The Emperor of Lies (15 page)

Then it happens, the thing she has
always known would happen. When she looks up, she sees the piano tuner has
climbed to the top of the stepladder again. His face is as black as mud, or as
if someone has poured soot over it and then given his eyes and mouth a
perfunctory wipe. She can now plainly see that he is considerably older than the
fifteen or sixteen she had assumed him to be: a little gnome, a child who has
stopped growing and prematurely aged into the body of a grown man. But with
skilful hands. It takes him only two seconds to short-circuit the bell with the
tuning forks from his sailcloth bags, and the ringing cuts like an acoustic
tidal wave right through the house . . .

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiing –

And suddenly it is as if the entire
storm has abated.

Then the Chairman is standing among
them again. He is bright red in the face, and his otherwise pedantically neat
suit is crumpled and unbuttoned.

Somebody
seems to have rung . . . ?

It is more a question than a statement.
It is obvious he does not know what to say.

Through the half-open door to
Superintendent Rubin’s office, Rosa can see the enamel bowl Chaja Meyer took in
lying upturned in the middle of the floor, surrounded by pools of water. Of
Mirjam, who was in there with him, there is no sign.

Superintendent Rubin
, says the Chairman.

It sounds as if his most immediate need
is a name on to which he can hook his confusion. But once having pronounced that
name, he seems suddenly to reach a decision, and repeats his command, with
renewed authority:

Superintendent Rubin, you will come with me!

And holds the door and waits for
Superintendent Rubin to go in with him, then locks the door behind him
again.

Chaja the cook is the first to rally
after the shock. In two strides she is at the piano and pulling Debora’s hands
away from the keyboard. Rosa Smoleńska goes down on one knee beside Werner
Samstag, who is still lying there on the floor with his trousers undone, and
though he is twice as tall as she is, she is able to get his loose-jointed body
over her shoulder and carry it backwards up the stairs to the dormitories
above.

In all the ensuing uproar, nobody
remembers Mirjam. It is in fact only long after Rosa and Malwina have got the
children to bed again that they realise Mirjam is missing.

They search the whole house. Even the
coal cellar, where the piano tuner has made himself a sort of nest, in which he
sleeps under a couple of mangy blankets. In the spilt washing water under Dr
Rubin’s desk, Rosa later finds the welcoming gift, the album, with the carefully
coloured-in pictures of Hagar and Lot ripped out and torn in two.

But they don’t find Mirjam.

At about five in the morning, Józef
Feldman comes up to the house as usual, walking his bike with the buckets of
coal dangling from the handlebars. Superintendent Rubin hands Feldman a
battery-operated torch, and Feldman sets off into the empty dawn to look for
her.

As the first light of day reaches over
the wall in Bracka Street, he finds the body in an untouched bank of snow
between a closed-down grocer’s shop and the no man’s land leading from the wires
and watchtowers at Radogoszcz Gate. Mirjam is still wearing the knee-length
black coat she had on when she arrived at the Green House. Lying a couple of
metres from the body is the suitcase of dresses and rag dolls and black patent
shoes that the other children so admired.

It was a mystery to everyone how she
could have got out unseen. Perhaps she went out the back way, up the steps from
the cellar, which the previous day had been revealed to be in use not only by
Feldman but also by the piano tuner; then cut across the yard at the back of the
house that was used as a playground for all the orphanage children of Marysin.
But instead of turning right, into town, she must have gone left. Perhaps she
had been lured by the light and noise coming from Radogoszcz Station, and then
unwittingly walked straight into the restricted zone where the German guard with
the machine gun in his high tower aimed straight at her.

The shot must have hit the side of her
head, by her temple, for the blood lay cast in a wide arc of almost twenty
metres across the snow. From the drift of snow that the wind had piled over her
body during the night, one arm stuck up in the air like a pole. There was
nothing else to be seen of her.

When they carried the frozen body into
the boiler room of the Green House, Werner Samstag insisted on coming too. As
Rosa and Chaja washed and shrouded the dead body, something happened to young
Samstag that Rosa Smoleńska would never really be able to explain. He didn’t say
the Kaddish – presumably he didn’t even know the words – but it was as if his
face suddenly softened and sank into itself.

Dem tatn
oyf
, was all he said, and then he curled up beside the stiff
corpse.

He adopted the same position as Mirjam,
his arm sticking up like an exclamation mark, and was found the next day by
Feldman when he came in again with his buckets of coal to get the boiler going.
It was below freezing down in the coal cellar, and the insides of the windows
had a white covering of frost. Mirjam was dead, but Werner Samstag was alive. He
was asleep in the icy cold in the middle of the floor, with his arms clasped
around his own body and a bright, utterly peaceful smile on his lips.

Thus Justice and the Law prevailed in the ghetto –

Der gerekhter un dos gezets
.

Justice came in the person of blind Dr Miller. Day after day he dragged his body, supported on its false limbs, through the alleyways of the ghetto, putting houses and factories in quarantine, and making sure housewives took themselves off to the gas-fuelled kitchens he had set up especially for them, so they could get their drinking water boiled for the negligible sum of ten pfennigs a litre. The Law was presided over by apple-cheeked Szaja Jakobson, the judge. By now a special police court (
shnelgericht
) had been set up to mete out instant punishments whenever a crime was discovered. Workers caught pilfering shoelaces or misappropriating a few grams of wood chips were brought forward, beret in hand.

(They had two sentences to choose from:
excrement removal duties
or
deportation
. Most chose
excrement removal duties
, so even this proved beneficial to the ghetto.)

By cleanliness and discipline, the ghetto would survive from day to day.

That was what the Chairman, in his infinite wisdom, had decided. As for Love or other extravagances, the ghetto was hardly the place for them in current historical circumstances. Yet Love was to prove capable of getting through the wires anyway, in its own strange and wonderful way, and changing everyone’s lives. Not least the Chairman’s own.

The Praeses appointed a young lawyer with good prospects, Samuel Bronowski, as the President of his
shnelgericht,
and put at his disposal a secretary named Rywka Tenenbaum. Miss Tenenbaum was one of the many beautiful young women in his Secretariat to whom the Chairman had certain
romantic aspirations
. The two of them had even been seen together occasionally. But then the Chairman went off on his much-discussed Warsaw trip, and it so happened that while he was away, Rywka Tenenbaum went and fell head over heels in love with young law graduate Bronowski.

And as if that were not enough: when the Praeses was back from his trip, she not only owned up to her amorous adventure, but also rebuffed the Chairman’s continuing advances, saying she was not the woman he thought she was, and most definitely not
for sale
.

The Chairman was so furious about this deliberate betrayal that he immediately ordered Dawid Gertler to search young Bronowski’s home. In the course of his search, Gertler found no fewer than 10,000 US dollars hidden away in various places in Bronowski’s many secret cupboards and drawers. The young lawyer whom the Chairman had entrusted with fighting corruption in the ghetto turned out to be the most corrupt of them all. In view of the severity of the crime, the Chairman decided to lead the proceedings himself, and the perpetrator was sentenced to a six-month prison term followed by deportation, for theft, document forgery and accepting bribes.

Two days later, Rywka Tenenbaum hanged herself from the pipework behind the courtroom in Gnieźnieńska Street, one of the few buildings in the ghetto that had running water and a flushable toilet.

*

As far as the Chairman was concerned, it was not so much a matter of being popular with women as of power and ownership. Just as the court and the bank were
his
court and bank, each collective and distribution point
his
collective and distribution point, so every woman in the ghetto was to be primarily
his
and no one else’s.

Seasoned female employees in his various offices thought they could tell just by looking at the old man whether he had ‘got any’ the night before or not. They could tell by his mood. He could be as gentle as a dove if he had had his way. Standoffish, sarcastic,
nasty
, if he had been refused. Some even reckoned they could predict his state of mind from the degree of compliance his chosen ones had demonstrated in the course of the day. Goodwill on the Chairman’s part was always dependent on some woman having made up to him earlier. If he was rebuffed, on the other hand, nobody could do anything to mitigate the power and intensity of his fits of rage.

His rage was like the dark edge of a towering thundercloud. His eyes narrowed, the flesh under his chin quivered; the saliva sprayed from his lips.

There was only one person who eventually proved able to curb that anger once it was raging.

