he staggered off.’
Irene’s replies turned evasive when I asked about her feelings as a child with regard to her father. She clearly wasn’t ready to revisit that part of her past, so I returned to her stepfather. She told me that Rolf Lanik had grown up in Zurich and moved to Hamburg after medical school. He’d fallen in love with her mother eleven years earlier, while vacationing with his parents. Irene had lived in Hamburg with her mother and him before moving to Warsaw. Now, he had an office in the centre of the city and only came home late at night. In a disappointed voice, she added, ‘Once we moved here, he started living a separate life. We hardly ever see him. He works all day, and even in the evenings, too.’
‘Tell me a little about him.’
‘What would you like to know?’
‘You could start with your first impressions of him.’
‘I didn’t like him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He tried too hard. I mean, it was as if he was always kneeling to my level and reaching out to me. But I didn’t want him like that – as a friend. It was so awkward!’ She spoke desperately, as if needing me to confirm that her feelings were justified. ‘I wanted something else. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Rolf never had any children of his own,’ Irene volunteered. ‘I guess he didn’t quite know how to approach me.’
‘But he learned?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when did you begin to like him?’
‘I think it was when he started reading to me. I’d be in my pyjamas, lying in bed, and he’d take a book down from my shelves and sit with me.’ She smiled gratefully. ‘I loved the sound of his voice, and how he’d look at me expectantly, waiting to see my reaction to the story. I could tell he was really listening.’ Nodding at the rightness of her words, she added, ‘Dr Cohen, when Rolf is with you, you know you have all his attention. Maybe that’s why his patients like him so much.’
‘How do you know they like him so much?’
‘Because I go to his office sometimes, and I talk with them.’
‘So he’s your doctor?’
‘He wasn’t when I was little. Though he is now.’ She looked down, as if she’d said something shameful.
As Irene told me more about her present relationship with her stepfather, I began to suspect that her continued talk of his separate life meant that she might have spotted him with another woman – maybe before or after a medical appointment with him. If so, then she was probably petrified that he would abandon her and her mother – would ‘kill’ their family, in other words. She was likely convinced that history would repeat itself – her stepfather would spread foul rumours about his wife, and she and her mother would become outcasts again. Her father’s sudden appearance may have reinforced that fear. She may have also had good reason to worry that she wouldn’t be believed – and might well be punished – if she informed her mother of her stepfather’s infidelity, since Mrs Lanik undoubtedly shared her daughter’s fears of renewed poverty and ostracism. To Irene, the only way out of her predicament had seemed suicide.
Of course, my theory could have been wrong, and I was about to probe further into her stepfather’s daily routine when I realized why I’d experienced déjà vu: Irene had repeated what a young patient of Freud’s named Katharina had told him about the face of a man she envisaged whenever she suffered an anxiety attack: He has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.
If those weren’t the exact words quoted by Freud, they were very close. They were contained in Freud and Brauer’s Studies on Hysteria, a work I’d read several times.
Katharina had told Freud she’d overseen her uncle making love to the family cook. Could that be why I’d concluded so quickly that Irene might have seen her stepfather with a woman?
The important question now seemed: was Irene aware that she had quoted a patient of Freud’s?
‘Tell me, Irene,’ I asked, ‘have you ever read any works on psychiatry or psychoanalysis?’
‘Yes, at my grandfather’s house in Zurich. I think he owns nearly everything Freud ever wrote.’
Since she showed no sign of having been caught out, I concluded that she’d repeated Katharina’s words unconsciously – had appropriated them because her predicament was so similar. Unsure as to how to proceed, I returned to what might have happened a couple of weeks earlier to start Irene believing that she was under threat.
‘Maybe it was a dream I started having,’ she told me. She shifted forward in her seat, as though to commit herself to making deeper revelations, though she put her cushion over her lap again.
‘Tell me the dream,’ I requested.
Gazing into herself, she said, ‘I’m with some children on a meadow. In the green grass are lots of yellow flowers. Each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we’ve already picked, and we start to pick more.’
‘How many children are with you?’ I asked.
‘At least two, though I think there may be more. It’s hard to tell.’ She looked at me for approval to continue, and I nodded.
‘A short man wearing a hat comes up from the town below, and he takes the flowers from us – from me and the children. And then he walks up the hill to a cottage where a friend of his is waiting – a much bigger man who seems almost like a giant.’
‘Go on.’
‘The man in the hat hands the flowers to his friend, and he receives a loaf of bread in return. And then the man in the hat walks to me and tears off a piece of his bread for me, and I… I look around for the children who’ve been on the meadow with me, so that I can share my bread with them, but they’re gone. And then the dream shifts.’
‘Shifts how?’
‘I’m standing with the man in the hat on the sidewalk of Krakowskie Przedmieście.’ Irene closed her eyes and reached her hand out as if seeking to touch what she was seeing. ‘In front of me is a curving staircase, and it leads up to the Holy Cross Church. The street is empty. I don’t know where the other kids are, and I’m terrified. And… and that’s when I wake up.’
Her eyes opened and she looked at me purposefully; she’d undoubtedly read that it was my job to offer an interpretation.
I looked away, however; I was sure now that Irene had read Freud very closely. The children picking yellow flowers in a meadow had appeared in a dream of his that he’d discussed in a well-known, semi-autobiographical article called ‘Screen Memories’. She was placing her own experiences into the framework of her readings on psychiatry. Whether on purpose or unconsciously, I had no way of knowing, but in either case I suspected that she intended for me to return to Freud’s discussion of Katharina and extrapolate that they faced the same problem. In a sense, she was telling me in coded language, where to look for the origins of her troubles, without directly revealing any of her family’s secrets – and in a way she could be sure I would come to understand.
‘Can you see the face of the man in the hat?’ I asked her.
‘No.’
‘Would you close your eyes and try to picture him?’
‘Of course.’ She did as I asked, but after a few seconds she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Cohen, but I can’t tell you who he might be. I want to, but I can’t.’
She used the words tell you instead of see or recognize. A slip? Very possibly Irene knew who he was but would risk too much by revealing his identity.
I was convinced by now that she’d used Freud’s dream because she’d read his interpretation that a girl handing flowers to a man was symbolic of her losing her virginity. I suspected she’d had sex for the first time recently, and possibly with her stepfather. In that case, her guilt – at betraying her mother and threatening to destroy her family’s happiness – had brought on her self-destructive behaviour. She wanted to murder herself, but she’d transposed those violent feelings to an unidentified killer.
‘Do you know the children with you in the meadow?’ I asked, thinking they might have been other girls her stepfather had seduced.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘How old are they?’
‘They’re young – maybe ten or twelve. Like me.’
‘So you’re only ten or twelve in the dream?’
She looked inside herself again. ‘I think so,’ she said hesitantly, ‘but I’m not sure.’
Was it possible that her stepfather had violated her years earlier and had started again more recently?
‘Are the children boys or girls?’ I asked.
‘Both, I think. I’m not sure. They’re wearing yellow, so I don’t know.’
‘They’re wearing yellow?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘No, I meant that the flowers are yellow. Now I’m confused. You’re confusing me!’
‘I’m sorry. Can you identify the bigger man at the cottage who receives the flowers?’
‘No.’
‘Are he and the man in the hat Poles or Germans? Or maybe from Switzerland?’
She frowned nastily at me. Was I coming too close to unmasking her tormentor?
‘I think they’re Germans,’ she told me, ‘but I don’t know for sure. In any case, I don’t see why it matters.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t. How many times have you had the dream?’
‘A few times – I’m not sure.’
‘And how do you feel now – remembering it, I mean?’
She shrugged.
‘Well, are you glad you told it to me?’
‘Am I supposed to be?’ she snapped.
Her touchy replies made me realize that it would be best to stop now – I’d scared her with my probing and she’d tell me little more today. I downed my coffee and looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes past three.
‘Irene, for now, I only have one last question.’
‘But you’ll come back and see me?’ she asked in a tiptoeing voice. ‘You’re not angry with me?’
‘No, I’m not at all angry. And I’ll try to come back. I’ll speak to your mother about that as soon as I leave your room. But listen, Irene, I need you to promise me something or we won’t be able to talk again.’
‘What?’ she asked anxiously.
‘You must not try to take your own life while we’re working together. We must trust each other, and I won’t be able to work with you if I’m worried you might kill yourself if I say the wrong thing.’
‘Do you sometimes say the wrong thing?’
‘Of course,’ I told her, smiling at her naivety. ‘Everyone does. Though I shall try my best not to.’
I’d never admitted my failings to a patient so readily before. It seemed a change for the better, and I realized – astonished – that if I survived the ghetto, I’d be a gentler and more effective psychiatrist. Was that reason enough to go on living?
‘So do we have an agreement?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, I promise,’ she replied, and she showed me a relieved smile that convinced me she’d been waiting for me to take away her worst option from the beginning.
I stood up. ‘I’ll need your pills – the ones you took to try to end your life.’
‘Mama has them.’
‘Good.’
‘So what’s your last question, Dr Cohen?’
‘Imagine that you could tell the man in the hat something, what would it be?’
She gazed down. ‘I think I’d ask him to give me back my flowers.’
As I was leaving her room, Irene called to me. ‘Dr Cohen, I’m very sorry about what happened to your nephew. Forgive me for not saying so earlier.’
Stunned, I stammered a reply, ‘But how… how did you… I mean, who told you what happened to my nephew?’
‘Your former patient Jaśmin Makinska,’ Irene replied.
‘You know Jaśmin?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know her personally,’ Irene replied, ‘but she has been holding clandestine meetings since December – telling anyone who will listen to her about the wretched conditions in the ghetto. She’s been heroic, I think. A week ago, I went to a meeting for foreigners living here – Mama took me. Jaśmin held up a note she’d received from your niece after her son’s death, and she told the audience what had happened to him – and how you were suffering. After her talk, I started thinking that you might agree to help me.’
A patient’s last words are often what they’ve been waiting to tell you since the beginning – which meant that Irene needed to make it clear to me that she was aware that Adam had been murdered. And that she’d wanted to talk to me since learning that.
‘There’s one other thing I should have told you,’ she added. ‘In my dream, the big man who ends up with the yellow flowers we’ve picked… I know his name. I know it because the man in the hat calls out to him when he’s walking towards the cottage. It’s Jesion.’
‘And do you think his name is important?’ I asked.
‘I have a feeling it is. Sometimes it seems the key to everything.’
Irene remained in her room, though she refrained from locking the door, which seemed a hopeful sign. I paused on the gallery to measure her closing words to me against my own interest in names, and to consider, too, what she’d told me about Jaśmin, but Mrs Lanik, rushing up the staircase, drew my attention. She carried her horn-rim glasses in one hand and a book in the other. In the yearning of her eyes, I saw she feared the worst.
‘Is Irene all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘we had a good talk. And, most importantly, she has promised not to hurt herself while we work together.’
‘Thank you for that, Dr Cohen. What else did she tell you?’
‘She fears she is in danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘As I’m sure you know, she has adjusted poorly to her new surroundings. She feels threatened. If I were you, I’d do everything in your power to make her feel loved and cared for. And protected. Even if it means going away with her for a time. Maybe even to France – to Nantes.’
Mrs Lanik looked puzzled. ‘Why Nantes?’
‘Because of your parents.’
‘My parents? But they live in Bordeaux,’ she corrected me.
‘I must have misunderstood,’ I replied, wondering why Irene would have lied to me.
I was also astonished by her capabilities as an actress. How much else had she told me that wasn’t true?
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking of taking a trip with Irene,’ Mrs Lanik told me. ‘Dr Cohen, thank you.’ She grasped both my hands. ‘I’m forever in your debt.’
‘I only hope I’ve helped a little with whatever is troubling her,’ I replied, and as I said that I realized the real reason I’d stayed with Irene: she had needed to be heard, and my willingness to listen to her – to allow even the silence between us to speak to me – was part of a world of solidarity the Nazis wanted to destroy. By staying, I was fighting for all I’d once believed in. And I was asserting my right to live as the man I wanted to be.
‘I’d like for you to see her again as soon as possible,’ Mrs Lanik told me, ‘but my husband is coming back tomorrow. I’ll get word to you when I know he’s going away again. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She escorted me down the stairs. She had two wicker baskets of food waiting for me on the antique wooden table by the front door.
‘I managed to get you fourteen lemons,’ she told me, smiling happily.
Dispersed among red apples, the lemons were beautiful – a composition worthy of Cézanne.
‘You’ll never know how grateful I am for your help,’ I told her.
‘I only hope I’ve chosen well for you,’ she replied, and she handed me an envelope. ‘Here is your two hundred złoty.’
‘Thank you. And one last thing – I’d like to keep your daughter’s pills. She says you have them. If they are in the house, she might somehow find them.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
While Mrs Lanik was gone, I put my pipe tobacco and two lemons in my coat pocket for safekeeping and examined the eggs, butter, cheese and ham. She’d even put in tins of Russian caviar and French foie gras. She handed me the pills as soon as she returned. I was in luck – Veronal, my tranquillizer of choice.
As I stashed them in my pocket, my relief made me close my eyes with gratitude. The Nazis have lost control of me, I thought – being able to summon death at any time was a guarantee I’d needed since I first saw Adam in the Pinkiert’s cart. Ten pills would be all I’d need, and the end would be painless.
‘What about my German escorts?’ I asked Mrs Lanik. I didn’t see them anywhere.
‘Already in their car, waiting for you.’ Smiling broadly, as people do who’ve been crying and are thankful for the help they’ve received, she said in French, ‘And I’ve told them in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut and their hands off your food!’
The Germans were in the front seat. I got in the back, next to my picnic baskets.
As we took off, the Nazi comedian turned and pointed his gun at my face, vibrating with rage. ‘I might just make a bloody hole where that Jewish nose is!’ he threatened. ‘All I’d have to tell my superiors is that you tried to escape.’
His words sounded practised, which made them less believable. Still, I didn’t dare reply. I looked out my window instead, fingering the coins in my pocket, and after a few seconds he turned away and we started off. He said nothing more to me on the drive back home.
In my mind, I went over what Irene had told me, and all her revelations – whether fictional or real – now seemed to point to the man in the hat who took flowers from Irene and two other children.
Though there may be more than two, the girl had told me.
The distant white blanket of winter sky, the crack of ice beneath the wheels of our car, the ticklish wool of my scarf… All that I saw and felt vanished suddenly, because it was at that moment I realized that Irene had created her dream to fit what she knew about the murders inside the ghetto!
She’d intended for me to find out she’d been lying about Nantes or some other small detail, because she was eager for me to understand that her testimony had been carefully scripted.
Two children had vanished from the meadow; she was talking about Adam and Anna!
Except that Irene could not have learned about Anna’s murder from Jaśmin.
Was it possible that she had witnessed Jewish children being murdered? Maybe she had overheard the killer talking about them. Then, when Jaśmin spoke about me, Irene understood that my nephew was one of the kids who’d vanished.
She’d wanted to identify the killer to me, but couldn’t, which probably meant she was afraid of being murdered herself. By whom? Her stepfather? Maybe the man named Jesion.
Or perhaps even by her real father.
Bina, her mother and her uncle Freddi were waiting for me at home. ‘I’ve brought food,’ I told the girl, handing her the basket I’d carried upstairs.
I sat down on my bed, exhausted. Bina looked between the fresh fruit and me, beaming as if I were a messenger from God. She kissed me on each cheek, and I hugged her back, but I was still deep inside all that Irene had told me. Bina’s uncle – a short, dark, hairy man with a boxer’s build, smelling pleasantly of talc – burst into tears when he told me how grateful he was to be able to move in. Bina’s mother went down on her knees to recite a speech she’d memorized. I felt trapped by their fervent hopes for a better life, so when the girl went down to the courtyard to get my second basket of food from Professor Engal, I retreated into what had been Stefa’s room and locked the door. I’d left my list of the dead on my pillow. I stared at the names for a long time, hoping they would lift off the page and show me more of what I needed to know, but they didn’t.
