The Emperor of Lies (29 page)

He was kept in for a whole week, tied up in the room, which was like a gigantic asphyxiation.

At night, birds fell from the yard and dragged their dry, outstretched wings across his face. In the mornings, Mrs Rumkowska came in to check that his arms and legs were still firmly lashed. He cried out, shouting that his mouth was full of blood and feathers, but she did not hear, just bent towards him slightly and said it was all for his own good. Then she left him, locking the door behind her, and all that was left were the dreadful birds, whose shadows crawled like insects across the lead-grey walls.

It was not until near evening that the light in the enclosed yard had dimmed enough for the reflections of the fire at the timber processing factory to bring the room out of its suffocating shadow again. At that point, Mrs Koszmar came in with a tray with some food on it, lamented extravagantly at seeing
the young master in such a state
, and loosened his wrist bonds a little, so he was at least able to eat.

It had been a ‘deceptive’ fire, they said later.

The two policemen who had been on fire-watching duty that night did not notice anything, although they passed the former hospital building several times when it was already in flames. Its grounds were covered in a thin layer of snow with a frozen crust; the piles of timber outside the entrance also had snow on them. The policemen had seen the film of snow on top of the platform of timber slowly receding, and heard melt-water dripping and running as if ‘spring had come in the depths of winter’. Only then had they looked up and seen the smoke, which was escaping ‘in great volume’ from cracks in the hospital’s now bricked-up windows. One of the policemen got hold of an axe, and they smashed the lock and the two iron bars across the front entrance, and as if of their own volition, the double doors burst open and the liberated sea of fire swept over them.

The fire in the factory raged for twenty-four hours. During that time, there was a constant stream of people in and out of the Chairman’s flat, bringing reports and receiving new instructions.

Staszek lay there with his ear to the wall, listening to Commander Kaufman issuing orders to his firemen. Kaufman also spoke on the telephone to his ‘Polish’ colleagues in Litzmannstadt. He reported to them that adjoining houses and outbuildings had also caught fire, among them a timber store, and that it would be impossible for them to put out the fire if they were not given access to a hydrant twenty-five metres beyond the ghetto boundary, on
Aryan territory
. Could such a request possibly be granted and an order issued?

Half an hour later, the answer came. Kaufman’s request had been granted.

And once another half-hour had passed, the wooden barriers and barbed-wire fences along Wolborska Street were pulled down, and very soon afterwards a massive gasp ran through the hundred or so
dygnitarzy
who had gathered in the Chairman’s flat:

The Germans are helping put out the fire . . . !

Staszek could see in his mind’s eye the German firemen setting about burning doors with crowbars and fire axes, and leading whole armies of other firemen in under beams that were collapsing in on them in showers of sparks. For the first time in nearly four years, the ghetto borders were open and German, Polish and Jewish firemen were fighting side by side.

The cause of the fire was eventually established:

When the hospital was converted after the September operation into a timber-processing plant and furniture factory, it did not occur to anybody that the patients’ lift could not be used for goods and materials without installing a heavier duty electrical system. The overloading damaged a cable, generating the spark that ignited the whole factory.

From there, the fire spread to a warehouse where 3,500 brand new children’s cots were awaiting transport to the Reich. The fire chief of Litzmannstadt later acknowledged that without the Jewish firemen’s resourceful intervention, not only the tumbledown wooden settlements of the ghetto but also vital civil and military installations in his city centre, worth millions of marks, would have gone up in flames. At a ceremony at the House of Culture two months later, those firemen who survived were awarded a specially embossed outstanding service medal showing the Chairman’s profile superimposed on a stylised image of the tallest wooden bridge, and in the speech that followed, the Chairman made sure to highlight each individual fireman’s contribution in saving the ghetto and ensuring its future:

The Lord God of Israel constantly visits new trials upon His People. There are some who survive the trials they face, and there are those who perish . . . Thus shall all Jews in the ghetto be tested; and those who are found worthy shall be there on the day the temple of Jerusalem rises once more from the ruins . . . !