She gets to her feet on the defence side of the long table:

We must remember
, Regina Wajnberger says to the court that is in session to pass sentence in the Bronowski case,
that this is naturally not about theft or embezzlement; this is a classic
crime de passion;
that is how we must see it, and judge it.

The Chairman stares in disbelief at the young female counsel who is speaking for Bronowski. She can’t be much older than the accused is himself, and moreover so tiny that she looks as though she is having to stand on tiptoe to reach her own face. But his disbelief stems above all from this: that there is a single person in the ghetto who dare assert the rights of Love in a place where treachery and greed reign. It is like a miracle. With just one word, it is as if this wonderful woman has given his life and his life’s work new meaning.

Regina Wajnberger was one of those people of whom it is said: she had a strong soul but a passive heart. She knew that to get anywhere in the ghetto you had to aim for the very top, and from the very outset she had hoped to ensnare the old man. But Regina also had a brother, and that brother did not allow himself to be manipulated so easily. Benjamin, known as Benji, had to be viewed as more or less a Law unto himself. He complied with nobody, least of all his industrious sister; and she answered him with an unconditional love unlike any other love in the world.

Benji was tall and thin with a mane of thick, prematurely grey hair which he was always sweeping out of his face with long, bony fingers. He was generally to be found on some street corner, expounding to audiences of varying sizes on how vital it was that
certain ghetto dignitaries
take responsibility for their own actions and start to practise what they preached for once; and he would add, with a delighted, almost spiteful glint in his eye:

And from now on I count my so-called brother-in-law among those dignitaries . . . !

And those gathered round the lanky loner would burst out laughing. They laughed until they fell over in the street; strong fists wiped away tears and then enthusiastically hoisted Benji aloft.

Why were they in such high spirits? Because someone in the ghetto was finally daring to speak out and say what everyone thought but nobody dared say aloud? And because these home truths came not from some passing stranger, but from the inner circle itself – from someone who might reasonably be expected to know – from the brother of the young woman whom
the old man
had finally chosen to marry –
from the Chairman’s own brother-in-law to be?

Sister and brother. They were each other’s opposite and precondition:

Where she was the Rule, he was the errant Exception.

Where she was the Light, shining like a lamp, he was the great Darkness.

Where she was the smiling, perpetual Innocent, he was the Conscience.

Where she (despite her physical frailty) was the Strength it took to overcome all obstacles, he was like a constant Weakness that would punish her until her dying day, and even longer.

If Benji had not existed, Regina would hardly have accepted when the Chairman presented her with an offer of marriage. She might possibly have carried on seeing him ‘at the office’, as his other lovers did. What was the alternative? Any woman who had once been favoured with the presence of the Praeses scarcely had any option but to bend to his will.

But getting married was another matter. Her father, lawyer Aron Wajnberger, warned her repeatedly of the consequences of allowing herself to be wedded to that ‘fanatic’ for all time, for all eternity. But for Regina, the ghetto was like slow suffocation. Every day, a little bit more of the life she lived was taken from her. Her aged father was now in a wheelchair; he could no longer get up or walk unaided; and what would happen the day her father – who was, after all, an esteemed and respected lawyer in the Chairman’s camp – no longer held his protective hand over them? And what would happen to Benji then?

Her brother meanwhile naturally went round the ghetto in his typical way, doing all he could to undermine the position she had carved out for herself and her family.

Benji was particularly fond of talking to the ‘new arrivals’, the Jews from Berlin, Prague and Vienna who were seeking out the market places of the ghetto with increasing desperation. To them he could tell it
like it was
: that the deportations which were about to take place were just the beginning of an
exodus on a massive scale
, and that the Germans would not give up until not a single Jew was left alive in the ghetto.

And the new arrivals should not think they were safe just because they had been deported once already, or because they as ‘German Jews’ constituted some specially spared elite:

On these trains, we all travel in the same class, my friends!

Only the Chairman believes the Germans will treat good, well-behaved Jews any differently. In actual fact, they see the whole lot of us as rubbish to be thrown away – and the only reason they’ve gathered us all in one place is to make it easier to get rid of us. Believe me, my friends. That’s what they want. To get rid of us.

Some of the new arrivals thought what Benji said was
dreadful
and wanted to hear no more. Others stayed and paid attention.