After putting some supplies for Izzy in one of the baskets that Bina had emptied, I went down to the street with the girl and she hailed me a rickshaw. She kissed me goodbye tenderly; she obviously liked having a benefactor, even if he played the Big Bad Wolf on his own small stage at times.
Izzy danced around when he saw what I’d brought him; unfortunately for me, he made the same rubbery-handed movements that he’d taught Adam as an Indian raindance.
‘Where’d you get all this?’ he asked, picking his excited fingers through the cheeses.
‘A new friend,’ I told him.
I handed him the two lemons I had in my coat pocket. He cupped them if they were the goose’s golden eggs.
While he prepared lemonade, I told him about my session with Irene, ending with how I’d come to believe that she had learned that at least two ghetto children had been murdered. ‘Izzy, I don’t know how, but she knows who’s doing this!’ I exclaimed.
He questioned me at length about my conclusions – a good thing, as it turned out, because my repeating so many details helped us come up with new possibilities and dangers.
‘Irene might even have faked her suicide attempt to convince her mother to send for you,’ he speculated.
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I replied. ‘She told me that we can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening in the ghetto, and sending for me was her way of helping – she wants me to use her clues to catch the killer.’
Izzy and I were on our second cup of lemonade by then.
‘We’ve got to go to Krakowskie Przedmieście and look for someone with the name Jesion,’ I told him. ‘Irene implied that he holds the key to solving these murders.’
‘But we don’t have an address and–?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I interrupted, ‘you and I are crossing to the Other Side – early.’
He was seated as his worktable. I was standing, too jittery to sit.
‘It could be a trap,’ he warned.
‘No, I don’t think so. Irene lied to me, but only because she’s terrified – and so I’d come to realize that she’d scripted some of what she told me. Whatever she knows has put her in physical danger. She couldn’t tell me any more than she did without risking not just her own life but also her mother’s – without killing her family. So she’s leaving it up to me to identify the murderer – and to do whatever has to be done.’
‘If that’s true, then you’ll never hear from her again,’ Izzy said authoritatively.
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s already told you all she could.’
‘Except that Mrs Lanik said she would wait for her husband’s next absence and then send a car for me.’
‘What if she lied, too? She might have helped her daughter plan everything. Maybe her parents aren’t in Bordeaux, after all. She might have told you that to make sure you knew that some of what Irene told you had been made up. And if her husband or ex-husband are involved in the murders in some way, it’s more likely that she’s the one who overheard what they’d done – or maybe even saw the bodies.’
While I thought that over, he cut us squares of foie gras. He put mine on a slice of bread and ate his plain because of his rickety teeth.
‘There’s more I need to tell you before we leave the ghetto,’ I told him. ‘I think that Adam, Anna and Georg were killed for the defects on their skin.’
‘Defects? What are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘Remember the birthmarks on the back of Adam’s right ankle?’
‘Of course, but what good could they be to anyone?’
I explained why I believed Rowy and a partner outside the ghetto might be responsible for identifying the children to be murdered – possibly with the help of Ziv.
‘Sorry, Erik, I don’t buy it,’ he told me, licking some foie gras off his fingers. ‘Rowy wouldn’t tell you how frightened he was of being forced again into a labour gang if that was his motivation for turning three kids over to the Nazis.’
‘He probably didn’t believe I would be any good at detective work.’
‘Pfffttt!’ he scoffed, in that Gallic way he’d picked up aboard the Bourdonnais. ‘As for Ziv, Ewa told me he runs away every time a mouse appears in the bakery.’
‘But he can think ten moves ahead at chess! He could have planned everything.’ Then a perverse possibility made me start. ‘He was jealous of Adam. My God, he wanted to remove the boy from Stefa’s life!’
‘Even if that were true, which I don’t believe, why would he kill Anna and Georg?’
‘I don’t know, but he did volunteer to help Rowy find more kids for the chorus. What if it was so he could identify children for murder?’
‘I admit that sounds suspicious, but you saw how shattered he was after Stefa’s death. Is that the kind of young man who would plan to murder children?’
‘Look, Izzy,’ I told him, irritated that he was right, ‘all I know is that after we try to find Jesion, we need to take a good look through Rowy’s apartment and Ziv’s room at the bakery. We have to turn up something incriminating. And we’ve got to work fast. We’ve no guarantee that whoever is responsible won’t have another Jewish boy or girl killed.’
Izzy gazed down into that terrible possibility, then started. ‘Erik,’ he told me, ‘what would you say if I could bring the murderer’s Jewish accomplice straight to us?’
Izzy and I moved my desk and my old Mała typewriter into Stefa’s room. We settled on the following wording for our note:
Someone has learned of our activities, and we’re in danger. I need to talk with you. We need to meet outside the ghetto as soon as possible. Introduce yourself to the guards at the corner of Leszno and Żelazna this evening, at exactly 7.30. Do not try to contact me. The guards at the gate will know to expect you. A car will be waiting outside to take you to my home.
We typed three copies and left them unsigned. We put them in envelopes but wrote no name on the outside.
Whoever had been responsible for Adam’s death would be terrified of being exposed as a murderer and would take the note seriously even if he wasn’t absolutely sure it was genuine. As for whoever was innocent, he’d likely believe that the note had been sent to him in error – since his name was not written either in the letter or on the envelope – and stay far away from the guards at Leszno and Żelazna.
I paid a boy selling armbands embroidered with the Star of David to take the letter to Ziv in the bakery, and Izzy paid an old woman selling tin cups on the sidewalk outside Mikael Tengmann’s office to hand an envelope to him.
I wanted to take a quick look at Rowy’s apartment before leaving our note. It was on the ground floor of a stately neoclassical building, with impressive columns flanking the doorway, but much of the roof had imploded and was patched with wooden planks and burlap.
Luckily, I found the young man at home, practising the slow movement of what sounded like a Mozart concerto. His warm, full tone seemed to give form to my sense of abandonment. I could not bear it for more than a moment and knocked.
Rowy welcomed me warmly and put his violin back in its velvet-lined case. I told him I’d had some good fortune and handed him the caviar Mrs Lanik had given me – the price of putting him at ease. He insisted on opening the can right away, and on toasting some challah to eat with it. I sat at his worktable, which was piled high with musical scores. Next to me a rusted bicycle was leaning against a wooden dresser – Izzy and I would start by searching there.
A pink sheet hung from the ceiling halfway back, hiding the only window from view.
‘A young couple with a toddler moved in a few weeks ago,’ Rowy explained.
It was cold in the apartment, so he put more sawdust in his oven. Over our snack, we got to talking about the cramped conditions in the ghetto, and Rowy warned me that the Jewish Council had begun forcing residents with spare rooms to accept Jews who had arrived recently from the provinces. Waving off his concern, I said, ‘Izzy already told me. A girl I know named Bina just moved in with her mother and uncle.’
‘Three extra people – it must be hell,’ he said, and from the way he looked at me, I knew he meant more than sharing my home with strangers.
I couldn’t discuss my inner life with a man I didn’t trust, so I made believe I’d failed to understand his implication. ‘I’ll be fine living in Stefa’s room,’ I assured him.
On saying goodbye, he embraced me. I went stiff, but then kissed his cheek to throw off his suspicions. After leaving, I waited a half-hour, then slid our note under his door and fled.
By then, it was just after five in the afternoon. Izzy had suggested the Leszno Street gate because there was a small café run by an acquaintance of ours nearby, and from there we could see everyone entering or exiting the ghetto. We met there at 5.30. We took a table by the window. We kept the brims of our hats low on our foreheads to be less recognizable.
At seven, we went outside to make sure we didn’t miss any passers-by. I turned up my collar and stood with my back to the street to keep my face hidden, blocking Izzy from view at the same time. Whenever anyone approached, he would glance around my shoulder to see who it was.
We stood that way until fifteen minutes to eight. The coming curfew had emptied the street by then. A Jewish policeman told us we’d better make our way home.
We dragged ourselves off; we’d failed to trap Rowy, Ziv or Mikael.
Could the murderer’s accomplice inside the ghetto be someone we’d never even considered?
Izzy and I agreed to meet the next morning at his workshop to settle on another plan. In my brief conversation with Rowy, he’d mentioned that he’d given a copy of his apartment key to Ewa, and I intended to make up a reason for her to lend it to me.
At home, Bina handed me my dinner: a silvery perch lying on a bed of leeks sautéed in schmaltz. I hadn’t seen so beautiful a meal since the Before Time and told her so. The girl took off her apron and sat with me at the kitchen table, watching me eat with the pleased smile of a chef who’s appreciated. After a time, she moved her hands to her lap, wishing to speak her heart but afraid that I’d yell at her. Caressing her cheek, I said, ‘Listen, Bina, you’re a wonderful girl, but don’t grow attached to me.’
‘But why, Dr Cohen?’
‘Because one way or another I’m getting out of here as soon as I can, and I can’t take you with me.’
Guilt for so many bad choices I’d made throughout my life chased me to Stefa’s window that night to look up at the few stars that succeeded in penetrating the hazy gloom over the city. I puffed away at my pipe until long after midnight, grateful for the darkness and the quiet – and the comfort of good tobacco.
A first gunshot woke me from my half-sleep. I thought the bang had exploded out of a dream. Then a second shot thudded against the wall. Bina and her mother began screaming. I jumped up from my chair and pulled open my door. Uncle Freddi was slumped on the ground, a dark rose blossoming on his chest.
I pressed both my hands over Freddi’s wound, hard, but the blood sluiced out and ran down his bare chest on to the floor. Bina’s mother was staring at her brother and shrieking his name.
‘Turn on the light!’ I shouted at her, but she didn’t move.
Bina was next to me, on her knees, her hands clamped over her mouth. When I pleaded with her for more light, she jumped up and pulled the cord of the lamp by the bed.
Freddi’s wound was deep. The killer must have hit an artery, because his blood was spilling out like wine from a spigot. The warmth of his life pulsing erratically below my hands made me shudder. His eyes were open, but they weren’t watching anything in our world.
‘Hold on, we’ll get help,’ I told him, but I knew it was too late.
I looked at Bina. Her eyes – darkly lit with terror – had just grasped the imminence of her uncle’s death.
‘Did you get a look at whoever shot him?’ I asked the girl, but as I spoke she turned towards the doorway; neighbours had just appeared.
When I felt a slackening in Freddi’s chest, I moved my hands to his wrist and felt for a pulse, but it was already gone.
While Professor Engal examined Freddi’s body, Ida Tarnowski tried to calm Bina’s mother, but she kept pushing the kindly old woman away. I fled the mayhem for the bathroom and scrubbed my hands over and over, but I couldn’t get the blood out from under my fingernails, since the ghetto soap melted to a useless mush when mixed with water. My legs were shaking, so I leaned back against the wall, staring at the gnarled backs of my hands, wondering if I would ever stop feeling Freddi’s life inside their grip. Then I summoned Bina into the bathroom and cleaned her face, which was splattered with blood. She went limp as soon as I touched her, like a small child, so I sat her on the rim of the bathtub.
‘Did you see who did this?’ I asked her.
She looked up at me as if unable to fit what had happened into her mind.
‘Take your time,’ I told her.
‘It was a man,’ she replied. ‘But it was too dark to see his face.’
She was shivering, so I fetched my coat and draped it over her shoulders.
‘How old was he – this man?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t tell.’
‘What do you remember about him?’
‘He was small. Maybe only a little taller than me.’
Bina was about five foot two, by my estimation. ‘And did you see him shoot Uncle Freddi?’ I asked.
‘Only the second shot. The first… it woke me up. Maybe the man shot the lock. I’m not sure.’ Her eyes focused inside. ‘Then I saw him, and I knew I was awake but I didn’t understand – I thought maybe you’d come into the room.’ She showed me an inquisitive look, as if waiting for me to confirm that I hadn’t been there.
‘I was in my niece’s room, asleep,’ I told her gently.
‘Yes, I know that now. Uncle Freddi… I saw him standing next to the chair where he’d been sleeping. He spoke to the man. I think he said, ‘What do you want?’ Maybe he also thought the intruder was you. Then I heard a second shot, and Uncle Freddi fell. And then the man ran out and you were holding my uncle, and Mama was screaming…’
I held Bina close to me while she sobbed. When she could talk again, I asked, ‘Was Freddi involved in smuggling?’
‘I don’t see how he could have been. The Germans transferred him to the ghetto just two weeks ago. The only people he knew here were my mother and me.’
Professor Engal and another man carried Freddi’s body to the courtyard. Bina’s mother went with them to watch over her brother. The girl had wanted to accompany her, but her mother had said, ‘There are some things I need to tell your uncle alone.’
I saw such disappointment in Bina’s eyes that I steered her back to bed and covered her with a blanket. ‘Lie there, and I’ll make us some nettle tea,’ I told her.
First, however, I went to the front door. The lock was intact, which meant that both shots I’d heard had been fired at Freddi. Yet I’d only seen one wound; the killer must have missed on his first attempt, which meant he probably wasn’t a professional.
More importantly, he must have used a key to get in. Only Ewa and Izzy – and now Bina – had copies.
When we were seated together with our tea, Bina promised me that she had kept the key in her pocket since receiving it from Izzy and had not lent it to anyone. After I assured her that I believed her, she began to talk about her uncle in a frail, unsteady voice, as though pulling back details from out of the distant past. She told me that he had written a script for Conrad Veidt and had met with the actor at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in the spring of 1939 to discuss changes.
She needed me to understand that her uncle had been on his way to becoming a famous screenwriter – and that he was irreplaceable.
We owe uniqueness to our dead at the very least, of course.
‘Uncle Freddi had promised to write a part for me when I was older,’ she told me.
‘So you want to be an actress?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I wanted to be a dancer before we came here. But it made Uncle Freddi so happy to think of us together in Berlin that I didn’t want to spoil his fun.’
I could see from the way Bina gazed off that she would write an entire future for her uncle over the next weeks and months. Another movie never to be made.
While I went to the window to see what was happening in the courtyard, Bina walked purposefully into to the kitchen and came back with a pot full of soapy water and a brush.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ I told her. ‘You have to rest!’
‘No, I have to clean up,’ she replied, and she got on her knees to begin scrubbing the bloodstains off the floor. Soon she was in tears again, so I lifted her to her feet, led her back to bed and instructed her to sleep. Now and then she would open her eyes to make sure I was still sitting with her. ‘I’m right here,’ I’d whisper.
When she drifted off, I began lightly caressing her hair. I learned the smoothness of her neck and the shadowed curves of her cheeks. I learned the way her chest would rise once, then once again before easing back down, as though she were overcoming her own resistance to life.
And once I’d learned these things, I walked away.
I took a rickshaw to Izzy’s workshop just after eight in the morning. He came to the door in his winter coat, but with his pyjamas on underneath. Reading in my face that I’d had a bad night, he reached out for my arm. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked, leading me inside.
When I explained about Freddi, he went pale. I sat him down at his worktable, where he’d been drinking coffee out of a bowl. ‘And no one else was hurt?’ he asked.
‘No. Listen, did you ever give Stefa’s apartment key to anyone?’
‘Of course not,’ he replied defensively. ‘I just made the one copy for Bina.’
‘Then Ewa must have given out our key. Or Stefa did.’
‘How do you know that?’
I sat down next to him and took a quick sip of his coffee, but it was too weak to do me any good. ‘The lock on the door wasn’t shot. Freddi’s killer let himself in.’
‘Someone might have taken it from Ewa just long enough to have a copy made,’ Izzy speculated. ‘Ziv works with her and could have easily done that. So maybe you were right about him. Maybe he fled Łódź to get away from the police or something.’
‘Except that Mikael could also have gotten it from Ewa. Though he let me see Adam’s medical file, which I don’t think he’d have done if he were involved in the murders.’
‘Poor Freddi,’ Izzy sighed. ‘He must have made some bad enemies really quickly.’
‘Freddi? This has nothing to do with him! The bullet in his chest was meant for me.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Only you and I knew that Bina’s family moved in yesterday. Though…’ Remembering the talk I’d had with Rowy the previous afternoon, I cut my sentence short.