Staszek liked being with the men who gathered at the Chairman’s home for the Jewish festivals. Men like Jakubowicz, Reingold, Kligier and Miller. He liked their decisiveness and gravity, their muted hums and haws and reserved tone behind other people’s backs. Above all he liked Moshe Karo, the man who was said to have rescued him that time the transports of children and ‘mad’ mothers had arrived from Brzeziny and Pabianice, and the Germans had threatened to take them all away and shoot them.

One day, just a couple of months before his bar mitzvah, Moshe Karo took him along to the old Talmud school in Jakuba Street where the holy books were kept. Mr Karo was handed a bunch of keys by Rozenblat’s men, who guarded the place round the clock, and then he led Staszek up a narrow side corridor to a gallery on the second floor, with wood-panelled walls. A black velvet curtain concealed a tall door with an iron grille. Karo drew back the curtain and tried several keys in the door until he finally got it open. In the glare of a naked light bulb, shelves running along the walls of the room could be seen to contain long rows of Torah arks and prayer books. Some of the Torah scrolls were so badly burnt that they were impossible to open. Two of them, Karo told him, had come from the
Altshtot
synagogue in Wolborska Street; others from the so-called
Vilker shul
in Zachodnia, one of the oldest synagogues in Łódź, and a seat of learning to which students of the Talmud had come from all over Poland. The day before the hired arsonists came, the Germans had almost everything of value in that synagogue taken down and carried away – from menorahs and candelabras to reading desks. They also emptied the Torah arks. But the cantor of the synagogue realised what was going on, and was able to hide some of the most precious items under a stone shelf on the facade of the building. Then the books were transferred to the ghetto in strictest secrecy.

Moshe Karo was a calm, quiet man, who moved slowly and with great dignity. His face, too, had a fixed and unchangingly benevolent expression, with which he looked on all those to whom he spoke, and which Staszek imagined not to alter even when he was asleep. But from time to time, some inner agitation seemed to take possession of Karo. His eyes would glaze over and look inwards, and his voice, normally so gentle and conciliatory, would suddenly sound hard, anxious and admonitory:

In my misery and distress, I often think of our time here in the ghetto –

I think of all the holy places they have destroyed, the way they have made us eat
treyf
and we have no longer been allowed to keep the Sabbath commandments. But there is one thing they cannot take from us – the teachings of the Talmud and the holy wisdom of the prophets.

‘If you do not stand fast in your faith, you will be found wanting . . .’

So says the Lord, and time and again he has shown the same severity towards his people, punishing them for not following his decrees; he has annihilated their cities and driven his people out into the wilderness.

But however great the tribulations he has made us endure, some remnant has still been left, to build the walls of Jerusalem anew, and faith has been that remnant. The prophet Isaiah knew this. That was why he baptised his son Shear-Jashub, the one who will return. Our dearly beloved Praeses knows this, too. He, the humblest of all, knows what it is to be called upon as a tool.

That is why he has decided all that remains of power shall be transferred to you, and you shall be that remnant.

So your name shall be Shub, he who returns, whom nothing and nobody can destroy, he who will survive us all –

Staszek pondered what Moshe Karo had said. He pondered most of all of what Moshe Karo had said about the Chairman being merely a tool, and though he had no paper or pencil to hand, he drew himself sitting on a tall throne with his father crawling helplessly at his feet. And the sight of his powerful father in this submissive state gave him a feeling of such deep satisfaction that he was oblivious to everything else until Moshe Karo – once more an ordinary, modest man, shutting and locking the door with the iron grille and pulling the curtain back over the holy books he had been instructed to show – said in his normal voice that he had to hand the keys back to the police guards.

*

Then it happened, of course, the thing everyone knew would happen and absolutely anybody could have predicted. The Chairman, too, was taken away to Litzmannstadt by the authorities.

When Regina heard the news, she stood stock still, as if everything around her, including the air she breathed, had suddenly turned to glass.

