The Warsaw Anagrams (2 page)

He waved off my concern. ‘So what can I get you? How about some nettle tea?’

‘Thank you, but I’ve discovered I don’t need to drink any more.’

‘Mind if I make some for myself?’

‘Be my guest.’

While he boiled water, I asked him questions about what had happened since I’d left Warsaw the previous March.

Sighing, he replied, ‘
Ech
, mostly the same old misery. The big excitement was during the summer – the Russians bombed us. Unfortunately, the numbskull pilots missed Gestapo headquarters, but I’ve heard that Theatre Square was turned to rubble.’ He lowered his voice and leaned towards me. ‘The good news is the Americans have entered the war. The Japanese bombed them a week ago according to the BBC – I’ve a friend with a hidden radio.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

He pointed up to heaven. ‘I don’t want to sound optimistic – God might pull some more pranks on us if He thinks I’m being arrogant.’

Heniek’s superstitiousness would have provoked a sarcastic remark from me in times past, but I’d evidently become more patient in death. ‘So where do you work?’ I asked.

‘A clandestine soap factory.’

‘And you have the day off?’

‘Yes, I woke up this morning with a slight fever.’

‘What’s the date?’

‘The sixteenth of December 1941.’

It was seven days since I’d walked out of the Lublin labour camp where I’d been a prisoner, but by my count I’d taken only five days to reach home, so I’d lost forty-eight hours somewhere under my steps. Maybe time passed differently for the likes of me.

Heniek told me he’d been a printer before moving into the ghetto. His wife and daughter had died of tuberculosis a year earlier.

‘I could live with the loneliness,’ he said, gazing downward to hide his troubled eyes, ‘but the rest, it’s … it’s just too much.’

I knew from experience that
the rest
meant guilt, as well as more subtle and confusing emotions for which we had no adequate name.

He dropped his nettle leaves into the white ceramic flowerpot he used for a teapot. Then, looking up with renewed vigour, he asked after my family, and I told him that my daughter Liesel was in Izmir. ‘She was working at an archaeological site when the war broke out, so she stayed there.’

‘Have you been to see her yet?’

‘No, I had to come here first. But she’s safe. Unless …’ I jumped up, panicked. ‘Turkey hasn’t entered the war, has it?’

‘No, no, it’s still neutral territory. Don’t worry.’

He poured boiling water over his nettle leaves in a slow and perfect circle, and his exactitude charmed me. I sat back down.

‘Excuse my curiosity, Erik, but why have you come back to us?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure. And I think that any answer I might be able to give you wouldn’t make much sense unless I told you about what happened to me in the ghetto – about my nephew most of all.’

‘So, what’s stopping you? We could spend all day together, if you like.’

A mischievous glint appeared in Heniek’s eyes. Despite his grief and loneliness, he seemed to be eager for a new adventure.

‘I’ll tell you a little later,’ I replied. ‘Being able to talk with you … it’s unnerved me.’

Heniek nodded his understanding. After he’d had his tea, he suggested we go for a walk. He carried a bag of potatoes to his sister, who shared a two-bedroom flat with six other tenants near the Great Synagogue, then, together, we listened to Noel Anbaum singing outside the Nowy Azazel Theatre. His accordion made the most brilliant red and gold butterfly-shapes flutter across my eyes – a glorious and strange sensation, but one I’ve gotten used to of late; my senses often run together now, like glazes overflowing their borders. In the end, might they merge completely?Will I fall inside too great a landscape of sound, sight and touch, and be unable to grope my way back to myself? Maybe that will be the way death finally takes me.

Heniek, when I hear the patient hum of the carbide lamp that sits between us, and watch the quivering dance of its blue flame, the gratitude I feel embraces me as Adam did when I told him we would visit New York together. And my gladness at being able to talk to you whispers in my ear:
despite all the Germans’ attempts to remake the world, the natural laws still exist
.

So I must tell my story to you in its proper order or I will become as lost as Hansel and Gretel. And unlike those Christian children, I have no breadcrumbs to mark my way back home. Because I have no home. That is what being back in the city of my birth has taught me.

First we will talk of how Adam vanished and returned to us in a different form. And then I will tell you how Stefa made me believe in miracles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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