‘What is it?’ Izzy questioned.
‘Listen to my thinking and tell me if I’m right. The murderer outside the ghetto and his Jewish accomplice must have thought I was still living alone. One of them came to put a bullet in me, or, more likely, sent someone else. Whoever it was panicked when he saw two women and a man in the room. It was dark, and he assumed the man was me. His first shot missed, which may mean he wasn’t a trained killer. We’ll probably find the bullet lodged in the wall somewhere. In any case, his trying to get me out of the way means that our note convinced Mikael, Rowy or Ziv that we were on to him.’
‘So you think that whoever sent a killer knew that what we wrote was made up – and that it hadn’t been sent by his accomplice outside the ghetto?’
‘Yes, though I have no idea how. In any case, since he knew the note wasn’t genuine, he also knew that I had to have sent it.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Because I’m the only one who’s been investigating Adam’s murder! It could only have been me. But listen, Izzy, this also means that Rowy can’t be guilty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because while I was with him yesterday afternoon, he warned me that the Jewish Council would make me take on tenants, and I told him Bina and her family had already moved in – and that I was living in Stefa’s room. If he sent a killer, he would have told him to walk through the main room into the bedroom – that I’d be sleeping there.’
‘Unless the killer panicked and didn’t follow Rowy’s instructions. You said yourself he might not be a professional.’
‘True, but after he took down Freddi, he’d have come for me in the bedroom.’
‘Which makes Ziv our main suspect. We have to figure out how he could have known our note was a trap.’
Izzy and I tossed unlikely speculations between us, dissatisfied and irritable, until there was a knock at the door. He retrieved his gun from his tool chest. When he motioned for me to hide, I slipped behind the curtain that concealed his lavatory.
‘Who is it?’ Izzy called through the door.
I didn’t catch the reply, but I heard the creak of the door opening.
‘Put your hands over your head and take off your overcoat!’ Izzy ordered our visitor.
‘I’m afraid I can’t take off anything with my hands in the air,’ the man retorted in an amused tone.
I recognized his voice immediately and came out of hiding. Izzy had his gun pointed at Mikael, who rolled his eyes as if this were a badly written scene in a Yiddish farce.
‘How about telling your zealous friend to put his weapon down before someone gets hurt?’ he asked me.
‘He might have a gun,’ Izzy reminded me.
‘Are you crazy?’ said Mikael, shaking his head, and he lowered his arms with a sigh.
‘Just take off your overcoat and toss it down,’ I told him. ‘I need to search your pockets.’
‘Erik, I’m here to help you!’ he declared.
‘Just humour me.’
He let his shoulders slump as if we were exhausting him, but he had realized by now we were serious and did as I requested. Finding no knife or gun, I laid his overcoat on Izzy’s worktable. Then I went to Mikael and confirmed that he had no weapon on him.
‘I hope you feel ridiculous!’ he told me in an offended voice as I was patting his trousers.
‘Feeling ridiculous is a sign of life,’ I replied.
‘Talmud, Torah or Groucho Marx?’ he asked – and it was his absurd humour that won him to me again.
‘Sorry,’ I told him, and I motioned for Izzy to put away his gun.
Izzy and I sat opposite Mikael, who looked at me with troubled eyes. ‘Ewa sent word to me about what happened to your new tenant,’ he began. ‘She said a girl named Bina let her know that you’d come here. I need to show you something.’ Grimacing, he added, ‘I think maybe I should have showed it to you before.’
He took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. ‘I want you to know I’m risking everything by letting you see this.’ He handed it to me.
The note was typewritten: If you should tell Erik Cohen anything that casts suspicion on me, you will never see your granddaughter alive again.
There was no signature. But many of the letters were faded – as if they’d been made with a badly functioning typewriter.
‘Who is this from?’ I asked Mikael.
‘I can’t be sure,’ he replied, ‘but it must be from whoever is responsible for Adam’s death. Maybe from Rowy. As you and I discussed, Adam and Anna had him in common.’
‘When did you get it?’
‘Three days ago. I’m only showing it to you because I’m worried that another child will be killed. Though, if I’m going to be completely honest, I’d never have gone to your home to show it to you.’
‘But why?’
‘I think Rowy is having me followed. I’ve spotted a man tracking me twice.’
‘What did he look like?’ Izzy asked, undoubtedly thinking – like me – that he might have been the same man who had killed Freddi.
‘Young – maybe thirty. Small, wiry…’
‘How small?’
‘I don’t know – maybe only a little over five feet.’
Izzy and I shared a knowing look.
‘What else?’ I asked.
‘Nothing – it was after dark both times I noticed him. I didn’t see his face. Anyway, this time I took a rickshaw here, and I made the driver take a circuitous route. I don’t think anyone could have managed to follow me.’
‘But why would Rowy be scared of what you could tell Erik?’ Izzy asked.
‘I don’t know. He must think I know something about him that would prove he’s guilty.’ Mikael reached across the table for my hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Which is why you can never tell anyone about the note or that I came to see you.’
‘No one will ever know,’ I assured him.
‘And you?’ Mikael asked Izzy, who nodded his agreement.
I handed the note back to him.
‘Now that I’ve shown it to you, I want to destroy it,’ Mikael told us, moving Izzy’s glass ashtray closer to him. ‘It feels like a bomb in my pocket.’ Crunching the paper into a ball, he set his lighter to it and dropped it into the ashtray.
I watched flames rising from the paper as if participating in a ritual linking the three of us into a conspiracy.
‘There’s a problem,’ I told Mikael. ‘The person responsible for identifying Adam and Anna to a German or Pole outside the ghetto may not be Rowy. It could be Ziv.’
‘Ziv?’ he scoffed. ‘No, that’s impossible. He’s so… so inoffensive. And Ewa adores him. They’re like brother and sister.’
‘Ziv volunteered to help Rowy identify children for his chorus. And he’s clever enough to have planned the murders. In fact, he once told me he can think a dozen moves ahead.’
‘But what could he possibly gain from killing Jewish children?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Imagine the note you received is from Ziv, not Rowy,’ Izzy suggested to Mikael. ‘Is there something he wouldn’t want you to tell us – or the police?’
He gazed off for a time, considering possibilities, then shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
Izzy and I questioned Mikael at length about Ziv, but nothing he told us seemed incriminating until he mentioned that when the young man had gone to him for a medical exam he had confessed that his mother was still alive and living in Łódź.
‘So he’s not an orphan?’ I asked, stupefied.
‘No, Ziv told me that he sends money to his mother every month. He made me swear not to tell anyone, because she disobeyed the Germans and never moved into the ghetto. She’s in hiding in Christian Łódź, with a family she’s paying, and when I talked to him about her, he said she was running out of money. The situation was getting desperate.’
‘When was this?’ Izzy asked.
‘Some time in early January. I’d have to check my files to know for sure – to see when he came for his medical exam.’
‘How does he get the money to her?’ I questioned.
Mikael shrugged. ‘Is that important?’
When I looked to Izzy, he told Mikael just what I was thinking. ‘He’d need the help of a Pole or German outside the ghetto to make sure the money reached her!’
We instructed Mikael to return to his office and said we would be in touch with him later that day. He left the workshop by the back exit.
Ewa and Ziv were both working when we stepped inside in the bakery. We took Ewa out to the courtyard. She swore that she’d never lent Stefa’s key to anyone, which meant that Ziv took it from her handbag and made a copy.
‘Stay here,’ I told her.
‘But why?’
‘I don’t want to risk you getting hurt.’
We went back inside. Ziv was kneading dough on a counter, a paper bag on his head, white with flour from head to toe. I asked him to come into his bedroom with us.
‘What is it you want, Dr Cohen?’ he asked, backing up, fearful, undoubtedly sensing that he might have to dash past me to make his escape.
‘Indulge me,’ I told him, enjoying my power over him. ‘I need to ask you something.’
Tears flooded his eyes. ‘What… what have I done?’ he stammered.
‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ I answered.
By now, all the bakery workers except Ewa had gathered around us. Ziv still didn’t move, but he glanced away for a moment, which was enough time for a skilled chess player like him to plan a strategy.
‘Get into your room!’ I told him harshly, determined to interrupt his thinking.
Taking the paper bag from his head, the boy turned and shuffled ahead of Izzy and me. Sacks of flour lined the back wall of the storeroom he lived in, and the wooden shelves were stacked with tins and jars. I shut the door behind us and turned the bolt to lock it.
Ziv’s cot was topped by a bright yellow blanket. His alabaster chessboard rested on top of his pillow. A photo of a dashing young man in a tuxedo was tacked to the left wall, and it was signed in blue ink by the chess champion Emmanuel Lasker. Below it was an old wooden chest. I started looking there.
‘What are you searching for?’ Ziv asked in a thin, apprehensive voice.
I made no reply. I began looking through his underwear.
‘If you tell me,’ he continued, ‘I’ll give it to you. Do you want the money I’ve saved up? I’ll give you everything I have.’
I continued hunting for evidence, tossing the clothing I’d already examined to the floor.
‘I… I think I understand now,’ the boy told me, but in so unsteady a voice that I looked at him. He sat down on the edge of his bed, gently, as if afraid to make any noise. ‘God, what an idiot I’ve been, Dr Cohen.’
That comment surprised me. Fixing my gaze, he said, ‘I should have known. I’ve played this all wrong.’
‘What should you have known?’
‘What you’re looking for is behind there,’ he said gloomily, pointing to his photograph of Lasker.
Ziv was crying again – and silently. He was an excellent actor, but I already knew that.
One of the bakery workers must have summoned Ewa. She began pounding at the door and yelling my name.
‘Go away!’ I shouted back. Turning to Izzy, I said, ‘Hold the gun on him.’
Taped to the back of the photograph was a white envelope. I ripped it away. Out of it spilled a slender gold chain holding a small enamel medallion of the Virgin Mary.
I would have expected a surge of righteousness or rage on finding the man who had betrayed Adam; instead, holding Georg’s pendant gave me a sense of having been moved around Warsaw by a will that was not my own.
I leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath. My mouth was metallic tasting, as if I’d swallowed rust.
Ewa was still banging at the door and calling out to me. The noise and heat pressed down on me. I hated Ziv for making me kill him.
‘It’s not mine, I swear,’ the young man told me, shaking his hands wildly. ‘You have to believe me!’
‘I know whose it is!’ I hollered. ‘It belongs to a boy named Georg – a street juggler. You remember him, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t,’ he replied, moaning. ‘I discovered the pendant in my room two days ago.’
‘Who left it here?’ Izzy demanded.
Ziv faced him and joined his hands together. ‘I don’t know. I asked everyone in the bakery about the pendant, but no one had lost it. You can ask them. Ask Ewa! I decided to keep it until someone claimed it.’
‘Is that the best story you can come up with?’ Izzy demanded.
‘What did you get in return for Adam?’ I asked.
Ziv looked helplessly between me and Izzy. Finding no sympathy in our faces, he gazed down and squeezed his head between his hands as if to hold his thoughts inside. His skilful performance only enraged me further.
‘What did you get for my nephew?’ I demanded again.
‘I didn’t hurt Adam! Oh God, I’d never have hurt him! Stefa loved him more than anything.’
‘Give me the gun,’ I told Izzy. He handed it to me. I pointed it at Ziv’s head. ‘Tell me the truth!’ I ordered.
‘Let me think!’ the young man pleaded. ‘Dr Cohen, now that I know I’ve been set up, I can figure this out. I’m good at figuring things out. You know I am!’
I put the barrel of the gun up to his temple. ‘This is no game, you little bastard! Who have you been working with outside the ghetto?’
‘I don’t know anyone outside the ghetto,’ he insisted, and he reached for my arm to implore me, but I batted it away.
A key turned in the door. Ewa opened it and faced me. ‘If you hurt Ziv, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
‘I have no rest of my life,’ I replied.
‘Still, you should be pointing that gun at me, not him.’
‘After Papa and I moved into the ghetto, we had difficulties getting insulin for Helena,’ Ewa told me and Izzy. Seated next to Ziv, she was rubbing his hand to calm him – and to give herself the strength to tell me what she knew. Her lips were trembling, and she couldn’t look at me. She kept gazing off; she would have preferred to be anywhere but where she was.
‘And it became more expensive, too,’ she continued. ‘We were getting desperate, but in early January Papa told me that his German supplier had promised to get him insulin for almost nothing. All we had to do was find him Jewish children to photograph. Papa’s friend was a medical researcher who’d just moved to Warsaw – a German doctor my father had known in Zurich. He told Papa he had theories about the Jews involving their skin, but I never found out exactly what he meant.’
Ewa – the quietest among us – was opening the final door of this mystery.
‘Did your father mention this man’s name?’ I asked.
‘I’ve tried to remember. I think I must have heard it.’
‘It has to be either Rolf Lanik or Werner Koch. Think, Ewa.’
‘Those names, they seem close, but… Could it have been Kalin… or maybe Klein?’
Ewa gazed at me questioningly, but I closed my eyes – out of gratitude, because I suddenly realized why a string had been put in Adam’s mouth and a piece of gauze in Georg’s hand. And how they identified the murderer. Though I still didn’t know who had given me those clues. Might Irene or her mother have been brilliant enough to leave them behind?
Knowing who the murderer was also made me understand why his helper inside the ghetto hadn’t been persuaded by our note to go to the Leszno Street gate.
Yet it was then that a first regret pierced my excitement: if only I’d figured out earlier that the Rolf who’d signed the photographs of the Alps hanging on Mikael’s office walls had been Rolf Lanik, a talented little boy who’d juggled socks to earn his supper would still be alive.
‘Are you all right, Dr Cohen?’ Ewa asked me, and Izzy reached for my shoulder.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Go on.’
‘The researcher friend of my father’s wanted to photograph skin defects, particularly on children,’ Ewa continued. ‘We were both so relieved to have his help! So when Papa examined Anna and noticed a blemish on her hand, he told her to go to an address outside the ghetto, where she’d receive a hundred and fifty złoty for letting a doctor there photograph her. Papa didn’t know that she’d be killed.’ Ewa held my gaze. ‘He didn’t know. He swore to me he didn’t.’
‘I believe you,’ I told her, but I didn’t believe her father.
‘Anna told Papa she was going to sneak out of the ghetto anyway, so it seemed all right,’ Ewa continued. ‘He only began to think that something bad might have happened to her when she didn’t show up for her abortion. Later, he learned from her parents that she’d been murdered.’
I faced Izzy. ‘After Anna was turned away by Mrs Sawicki, she must have gone to the address Mikael had given her.’
‘She risked everything because she needed money to pay back her friends,’ he observed regretfully.
‘Papa confronted his photographer friend,’ Ewa continued, ‘but he swore that he hadn’t hurt Anna – that she must have been murdered after being photographed at his office and receiving her payment. Papa was sure he was telling the truth. Then Rowy chose Adam for the chorus, and my father noticed his birthmarks at his check-up – though I didn’t know that then. Apparently, Papa visited backstage at a rehearsal one afternoon, and he told Adam that if he ever left the ghetto he should go to have his leg photographed because he’d get a hundred and fifty złoty.’
That made sense; Adam would have trusted Mikael because of the horseradish the physician had given him.
‘With all that money,’ I told Ewa, ‘Adam must have thought he’d be able to buy enough coal to keep Gloria warm till spring.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told me, and she began to cry.
I felt nothing for her; her tears were too late to do any good. ‘What was the address?’ I asked her impatiently.
She wiped her eyes. ‘I’m not sure. Somewhere on Krakowskie Przedmieście.’
Izzy looked at me knowingly. ‘We have to find Jesion,’ he told me.
Ziv put his arm over Ewa’s shoulder, which only made her tear up again.
‘Please go on, Ewa,’ I pleaded. ‘Every moment we wait puts another life at risk.’
‘After I found out what happened to Adam,’ she resumed, ‘I remembered seeing his birthmarks once, when Stefa was getting him dressed for school. To think that my father might have been responsible… A black terror took hold of me.’