The Chairman asked me to tell you particularly that there is no need to worry about him
, said Miller, who had been driven all the way from the Secretariat to their new home in Łagiewnicka Street to deliver the message.
It’s not like what happened to Gertler. The authorities only want to interview him about the distribution of food.

But Staszek could clearly see how Regina started at the words:

It’s not like what happened to Gertler.

*

Most of the Chairman’s various heads were to do with the exercising of his authority. These heads had staring eyes and the skin under his cheeks and sagging chin was as rigid and unmoving as if it were made of plaster. But there were also heads that were as round as moons, with slanting little slits for eyes and a mouth that was open, smiling craftily as if there were someone sitting inside it ready to jump out and strike the speaker, the minute that person said anything the Chairman did not want to hear.

The Chairman’s smiles were like his hands: the smiles were tools with which he told people what to do.

Unless, that is, he was smiling just to
make a show of
being pleased. Then he would slap his knees emphatically and twist the upper part of his body into sudden contortions. At such moments, that
look
of his was always there – the complicit look, from the kindly and ingratiating head Staszek had learnt to fear more than anything else.

Only twice had Staszek seen the Chairman entirely headless.

The first time was when the Chairman was in his cage, looking at Staszek as if he wanted him to come and unlock the door. The second time was when the Germans came to take Gertler away. That day, by mistake, Staszek went over to the other side of the landing, to the room the Chairman used as his home office. There he saw the Chairman lying on his back on the sofa with his mouth open and his knees drawn up to his chest like a child. His face had been so rigid and immobile in sleep that Staszek had been sure the body and face could no longer be those of a living person. Not that he thought the Chairman was really dead, but this is what he would look like when he was.

That was why Staszek was now moving among the serious men who had gathered in his flat as soon as the Chairman was arrested, crying:

My father Praeses, is he dead now?

My father Praeses, is he dead now?

In all the Chairman’s rooms, small groups of people stood repeating in low, whispering voices the soothing message Doctor Miller had brought. That the authorities only wanted to know how the food distribution was going; that there would definitely be no question of further deportations. So it took quite some time for the assembled dignitaries to become aware of the child wandering among the adults, screaming improprieties.

Mrs Rumkowska swiftly grabbed him by the arm and hauled him into the Room –

Staszek resisted with all his strength.

I want my father Praeses back
, he screamed.

He was no longer ‘himself’. All there was left of him was this one, utterly unbridled wish:

I want my father Praeses back
, he screamed, over and over again.

Meanwhile, negotiations were in progress in the bright, open room. They were already discussing who could possibly be appointed the old man’s Successor.

With the help of Mrs Koszmar, Regina tore off a piece of sheeting, which she twisted into a firm, hard rope, and together they forced it into his mouth to make him stop screaming. It was the second time Staszek had been restrained. But this time he could not move any part of his body. Not even his mouth. His tongue was like a suffocating ball in his gullet, which he had to struggle not to swallow and continually gagged on.

But the scream was there inside him, even so.

And the source of the scream was this terrible state of being someone yet no longer existing.

He saw himself lying in the bottom of a wardrobe alongside a head that was not his yet still somehow belonged to him. And somewhere nearby, the Chairman was gathering up his scattered body parts and advancing towards him through the darkness, and the leather apron he had round his waist was bloodied by all the body parts he had been forced to cut off to get all the way there: to his only, most beloved Son.

The Chairman was gone all that day and half the next. It was half past ten the next morning before Miss Estera Daum telephoned from down at the Secretariat to say that he, the Most High, had been seen returning unharmed. He had come from the city on the ‘Aryan’ tram that passed through Bałuty every day, still in the suit and overcoat he had been wearing when the Gestapo came for him. His first action on resuming his duties was to lock himself in his office, Miss Daum reported, and he was still sitting in there now, having called in his closest associates one by one.

In his darkness, Staszek imagined himself lying with his back to a wall.

The wall reminded him of the brick wall outside the tannery in the yard, but without any loose bricks you could pull out. He was lying with his back pressed against the cold, hard surface of the wall, and standing there in front of him in the gloom was the boy with the cross of wood, with all the bottles and jars of medicines and tinctures dangling from it on lengths of rope and string.

