Warsaw

by Richard Foreman

  Where once Adam Duritz had thanked the German for saving him, he eventually grew to curse his name. Their acquaintanceship ended. Duritz deemed his goodness to be laced with self-righteousness. His generosity was so formed to paper over the cracks of his guilt he judged. Saving him had ultimately damned the Jew. Duritz often imagined that if he could turn back the clock he would not have opened the door to the Good Samaritan. It had been his will to die. Now he inadvertently killed, against his will. Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upwards.

  Sweat soaked his brow and trickled down his cheeks like tears. His lips were dry and he struggled to swallow. Duritz searched in vain for a bench on the street where he could catch his breath, take the weight off his feet. Light-headed. Even Jessica evaporated from his thoughts. He could feel himself swaying, but yet still could not cessate the sensation. Sounds swirled. Dizzy. Epilepsy? No. Somebody had put weights upon his eyelids. Legs heavy, as if filled with molten lead. The wooden handle of the cudgel was damp in his clammy palm. The harsh sun throbbed upon his forehead. Adam felt a fly land upon his bottom lip but he couldn't muster the will to brush it off. The streaming throng before him seem to kaleidoscope in and out of focus. He heard the distant sound of the cudgel clatter to the ground before he passed out. In that third state of being, a twilight between consciousness and sleep, Adam Duritz also thought he caught a familiar voice, presence. Did he recoil or embrace the commanding apparition? A delirious darkness enveloped him like a shroud. And all was a blissful, black silence.

  6.

  Time passes.

  Thomas Abendroth did indeed help Duritz home that afternoon. He had been following the policeman at the time, ruminating upon whether he should approach his old friend. The Corporal had been taken back by the frazzled look he had received from Adam in the Umschlagplatz. He was worried about him - and curious. The incident of Duritz passing out in the street had forced the soldier's hand however to make contact with his, in some sense, colleague. Thomas carried the heat-exhausted adolescent back to his building. With his arm around his shoulder, and his friend unconscious, they looked like a couple of drunks on their way home. Sweat saturated the Corporal's dirty face and aching frame as he negotiated the steep stairs of the tenement block. For his part Adam remained somewhat delirious, muttering fragments of sentences and falling in and out of consciousness; the whole episode, day, felt fuzzy - as if the Jew had been plunged into a period of hypnogogic sleep. Thomas found the key to Adam's room in his damp pockets and he let the pair of them in. He placed the policeman on his cot, undressed him, made him take in some water and then let him sleep it off.

  Tired and somewhat drained himself Thomas also decided to take the weight off his feet. He pulled up a chair and kept watch over his turbulent friend till he came around, dozing off a couple of times himself as he did so.

  "I thought it was you," Duritz stated, either weakly or lazily.

  Maria had once asked her husband to write about his friend and tutor, the Jew. She even wanted a physical description of this youth who had affected her husband so. Thomas became quite pensive concerning replying to his wife but he wrote what came to him and he described Adam as having a cold, sarcastic manner. Even when he smiled it was a somewhat ironic, twisted smile - as though he was partly grinning at something else altogether. Feeling a little guilty at positing this about his friend Thomas was quick to also report to his wife Adam's good qualities, his intelligence, sense of humour, resilience. And he was capable of so much. He was Raskolnikov, Thomas had written (hopeful that his wife had remembered and appreciated the character from a novel he had told her to read all those years ago). Yet here was that unforgiving, bitter face before him again, the cheeks and jaw little sharper, the eyes a little blacker, the expression a little more choleric. Yet why should he forgive? Shouldn't he be bitter? - Thomas later thought to himself.

  "I suppose I should thank you for all you've done for me? You should congratulate yourself on being a Good Samaritan again. Do you think that in saving me you will be making up for everyone else you have turned a blind eye to?" Duritz posed and then gulped down a glass of water that Thomas had left for him by the bed.

  "It appears that I only did what you would have done for me," Thomas dryly replied, parrying sarcasm with sarcasm.

  "Was it concern or curiosity which made you follow me?"

  "Both."

