Warsaw

by Richard Foreman

  It was not until Kleist had dipped into his records that he realised that the Corporal and once academic wunderkind were one in the same person. He had initially been interested in the Wehrmacht Corporal because of his popularity with his men and the humane in way he tried to interact with the Jews. Like Christian he had learned Polish. Corporal Abendroth first caught the Lieutenant's attention because, although approaching middle-age, he considered him a fine specimen of an Aryan man with an interesting, intelligent face. He possessed a certain natural authority, a quality the officer admired. When Christian eventually found the time to inspect his files he was intrigued to uncover why and how "Young Goethe" had become a school teacher for infants in some dung-filled backwater. And why was he but a lowly Corporal? He was far from being Nietzsche's superman now Christian Kleist ruminated to himself, slightly amused by Abendroth's apparent fall from grace.

  Adam continued to follow Jessica and the superficial suitor - who were holding hands like a couple of cloying teenagers - through the sticky grey streets. His eyes were painfully fixed upon them as if Adam were glaring at a corpse. Seeing how well fed and dressed the ex-policeman was a few child-beggars disturbed him - those that had the energy to actively supplicate Duritz - but they were brushed away like flies, their claw-like hands still tickling the air as he rudely dismissed them.

  "God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance," Duritz fervently muttered underneath his breath. His fall was felt all the more because of the high ideals and colourful plans he had so recently formed. The Jewish Princess was just the same, except that the flirt had now become a common whore. Now he understood how she had obtained the jobs and work cards. Rather than he using her the other month, Duritz fancied that had he not been used, manipulated, by her to get her own way? And was she not now playing with and offering herself to the fop Nelkin for something in return? Whereas once she had extracted her family's protection from Adam, wrung him clean, she had abandoned him – but Andrzej it still seemed had something to trade. Women were all the same, moths attracted to the brightest flames.

  The couple sat down at one of the only cafes still open for Jews in the district. Andrzej was one of the privileged few to be able to afford to eat there. His father had granted him a position in the Council's administrative service. The position was utterly superfluous. Andrzej was a young man of leisure and relative means, which obviously made him a catch in the eyes of girls like Jessica - and their mothers. He smiled, akin to a satisfied frog upon a lily pad, as he pulled the chair out for her. Carefully positioning himself so as to be out of sight, yet close enough to discern the torturous scenes in front of him, Adam sat upon a tenement step opposite the cafe. Jessica's back was to him but he could all too clearly see the lust and slime in the straw-man's eyes.

  There was indeed love and hope in Andrzej Nelkin's eyes. After some of the things Jessica had said - and having spoken to a couple of his rivals himself - it appeared that he was her sole remaining suitor. Satisfaction thus polished the ego of the son of the Judenrat official. He had beaten off the competition. A sense of triumph was relished just as much as the prize, albeit the promise of finally consummating his relationship with Jessica also made Andrzej figuratively lick his lips that morning. He had begun to think her a tease and not worth the effort, especially since growing cold towards him during the last couple of occasions when they had spent time together. But now it would all be worth it. Hadn't he earned it too, what with the presents and favours that he had bestowed upon Jessica and her family?

  The pallid youth's heart sank to the point where Duritz felt physically sick. He tried but could not avert his eyes from his new world crumbling down around him. History was repeating itself. He felt empty but yet also consumed with resentment - towards her, him, fate, chaos. The ache was similar yet different to that of when he had suffered starvation in the ghetto. In the same way that he would have done anything for food back then, stolen a crumb out of an infant's mouth, murdered for a bite upon an apple, Duritz felt similarly desperate and hungry now for Jessica's love - anyone's love. It was Thomas Abendroth who had rescued him from starvation before, bringing rations in payment for his Polish lessons. But what could the good soldier do and say now to proscribe a remedy? The German optimist could afford to be optimistic. Adam reasoned sometimes that it would have been better if Thomas had just let him curl up, waste away and perish all those months ago - be delivered.

  There was little choice on the menu. Jessica allowed Andrzej to choose for her. He invested in a bottle of wine and poured out a generous measure in Jessica's glass in order to animate the girl and get her in the mood. Again she was remote. Their last two dates had ended prematurely with the girl, feigning illness, leaving early and denying him a kiss and feel. This time he would force the issue. He reached for her hand across the table but, seeing his sortie out of the corner of her eye; Jessica retracted it and took another sip of her wine.

  "Is something wrong? Have I done something wrong?" Andrzej innocently exclaimed.

  "No. Yes. Please don't be angry with me."

  Adam - pained, numb - slumped upon his step, the model of one of Turgenev's spurned and superfluous men. The youth attempted to smile philosophically. The only true love is unrequited love didn't someone once say? He could feel his forehead becoming sunburned for, though attempting to smile, his brow was still rippled in grief. He didn't blame her. He shouldn't hate her. He knew that obsessive hatred was just another reason to retain an attachment to someone. Adam even had to laugh to himself somewhat as he recalled the conceit that had coloured his reveries. He was John Rokesmith from "Our Mutual Friend", secretly keeping a loving and protective eye over Bella Wilfer and her family. One day she would discover who he really was, what he had done - and realise that she was good enough for him and he good enough for her. Folding up his old newspaper, which the voyeur hid behind to conceal himself from his subject, Duritz willed himself to return home. Sad. Despairing. Wistful. What little bread he had he gave out to the first child that approached him as he retreated back down the moribund street.

  "This is difficult for me. You've been such a good friend - and I want to stay your friend. But I cannot see you so much anymore Andrzej."

  Andzrej Nelkin's face that not two minutes ago had expressed sympathy and love now hardened like baked clay.

  "What a lovely speech, it almost seemed prepared or rehearsed. So, after providing for your family and keeping you alive by giving you work cards, what you're saying now is that you don't need me anymore?" Andrzej replied in a sarcastic tone that he too had played out before. Jessica didn't know how to answer. Her right hand trembled slightly on the table next to her glass. She looked distraught and vulnerable, a bird that could no longer fly. But Andrzej hadn't finished with the girl yet. A couple of gun shots hammered out from a few blocks away but, whilst Jessica flinched, the aggrieved suitor ignored them.

  "Is there someone else? Who is it?" the Jew demanded, as though this was the most important piece of information in the entire affair.

  She briefly, potently thought of Corporal Abendroth, his image idealised through the alchemy of attraction - but Jessica shook her head to both shake the soldier out of her mind and express to Andrzej that no, she had not found someone else.

  Andrzej breathed heavily through his nose, half snorting and half seething. His Slavic eyes ablaze he glared intently, accusingly, at the skinny diffident girl. He too then shook his head. Was it in disbelief that she could reject him? Was he just intensely disappointed in Jessica, or that it was all ending? Or was Andrzej shaking his head because he didn't believe her? - She who before the war always had a taste for goy. The black-haired, bony-faced unrighteous youth suddenly grinned to himself though. The petty egoist didn't want to show how much his pride had been tarnished. He came to the realisation that Jessica was just after all another notch on his belt. For all of their att
empts over the past few months to try and cultivate a normal relationship in the ghetto they were in the ghetto and nothing was permanent or rose above the ghetto. Should she have even been unfaithful to him he couldn't complain that much, after all he had other girlfriends in other districts and a clutch of felicitous prostitutes he could and did visit at anytime it pleased him to do so. