The Emperor of Lies (28 page)

After Staszek’s ‘little outing’, as it came to be called, the Chairman’s behaviour towards him changed. It was as if he stopped addressing him directly, and began to talk instead to someone standing beside him, another Staszek who looked the same and did the same things but was separate from him.

And the Chairman seemed to be a little afraid of that
other
Staszek.

Sometimes that fear became so intense that the Chairman’s eyes took on a dark, feverish look. As if the other Staszek were constantly hounding and harrying him, but he could not explain how or say anything about it at all.

He and the Chairman still went together to that other room, where there was nothing to breathe but old dust and pigeon excrement.

When they had been in the room before, the Chairman had insisted they make themselves ‘comfortable’. He had dragged armchairs out from the wall, brought an ashtray and lit cigarettes. Sometimes he had even started telling him things. He sometimes got so carried away by these stories that he even forgot his hands, lying there on his lap, ready for use. But nowadays he mostly just sat there, regarding Staszek with a mute and watery look in his eyes, and inwardly smiling.

The first time I saw you, you were so big and strong and clever
, said the Chairman, and Staszek sat beside him, waiting.

It was as if they had the bars of a cage between them. The Chairman was on one side of them, Staszek on the other. At that moment, neither of them knew
who was master and who was slave
, as the Chairman himself would have put it.

But to be more precise: Staszek knew.

The Chairman was the one
behind
the bars.

Not that it afforded the boy any kind of relief. It was the times when the Chairman was in his cage that Staszek feared most. Then all this was no longer about the Chairman and Staszek, but just about the Chairman and the cage. The Chairman paced and paced. All night long he paced, measuring the distance from one side of the cage to the other. Or he stood alone in the cage, praying. Rumkowski prayed every morning and evening; either in the old preventorium two blocks down the street where they lived, or in the old Talmud Torah School in Jakuba Street that was used as a synagogue. When Rumkowski prayed, it was in a loud, piercing, insistent voice, as if making demands even of the Almighty. And he spoke to him the same way:

Why, Stasiulek? I received you so that you could be among the pure. That was why I let you come to me instead of all these other ganovim who just set themselves against me and jeer and humiliate me. Why do you persist in hurting me?

But there were other times when the Chairman wound his fingers around the bars of the cage one by one and pleaded:
Staszek!
He cried;
Stasiu, Stasiulek, Stasinek
 . . . And stretched his arms through the bars and took his Son’s head and pressed it to him.

Then he kissed him.

Then he crowned him.

And the Son was dressed for the coronation in big, red clothes the Chairman had had made, and for his feet he had tall, shiny shoes of real leather, a protective covering into which every toe had to be curled with the care and precision of which only the finest nobleman was capable. (The Chairman demonstrated:
Not too fast, not too slowly; keep it all supple and smooth
.) And once the coronation was complete the King, the high General, stood alone in his cage and bore witness to the creation on the other side, and the tears ran down his cheeks. (Why are you crying, Father?) Perhaps he was crying because however much he dressed and ornamented his son, he still could not touch his Innermost Being, whatever it was that made his toes move as light as feathers within the points of the fine leather shoes, made his shoulders tremble beneath the weight of his gleaming red mantle, and his heart pound and beat inside his broad breastplate.

And the Chairman beheld his beloved and perfect Son and said:

Staszek, Stasiu, Stasiulek – my precious little one: what has become of you, and what has become of all the other precious children?

But Staszek carried on meeting the other boy, the one with the portable cross and the chemist’s glassware. These days they met in safer places, out of range of the key man. One of them was a little way down the yard at the back, where there was a tannery that cleaned and prepared the leathers needed by the ghetto’s shoemakers. Each time they met, Staszek fed the boy with bits of bread that he first moistened in his own mouth and then rolled into little balls, and the boy opened his mouth wide and swallowed just like a tortoise, and told him stories of what had happened in other parts of the ghetto.

One was about the Chairman, who had paid a visit to the simple room with the iron stove that the bottle boy and his uncle Bronisław shared with the boy’s older cousin, Oskar, who was blind and so could not take care of himself or contribute anything to the family’s livelihood.

This had been in the hard winter of 1941.

Bronek, who in order to pay the rent had taken on extra work as the caretaker and odd-job-man in their building, had decided that rather than sitting in front of the stove warming himself, the boy should go out and hack at the ice outside the front entrance. Bronek came up with ideas like that sometimes. Not because anything necessarily needed doing, but just so his nephew was
earning his keep
. So the boy had been standing there outside the entrance with pick and shovel, when suddenly an army of carriages pulled by snorting horses came along the street; the whole lot of them drew up in front of Bronek’s nephew, and the Chairman stepped out of the one at the front, and
just look
– he stepped out and shook the insignificant boy’s hand, and said that if
he
had had such a hard-working, conscientious son, he would have been proud to call himself his father, and then he gave the boy a fistful of food coupons and sweets.