  "When I satisfy your curiosity as to how I'm doing, what I've become, I dare say you won't be so concerned anymore Thomas."

  "You never know Adam, I might surprise you."

  "I have faith in my doubts - and German is not the language of the concerned."

  "Then I'll feign concern in Polish," Thomas replied in his friend's tongue, with an attempt of a smile on his lips. Although Adam too switched into speaking in his native tongue the flint-like expression on his face remained the same. For Duritz there was just too much blood under the bridge between the German and Jew. And he just wasn't the same man that Thomas had known. Adam possessed now - or was possessed by - a dybbuk.

  "Polish is the language of the dead and dying. For every new word you learn each day in Polish, a hundred of her speakers are silenced. By the time you master the language there will be no one left to have a conversation with. Rather than you for me, I should be concerned with your state of mind Thomas if that's your noble aim in life, to learn a dying language and to talk with dead people," Duritz pronounced.

  "As you seem to be getting back to your old self, I'll take my leave. I have no wish to argue with you Adam."

  "It's up to you if you want to go, but I'd be interested to see whether you would agree or argue with me on a theory I have. What do you think is the aim of Hitler and Germany in this war? The argument of "living space" is ridiculous and you know it. My theory is that the war is a smokescreen to the end of the murder of my people. The genocidal, psychotic masquerade is not beyond Hitler. The Western Front is but a fence to keep prying eyes out. The argument for the establishment of the ghetto was containment. But were we not contained, penned in like livestock, just until the slaughterhouses could be built? We are just animals to you. Our sense of humanity has been distorted, erased. I spent half my time as a philosophy student writing essays on how the concepts of "humanity", "religion" and "conscience" were just that, concepts and words. We were really just animals programmed by our biology to survive and reproduce. We were just apes with more sophisticated voice boxes. Romantic love, freedom, compassion, God were fictions, cultural constructs, lies. Yet now I realise that even if they are lies - which they doubtless are - they should be believed in to counter the machinations, propaganda, of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world. Of our own bestial voices. If we convince ourselves we're animals then we're giving ourselves the perfect excuse to behave like animals. The relationship between the wolf and the sheep should be confined to the wolf and sheep. I can't help but come to the conclusion though that I don't know why or how this is happening. I'm just left with a scalding sorrow; a darkness. I've been infected too. I know, as you do, that I'm contrary and conceited yet there is a real sense of what I can only describe as dread - that I am more evil than good. I must be doing something wrong, otherwise I wouldn't feel guilty. Is it guilt, or folly? I don't know. I even have a new neurosis Thomas. As well as not being able to look at myself in the mirror I can't even bear to look at my own shadow nowadays. It's a chilling reminder of my heart - black, insubstantial, lifeless. I know it's a cliché, melodramatic, but I have lost my faith. How can one not? - Not that I can claim to have had much faith before the occupation. But even the embers have died out. I sometimes still talk to God - I curse his name, call him cruel and blaspheme - out of a childish hope that he will prove me wrong or strike me down. But am I not more scared of our guardians in grey who will descend upon me should I not serve your God, Fuhrer? And so I bow my head and threaten, force and lie to good, innocent people. I send them to their deaths so that I can preserve my wretched existence. Yet lately I wake up in the
morning fearing the day and desiring to die painlessly in my sleep, escape. Yet I get up out of fear. And I am selfish, base. I know that one of the reasons why we stopped talking was that you suspected that I was abusing my position. You have probably even felt a little guilty because you helped put me here. Don't. Yet I have taken advantage of families, mothers, daughters. But no more. But yet why do I even say that? I know I will."

  Duritz expressed all this whilst lying in bed, glaring at the ceiling. It was as if he had been talking in his sleep, or certainly he seemed to be addressing himself as much as Thomas. Sweat moistened his features. Finally, at the end though, Adam's febrile eyes gazed up at his friend - pleadingly. The soldier's features and heart had already softened.