As when a marionette’s strings become entangled, they began mournfully knocking and rattling and chinking against each other. It was like the sound of water, if there could have been water running there; or like the sound of hooves and carriage wheels way off along a cobbled street. The women the bottle boy was telling him about were lying along the side of the road, or in the inner courtyards: some still hugging their children protectively; others with their legs parted wide, like animal carcasses, and nobody took any notice of the way they were lying or what they looked like, just took the dead bodies and swung them up onto the back of the lorries like sacks of flour.

There is such sorrow in the bottle boy’s thin voice as he says all this that Staszek starts crying, too. He is not crying for the bottle boy or for his dead mother or for all the other dead people; he is crying for himself. He is crying because he is lying with his face to a wall. And because that wall is dividing him from what he once was, and because the wall is so high that nothing can be seen, nothing can be heard from the other side of it; nothing but the empty bottles clattering and jingling every time the insignificant body given the task of carrying them gets up and falls again, gets up and falls; and Moshe Karo’s voice intones the Lord’s promise to the Diaspora as it was spoken of by the prophet Ezekiel, the text he himself will read at his bar mitzvah:

Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions; but I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them, so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.

He must have fallen asleep, because the next moment the clatter of the bottles has evaporated and the smell of tobacco smoke hangs heavy in the air. A faint streak of light has found its way into the room. Without turning round, he knows the Chairman is in the room and has presumably been there for some time. Like so many times before, he is wearing his crafty, observing head, and Staszek sees this and starts to cry again. Crafty as he is, the Chairman chooses to misunderstand. The bed springs give a little as the Chairman sits down and cups Staszek’s chin in his hand so carefully that you might have thought he was handling the most precious jewel.

Don’t be sad, boy. I’ve brought some food for you.

Look at this lovely food.

Paper rustles as the parcel is unwrapped. Soon the Chairman’s teat-like fingers will be pushing their way into his mouth with the first bits of bread. He swallows quickly to quell the spasm of nausea washing over him.

I’ve been talking to Moshe Karo.

He says you are making real progress.

I’m proud of you.

The Chairman smears big dabs of slightly rancid butter over Staszek’s lips and follows them with bread, candied peaches, jam. The boy is crying tears of loathing and disgust, but he sucks and licks and swallows obediently. Thickly whipped cream, too. The Chairman has a whole handful of it, and presses it to his mouth for him to lick off.

On the first Sabbath after Hanukkah, we shall celebrate your bar mitzvah.

The Chairman is now lying down on the bed, with his sticky hands round Staszek’s chest and waist. They feel their way down his backbone, applying and rubbing the viscous butter in long strokes between his thighs, to the constant accompaniment of thick, panting breaths, like a piece of heavy machinery working away behind him; and then he has two buttery fingers stuck up his anus, and two even more slippery fingers stroking and massaging between his testicles and the base of his penis, and despite the pain and the shame he cannot help going hard, and the sudden pain makes his whole body twist aside, but –

Don’t be afraid
, says the flat, damp voice against the back of his neck, Staszek suddenly enveloped in an rich haze of alcohol and old tobacco smoke –

I shall never let them take you from me.

You are everything to me.

Then there is an inarticulate grunting sound: as if the Chairman is crying to himself or even laughing. Or perhaps it is just the sound of air being expelled from his body. Or perhaps it is their two bodies, the friction between them; and with a kind of snorting exultation, the Chairman heaves his weight on top of him and clings there, and lets his big, heavy, grateful head glide down over Staszek’s neck, the bones there, his shoulder blades, and with his swollen lips and great, wet tongue begins to suck and lick all the greasy, oily residue of what he had previously rubbed onto the skin. And bit by bit, thrust by thrust, Staszek’s body is pressed harder against the wall. He is plastered there, like an insect somebody has killed: exactly like the mute impression left by his dead body. And now there is no wall any longer – no tears, no pain. Just a body with no head. And who can be afraid of a body with no head?