From that moment on, Bronek ralised that his nephew was a real
glik
, one of those people from whom ‘money ran like shit’, as he put it to blind Oskar.

So Bronek put two lengths of wood on his nephew’s shoulders and sent him off with as many of Mr Winawer’s black-market drugs as he could hang on him; and since that day the boy had been walking the ghetto as an itinerant pharmacist, hung with Vigantol, Azetynil and Betabion; and ordinary sugar pills (who noticed the difference if they put their faith in their own hopes?); and tablets you might take for the foul-smelling, acid reflux the factory soup gave you; and an extract of bark with added
Kaffeemischung
that was said not only to contain ‘extra nutrition’ but also to improve potency, known by the people of the ghetto as ‘Biebow’s blend’, since Biebow was rumoured to have been a coffee merchant in a past life.

(Uncle Bronek based this on a theory he had, namely that in these hard times, there is only one thing ordinary folk want to do, and that is to get out of the ghetto – and if they can’t do it ‘naturally’, then they try pharmaceuticals!)

Look at this . . . !
yelled the bottle boy, and thrust a bottle into his mouth pulling the stopper out with his teeth; and before Staszek could blink, flames were licking gloriously from his mouth, making all the other bottles and jars glint like a starry sky. The bottle boy smothered the flames by covering his mouth with both hands, and when Staszek looked up again, his gaping little tortoise mouth looked like a big, black crater, above which two white eyes were gazing out in alarm.

This is how it was –

Once when Rosa Smoleńska was teaching history and arithmetic to the children in the Green House, she went into a little room beside Superintendent Rubin’s office and came back with a pencil box with a sliding lid and flower garlands along the sides, which she gave to Staszek. Draw me a map of Palestine, she said, and then put in all the cities, rivers and lakes in Judaea and Samaria you can remember, with their names. Staszek started on Palestine, because he knew what that country looked like, of course –
Eretz Israel
– but within its borders he did not draw lakes and cities but jackals and scorpions and desert rats, and other animals with horns and tails and sharp teeth.

Then he drew Germans –
lots
of Germans, because there were so many.

Their external attributes were easy: the police guards with their field-grey military overcoats and steel helmets that came right down the backs of their necks; and then the
other
soldiers, the ones who came in the shiny, black cars and stood laughing when they nailed Cantor Kohlman up in the tree – the ones with death’s heads on the front of their caps and pips instead of stripes on their collars.

From Zagajnikowa Street, the wide and dusty exit route below the Green House, they had been able to see the Germans patrolling and keeping guard at Radogoszcz Gate every day. He drew barbed wire, a tall watchtower and the two or more Germans who checked papers and raised and lowered the barrier every time goods had to come through. He tried to recall what it had been like, that time the rain had hung in the few street lights that still worked, and all the Jews in the village had been fetched out of their houses and herded down to the square in front of the church. But all he could really remember was the man the soldiers accused of trying to escape, and dragged into the middle of the church square, and he remembered the face of the soldier who beat and kicked him, and carried on beating and kicking though the man lay there unmoving. And the face of the soldier who was beating and kicking looked just the same as the face of the man lying on the ground being beaten and kicked. They were both wet and shiny in the rain, and somehow twisted and hooded in shadow. That was why the only things that really showed up clearly in the picture he drew were the naked white soles of two feet sticking up out the bundle of clothes which was all that was left of the man: naked white soles and a body kicked to a pulp, and a furious, dissolving soldier face, looking as if somebody had kicked it, too.

After meeting the bottle boy and hearing all the fantastical stories he had to tell, Staszek started drawing other things besides Germans. He drew a host of angels, flying over a city of barbed-wire fences and tall walls. The angels were invisible to the German soldiers in their watchtowers, though the sky above them was filled with the flames of vengeance. Some of the angels in the heavens were even holding
shoifer
horns, which they blew, bringing both fences and walls tumbling down, but still the soldiers noticed nothing.

Sometimes when Staszek was sitting drawing, Miss Smoleńska would come by and stroke her hand across the back of his neck. Mrs Rumkowska never did that, though she followed what he was drawing just as closely as Miss Smoleńska had done, and she, too, had a big, swollen smile that she smiled all the time. But she never touched Staszek or said anything to him beyond what was strictly necessary and what duty demanded – such as what he had learnt at school, or whether he had behaved himself so his father or Moshe Karo, or for that matter, Mrs Koszmar the housekeeper (
Madame Cauchemar
, as Mrs Rumkowska called her) had no need to be ashamed of him. Everything Mrs Rumkowska said had to do with shame.

In the middle of the room where the Chairman held his receptions, there now stood a large tailor’s dummy with no head, and the dummy had a private tailor named Master Hinzel to go with it, a dry little man with wax in his ears and a mouthful of pins, who had come to make Staszek a suit for his bar mitzvah. Master Hinzel pinned different materials onto the dummy, and Mrs Rumkowska and Princess Helena walked round it, considering them. Sometimes Staszek had to model them himself, and they pinned and pinioned him as if
he
were made of fabric.