Ewa gazed down into her guilt. ‘On the morning of Stefa’s funeral, I finally confronted my father. At first he lied and said he hadn’t spoken to your nephew, but then, when I threatened that he’d never see Helena again if he didn’t tell me the truth, he admitted that he’d suggested to Adam that he go visit the photographer on Krakowskie Przedmieście – but only when he was still under the belief that his friend was innocent. Papa promised me he’d never tell another child about the photographs – and that he’d never speak to his friend again. That’s why I didn’t go to you or the police. I should have. I know that now. I’m sorry, Dr Cohen.’ She turned to Ziv and squeezed his hand. ‘And I’m sorry for risking your life,’ she told him. ‘It’s my fault that you were almost killed.’
‘It’s all right,’ Ziv told her. ‘I’m fine now. And you were just trying to protect Helena and your father.’
Ewa shook her head as if he was too kind to her. Turning back to me, she said, ‘After Stefa died, I couldn’t face you. I’m sorry. And Papa… I couldn’t entirely trust him, so I told him I no longer wanted his help in getting insulin. But it was hard to find another regular supplier, and Helena went into shock and nearly died. So Papa began helping me again – though he promised he wouldn’t get insulin from his friend any more. He has another source now – a good, reliable source.’
‘No, that can’t be true,’ I told her. ‘And I think your father has lied to you all along.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Another boy was murdered more recently,’ I told her coldly, wishing she’d come to me sooner. ‘He was murdered after Stefa’s death, and skin around his hip was sliced away.’
She shook her head disbelievingly. ‘Which boy was killed?’
I held up the Virgin Mary pendant. ‘The owner of this,’ I told her. ‘His name was Georg – Rowy or Ziv must have recruited him for the chorus. He juggled socks and sang old Yiddish songs.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Ziv told me urgently. ‘Dr Cohen, you have to believe me. Rowy must have found him.’
‘I believe you,’ I replied. ‘I’m sorry for ever doubting you. And I should never have put you through this.’
‘It’s all right, I understand,’ he said, smiling sweetly.
I’d nearly killed him, and he smiled at me as if our friendship was stronger than ever.
‘Ewa, your father must have decided that he couldn’t risk Helena going into diabetic shock again. He’s still sending kids to his photographer friend.’
‘No, he swore to me he wouldn’t do that!’ she replied, moaning.
‘There are other things you should know about your father,’ I told her bitterly. ‘He must have realized I was close to learning what he’d done, so he paid someone to shoot me. But he didn’t know that new tenants were sleeping in my room. So the killer shot the wrong man.’
‘It doesn’t seem–’
‘Possible?’ I cut in harshly. ‘Don’t you see? He’ll do anything to keep Helena and you alive – and to keep from being caught. He’s even tried to frame Rowy and Ziv – he didn’t care which one. He left Georg’s pendant here, and I’ll bet he left Anna’s pearl earrings with Rowy. Ziv says he noticed the Virgin Mary pendant two days ago, which means your father has known for at least that long who my main suspects were. Though I don’t know how.’
‘Maybe I let something slip at Stefa’s funeral,’ Izzy observed apologetically.
‘It could just as easily have been me,’ I told him. ‘And just before we came here, your father brought me a note – a threat that he said he’d received. The note said that if he ever revealed anything about the murderer, he’d never see Helena again. That was part of his plan to shift the blame. He even implied that he was being followed by the same man who had tried to shoot me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she replied. ‘Who was the note from?’
‘He led us to believe that it was from Rowy, but it wasn’t. Your father wrote it himself.’ I turned to Ziv. ‘Once he realized I suspected you as well as Rowy, he cleverly revealed that you’d told him you needed extra money to send to your mother outside the Łodź ghetto. He let that slip as though he didn’t understand the implication. The perfect touch was letting Izzy and me jump to the obvious conclusion about you.’
‘So you thought I needed a lot of extra cash,’ Ziv observed.
‘Yes, and that you had a contact outside the ghetto helping you get it to your mother.’
‘Which is why we came here,’ Izzy told him. ‘To search for evidence of who you were working with outside the ghetto.’
‘But my mother died a month before I came to Warsaw,’ the boy insisted, as if righting an injustice. ‘I never told Dr Tengmann that she was alive. I promise.’
‘So she’s not hiding in Łodź?’
‘If she had found a place to hide, why wouldn’t I be with her? Or at least be hiding elsewhere in Łodź, where I could be nearer to her.’
‘But can you prove she’s dead?’ I challenged him.
‘Why would I have to?’
‘Because if Ewa hadn’t told me the truth, it would have been your word against her father’s. I would have believed him, and you, Ziv… you’d be dead.’
The boy gazed down and smiled fleetingly, as if in admiration of Mikael’s strategy. Looking up, he said excitedly, ‘You sent me that note, didn’t you, Dr Cohen? You wanted me to go to the Leszno Street gate!’
‘Yes, we were trying to trap the killer, but no one showed up.’
‘So Ewa’s father must have known that your note was a trick, but how?’
‘Because he knew that the German he was working with wasn’t in Warsaw and couldn’t have sent him that note.’ I turned to Izzy. ‘He knew that Lanik was out of town. They must have found a way to communicate with each other fairly regularly. Maybe Mikael has access to a working phone.’ To Ewa, I said, ‘Your father must have had someone leave Georg’s pendant here secretly. He knew that when Izzy and I came here, we’d be sure to find the evidence we were looking for. He improvises well.’
‘If that’s true, then who left it here?’ the young woman asked.
‘Your father must have had a copy made of the key to the bakery and could have paid a streetkid to leave the pendant under Ziv’s door.’
‘But it wasn’t left under my door,’ Ziv told me. ‘I found it under my pillow. It had to be someone with the key to my bedroom, or a person I let in.’ His eyes opened wide with astonishment. ‘It must have been one of my chess students.’
‘Are you teaching anyone who knows Ewa’s father?’
‘That woman who came for her first lesson two days ago – Karina.’
‘Who’s Karina?’ I asked.
Ewa replied for Ziv. ‘She and my father… They’ve been seeing each other since late November.’
Izzy understood before me. ‘Describe Karina,’ he requested of Ewa.
‘Pretty, in her fifties, with silver hair and…’
‘Enough!’ I said, angry at myself; I didn’t need to hear more; Melka – whose real name I now knew – had told Mikael who my suspects were. I had to give her credit; she’d convinced me that she was hardly paying attention to all that I’d revealed to her after we’d shared her bed.
Mikael had used my vanity against me. He must have even told her to offer me a sugar crystal for my tea. He was a coldly observant and resourceful man.
‘We’ve got to go,’ I told Izzy.
Ewa jumped up and reached for my arm. ‘What’ll you do to my father?’ she asked, terrified.
Could I kill Mikael? I wasn’t sure. So Izzy and I spoke instead of how we’d murder Lanik. He sat on Stefa’s bed, curled over his angry ideas, and I stood by the window, cooler, but also more perverse – Mr Hyde creeping through the underbrush of his mind.
We decided we’d go to Lanik’s office and shoot him there if he was unprotected. If he had soldiers or guards with him, we’d wait until he left for lunch.
I wanted to strip him, as he’d stripped Adam, and make him beg for his life while kneeling in the filth of a Warsaw backstreet, have him weep for all the springtimes of Germany he’d never see. I wanted a hungry-for-vengeance crowd of Poles to learn what a wrinkled, shivering coward he was minus his uniform, gun and guards, and without his beloved, dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf in his hands, justifying his murder of the most defenceless among us.
And once he was dead?
Izzy and I would flee across the river for the suburb of Praga; Jaśmin Makinska lived near the tram depot on Street. We would either stay with her or, if she could, she would drive us to Lwów, where we’d hide out in a rooming house or small hotel for as long as it took to sell my remaining jewellery. We didn’t have Christian identity papers, but a couple of hundred złoty stuffed in an innkeeper’s pocket would win us his grudging silence for a few days.
Our goal: the Soviet Ukraine. We’d bribe our way over the border and head to Odessa, where we’d catch a freighter across the Black Sea to Istanbul. From there, it would be easy to get to Izmir. After our reunion with Liesel, Izzy would catch a boat to the south of France, where he’d buy forged papers. Then he’d sneak into the German-occupied territory in the north, for a rendezvous with Louis and his sons in Boulogne-Billancourt.
I wanted to be there to see my old friend’s victory over all that had stood between himself and his dreams, but I knew by then I’d never leave Liesel again.
I felt strong knowing we had a plan, but Izzy started to cry.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing… and everything. The relief of knowing I’ll either be dead or free – it’s too much right now.’
I began gathering together all of the small valuables that I could sell, including the letter opener I’d stolen. Izzy sat at my desk to read through Adam’s medical file, and when he was done, he asked, ‘So why do you think Mikael let you have this?’
I was sitting on the ground by my dresser and had just taken Hannah’s ruby earrings out of the toe of one of my socks. ‘He must have thought that his openness would convince me he had nothing to hide,’ I replied. ‘And he was right. Since Adam’s death, he has been trying to outthink me.’
‘And he nearly did,’ Izzy observed.
‘Convincing Melka to sleep with me was his master stroke. She must be deeply in love with him to have gone along with a compromising plan like that.’
I got to my knees and slipped my hand under the mattress to take out the record book of Adam’s illnesses that Stefa had entrusted to me.
Turning round, Izzy said, ‘While you finish getting together what you’ll need, I’ll be writing something.’
He’d already slipped a sheet of paper in my typewriter and was obviously hatching a plot, but I didn’t question him; I had Hannah’s earrings to hide in case we needed to make an emergency bribe. I cut a small square at the centre of fifty pages of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, dropped the jewellery inside the resulting cubbyhole and slid the slender volume back into its place on my bookshelves.
I put all the valuables I’d sell inside my old leather briefcase.
When Izzy was finished hunting and pecking, I led him into the kitchen, where Bina was scouring the oven. She was wearing her coat and her black beret.
‘Give me your hand,’ I told the girl, reaching out for her.
I put five hundred złoty in her palm. ‘Make sure you stay alive!’ I ordered her. She replied that it was too great a sum, so I shook her hard. ‘Do anything you need to do, but promise me you’ll make it out of here!’
‘I swear,’ she replied, starting to cry, because I was bullying her.
Apologizing, I hugged her to me, then counted out another 500 złoty and handed them to her. ‘Give half of this to a little acrobat named Zachariah Manberg who performs outside the Femina Theatre every day at noon. But only give it to him a little at a time. Otherwise he’ll just squander it – or have it stolen by the older boys.’
‘And the other half, Dr Cohen?’
‘There’s a young woman who works in the bakery in the courtyard – Ewa. I want her to have it.’
‘I’ve met her. I’ll make sure she gets it.’
‘Good girl. Also, if you run out of funds, there are some reasonably good paintings in Stefa’s wardrobe, and first editions of psychiatry books on my shelves. Sell them on the Other Side if you can, but don’t take stupid risks. You can sell everything but Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Leave that for me, in case I need to come back.’
Bina nodded.
I was left with a little more than a thousand złoty for myself, and Izzy had nearly six hundred at his workshop.
‘All right, let’s get going,’ I told him.
‘Where will you go?’ the girl asked.
‘We’ve one errand to run inside the ghetto, then we’ll head for the Soviet Ukraine. I don’t think I’ll be back.’
She brought her hands over her mouth and moaned. ‘You’re… you’re leaving for good?’
‘Yes, it’s time.’
‘But we’ll see each other when we’re free, won’t we?’ she asked in a petrified voice.
‘Yes,’ I replied, smiling. ‘I’ll come back and find you. We’ll have a reunion, right here in Stefa’s apartment. So take good care of it.’
‘I will. Now bend your head down, Dr Cohen,’ she requested.
‘What?’
‘Bend down.’
I did. And then that astonishing girl gripped my shoulders and kissed me on my brow as if I were her child setting out for his first day of school.
I’d put on my good suit so that I’d look like an elderly gentleman out for a leisurely stroll. At Izzy’s workshop, he, too, changed into his best clothes and put on his Borsalino. Then he counted his stash of złoty and grabbed his gold watch. I reminded him to take a lemon along. He took two. He slid his photographs from the Bourdonnais under his coat.
‘I need to say goodbye to Róźa,’ he told me.
I waited outside his apartment. When he returned to me, his face was flushed.
I hailed a rickshaw. I had to decide now where to go: Mikael’s office or the Jewish Council.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘Just a minute,’ I told him. ‘I still don’t think I can kill Mikael,’ I confessed to Izzy.
‘Then let me do it,’ he requested.
‘It’s not your war,’ I told him.
‘Erik, I loved Adam too!’
‘Still, you should go to Louis guiltless.’
‘Me, guiltless?’ He grabbed my arm hard. ‘Have you heard anything I’ve told you about my life?’
I took his free hand and kissed it. A strange gesture, but this was not a day like any other, and a quarrel with him could have ruined all our plans.
Izzy understood. ‘Sorry,’ he told me.
I turned round to face the driver. ‘Take us to the Jewish Council’s headquarters,’ I told him.
Benjamin Schrei was in an office he shared with two other men. He rushed to greet us, smiling his million-dollar Gablewitz smile, and introduced us to his colleagues, who brought us desk chairs.
We sat down opposite our host. Four wilted, fire-coloured tulips sat in a turquoise vase on his desk between us.
‘You might try watering them,’ Izzy told him in his bantering way.
Schrei slicked back his gleaming hair and sighed. ‘They were doing great till this morning. You should have come yesterday. It’s your timing that’s bad.’
‘Yesterday, we didn’t know what we know now,’ I replied, and I told him what we’d learned about Mikael. When I was done, I handed him Georg’s pendant and suggested that he question Ewa if he had any doubts about our conclusions. Izzy added that he’d probably find Anna’s earrings with Rowy.
‘You boys have done good work,’ he told us. ‘And the council is grateful.’ He lit the cigarette that he’d dangled between his lips, then leaned towards us. ‘So what do you have in mind for Dr Tengmann?’
He squinted at me through his smoke.
‘Does it make any difference what I tell you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’ll take care of him whatever you say.’
‘And take care of means exactly what?’ Izzy questioned.
‘He shall cease to cast a shadow on this earth,’ Schrei answered in a dramatic voice. Catching my glance, he added, ‘Nothing you can say will prevent that. Still, I’d like to know what you’d do in my position.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m a curious man. And I want your opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you, Dr Cohen. You interest me.’
‘Even though I’m an assimilated Jew?’ I asked to provoke him.
‘You’re hardly assimilated now.’ Eyeing me cagily, he said, ‘Face it, Dr Cohen, you stink like a ragpicker from the most backward shtetl in Poland. And you’ll never voluntarily speak German or Polish again to anyone who isn’t Jewish. Am I right?’
‘Probably,’ I admitted.
‘You know,’ he added, an amused smile twisting his lips, ‘if you learned a little Hebrew, you could be a pretty good Yid.’
‘He is a pretty good Yid!’ countered Izzy, ready for a fight.
‘You’re right,’ Schrei replied. ‘I’m sorry. It was a bad joke.’
‘I think Stefa would want him dead,’ I told him.
‘Fine, but what do you want?’ our host insisted.
‘I want a cigarette,’ I requested, stalling.
I knew that Schrei wanted me to give him the biblical answer: an eye for an eye… That would have proved I accepted the rules of the God of the Torah. But what he didn’t understand is that I wanted to take responsibility for my revenge. I wanted that sceptre of red fire for myself.
‘Mikael Tengmann being killed won’t bring back Adam,’ I told him after he’d lit my cigarette. ‘And my sending him straight to hell wouldn’t make me happy.’
‘It won’t make me happy either,’ he confessed. ‘But I’ll still do it.’
‘You’ve a hard job,’ I told him.
‘Ah, now you’re beginning to understand,’ he replied, showing me a gratified smile.
‘You take care of Mikael, and I’ll take care of the Nazi working with him,’ I said as if we were trading stocks.
He shook my hand to complete the deal. ‘All right, but do you know who the German is?’
‘Yes.’
‘How are you going to get him?’
Izzy answered for us. ‘That depends on how well he’s guarded.’