  "Sometimes I don't recognise myself - but yet I also need to get away from myself, from that place. Sometimes the looks on their faces pierce, burn. I was there when they took Korczak and the children Thomas. I even helped. His journal was open upon his desk when I searched his office for any children who might have been hiding in there. I remember an extract from it. He wrote, ‘It has been a long time since I blessed this world. I tried it tonight. It didn't work.’ I remember it, because that's how I sometimes feel too. When I first dressed myself in my uniform, wearing that black cap over there with the band around it, I thought even then that I but looked like a glorified railway porter. How right I was. I'm suffocating at that place. We've seen things that we're not supposed to see. Dostoyevsky said, ‘Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.’ I used to believe that, maybe. But now I'm not so sure. I feel like I'm fraying, frayed. I'm either going to lose my mind or my life soon. I know that. In a way it even brings me some comfort. That place will be the death of me either way. I've even extorted out of one of my neighbours, a doctor, a cyanide pill. Death is the only life changing experience."

  Adam's lip curled into a heroic attempt at a wry smile at the remark.

  "If I owned the authority to recommend you for the police service then maybe I can pull a few strings and get you released from your position, although I don't want to promise you anything and give any false hope."

  Adam barely registered the final part of his friend's sentence however for although he promised it not, hope indeed shot through his heart like adrenaline and cracked his hardened, sickly features. He had once thought that joining the Jewish Police would be his salvation. Now he knew that his second-chance could only come from leaving the force.

  The next day Thomas Abendroth secured for Duritz two months temporary leave from his duties. Although the Corporal wasn't on familiar terms with his SS counterpart, who was supervisor to Adam's brigade, Thomas knew him to be corrupt - and corruptible. Resolute in his decision not to release the Jew from the service completely ("it would prove a death sentence for him in the long run - and more importantly I cannot spare any men") Thomas nevertheless purchased two month's worth of time and respite for his ailing friend.

  During the following two weeks Adam regained his strength and refreshed himself through sleep and periods of sober reflection. Thomas continued to visit him and although there were moments of awkwardness (Adam still possessed shards of a phlegmatic humour and silences ensued when the conversation began to move onto things that both preferred not to discuss), the two men regained something of their former intimacy and affection. In a way Thomas became Adam's confessor. One day Duritz spoke of his fears of turning into his father. He was a bully - he used to beat his wife without remorse and had used his belt on Adam's younger brother to the point of making Joshua run away from home. The self-absorbed patriarch was also a womaniser and creature of appetite; not only, Adam suspected, had he raped his mother on occasion when he was young but so too he knew that he visited prostitutes. He had probably spent more money on his mistresses and whores over the years than he had on investing in the business. Adam confessed that when young his father had shaped him in a way because he vowed to himself that he would be the opposite of the petty tyrant and ignoramus; he studied hard, developing both his intellect and a humanist's sensibility. He spent as much time away from the house and bakery as possible. And when Adam did come home each night he locked himself in his room and read - and the books provided him with yet another world in which to escape and prove himself to be the anti-thesis of his father. Yet had not the sins of the father - despite the best efforts of Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and Kant - still infected the son? Had there not been moments when Adam had freely used his cudgel as much as his father had unbuckled his thick leather black belt? Had he not become a glassy-eyed debaucher and - although too ashamed to declare this to Thomas - a rapist?

  As well as confessing his sins to his sympathetic friend Adam was also conscious of Thomas acting as a vessel for his thoughts and history. The Corporal would out-live him. The idea naturally came to Duritz that, if he could still ingrain his life and philosophies into Thomas, then he too might live on in a way and continue to tell his story. Adam asked Thomas, who accepted, to keep hold of copies of some the writings (poems, essays, a journal) that he had composed when younger and during the fall and occupation of Warsaw. Duritz, in a strange way, envied the members of the Oneg Shabat - a secret group (though known to Duritz, albeit he would never have reported them). They met on the Sabbath to collect memoirs and letters of the people in the ghetto. He craved their sympathetic company and the act of rebellion.