Benji was one of the few ‘real’ ghetto dwellers they had met who spoke in a way they could understand – in pure, clear German, in which one could discuss not only Schopenhauer but also practical matters like how to apply for a proper place to live, or where to go in the ghetto for coal briquettes or paraffin. And besides, Benji seemed to have connections in the higher echelons of the ghetto hierarchy. If they could interpret his outpourings correctly, they might get at least some hint of an answer to the question that was plaguing them all. That is: how long would they be kept here? And what did the authorities have in store for them?

And Benji told them willingly – everything he knew.

He told them of the Debt the Chairman had incurred from the authorities when the ghetto factories were built, and of Biebow’s constant demands that this Debt be repaid in some form; if not in cash then at least in valuable objects or brigades of hearty, healthy workers who could be sent to labour outside the ghetto. The Debt, he said, was infinite. That was why the new arrivals had to pledge to hand over all their ready money and exchange all their possessions for money at the Chairman’s bank for a ludicrous cashing fee, and still it would not be enough:

He speaks to you as if you were a resource, but you are not a resource; in actual fact you have all come here to be slaughtered . . . And do you know how? The same way as animals, put into a pen. First they have to tire themselves out round its zigzag runs and then, when they come out, the club and the butcher’s hook are waiting . . . !

Many of those Benji talked to subsequently hung on to their savings and assets. It was said that many also asked whether there was anyone else in the ghetto to hold their possessions in trust for them. Was there a private bank? But Benji was aware of none, and if, contrary to expectation, he had known of anybody, he would never have said so. He simply stared back at whoever asked, looking at them as if they had just crawled out of their own skin, and then strode off.

*

Before the deportations began in the late winter of 1942, the wedding of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and Regina Wajnberger was the most widely discussed event in the ghetto.

People talked about the lavish celebration the Chairman was expected to lay on for his bride, and the gifts he intended showering on her family and all the Jews in the ghetto out of gratitude for having been given her. But mainly they talked about his chosen one. They said how
scandalous
it was that she was thirty years younger than him, but most of all that she was ‘one of them’, and so it followed that it could have been absolutely anybody who was thus overnight elevated to the mighty man’s side. Many saw in the image of the young, apparently defenceless Regina a way out of this captivity and degradation that nobody had thought possible until then.

The Chairman’s own relatives, however, seemed less responsive. Princess Helena had asked her husband a number of times to talk his brother Chaim out of it. And when that
had no effect, she had gone to the rabbis and asked to have the marriage put to a legal test. She thought
that false creature
– as she called Regina – had deliberately set out to seduce a helpless old man, and what was more, one with a weak heart, who could thus scarcely be expected to survive the emotional turmoil that marriage with a woman thirty years his junior would probably
entail. But the Chairman said that he had not considered changing his mind at any stage, and had no intention of doing so now. He said of Regina that she was the first woman to come near him who had not made him feel ashamed. In her dazzling smile, he perceived an innocence that redeemed him from all previous taint, and a sublime purity that spurred him on to new duties. Only one thing worried him. Whether her delicate body would be capable of bearing the child he intended to give her. More and more often of late, he had begun to think it his duty not only to discipline and educate, but also to ensure that his inheritance was passed down. In March that year – 1942 – he would be sixty-five. He therefore thought, not unreasonably,
that he had no time to lose in bringing into the world the son he had always dreamt of.

The marriage service itself was conducted by Rabbi Fajner in the old synagogue on Łagiewnicka Street and was a simple ceremony, with Rumkowski in a three-piece velvet suit and the bride as fragile and beautiful as spring rain beneath her white veil. In the course of just a few hours, the Chairman and his young wife received no fewer than six hundred telegrams of congratulation, sent from every conceivable corner of the ghetto; and outside the front entrance to the hospital where the Chairman had his ‘town residence’ at the time, hundreds of
kierownicy
, heads of department, representatives of the local police and fire brigade queued to hand over personally the gifts they naturally dared not come without. Even Princess Helena and her entourage had thought it prudent to abandon their opposition and change sides, and they stood smiling in the doorway to welcome all the guests, including Princess Helena’s own administrator, Mr Tausendgeld, who had personally undertaken to set up a present table on which the gifts and greetings telegrams were piled.