‘Maybe you should take a few days to plan this,’ Schrei suggested. ‘If the Germans find you outside the ghetto, they’ll shoot you on the spot. And that’s if you’re lucky.’
‘I can’t wait. If I wait, I may lose my nerve,’ I told him.
‘You have money for bribes?’
‘Yes.’
‘A gun?’
Izzy patted his pocket. ‘It’s German,’ he replied, grinning at the irony.
‘Then I’ll let you boys get on your way.’ He handed me his tin of cigarettes. ‘Take this for good luck,’ he told me, standing up.
He accompanied us to the door. We shook hands again, and then he leaned in and embraced me, whispering in my ear, ‘Shoot quickly and don’t ask him why he killed Adam. No answer he gives you will give you peace, and the delay will just increase the likelihood of your being caught. When you get back out to the street, don’t run. It’ll attract attention.’
Good advice – one murderer to another – and it was flattering that he presumed that Izzy and I could still run. But I still had to know why Adam’s leg had been worth stealing.
The border crossing at the back of the rickshaw workshop had been bricked up by the Jewish Council, which was under increasing pressure from the German authorities to curb smuggling. So we went to the women’s clothing factory that led to Maciej’s garage. We paid our toll to the head seamstress and crawled again through that tunnel of pressured darkness into the next world. Happily, Maciej heard our banging and let us out.
‘You again – the angry Jew!’ he said to Izzy, beaming, and they shook hands like cousins. ‘Take off your armbands,’ he reminded us.
We handed them to him, and Maciej added them to the collection in his office.
Maciej escorted us to the door, looked both ways to make sure the street was free of policemen, then summoned us out.
Krakowskie Przedmiescie was crowded with workers and shoppers. Owing to the freezing rain that had just begun to fall, it was a confusion of umbrellas battling for airspace. We bought a big blue one that would rule the street.
In front of the Bristol Hotel was a group of German soldiers standing around a tank, but we didn’t detour around them or decay into our miserable ghetto shuffle; the murder drawing us forward had freed us from any fear of misfortune.
Can it be that criminals walk easier through their days and nights than the rest of us?
After passing Warsaw University, we spotted what we were looking for on the east side of the street: ‘E. Jesion – Butcher.’
A little way back, guarding the west, were the twin pinnacles of the Church of the Holy Cross.
We looked in the shop window from twenty paces away. A red-faced butcher in a white apron, with wire-rimmed spectacles circling his puffy eyes, was working at a marble counter, cutting thick ribbons of fat off a side of pork and tossing them into a tin pail. He was big and broad. His flat-topped haircut – and the moustache hyphening his thick top lip – made him look as though he’d stepped off a Grosz etching.
Was this the brute who had taken Adam from us?
The anger that rose inside me was like a strangling wind – leaving no room for anything but the need to have Jesion’s future in my hands.
He looked up and noticed us, then cut away more fat. When he glanced back at me again, I knew he was wondering why a stranger would gaze at him so intently. Guilt had made him observant – and quick to fear the worst.
Izzy sensed what was on my mind. ‘Erik, he’ll know where Lanik’s office is,’ he said. ‘We can’t kill him before we find out where it is.’
‘I know. I was just thinking that the perfect crime is one you wouldn’t mind being arrested for.’
‘No one’s going to capture us,’ he assured me, and he told me what he had in mind for Jesion. It seemed like a good plan.
As we stepped inside, the butcher looked up with a forced smile. In Polish he asked, ‘What can I get for you gentlemen this morning?’
I put my briefcase and folded umbrella down in the corner and looked around quickly. There was a door at the back. It must have led to his storage room.
‘Is something wrong?’ the man asked us, sensing trouble.
‘Are you Mr Jesion?’ Izzy questioned.
‘That’s me all right,’ he replied, doing his best to sound jovial.
I locked the door with a firm click. ‘We’ve got a gun,’ I told the butcher. ‘So drop your knife.’
‘What? I don’t understand.’
Izzy took out his pistol. ‘Drop your knife to the floor,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll put a bullet in your head.’
I stepped around the counter to watch Jesion’s movements. When he tossed away the blade, it made a metallic clang on the tile floor.
‘I’m going to step through the door at the back to make sure no one is there,’ I told the butcher, ‘and then you’re going to follow me in. You understand?’
‘If it’s money you want,’ he replied, ‘just take it.’
I pushed open the door and entered a dark, chilly room, nearly bumping into a goat’s carcass hanging bug-eyed from an iron hook in the ceiling. I recoiled in horror. The smell of blood packed my nostrils.
I tugged on a cord attached to a bare bulb behind me. At the back, on a square marble table, were two other goats, not yet skinned. A vision of Adam lying beside them and stripped of his clothes made me avert my eyes.
‘All right, send him in,’ I called through the door.
Jesion stepped inside, followed by Izzy, who kept his gun pointed at the butcher’s chest.
‘Are you… are you one of the kids’ grandfathers?’ Jesion asked fearfully.
‘So you’ve guessed,’ I told him.
He cleaned his fingers on his apron. ‘Well, you hardly look like robbers.’
‘He was my grandnephew,’ I explained.
‘Which one?’
‘The boy with the birthmarks on his ankle.’
Jesion raised a hand to his face and took off his glasses, wiping his eyes. He showed me a desolate look. ‘What was his name?’
‘Adam,’ I told him.
‘Adam,’ he repeated to himself, listening keenly to the sound it made. ‘Did you get his body back?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ve given him a proper burial?’
‘I’m not sure. We’ve been waiting for the ground to thaw. Listen, Jesion,’ I said, ‘you seem awfully calm for a man with a gun pointed at his heart.’
‘In a way, I’ve been hoping you’d come. I can’t stand any more of this. I think all the time about what I might have to cut from another kid. It’s too much.’
‘How do you kill them? There are no marks on…’
‘Me, kill them? It’s not like that!’ He shook his head. ‘When the kids are brought to me, they’re already dead – brenen zol er!’
His Yiddish was mis-pronounced. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. ‘What did you say?’ I asked.
Jesion cursed the murderer again.
‘How in God’s name do you know Yiddish?’ Izzy questioned.
‘My mother is Jewish, though she changed her name when she was a young woman to hide her background.’ He started undoing the cord of his apron. ‘I only ever spoke Yiddish when I stayed with my grandparents. I’m rusty.’
‘Is it Lanik you want to burn in hell?’ I asked.
His face brightened. ‘You did it! You must have figured out the clues I left!’
‘So you were the one who put the string in Adam’s mouth and the gauze in Georg’s fist?’
‘Yes. I had to think of something to stop more children from being murdered. When did you understand what my clues meant?’
‘Only today. You were incredibly clever.’
‘I couldn’t risk anything obvious,’ Jesion replied, taking off his apron and folding it neatly, ‘but I’d heard that the Jews inside the ghetto were working in anagrams these days, so I thought that someone in the Jewish police might just turn linka into Lanik and Flor into Rolf. And that they might be able to stop the bastard. Only a Jew would know both Polish and German well enough to understand that linka was string and Flor was gauze, so I felt that the right person would figure out Lanik’s whole name.’
‘But you left nothing on Anna,’ Izzy interjected.
‘She was the first. I was too shocked and upset to think of how I might leave a clue behind. Only when Adam was left with me did it occur to me how I could do it without risking too much.’
‘If Lanik had discovered the string or gauze, what would you have said?’
‘That it was carelessness on my part. He wouldn’t have guessed. The Germans aren’t talking in code like the Jews.’
‘That was a good and brave attempt to help me,’ I told him. ‘Thank you.’
‘After what I’ve done, you’re thanking me?’
‘Under the circumstances, you did the best you could.’
Jesion grimaced, then raised a quivering hand to his head, dizzy. We sat him down at his table, and he leaned over and cried as if life were spilling out of him.
At length, I asked him, ‘How many children have been murdered so far?’
‘Four – three boys and a girl.’
‘Then there’s one I don’t know about,’ I told him.
‘Probably the first of the boys – he came in just after Anna. He wasn’t from the ghetto. Lanik told me he and his family had been in hiding.’
‘How did Lanik find him?’
‘Christians denounce Jews in hiding all the time. It’s become the national sport.’
‘The body of this boy… Where was it left?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t ask.’ Jesion sneered. ‘The son-of-a-bitch has his chauffeur bring the dead children here at night, and he tells me what I’m to do. When I’m done, he takes the body away. That’s all I know.’
‘And how does Lanik kill them?’
‘My guess is that he offers them poisoned food. He once told me they come to him famished.’
‘Have you ever heard of Mikael Tengmann?’ I asked.
‘No, who’s he?’
‘A doctor in the ghetto – an old friend of Lanik’s. He’s the one who identifies children who have birthmarks or blemishes.’
‘I see. So how did you find me?’
‘A courageous girl helped me figure out who the murderer was.’
‘Was it Lanik’s stepdaughter Irene?’ he questioned.
‘You know her?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘She and her mother often come into town to buy their meat from me.’
‘So did you tell Irene that her stepfather was ordering you to cut up the children?’
‘No, it wasn’t me. I couldn’t risk that. I was careful not to let on.’
‘Then one of them must have overheard Lanik discussing the murders or seen the skin you’ve taken from the children. Or Irene figured things out from other clues we’ll never know about.’
‘Does Lanik photograph the skin?’ Izzy questioned.
‘I’m not sure. All I really know is that it has something to do with a transfer he wants to a more important job. When the first boy was brought to me, he told me that he needed the skin around his birthmark for a present he would be carrying with him to a camp – to Buchenwald. As best I can figure out, he’s eager to work there so that he can perform experiments on the prisoners – medical experiments involving how to cure burns. That’s his speciality, as I understand it. I think he left a couple of days ago for there. I’m betting he took the children’s skins with him, though he talked of bringing them to a craftsman in leather before going and I’m not sure he’s had time to do that yet.’
‘Who’s the gift for?’
‘Someone at Buchenwald, but I don’t know who. Whether he hopes to prove some racial theory with the Jewish skin or simply ingratiate himself to some madman there, I haven’t any idea.’
‘Why did he pick you to desecrate the children for him?’ I asked.
‘Lanik found out that my mother was Jewish. He threatened to have her and the rest of our family sent to the ghetto. Mama is seventy-seven years old. She wouldn’t survive a week in there. I didn’t have any choice.’
‘Do you know where Lanik’s office is?’ Izzy asked.
‘Yes, it’s across the street – the second door to the left of the church. He’s on the first floor, but getting to him will be risky for you. His patients are all collaborators and Germans – soldiers, Gestapo officers… I go there to make deliveries on occasion, and he keeps a heavily armed guard by the door.’
‘Where does he eat lunch?’ I questioned.
‘I’ve seen him at a German restaurant nearby – a kind of beer garden.’
‘Is it crowded?’
‘Sometimes.’
I wasn’t sure what to do, but Izzy saved the day; he took out the note he’d typed at home and handed it to me. It read:
Rolf, please come to the Cathedral in Praga at 1 p.m. I’m in trouble with the Jewish Council and need your help. Don’t fail me, I beg of you. My life is in your hands.
At the bottom, Izzy had forged Mikael’s signature beautifully, having found it at the end of Adam’s medical file.
‘You make a better detective than I do,’ I told him gratefully.
‘Those who lead a double life learn the ways of stealth,’ he replied. A one-line poem he’d wanted to tell me for decades, I guessed.
I handed the note to Jesion. ‘Go ahead, read it,’ I told him.
When he was finished, Izzy said, ‘Lanik doesn’t yet know that we’ve identified Mikael Tengmann as his accomplice, and he’ll believe the appeal for help is real. They’re old friends, so he’ll go to Praga.’
‘Do you know if there are Germans patrolling the bridges over the river?’ I asked the butcher.
‘Sometimes, but you should be safe at lunch time. With so many people going back and forth, they don’t usually make trouble. But do you intend to kill him in the Praga Cathedral?’ he asked in a horrified voice.
‘If you can tell me how to lure him to a synagogue,’ Izzy told him with a crafty smile, ‘I’ll happily shoot him there.’
Jesion put our note in an envelope and took it across the street to Lanik; he planned to say it had been dropped at his shop by a ghetto courier. Ten minutes later, he was back, out of breath.
‘I gave the note to him, but he didn’t read it in front of me,’ he told us worriedly.
‘But you did tell him that the courier had said it was urgent?’
‘Of course.’ The butcher grimaced. ‘He asked me what the man looked like, and I couldn’t think of how to reply, so I described Jan Kiliński on his statue in Krasinskich Square – with that peasant hat and heroic moustache. It was all I could think of.’
Izzy had a good laugh, which made Jesion smile. ‘I didn’t foul things up?’ he asked us.
‘No, you did good,’ I told him.
‘What’s Lanik look like?’ Izzy asked.
‘He’s tall, over six feet, and he has dark brown hair that he wears very short, parted on the left.’
‘That’s it then,’ Izzy said cheerfully. ‘We’re off!’
Jesion reached for him. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘A gun makes a lot of noise, but a knife…’
The steel blade was four inches long, slightly curved, the handle polished ebony. It fitted into my hand as if it had always been mine. I kept it in its leather sheath, concealed in the inside pocket of my overcoat.
Jesion’s last words to me were, ‘If you free me from that son-of-a-bitch, I’ll bless you in my prayers for ever!’
We encountered no difficulties on the bridge to Praga and headed straight to Jaśmin’s apartment, but she wasn’t home. The caretaker of her building told us she sometimes returned for lunch, usually just after noon.
To kill time, we sat at a café sipping weak coffee that had the unlikely aftertaste of smoked fish, then waited for Jaśmin down her street. Izzy and I hardly spoke; the murder we’d planned was too greedy for our attention.
Jaśmin never showed up. At 12.35 we couldn’t wait any longer and made our way to Floriańska Street, and from there to the cathedral. We found it nearly empty. Two elderly women sat in the first pew – sisters, I guessed, since they had the same tight bun of grey hair and finchlike compactness. A balding middle-aged man with a bandage over his left ear sat in the third-to-last row, his sullen lips sculpting prayers, his eyes closed. We spotted no priests.
Izzy sat in the last pew. I stood just to the side of the main door. I put down my briefcase and held my knife behind my back.
At a quarter past one, Lanik stepped inside. I hadn’t expected him to be in uniform. That troubled me – it was as if he now had an unfair advantage.
He took off his cap and brushed his hair off his forehead with abrupt, irritated flicks. He obviously thought it a burden to have had to travel so far from his office.
He had an intelligent face and large dark eyes. Stepping to the end of the centre aisle, he surveyed the pews.
Izzy turned to face him and stood up, just as we’d agreed. I crept left, towards the entrance, so that the German’s back was to me. The dark moistness of the cathedral seemed to enter me, as if I were becoming a shadow – and as if my change of form was meant to protect me.
I was squeezing the handle of my knife so hard that my hand ached.
‘Are you Dr Lanik?’ Izzy asked.
I remember his eager tone of voice – as if he had pleasant business with the Nazi. Izzy proved himself an extraordinary human being that day.
‘Yes, did Mikael Tengmann send you?’ Lanik replied.
I rushed forward in what I remember as a mad charge, but in truth, I must have been too slow; before I reached the German, he turned to face me. I’d intended to lunge at him and thrust the blade into his back while Izzy spoke to him, but that was impossible now. Instead, I jabbed the knife into his throat, so hard and deep that my fist pounded against the taut firmness of his neck.
Blood sprayed on to my face. I tasted the salty wetness of him on my lips.
He fell back on to the floor, hard, his head knocking into a pew. His cap went flying. I heard myself gasp.
Did the sisters in the front pew turn towards us? Did the balding man stop praying? I’ll never know; I never took my eyes from Lanik.
With desperate hands, he reached up and yanked the knife out of his flesh. If he was able to think at all, he must have been puzzled as to why Mikael Tengmann would send a killer after him.
Blood seeped from his wound. I’d been unlucky; I’d failed to hit an artery. He’d die slowly. Or if help came, he might even outlive Izzy and me.
