The Warsaw Anagrams (4 page)

I went to the kitchen for vodka and came back to find Stefa whispering to Jaśmin while cleaning her cheeks with a towel. When my niece looked up, her eyes were darkly hooded, and I realized then what should have been obvious: the German guard had raped her.

Without Jaśmin’s supplies, we would need a good deal of cash to bolster our rations of coarse black bread and potatoes, and I decided to look into the possibility of selling off some of the jewellery and silverware I’d brought with me into the ghetto. Through Jewish smugglers who ventured regularly into what we had begun to call
Sitra Ahra
– the Other Side – I was able to make enquiries at the antique shops and galleries along Nowy Świat in early December. Unfortunately, the owners – friends, I’d once believed – offered only a small fraction of what my treasures were worth. So I held on tight for the time being.

Shortly after that, Adam began foraging with the other members of his gang for chestnuts, dandelion leaves and nettles in the bombed-out lots and abandoned fields throughout the ghetto, turning their afternoons into urban safaris. He usually spent the tiny allowance I gave him on the molasses gloop that passed for candy in our ramshackle Never-Never-Land, though he managed to come home once with half a chocolate cake, earned, he beamed, by teaching a new friend in the chorus to ride a bicycle.

Adam rehearsed with Rowy and the other singers two afternoons a week. Just before Christmas, he also started taking chess lessons from Ziv in the young man’s room at the bakery.

The weather had turned bitter cold by then, and it became common to see shivering beggars and even stone-frozen corpses on the street. The German guards must have hated being so far from home throughout the winter, and they started beating Jews at random to keep themselves entertained. In consequence, Adam’s extensive wanderings left Stefa in a state of nervous exhaustion. She scolded him often, but he’d simply disappear with Wolfi, Feivel, Sarah and his other friends whenever we left him on his own. By this time, he and his playmates had demonstrated that they were able to avoid the Gestapo and the Jewish police far better than any adult, so after a while Stefa and I stopped worrying ourselves sick.

Still, I began to suspect that he and his friends might be up to no good – maybe even smuggling – when Adam came home late one afternoon smelling like manure.

‘Wolfi pushed me into a rubbish heap!’ he told me.

By then I’d heard of kids crawling through sewage tunnels to reach Christian territory and offered him a sceptical look.

‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘You know Wolfi is
meshugene
! And he’s getting worse!’

‘All right, I believe you,’ I told him, since Wolfi was indeed a handful. I took him by the hand. ‘Anyway, let’s get you clean before your mother comes home or we’ll have no peace tonight.’

Mail was still being delivered, though we had to pay weekly bribes to the postman, and a first letter from Liesel reached me in early January. The photograph she sent showed off what she called her ‘Mediterranean tan’. Her new friend Petrina had short needles of black hair and watery eyes. Her arm was draped over my daughter’s shoulder in a comradely manner, but I could see from the solemn way Liesel looked at her that she had fallen in love.

Liesel had posed that way to tell me what she didn’t dare write.

My daughter asked what we needed, so I scribbled a long list beginning with pipe tobacco for me, pepper for Adam and bitter chocolate for Stefa.

Keeping secrets between us seemed pointless now. ‘May you and Petrina enjoy a happy life together in the land of Homer,’ I ended my letter. ‘Inside this envelope is a kiss from your silly old father, who hopes you forgive him.’

For years, I had feared giving up my expectations for my daughter, but when I posted that letter I felt a lightness of spirit that left me giddy – as if I’d repaired what had been broken. When I later told Izzy about what I’d written to Liesel, he congratulated me – which I knew he would – and I surprised myself by confessing to him that I was only now becoming the father I’d always hoped to be.

That evening, after supper, my nephew and I went for a long happy walk. Our last.

Know this: Adam was a child born under the signs of both the sun and moon. When he was sad, his unhappiness swept over Stefa and me like a desolate wind, turning our spirits to dust. But when he was happy – dancing by himself to a tango on the Victrola, or stretching his little fingers across Bach arpeggios on his mother’s piano, or just sitting at my feet multiplying numbers – we were certain we would be able to outlast the Nazis.