  By the end of the two weeks, Thomas couldn't help but notice the change in his friend, or patient. His eyes seemed more expressive, free from sleep deprivation. Adam smiled more. He even laughed on the odd occasion. His demeanour enlivened - he gesticulated with his hands, looked his friend in the eye and stooped less. Duritz' mind, as well as his body, became increasingly animated; diverse thoughts flowed freely and clearly. They discussed literature. When Adam confessed of his desire to begin to translate again, Thomas duly provided his friend with the necessary pens, paper and dictionaries. Feeling like the world was opened up to him once more Adam, at first, was at pains to finally settle upon choosing a project for himself. Eventually he decided upon translating a set of Plutarch's essays from English into Polish. He always liked reading and writing in English, the language was rich in sensibility, whimsical. A couple of years previous to the occupation, Adam had composed a paper on how - rather than one being in control of language and using it as a tool - one's language shaped one's thoughts. He himself believed he projected a different character, or felt slightly altered, inhabiting or being inhabited by different languages and dialects. The nihilistic student produced the syllogism at the close of the essay, published in one of Warsaw's minor academic journals (under a Christian pseudonym), that if words have no sovereign meaning - and Man is the sum of his language - then isn't Man but a sum of meaninglessness? Although still somewhat sarcastic and resentful Thomas was relieved in that his young friend no longer seemed to be unhealthily morbid or fatalistic in his humour. He convalesced. Was he mistaken, but Thomas began to sense that had Adam a burgeoning sense of consolation in his life? Purpose.

  Although he had accused Thomas of a similar conceit - and mocked him for it - Duritz couldn't help but be attracted to the shining idea of protecting and saving Jessica and her family. It had dawned upon him one evening, akin to a religious revelation. Atonement. Adam told himself that the cause was borne not from romantic love but rather from a need for redemption and worth. Selfish altruism. He was willingly kept awake at night by the idea. His heart warmed, swelled and brightened at the prospect of somehow liberating his would-be friends and surrogate family. They would escape from the ghetto, either by cunning or his heroism or sacrifice - and make their way through the countryside. Adam fancied that he would join an imaginary band of partisans. A resistance. Surely they must be in the hills, biding their time? Or they would make it all the way to Jerusalem.

  Jessica Rubenstein's position and mood also underwent a transformation over the course of when we were last with her. Her cheeks were now
sallow, her eyes as red and black as the policeman's once were. Increasingly fearful of the rate of evacuations she decided to take up the offer of Josef, an administrator at the hospital and suitor, to work in the dilapidated clinic. It must be said though that her decision was also reached from her need to keep busy, to forget the memorable. At first however, due to the sheer futility and fatalism which infected the hospital, Jessica nearly abandoned her position as a nurse's assistant a few days after starting. On the first morning she had been briefed by a senior nurse. She had been so overwhelmed and distracted by what was said - and the gruelling sights around her - that Jessica barely remembered any details of the speech by the end of it,

  "You will need to learn, as quickly as possible, the symptoms and treatments for the following - all of which are common: typhus and stomach typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, diarrhoea."

  Jessica nodded meekly at the severe-looking nurse as if to say she understood and could learn such things - but the unimpressed shrewish woman continued,

  "Influenza, osteomalacia - which is weakening of the bones - necrosis - which means tissue loss - various intestinal disorders which I will go over with you at a future time, scarlet fever, goitre, diphtheria, pneumonia and oedema."

  The pungent stench of gangrene made her nauseous. Jessica feared contracting typhus or tuberculosis and then passing it on to her family. Conditions were atrocious, inhumane. The diffident girl felt helpless. They were in the jaws of a terrible monster - and at any moment he would close his mouth and all would be swallowed up in darkness. Jessica came home on her third day crying from being present at a birth where, at the consent of its mother, the baby had been put to sleep so as to end its suffering before it began. If not for her mother's encouragement and strength (and Thomas' words, "Just because you might be fighting a losing battle - that does not mean that you should give up.") Jessica would not have got through her first week. Yet, although believing the doctors and nurses to be blind and stupid at first, Jessica grew to admire their fortitude and virtues. She craved for a sense of worth and meaning to her life also. As tiny and ultimately fruitless as it was, was she not making a difference? Goodness felt good. By the end of her first two weeks Jessica no longer toiled over why she should stay or leave, such was the habit of her going to work and being too busy to debate her decision. She also needed the work card.