Lanik looked at me imploringly as he tried to speak, making gurgling noises – as if a knot were lodged in his throat. He fought to sit up, pulling on the back of the last pew, and after he’d managed this feat, his eyes pleaded for mercy. ‘Hilfe!’ he mouthed in desperate German. Help me!
Was he thinking he might never see Irene and his wife again?
I was stunned by how much life we have inside our bodies.
I knew it was now I should speak Adam’s name, but I couldn’t talk – proof that you can never predict how you will behave when you stand before the tower of vengeance you have erected.
Izzy retrieved my knife, which was streaked with blood.
‘He might not die,’ I whispered to him. Hearing my own voice made me shiver, and my hand clutching his arm was my request for help.
‘Don’t worry, Erik,’ he replied.
How could he speak so calmly? I never asked him, though once he told me he had never felt more alive than when he stood over Lanik and realized what he had to do.
Sometimes I think that Izzy was the strongest person I ever met.
Kneeling down, he told the German, ‘There was a beautiful boy named Adam, and he had birthmarks behind his ankle.’
He spoke sweetly and slowly – as if his words were the beginning of a children’s story that Lanik still had time to read.
The Nazi shook his head as if he knew nothing about my nephew.
Was it his denial that incensed Izzy? He grabbed Lanik by the hair and smashed his head against the floor.
I cringed on hearing the cruel thud – like two billiard balls knocking together.
The German groaned, and blood spilled over his lips, as though he were vomiting his last chance for life.
Leaning down, Izzy spoke into Lanik’s ear: ‘Adam and Anna say hello.’
And then, using both hands, he planted the blade as deeply as he could in the Nazi’s chest.
In the weeks to come, I would often wonder how I could have known Izzy nearly all my life and never suspected how good he would be at murder.
A black Mercedes was parked outside the church, obviously waiting for Lanik to return. A dark-uniformed chauffeur was inside, reading a newspaper spread into wings. Remembering Schrei’s advice, we didn’t run. We walked east. I never looked back.
Izzy carried my briefcase; I’d left it behind and he’d gone back for it.
Rain splattered around us but didn’t feel wet against my skin. Its relentless pounding seemed the world’s way of insisting on a justification from me for my very life.
Izzy opened our umbrella and summoned me to him, but I needed to be by myself. I was listening for a policeman’s voice to call out to us in Polish or German and demand we stop. I would have turned round and begged to be shot on the spot.
The voice never came.
I remember passing railroad lines. Did we zigzag along sidestreets to keep from being seen? What happened to my bloodstained overcoat? I can’t recall, but I must have left it inside the church; I remember being chilled and noticing at some point that I no longer felt the protection of my muffler around my neck.
I was lost inside the labyrinth of ending a man’s life. When we passed a bus stop, I considered waiting there for the Germans to find me, not out of guilt, but because I couldn’t see how I’d ever find my way back to the person I’d been. Or why I’d want to.
Then, my heart seemed to leap in my chest, and the rain became wet, and I saw Izzy looking back at me with worried eyes, and I began walking purposefully behind him, towards the horizon, which was where freedom was waiting for us. It was as if a hand had tugged me back to my own hopes – my daughter’s hand, as it turned out; I realized I still had a chance to live out the rest of my life with her.
I don’t know how far we walked. I next remember Izzy pointing to a brick building on the left. It was a grimy hotel, with dead geraniums in ceramic windowboxes.
‘We’ll call Jaśmin from in there,’ he told me.
Izzy left our umbrella at the door. I took Jaśmin’s phone number from my wallet. The owner of the hotel was standing behind the counter of a wooden bar, polishing glasses with a tea towel. When I explained what I needed, he lifted out a black phone and put it on the counter.
‘Where are you boys from?’ he asked us as I sat down on a bar stool.
‘Muranów,’ answered Izzy, drying his hands on his trousers. ‘We’re on our way to a wedding, but we got a little lost.’ Izzy smiled and shrugged as people do to excuse their frailties. ‘I rarely come to this side of the river.’
‘How’ bout a little drop of something to take the bite out of the cold weather?’ the man asked, slapping his cloth over his left shoulder.
‘Two vodkas,’ Izzy replied.
I picked up the receiver and began to dial. Our host was pouring our drinks when Jaśmin answered. Thank God she’d returned home.
‘It’s me,’ I told her, unwilling to let the hotel owner overhear my name.
‘You who?’ she asked.
That had me stumped. ‘Stefa’s uncle,’ I finally told her.
‘Dr Cohen? Oh, my God! I thought I’d never hear your voice again.’
‘We’re lost,’ I told her. ‘We’re outside Praga, but I’m not sure where.’
Izzy took the phone and described our location. ‘Listen, baby,’ he added casually, ‘can you pick us up in your car and drive us to the wedding?’
After a moment, he nodded towards me to let me know that Jaśmin had agreed.
‘Meet us down the street,’ Izzy told her. ‘We’ll be waiting under a blue umbrella.’
The vodka didn’t scorch my throat, as it usually did. Or more likely I was too far away from myself to feel it.
Izzy paid for our drinks and our phone call. Outside, he began walking away, towards the countryside. I stayed put.
‘Erik, come on!’ he exhorted me, summoning me with whirling hands to follow him. ‘I don’t want that hotel owner to see the car that picks us up.’
I obeyed. We both knew I was useless now and he’d have to take charge.
We waited in an empty lot strewn with refuse, out of sight of the hotel. Izzy held our umbrella over our heads, hiding our faces from the occasional cars that drove by. He hooked his arm in mine and held me close.
The rain had subsided a bit, but I was still freezing.
Irene would be grief-stricken on hearing of her stepfather’s murder. Unless her keen affection for him had been part of her performance.
If she didn’t intend for me to kill him, then why did she send for me? Maybe she feared that she, too, would end up on a butcher’s table unless her stepfather was stopped. Perhaps she had been marked at birth, like Adam, Anna and Georg.
There were so many things I’d never get to ask her. Though perhaps Izzy was right and she’d told me all she could.
He put his arm around my waist because I was shivering. ‘Look, Erik,’ he observed cheerily, ‘the worst that can happen is that the Nazis will find us and shoot us.’
Black humour under other circumstances, but in this case he meant: We’ve done what we needed to do and, if we have to die, then at least we’ll go together.
A big black car with wooden doors pulled up a few minutes later. Jaśmin rolled down her window. She was wearing a peaked green hat topped by a golden feather – the kind of cap Robin Hood might wear in a theatrical production. On her slender hands were white kidskin gloves. ‘Get in!’ she urged us.
I sat in front and Izzy got in the back.
‘You’ve saved our lives,’ he told her right away.
I started to introduce them, but Jaśmin reminded me they’d met at my birthday parties.
She took off slowly, concentrating on the road. Her lips were pressed tightly together. She knew she might lose her nerve if she faced me, so she didn’t.
Izzy began explaining what we’d done. Jaśmin said nothing, though when he told her how he’d stood up to address Lanik, she began hiccupping – an old sign of failing nerve I recognized from our sessions.
‘You can drop us any time you want and get on your way,’ I told her when Izzy had finished. ‘We’ll still be grateful for the help you’ve given us.’
She took her eyes off the road for just an instant and brushed my cheek. ‘You once told me, “Terror traps us all from time to time, but the important thing is not to let it build walls around us.”’
‘I remember,’ I told her, but in truth I’d said that to most of my patients.
‘Do you recall what you did then?’ she asked, showing me an eager look.
‘No, I’m sorry. It was a long time ago.’
‘You stood up from your chair and came to me on the couch. You’d never done that before. You were probably breaking all the rules. In any case, you reached out your hand to me, as though you were inviting me to dance. That terrified me more than anything. I closed my eyes and turned away. But you didn’t move. You were showing me I could count on you. After maybe twenty seconds, I opened my eyes and took your hand. You’ll find this hard to believe, but I think that was the first time I’d really touched anyone – the first time I was sure that another person was real. That moment changed everything. And you… You kissed my cheek – to acknowledge my bravery, I think. And then you went back to your seat. After lighting your pipe, you said in that professional voice of yours, “Now, where were we…?”’
Tears dripped down Jaśmin’s cheeks and she gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Jaśmin waved away my effort to find adequate words of reply and smiled. ‘I’ve already figured this out, Dr Cohen. We’ll go to my sister’s farm. No one will be able to find you there. We’ll have some time to think of what to do next.’
‘Thank you,’ I told her, astonished that the small mitzvah I’d done for her twenty years before could change the direction of my life at this very moment.
‘So where’s your sister’s farm?’ Izzy asked.
‘Between Warsaw and Lublin, just east of Puławy.’
‘Puławy, great!’ exclaimed Izzy like a boy eager for adventure, leaning over the front seat. ‘I wonder if anything is left of the art collection in Czartoryski Palace.’
From the wild exuberance in his eyes, I realized he was running on nervous energy.
‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to visit the palace,’ Jaśmin told him. ‘The Nazis have sent most of the Jews of Puławy to labour camps, but there’s still a small ghetto, and the Germans are everywhere. We’ll have to avoid the city.’ She put her hat down on the seat. ‘I don’t suppose you two have any false identity papers.’
‘No.’
‘Then we’d better steer clear of the main route.’
We drove on wretched backroads over the next hour and a half and twice had to push and curse our way out of mud – all to no avail it soon seemed, because after detouring around Żelachów, we came around a sharp turn only to meet up with two German soldiers conversing by their motorcycles at a railroad crossing. They were less than a hundred yards away and spotted us immediately, so it was too late to turn round. One of them flagged us down.
‘Be a dear,’ Jaśmin said to me as she eased the car towards them, ‘and give me my hat.’
I handed it to her and she put it on.
‘Eccentricity tends to startle our Aryan rulers,’ she explained.
As soon as we’d come to a halt, Jaśmin rolled down her window. The soldier who’d signalled for us to stop opened his eyes wide with curiosity on seeing such a grand lady behind the wheel.
In faulty but charming German, Jaśmin told him, ‘I don’t suppose you know if we’re on the right road to Puławy, dear boy?’
‘I’m not sure. Wait a minute.’
He conferred with his colleague and then gave her directions to the main road.
‘Thank you – you’re a sweetheart,’ she told him, waving coquettishly, and then, giving him no time to reply, she started off.
I counted the seconds before the soldiers would begin firing, but they never did. Had they intended to ask for our papers? On reaching a count of thirty, I turned around, but the Germans were already facing away from us and talking together – probably about what a peculiar people they’d conquered.
Jaśmin was glancing in the rear-view mirror to confirm we weren’t being followed.
‘Who knew Sarah Bernhardt was driving us to safety!’ Izzy told her.
‘Brilliant!’ I seconded.
‘Thank you both, but I seem to have peed in my knickers,’ she confessed.
We pulled over after a mile and gave her a chance to dry herself and regain her composure. ‘Was I really good?’ she asked hesitantly, hidden behind the car, and when we nodded, she began to laugh, so that we did too.
The sun was peeking through a cavern of dark clouds. On both sides of the road were apple orchards. This valley would be a sea of pink blossoms in a month.
‘Poland is a beautiful country,’ I remarked to Izzy.
‘Yeah, just don’t get attached to it,’ he replied. ‘We’re not staying long.’
It was four in the afternoon by the time we entered the gravel driveway of Liza’s farm. I was asleep in the back.
I awoke to a woman with friendly brown eyes peering at me. She was so close that I could smell the wet wool in her blue and red tartan tam.
Had I died and gone to Scotland?
‘Dr Cohen – time to get up,’ the woman told me in a sing-song voice.
I sat up, still half asleep. Behind my Scottish fairy godmother stood Izzy and Jaśmin, talking together. A big black dog was jumping between them and barking.
‘I’m Liza, Jaśmin’s sister,’ the woman told me sweetly. ‘Welcome to my home.’
Liza’s farm rose up a small slope from the grassy bank of the River Wieprz, across a thick wood from the village of Niecierz. An eighteenth-century stone house with two tiny upstairs bedrooms, it had originally been a second barn for a large manor house that lay a half-mile east and which wasn’t visible because of a low hill topped by a copse of spruce trees. Liza lived alone; her husband had died a few years earlier and her son and daughter, now adults, lived in Kraków.
The floors were hexagonal terracotta tiles – darkly lustrous with age – and the furniture was all heavy wood. The whitewash on the walls shone with grey-blue tonalities in the slanting afternoon light. The ceiling upstairs was so low that I could touch it by standing on my toes.
There was no electricity and no phone. We were in the Poland of our ancestors.
Izzy and I moved our things into the spare bedroom. It was freezing, but Liza soon got a coal fire going in the iron parlour stove, then opened her husband’s wardrobe and said, ‘Take whatever you want.’
We found thick woollen coats and scarves.
Liza was a potter. Her workshop was in the apple cellar, which was empty at this time of year but still smelled like cider. We drank good coffee for the first time in months and gorged on her while sitting around a stone table in her kitchen. I kept anxious thoughts away by watching the two sisters closely – Jaśmin so stylish and regal, and Liza in men’s trousers and a moth-eaten yellow sweater. I could see they adored each other in the way they laughed over nothing and gave each other complicitous, sideways glances. Over the next few months, they would often seem telepathic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that each one was living out the life the other might have had.
Liza told us that first afternoon that she would teach us how to use a potter’s wheel. We would be her assistants for as long as we lived with her. She assured us she was happy to have company.
When I pointed out that we were putting her life in danger, she shrugged as if the risk were of no importance.
Jaśmin told us she would stay the night, but would have to leave at dawn.
‘I have to get back to Warsaw. Tomorrow’s Friday, and if I’m not at the gallery on time, the owner will think it’s suspicious. I’ll come back on Saturday afternoon.’
That evening, over our early supper, I told the sisters about Irene and how she had heard Jaśmin speak about the ghetto, though I omitted that the girl had led me to Jesion and Lanik. I believed then that I held that information back because I didn’t dare speak of Adam’s murder in my fragile state. Now, I realize I was also protecting Irene; if Liza or Jaśmin were ever arrested, the less they could reveal about the girl the better.
The very next day, Izzy and I diagrammed our plans for making it to Lwów, and from there to Kiev, but Jaśmin soon made contact with an arms smuggler in the Warsaw Underground, and he told her that he had information that the Germans were building labour camps and military bases all across eastern Poland; in consequence, we ought not to risk our escape just yet. Her smuggler friend would let her know when it was safer to leave.
We stayed with Liza from March all the way to early July. After a few weeks, we were glad not to have to leave, though we knew we would set off as soon as Jaśmin gave us the go-ahead – if for no other reason than to stop putting Liza at risk.
Izzy and I stayed close to the farmhouse at all times; we dared not go near the nearest village for fear of being spotted and denounced. Still, sometimes at dawn, before anyone was up, we’d take her dog, Noc, for walks through the fields.
Noc had an extensive Polish vocabulary, and Izzy and I taught him Yiddish, as well.
Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik! Izzy would yell at the beautiful mongrel when he was barking too heartily at some rabbit or squirrel he’d chased into the underbrush. Amazingly, the dog would go all quiet and sit on his haunches, looking back and forth between us with his deep brown eyes full of remorse. Given his luxurious black coat, we joked that he was the reincarnation of a Jewish furrier and had been waiting all this time to learn his true language.
A few days after our arrival, Liza purchased insecticide at a local apothecary, and Izzy and I dusted ourselves with the white powder from top to bottom, turning ourselves into foul-smelling snowmen.
Izzy submerged in our bathtub first. When he was done, I stepped into the scalding water, sat down and closed my eyes. And entered paradise. I could not have been happier had I been five years old and embraced by my mother.
I hadn’t been aware of how tense and constrained my body had been – as if I’d been tangled in vines. Away with the lice went months of grime.
Still, I sobbed alone that night, hidden in Liza’s cellar.
Izzy and I wrote just a single letter to our children, fearing that our correspondence might cause trouble for Liza. I told Liesel I’d contact her again when we reached the Soviet Ukraine.