Adam carried Gloria home inside a shoebox during the third week of January of 1941, and the lesson I wish she hadn’t taught us was that even fairy-light creatures can tilt the balance of several lives.

On lifting the lid off his box, my nephew told his mother and me that the manager of the Roth’s Pet Shop had given him the budgerigar free of charge. As to the reason, all the boy had to do was point; Gloria’s left foot was a lumpy grey mass hanging by a thread – a textbook illustration of the ravages of cancer.

‘God in heaven,’ lamented Stefa as she stared at the poor creature, ‘what the hell are we going to do with a crippled budgie?’

Gloria limped into the far corner of the box, gamely trying to put some distance between herself and my niece. The bird was pale blue, with a bright yellow beak and slender black and white wings. She’d have been pretty, but her breast was gouged with
raw-looking
empty patches.

‘She can’t fly,’ Adam informed us glumly. ‘One of her wings doesn’t work. So I’ve adopted her.’

‘She’s going to leave droppings everywhere!’ Stefa declared, her hands on her hips.

‘She can’t leave anything if we don’t feed her,’ I joked.

The boy glared as if I was a traitor, then stuck out his tongue at me.

I stuck out my tongue back, then tried to pinch his ear, but he ducked away.

‘Adam, my darling,’ Stefa snapped, and her
darling
was a clue that he’d better run for cover, ‘this poor bird is undoubtedly crawling with lice and is going to spread disease, and I want you to get rid of it this minute and then scrub your hands!’

My niece had begun to rely on run-on sentences to outduel her son. Hoping to broker a truce, I said, ‘I’ll build her a cage.’

‘Oh, like you built those lopsided bookcases of yours!’ Stefa observed, pointing to my rickety constructions. She showed me that sneer of hers that was like a boot on your chest.

‘We’ll
buy
a cage,’ Adam interjected, and the little imp produced two złoty from his pocket with a cheeky smile.

‘Where’d you get those?’ his mother demanded, certain he’d become a criminal.

‘Gambling on horses!’ he shouted. His true wish, perhaps.

‘How really?’ I asked.

‘I do maths homework for Feivel, Wolfi and some of the other kids.’

A few days later, Gloria moved into a conical cage that Izzy made for us out of a wood base and wire spokes. He soldered a swastika to the finial, since provoking Stefa was the key to the vaudeville routine they’d developed over the years.

‘Izzy, that’s not funny at all!’ she told him, which made him grin in triumph.

‘What you don’t understand, Stefa my sweetheart,’ he told her, ‘is that madness and magic are inseparable. The swastika will prevent the Nazis from confiscating Gloria when they pass a law against Jewish pets.’

By then, Adam was in love. Gloria’s repertoire was limited to eating, chirping, defecating and tearing out her breast feathers in a neurotic frenzy, but my nephew would put her on his shoulder and carry her around as if she were the bewitched form of a princess. When Stefa wasn’t home, he’d even sit her on his head. Gloria seemed to enjoy riding on a bouncy perch made of blond hair and smelling of our last bar of lavender soap, but does anyone know what a budgie is really thinking in between meal times?

For Adam, joy had feathers. And after a while, I realized there was something affecting and encouraging about Gloria – maybe because her total, irremediable uselessness was proof that we could still afford at least one luxury.

Adam’s chorus gave its first concert on 28 January, at Weisman’s dancing school on Pańska Street. A water pipe had burst that morning, and despite some frantic mopping by the organizers, puddles were still scattered around the room.

In the audience were a few friends and acquaintances, including the renowned jazz pianist Noel Anbaum, and Ewa, whom Stefa – ever the matchmaker – had hooked up with Rowy after sizing up the young man at a chorus rehearsal. According to my niece, the two had already had three
extremely successful
dates, and the knowing look she gave me as she pronounced her assessment made it clear just how far they’d already journeyed together.

Soon, the lights flickered for the audience to take its seats. Eight girls and four boys filed up the stairs at the side to the stage, fidgeting and pushing, which made me fear a descent into musical hell. Under Rowy’s raised baton, however, the children’s faces grew serious, and they harmonized their Bach chorales like brothers and sisters. Closing my eyes, I felt as if I’d stopped hurtling through my own displacement for the first time in months; I was just where I wanted to be. I’d landed.

