The Warsaw Anagrams (34 page)

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.