I’d get up every morning to watch the sunrise, grateful for the boundless pink and russet sky, for all that blessed light falling over the earth, for the warm breezes of spring and the butterflies fluttering over the flowers, for eagles and hawks and magpies and all that could fly beyond the control of the Nazis. Grateful, too, for a red fox that I saw late one afternoon, and who stopped to watch me as if I had descended to the earth from out of his sunrise.
The sound of my whispering with Izzy as we fell asleep was like protective netting. We covered ourselves with our voices every night.
He and I fired a few of our lopsided cups and vases in the kiln over those first weeks of refuge. One day, however, Liza decided she would teach me to centre a pot or die trying. She put her hands over mine and moved them through the luxurious wet clay, while that wheel of creation spun round and round between us like a dreidl that would never stop proclaiming the miracle of our escape. If she and I had been younger, maybe we’d have had a chance at another life. But one passes a gate without knowing it, and then there is no point in turning round and starting over. We both knew that and ended up laughing.
Still, it was good to be able to learn a new trade at my age.
Izzy and I were occasionally at each other’s throats over the most meaningless trifles, but we never forgot we were riding on the same raft at the centre of an angry sea, and that made all the difference. We were careful to give Liza enough time for herself and often stayed in our room – teaching Noc the subtleties of Yiddish grammar or tossing him his leather ball – when we would have preferred to be with her.
Imagine having to care for two elderly good-for-nothings. God, what we put that woman through!
It was a small life we had, but anything bigger would have put us at risk. Besides, we were exhausted. We hadn’t realized how depleted we were till we were off our island.
I slept twelve hours a night over those first weeks. And once my stomach adapted to wholesome food again, I made Liza’s dinner plates shine at every opportunity.
My hunger may have been obsessive at times, but Izzy’s nose hadn’t been dulled – like mine – by fifty years of pipe-smoking, and once his sensitive sniffer picked up the scent of good food again, it turned him into a slavering wolf; for a month or so he was unable to hold a conversation if there were even just a few grains of kasha or a smidgen of creamed sorrel still available. He would eye any crumbs Liza and I left over as if they had been stolen from him while he was reaching for the butter or pepper, and you could hear him counting the seconds he regarded as requisite – given our turn-of-the-century notions of etiquette – before he could make a headfirst dive for our plates.
When he was on one of his binges, cannibalism seemed a real possibility. Liza and I kept our distance and advised Noc to do the same.
His scurvy proved no match for his boundless appetite.
In the silence of the forest protecting our farm, I began to believe that as long as there were women like Liza in the world, Jewish history could never come to an end – not here or anywhere else. And that sooner or later, the world would come to its senses.
Liza sold her bowls, mugs and vases at two shops in Puławy. The owners came once a month to pick out the merchandise they wanted. Jerzy, one of them, selected a Japanese-looking bowl of Izzy’s one day – blue, with calligraphic black strokes near the rim. His first sale. We celebrated with wine that evening.
At night, in bed, Izzy and I would talk about the friends we’d left back in Warsaw. It always seemed strange to us how geography can determine everything during a war. I wondered if I would ever see the city again. And if I’d want to.
In the early hours of the morning, I’d sometimes hear my name being called, as though from downstairs, and I’d try to get out of bed, certain that Liza was in trouble, but I’d find – to my horror – that I was unable to move. My arms and legs were paralysed. Never had I known such helplessness. And then I’d see Izzy’s face lit with crescents of light and dark by the white candle in his hand, and hear him whisper my name, and I’d realize he was waking me again from the nightmare that was being sent to me by all that I’d failed to do.
Twice a week, a stocky labourer and his teenaged son came from Niecierz to work Liza’s land; she had an agreement with them that allowed her to keep half of her fruit and grain. Izzy and I would hide in the cellar whenever we heard their donkey cart rambling down the potholed dirt road that skirted our farmhouse, reading by candlelight until Liza sounded the all-clear, which was a high whistle that would make Noc race up the staircase and bound into her arms.
I started fishing in the early evening in late May, on a quiet bend in the River Wisłoka guarded by dense, leafy woodland – mostly paper-barked birches and tall, broad oaks, but also curlicue-branched hazel bushes near the water. Noc would tag along, his tail twirling. He’d try in vain to catch dragonflies in his snapping jaws and watch the dark water around my line as if expecting a river sprite to surface at any moment.
On two occasions, I caught trout big enough to eat.
Izzy and Liza planted a kitchen garden, so that by early June we were able to begin harvesting fresh vegetables. The sweet, earthy smell of our beets carried me back to the days of my childhood when I’d go marketing with my mother. Liza, on sniffing at our perfumed trellis of pink and blue sweet-pea blossoms, would always fake a swoon, like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel overcome by love.
Food had never tasted so good as the meals we ate on Liza’s small patio, listening to the Polish trees and fields speaking in the language of wind from the Ukraine. But no matter how much I ate, crabs of hunger would still sometimes scuttle through my belly during the night. I’d light a candle and creak down the stairs into the kitchen. Often, Izzy would accompany me. We’d sit in our underwear at the kitchen table – little kids gorging on cheese and pastry while their parents lay sleeping.
One warm dawn in late June, I took off all my clothes and lay next to Noc in a potato field. The ground seemed solid below me – incapable of giving way – for the first time in a year.
Izzy and I were in the cellar on 7 July, helping Liza stack her freshly fired pottery on her shelves, when we heard two cars approaching. By now, we knew the routine. We crept behind the kiln, out of view. She rushed upstairs and closed the cellar door behind her. Two men soon entered through the front door, and Liza began talking German, but we couldn’t make out her words.
After a few seconds, she shouted, ‘Get out of my house!’
I listened for a gunshot. Instead, a German yelled, ‘Where are you hiding him?’
Him… I understood the significance of that right away; whoever had denounced us to the Nazis had only spotted one of us.
When Liza screamed, I jumped up.
‘Stay here!’ I whispered to Izzy.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, gripping my arm.
There was no time to explain. I leaned down. ‘Go to Louis when you get out of here.’
When I kissed him on the lips, he held me for a startled moment, then kissed me back.
‘Erik, no!’ he whispered desperately as I stepped away.
I meant to say with my eyes that our time was over, and I meant my smile to mean that I had no other choice. Did he understand?
When the cellar door opened, I started up the stairs with my hands extended high over my head.
‘I’m coming up!’ I called out in German. I didn’t dare glance at Izzy, because I was sure that his darkly shadowed eyes – and everything in them that I wanted to live for – might steal my courage, though I wished I could have reassured him that I’d be all right.
Three SS officers had come to the farm. Though I put up no resistance, the two younger ones knocked me down and kicked me. Liza stood by, shouting curses at them, until the one in command – forty-ish, with greying hair around his temples and black eyebrows – grabbed her and threw her to the ground.
‘I didn’t tell them!’ she shouted to me as I was dragged away. ‘I swear!’
The Germans shoved me into the back seat of their car.
Before I was able to holler out the window that I knew she could never betray us, the older Nazi raised his gun and fired. Liza fell over with a guttural cry, clutching her arm.
I shoved open my door and got out. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at him. ‘She only hid me to make money!’
He never even turned to me. He put the barrel of the gun up to Liza’s ear.
She showed him a bewildered look.
I can still hear the explosion of the bullet; it’s the sound of all the best people I ever knew being murdered.
The German in command got in the back seat beside me, demanding to know my name and where I was from. He slapped me across the face when I made no reply. Struggling for breath, I told him my name was Izydor Nowak and that I was a clockmaker from Warsaw; I appropriated my old friend’s identity because he’d be able to disappear more completely if the Nazis believed that they had captured him already.
I also told him that he had murdered a wonderful woman who had not deserved to die.
I next remember entering Puławy, where my captors made me stand in a town square with a group of about fifty other Jewish men for the rest of that day and all through the night. The Christian residents – thousands of them, it seemed to me – passed us on their way home from work, but none of them offered us a crust of bread or a cup of water. The Germans wanted to prove to us, I think, that we were nothing – less important to our Polish neighbours than dogshit on the sidewalk. And it was true.
By the time morning came, I was unable to escape my misery even for a moment. My throat felt as though it had been blasted with sand, and I was having trouble breathing. I had no more tears left.
Polish and German soldiers soon marched us off. To where, we had no idea. My good fortune was that exhaustion and dehydration made me delirious. Puławy was substituted by Warsaw, and I was rushing down Leszno Street. The dome of the Great Synagogue was rising into a sunlit sky just ahead, imposing, but like a grandfather only pretending to be stern, and summer rain had begun to fall, and its hammering against the dome was a good sound, the sound of life being born…
I stayed in Warsaw until a gunshot tugged me back to myself. A man in front of me had collapsed and been executed. Flies were already feeding at the wound in his head. We were walking down the platform of a small train station.
‘Keep going!’ someone yelled at me in German.
Stepping over the man, I knew that our blood would never be completely erased from the streets of every Polish city and town – not even if it rained every day for a thousand years. And I was thinking: The Poles who survive this war will hate us for ever, because the bloodstained cobblestones of their cities and towns will remind them of their guilt.
On the train, inside an oven-hot cattle car, I dropped down and curled into a ball to keep from being crushed. I wanted water so badly that I’d have opened a vein had I carried anything sharp on me.
I must have passed out. When I awoke, soldiers were jabbing us with their rifle butts, their Alsatians straining for a chance to taste Jewish flesh. They marched us forward. My head was heavy and cumbersome, as though it might fall off from its own weight, and my dry, useless tongue was a dead lizard inside my mouth.
We arrived at a large camp of wooden barracks and were marched through the front gate up to a desk where two prisoners were ladling water into tin cups. The liquid tasted of metal, but I gulped it down as fast as I could. I didn’t have enough saliva yet to eat, or even an appetite, but I grabbed my crust of bread as if it were Hannah’s hand.
I slept that night on a wooden floor surrounded by other recent arrivals.
The next morning, after roll call, one of the head prisoners called out Izzy’s name, and when I answered, he led me into a barracks that had become a workshop for tailors and escorted me to the back, where three skeletal men were seated tightly together, hunched over a table piled with hundreds of watches. ‘Enjoy your new office,’ he told me, and just like that he walked away.
A tall, anxious-eyed young man with a shaved head stood up and shook my hand. I told him my legs were still unsteady and asked if I could sit.
‘Of course,’ he replied, standing aside and gesturing towards his chair.
He told me his name was Chaim Peczerski. He introduced me to his two co-workers, Jan Głowacz and Jakub Weinberg.
Jakub had a torn ear and spectacles missing a lens. I thought that maybe one of the Alsatians had attacked him. Later, when I got to know what he was capable of, I asked some other prisoners, and I was told he’d started a vicious fight with a tailor from Turobin who’d bitten him to keep from being strangled to death.
Chaim explained that the watches on their desks had been stolen from Jews, as well as from Polish and Russian prisoners of war. We were in a labour camp run by the SS.
I was so disoriented I asked him if we were anywhere near Lublin.
‘You’re in Lublin, you idiot!’ Chaim replied, laughing.
‘You’re a Hebrew slave working for Pharaoh now,’ Jan added, sticking a homemade cigarette in his lips and grinning.
He had a waxy, sweaty face that I found frightening – as if it were a mask.
‘You’ll work with me,’ said Jakub, and his tiny brown eyes darted falcon-like from my face to my hands and then my feet, as if he was on a stimulant. Only a week later did I realize why.
‘We’ve a lot of work,’ Chaim told me. ‘We have a quota to meet each day or we don’t get any bread.’
‘The problem is, I know nothing about fixing watches,’ I confessed. ‘I lied to the Germans.’
‘You what?’ Jakub demanded indignantly.
‘I lied.’
‘You old bastard!’ he spat out, and he looked over at Chaim as though to demand my execution. The youngest among us was apparently in charge.
‘I had to protect a friend,’ I explained.
‘That’s fine, but you’re not working with me!’ Jakub snarled.
I stood up to go, but Chaim pushed me back down roughly. ‘What do you really do?’ he asked.
‘I’m a failed novelist,’ I replied, since it seemed safer to keep pretending I was someone other than myself.
Jakub laughed at the absurdity, and Jan sneered, ‘You’re useless!’
‘Get up!’ Chaim ordered. He pointed to the door. ‘Wait outside while we talk.’
When he called me back in, he told me that Jakub and Jan had voted against letting me work with them, but that he had overruled them.
‘You’ve got three days to learn enough to hold your own,’ he told me in a voice of warning.
I worked hard, but after three days I was still pretty much useless with the tiny screwdrivers and pliers. Chaim came up with a solution, however; I would polish all the watches that he and his colleagues fixed, thereby doing a quarter of our total work. Jan found that acceptable, but Jakub cursed me. He also began referring to me as Dostoevsky’s Jewish Idiot, which he regarded as witty.
One night, about a week later, I awakened to find Jakub leaning over me, whispering Hebrew words I didn’t understand. When I tried to sit up, he pushed me back down. Then he tugged my shoes off my feet.
‘What’ll I wear?’ I asked, moaning.
‘That’s your problem!’
As he crawled back in his bunk, I realized that when we’d first met, he’d studied me for what I had that might be worth stealing.
The camp had an active black market, and in exchange for five days’ worth of the rancid broth that passed for our soup, I was soon able to obtain flimsy leather shoes – three sizes too big – that I stuffed with newspaper.
Jakub then started taking my bread right out of my hands, mocking me when I refused to fight him for it and only stopping when a bigger prisoner put a homemade knife to his neck.
Jakub wanted to punish me as much as he wanted life. Maybe they were even the same thing for him.
Sometimes I think he uttered a magical curse over me on the night he stole my shoes, or on another occasion when I didn’t wake up in time to know he was with me, and that’s why I’m still here.
Before the ghetto, I’d have thought that was impossible, Heniek, but listen…
Jakub’s brother-in-law was a rabbi from Chelm named Kolmosin – a sturdy little red-nosed man, maybe fifty years old. He and Jakub used to pray together on Friday evenings behind a burlap curtain they hung over their adjoining bunks. The rumour I heard was that the rabbi was a descendant of Shabbetai Tzvi, and that he knew powerful incantations that had been passed down from branch to branch in their family tree for twenty generations – incantations that governed life and death. He had bribed the guards to be able to keep a Torah the size of a deck of cards with him, and we often caught glimpses of him huddled over it, making rapid annotations with a tiny pencil. Chaim told me that if he wrote down your name, your destiny would change, and it would be good or bad depending on the nature of the verse in which he had inserted it. In consequence, prisoners would try to win Kolmosin’s good graces by polishing his shoes or darning his socks, or by giving him smuggled cigarettes, sugar or other small gifts. He was the only prisoner I ever saw in a clean white shirt. He lived like a pasha.
Once, in August, I saw the would-be holy man sitting naked on his red velvet cushion and singing to himself. He carried that ridiculous velvet cushion with him everywhere because of his haemorrhoids – which were apparently beyond the control of his magical annotations. Later, he taught the oriental-sounding tune to Jakub and some of the other prisoners. He claimed that he’d learned it in a vision and that it would keep us safe.
I was of the opinion that singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ would produce better results, but maybe Kolmosin had the last laugh; the more I think about it, the more I wonder if he might not have helped Jakub tether me to the earth by writing me into a verse of Torah that would make me return after death. Perhaps I represented an opportunity for him as well, but for what I cannot guess.
Grudgingly, I have to admit that I have come to believe in magic, though I remain an atheist. A paradox? Probably, but what could be more common than that?
On waking and going to sleep, I’d picture Liesel sitting with Petrina on a beach near Izmir. I wrote long letters to her in my head, and while I was polishing watches, I’d often daydream about her, though my favourite fantasy was of Izzy surprising Louis – appearing at his door one day, unannounced. In my mind, the two men embraced for a long time, and then went for an arm-in-arm promenade along the Seine. Sometimes I joined them for tea and cake at Les Deux Magots.
I lived inside my head. For hours at a time, I’d walk through the Warsaw of my childhood and the London of my honeymoon, and the tours I took by myself – and sometimes with Hannah – kept a small pale flame alive inside me.
Come September, I was nearly always freezing, and often sapped of strength by a cold or diarrhoea. My body had become a cumbersome nuisance, and – like most of the men – I longed to be able to discard it.