The first encore was Rowy’s own solemn arrangement of ‘
El Male Rachamim
’, which left the more religious among the audience in tears. The second was ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ – Adam’s suggestion.

As he took his bows, my nephew looked at me with such adult earnestness that I was overwhelmed with admiration. For the first time, I had the feeling he’d accomplish magnificent things in his life, and I knew then that protecting him was the most important job I could have been given for my time in the ghetto.

The next day, a blistering cold front swept over the city. Adam stumbled around stiff-armed inside two sweaters and his fur-lined coat – a full-fledged member of a corps of Jewish penguins marching through the ghetto to their secret schools. I purchased two stoves powered by sawdust; by now, coal had vanished – hoarded by the Germans. The new stoves proved criminally inefficient, however, and for several nights in a row the temperature in our apartment rose to only seven degrees.

By now, some insidious avian disease had turned Gloria’s left eye milky white, and Adam was sure that the cold front was at fault. He moped around whenever he thought of her being summoned to budgie heaven, and nothing we could do could cheer him up.

I started going to bed with a scarf wound around my head into a
Thousand-and-One-Nights
turban. The sheets were ice caves, so to warm them up for my nephew I’d lie on his side of the bed for fifteen minutes, then slide over and summon him under the covers. He’d rush into my arms with his teeth chattering. I held him close all night.

The seventeenth of February 1941, was a Monday. The morning was bitter cold – 14 degrees below zero. Stefa had a sore throat and fever, and she’d developed an acne-like rash on her chest. She finally agreed that Adam could stay home from school. Not that she would join us in taking the day off. She drank down some aspirin and, despite my threats to tie her to her bed, pushed past me to work.

I bundled Adam under a mountain of blankets and, on his insistence, moved Gloria’s cage closer to the heater at the foot of our bed. After the cabbage soup I made for lunch, which he and I ate with our gloves on, Adam put on the Indian headdress his mother had made for him out of chicken feathers and announced he was going out.

‘The hell you are!’ I countered.

‘But I’m bored!’

‘With only a crippled budgie and a whining nine-year-old as company, you think I’m not?’

He gave me his devil’s squint.

‘Nice try, Winnetou,’ I told him, using his Indian name, ‘but the Cohen evil eye doesn’t work on other members of the tribe. Go read.’

‘I’m sick of reading!’ Tears of blackmail appeared in his eyes.

‘Look, Adam,’ I said more gently, ‘when we manage to find some coal, you can go out again.’ Enticingly, I added, ‘I’ll start teaching you algebra today, if you want.’

‘Algebra is for stupid people!’

‘Then go feed Gloria. She looked hungry last time I looked. And I’m sure she’s even more bored than you.’

In point of fact, Gloria looked like she needed a hot bath followed by a couple of shots of Scotch whisky, but then so did nearly everyone I knew.

He sneered at me and started away, so I grabbed him. When he squirmed free, rage surged through me like molten metal and I smacked him on the bottom, harder than I’d intended, knocking him into the cabinets. His headdress tumbled off and lost a feather in front. We looked at each other, stunned, as if a meteor had fallen between us. I slumped down to the floor. My tears frightened him. He wriggled his way on to my lap and told me he was sorry. I whispered that he wasn’t responsible, then picked up his headdress. I told him he could go out and play if he dressed as warmly as possible. When he fetched his woollen hat and asked me to put it on him, I made him promise not to leave our street even if Martians landed on the Great Synagogue and asked by name to meet up with him to negotiate a peace treaty.

*

After I realized that the sun had set, I put down my book and looked at my watch: 4.27 exactly. I’ll never forget that time.

Adam had been gone more than two hours. I left a note for Stefa on her bed saying I was out looking for him and tacked another note to the front door, telling Adam to fetch the spare key from Ewa at the bakery if he got home before me.

Adam wasn’t on our street, and I couldn’t find him in any of the weedy lots he usually played in, so I went to Wolfi’s parents’ apartment, but my knocks went unanswered. I managed to locate Feivel and two of Adam’s other friends, but they hadn’t seen him. The local shopkeepers all shook their heads at me.