Mrs Rumkowska and Princess Helena could not stand each other. Regina called Helena a
crazy hysteric
; Helena called Regina a
fanatical parvenue who had turned the head of an old man
. When other people were there, they exchanged fixed smiles with scornfully staring eyes. When they were alone, they argued incessantly.
You have the taste of a common barmaid
, Princess Helena might say of some opinion Mrs Rumkowska had expressed, and then the smile on Regina’s face was snuffed out and she dropped whatever she was doing and withdrew to her room with the blackout curtains. Princess Helena, never wanting to be outdone, collapsed on the sofa just as Mr Tausendgeld came in with a cup of tea.
Mein Gott, ich halte es mit dieser einfältigen Person nicht mehr aus
, said Princess Helena in a German that was intended for polite company but sounded coarse and awkward in a room where there was no one to listen but Mr Tausendgeld, who of course only spoke Yiddish.

The last time he met the bottle boy, he was wearing Master Hinzel’s suit for the first time, and he had put the leftover bread in jacket pockets that felt far too deep and big for the scant pickings Mrs Koszmar claimed she could spare.

It was the day the fire in the timber-processing factory in Wolborska Street broke out, and almost sent the whole ghetto up in flames; and Staszek had told Master Hinzel to make the pockets extra roomy because all his
Hanukkah money
would have to fit in there.

(He said things like that because he knew it amused people.)

He and the bottle boy had arranged to meet as usual in the yard by the tannery. There was a little hole in the brick wall, where Staszek left the food if the boy did not turn up for any reason. When he got there that day, the bottle boy was not there, but someone had taken out the brick he always slotted into the hole and left it on the ground. Had the bottle boy been there, seen that the hiding place was empty and gone away again? Or was it a
signal
?

Although he now knew danger to be lurking, Staszek could not resist going up to the wall. Just as he bent down for the brick, an arm was flung round his throat and a fist forced him to his knees. The panting behind him proved to be coming from a man with rotten black teeth and his cap pulled right down over his forehead, almost concealing his eyes. Other men appeared, ripping and wrenching at his clothes, emptying the pockets of anything edible. He held up his open hands to protect his face, but between his fingers, all he could see was the bottle boy, standing terrified beneath a sky that had meanwhile grown huge and unnaturally red.

Thus treachery, too, assumed a tangible form.

But the worst part had been going back with his new suit in tatters and all its generous pockets torn out: a crowned king, cast into the gutter.

Mrs Rumkowska assembled all the proof. The drawings and pictures he had been so careful to hide were now laid out for the Praeses to see. Regina also gave the Chairman back the pencils and sketchpad, and said anybody who sat drawing Germans in his spare time undoubtedly had nothing against taking orders from
them
. Not only from Gertler, who in her view had shown an
unhealthy
interest in the boy, but also from all those in Gertler’s pay: Miller and Kligier and Reingold. They had seen that the boy was the Praeses’
weak spot
, and by corrupting the boy they had tried to get at
him
.

This all tumbled out of her so fast that she hardly paused for breath, and the Chairman leafed quickly through the sketchpad, stopping at one picture which he showed to Staszek:

What’s this?
he demanded.

It was a picture of a boy bearing a square, wooden cross on his shoulders It looked like the control bar for working a puppet, though this one was resting on his shoulders and the strings were dangling down, and hung with lots of little bottles and jars. It was the bottle boy. But he could not tell the Chairman that, of course. Nor could he say that the bottle boy had claimed he, too, was the Chairman’s son. For a moment he toyed with the idea of saying it was the
other
Staszek, but in the end he just said he had been trying to draw his tailor’s dummy. The Chairman saw through this lie at once:

You impudent wretch
, was all he said, and then he bundled him into the other room, not even bothering to close the door behind him before removing the belt from his trousers, and started to beat Staszek before he had even bent over the back of the armchair.

And the Chairman’s beating went on and on, as it usually did; and Staszek cried out and tried to twist aside. After a while he grabbed the punishing hand of the Praeses and stroked it across his tearful face, as he knew the Chairman wanted him to. With no belt to hold them in place, the Chairman’s trousers had slipped down, and Staszek could see his male organ swelling and stiffening in his underpants, and when the Chairman put the boy’s hand to it, he raised the engorged, red head of the penis to his face instead, and started rubbing his hand up and down it as the Chairman had taught him.

Turning round, he saw Regina standing by the half-open door, looking at them. In the cloudy, brown light from the little enclosed courtyard, her face was pale and puffy, and it was impossible to make out her features. She said nothing, just stood there brushing the side of her face with one hand, as if there was something sticky or itchy on it that she could not wipe away. The next instant, she was gone.