There were a thousand of us in the camp – a thousand moths caught in a black and red lamp, fluttering against the glass of our Jewish identities.
But one of us found a way out, and his escape soon became mine as well.
On the morning of 7 December, our German guards noticed that a prisoner from Lublin named Maurice Pilch was missing. He had been a tannery worker. It was later discovered that he had concealed himself inside a shipment of hide bound for Austria. In effect, he’d mailed himself to Graz for Hanukkah!
The camp inmates were cheered by Maurice’s witty escape, but only briefly; the commandant, Wolfgang Mohwinkel, decided to execute ten men to compensate for Pilch’s effrontery.
An hour or so after this news spread through the camp, Chaim, Jan, Jakub and I heard screaming outside the barracks where we worked and rushed outside. Two guards had caught a teenaged prisoner and pinned him to the ground. One of them had his right knee pressing hard into the young man’s chest. We called this particular guard Caligula, because he enjoyed murder and was good at it. So far, he’d shot seven men for sport as they sat on the latrine.
Caligula told us gleefully that the boy was one of the ten Jews to be hanged. ‘The commandant likes ’em young!’ he gloated, as though he were talking about rape.
The trapped teenager had freckles and stiff blond hair like a brush. Chaim knew his name – Albert – and that he worked in the printing shop with his father. They were from Radom.
Caligula soon took away his knee and pressed his club over Albert’s neck so that he’d stop screaming.
I learned that day that a boy will punch and kick like a demon to see his seventeenth birthday, even if his windpipe is being crushed and he is unable to draw any breath.
‘He looks like a beetle on his back,’ Jakub whispered in a sneering tone.
After what seemed an excruciatingly long struggle, though it may have been only half a minute, Albert stopped gagging and flailing. His arms relaxed and his head sagged to the side. His eyes closed.
I thought he was dead, but the guard knew differently. Sensing a good time to be had, he eased off on the boy’s neck. After a second or two, Albert’s eyes fluttered open and he gulped for breath. He tried to sit up, but Caligula pushed him back down.
The Nazi brute called me over. ‘Stand on the ends of my club!’ he ordered.
Albert’s brown eyes shifted urgently to me, pleading for mercy. He tried to speak, but the German pressed down harder.
The weight of even my flimsy body would have broken the young man’s neck, so I shook my head.
‘Stand on the club or I’ll shoot him!’ Caligula yelled at me.
‘I can’t,’ I replied, though I knew he would carry out his threat.
‘Do it, you Jewish pig!’ he shouted.
‘Take me instead,’ I told him; it was all I could think of saying that would end this stalemate, though I admit I wanted to retract my offer a moment later.
But Caligula didn’t give me time for that.
‘You? Why should we waste our time killing an old man like you?’ he demanded contemptuously.
I felt cornered, and all I had with me was the truth. ‘Because I’m more dangerous to you than the boy,’ I replied.
‘And why is that?’ he asked, amused.
‘Because he’s young and may forget you if he goes on to lead a happy life, but I won’t. I’ll write about what you did to us and then dance on your grave.’
The malevolent guard smiled at me and lifted his club from Albert’s neck, as if my courage to speak my mind had purchased both of us our lives, but by now I was aware that the Nazis adored playing a game called Fool the Jew. I sensed the worst and raised my hand for mercy. And to cut a deal. ‘If you let us both live, I’ll tell you where to find some ruby earrings that I’ve…’
Rearing back with his club, Caligula ended my plea by giving Albert so brutal a blow to his head that the crack of his skull sounded like a branch being snapped.
The young man groaned. His head sagged, and his arms went limp.
The German kept hitting Albert until blood was flowing down his face on to the ground.
When he was done, he stood over the boy like a prizefighter posing for cameras. It was his theatricality that made me realize how vain our Nazi guards were, all of them eager to be stars in their very own Leni Riefenstahl film.
When the flashbulbs in his head stopped going off, he pointed his club at me. ‘You!’ he snarled. ‘You’re number ten now!’
The body has a life of its own; when the noose was placed around my neck, the constriction that had gripped my gut for the last few days burst open. Several hundred men were watching, but none laughed at the moist sag I’d made in the seat of my rumpled trousers. I wished I could have recited a verse of poetry equal to all the damned and shipwrecked faces around me, but my mind was dim, as if a sack had been placed over my thoughts, which were all jumbled together.
I remember looking for Izzy, thinking that seeing his face would help me to leave this world. When I recalled that he wasn’t with me any longer, my heart dived towards a panic so wide and deep that I felt as if I would never hit bottom.
I wanted one of Kolmosin’s incantations now – one that would make me land on the solid ground I’d known at Liza’s farm, even if it meant my back would be broken.
And I wanted a phrase of wisdom that would sum up what I’d learned over the course of my life.
I wanted more time. And more words.
I spotted Jakub. Hate is eternal, he was telling me with his ugly frown.
That was when I realized he’d needed a mortal enemy to keep himself alive.
A man in front – I’ll never know his name – diverted my attention with a small wave. He was bent and twisted, like a bonsai plant. He was crying.
His tortured form had made him understand what I couldn’t say. I was sure of it.
He held me through his jade-coloured eyes, and he assured me with all he was that I didn’t need to find any wisdom. All I had ever done and thought added up to Erik Cohen and that was enough.
I thanked him silently for his tears.
I made believe that Hannah, Stefa and Adam would welcome me beyond death.
Near the end, I heard a melody from out of my childhood, a folk song called ‘Hänschen Klein’ that my mother always sang in a mixture of Yiddish and German – and that I’d taught to Adam when he was tiny. Had I started to sing or had the man in front? I didn’t know. My senses were clouded by too great a wish for life.
When the hangman pulled the chair out from under my feet, I tried to hold my breath, but the taut heaviness of my own weight squeezed the air from me. Choking, I pulled at the ropes binding my hands, but the pressure drawing me down was too greedy.
And then the pain was gone. I found myself standing at the front of the crowd, next to the bent-backed man who had held me with his eyes. I watched my body swinging. And yet, looking down, I saw my own legs. I stepped my fingers across my cheeks and nose and lips, like a blind man reading a face.
I wasn’t who I’d been. And I was in two places at once. And no one could see me.
But I wasn’t scared. I felt as though all of the forward motion of the earth had ceased; that I’d stopped hurtling through my life.
But, of course, it was life that had stopped hurtling through me.
When I understood what had happened, I took a first step towards the front gate of the camp. And fell on my face. My nose and mouth pushed half a foot through the ground, into what felt like cold clay.
And yet when I picked myself up, I saw that I’d left no imprint in the earth.
Imagine a landscape continually sliding away from you – men and barracks slipping away into the distance, as though tugged by the horizon.
My first steps left me dizzy, lurching, groping along walls that weren’t there. I fell several more times, and on each occasion my hands penetrated several inches into the ground.
After an hour, I’d learned to focus only on objects close to me. What was in the distance I just let slip away. It took my feet and eyes a full two days to adjust to death. Then, I strode out of the camp.
While crossing Lublin, I looked up at a handsome woman leaning out her third-floor window, beating a sisal mat with a broom, and for a moment it seemed as if she could see me. My heart leapt towards hope, but then I realized she was glaring at a skinny white cat pawing some garbage behind me.
When I closed my eyes, each dry thud of the woman’s broom took form as a bluish square – one that quickly faded to pale green inside my inner darkness.
That was my first experience of a confusion of sight and sound, but later that day I’d notice that my heartbeat pulsed reddish-orange at the fringes of my vision, and that my breathing – particularly at night – appeared as a white-grey mist.
I headed out of town, northwest, towards Liza’s farm. Sometimes, I believed I could feel the turning of the earth below my feet. And when I grew tired, the cold December air began to shimmer around me, as though made from pearls. It was beautiful – and it made me understand that something of the world’s exuberance had remained far beyond the reach of the Nazis all the time I was in the ghetto and the labour camp.
I trudged on for two days and nights by my count. I often felt the urge to lie down, and on occasion I did, but I learned I no longer needed sleep.
I discovered Liza’s house empty and abandoned; Izzy was long gone.
On the floor by the potter’s wheel was the intricately designed skeleton of a dead mouse – the scaffolding of a life so perfect and unlike our own. Sitting by it, I began to think of Liza and of how quickly everything can be lost.
I realized I had to make the journey back to Warsaw, to where I’d started life.
Perhaps all the dead must go home before they can leave for ever.
As I dictate these words to you, Heniek, I can see a group of twenty-seven Jews from the Łaskarzew ghetto digging a pit in a forest just outside town.
As I was walking back to Warsaw from the labour camp, I’d heard the clanging of their shovels and left the road. They’d already dug a couple of feet down into the hard earth when I reached them.
It was very early in the morning. Birds were arrowing through the trees, and once the fog burned off, we’d probably have a day of sun. Five Polish soldiers and one German SS commander stood outside the pit, their guns drawn.
After the Jews had excavated another foot of earth, the German ordered them to go down into the pit. The men, women and children helped one another. A few of them dared to whisper, though they’d been warned not to talk.
A father jumped in before his daughter and raised his arms to summon her forward.
She hesitated. ‘Where’s Rudy?’ she asked; perhaps he was her older brother, or maybe even the family dog.
‘Come here, Katarzyna,’ her father whispered.
She knelt down, reaching out to him, and he lifted her into his arms.
He kissed her on the cheek, then again on her lips. He never told her where Rudy was. Instead, he pressed her head gently into his chest so that she could no longer see the soldiers.
Katarzyna was the youngest among them. She looked seven or eight. She was calm, but twenty-six other hearts were racing, including her father’s. I knew that from the way they looked up at the soldiers.
The German’s order came as a surprise. As did the hail of bullets.
The Jews in the pit weren’t yet ready. And I wasn’t either. But whoever is?
The Polish soldiers used automatic rifles. Katarzyna’s father fell right away. The girl spilled out of his arms.
Several people screamed and kept screaming. But not for long.
Katarzyna’s father died immediately, as best I could tell.
The girl didn’t. I stood at the rim of the pit and looked down at her. One bullet had hit her in the shoulder, another in the leg.
For several more minutes she continued breathing, though her eyes were closed. She’ll bleed to death, I thought. But I was wrong.
By the time the Poles picked up their shovels all but two of the Jews were dead, though most of the twenty-seven bodies had become tangled and I can’t swear that they were the only ones left alive.
Besides Katarzyna, the only other person who showed signs of life was a young man with a shaved head and bright blue eyes, in his twenties I’d guess. He was groaning and trying to sit up.
The Polish soldiers shovelled soil on top of him and Katarzyna, and kept shovelling until I could see nothing more of either of them.
Why am I telling you a story you’d prefer not to hear, Heniek? Because one of the things it proves is an essential truth that you may not yet have understood: we can never return to the Before Time.
We must create a new calendar, one that begins in 1939, when we were walled inside.
It is now Year Two in our struggle to keep our shadows from vanishing.
I lost what I loved most, and with it, my second chance. Not unusual, of course; before this struggle is over, the best among us will have been killed, imprisoned or exiled. Those left alive will be the cowards and collaborators – the tiny, fearful men who worship darkness and call it the sun. They will live to a ripe old age. Their faces will pucker and their hair will fall out, and they won’t even remember their own birthdate, and yet they will recall the days when they fought for the Fatherland in fine-edged detail and with proud fondness, as if a rousing Wagner fanfare were always playing in the background. Because they were young and ruled the world for a few brief years.
They will tell their children and grandchildren – and anyone else who dares to ask – that they had no choice but to work for the Nazis, though they were never Party members…
Caligula will even tell little Martin and Angela – his beloved grandchildren – that he worked hard to save the Jews in his care.
And little Martin and Angela will believe him.
But you and I, Heniek, we know how it was. And our understanding means everything to me now, because it means I can stop telling my story. And I can let you put down your pen.
We all want to be listened to – to feel we matter. We want to be able to tell the story of our life without being interrupted or judged, or asked to get to the point.
Freud and Chekhov, Jung and Dickens would all agree with me. I know it. And that is why they would understand why I’ve told you about my life the way I have.
‘The worst that can happen is that the Nazis will shoot us,’ Izzy once told me.
How many of us are able to live our lives knowing that there are far more terrible things than dying with a German bullet in your chest or a noose around your neck?
Those who can’t will always hate those of us who can. We know that now, you and I.
If you make it out of here, Heniek, then remember this: beware of men who see no mystery when they look in the mirror.
‘What’ll you do now that we’ve finished your story?’ Heniek asked me.
We had spent the last two days editing the manuscript and were seated on his couch. He was putting a slice of boiled onion onto a wedge of black bread.
‘I’ll wait around Warsaw,’ I replied.
‘For what?’
‘For Adam and Stefa. I made it back home, so maybe they will too.’
‘Listen, Erik, don’t get your hopes up,’ Heniek told me. ‘If they haven’t come back by now…’
‘Still, where would I go? And I can’t bear the thought of Adam not finding me here if he makes it home. Though there is one thing you can do for me.’
Heniek grinned; he’d known this was coming since I first started dictating to him.
‘All right, what is it you want?’ he asked, amused – but also eager to help.
‘Go to my apartment across the street and get Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams from the bookshelves. It should still be there. Then bring it here.’
‘What if the apartment is locked?’ Heniek asked.
‘Get the building supervisor to open it for you. Tell him you need to return a book to the previous owner.’
Heniek returned a few minutes later with the book in his hand.
‘Open it,’ I told him, excited by the chance to help him.
‘What do we have here?’ Heniek asked with merry surprise on spotting Hannah’s ruby earrings.
He lifted them out and held one up to his ear. ‘What do you think?’ he questioned. He was grinning with delight.
‘I’ve seen worse,’ I told him dryly.
He sat down beside me again. ‘So what do you want me to do with them?’ he asked.
‘I want you to sell them and get money for bribes. I want you to leave the ghetto.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if I–’
‘Listen,’ I interrupted harshly, ‘if you don’t make it out soon, then you won’t survive.’
‘So, our neighbourhood ibbur can see the future now?’ he asked, trying to use humour to mollify me.
‘Heniek, the kids that Lanik murdered… I no longer think that it’s mad to regard Adam’s death and the fate of all the Jews as linked. The Nazis want our children dead because they want to take our future away from us. I see that now – as clearly as I see you. So I don’t need a crystal ball to know that when the Germans run out of patience, everyone here will be packed into cattle cars and deposited at a labour camp – or marched out of town to dig their own graves in a nearby forest.’
‘But if I left, where would I go?’ he questioned.
‘I don’t know. But surely you’ve got an old friend or two on the outside.’
‘Maybe,’ Heniek said, but I could see he meant no.
‘Look, you think I’ve come for a reason. Maybe it’s to save you.’
‘But maybe not.’
‘If you need a better reason than your own life, then go and find Izzy and Liesel for me. Tell them how I died. Say that you were in the camp when I was hanged. Tell them I was ready to go. Kiss them for me and assure them that I met death with my hands in my pockets, that I wasn’t scared.*
* Erik asked me to put down my pen here, but we continued to converse for another minute at my kitchen table, and I include what we said to each other, this time, from my point of view:
‘But what you’ve just said isn’t true,’ I insisted. ‘You wanted to live. You told me so!’ I spoke desperately because I didn’t want him to send me away.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ Erik agreed. ‘Despite everything, I wanted a chance to go on. It was silly.’
‘Don’t you dare be ashamed of wanting to stay alive!’ I yelled.
Erik was quiet for a long time after that, but then, breathing deeply – as though summoning all his resolve – he reached slowly across to me and took my hand.
I could feel him – the roughness of his skin and warmth of his life. And it wasn’t painful.
Both of us were shocked. And reduced by gratitude to what was essential – two men acknowledging that nothing now could hold them apart. Not even their bodies.
I stood up and embraced him hard, and he hugged me back.
When we sat down again, Erik looked at me for a long time, and deeply, and I knew he was thinking that I understood him, and even more importantly, that I loved him, which was why, I think, he was able to stop telling me his story. And maybe it was why, too, I was able to leave the ghetto.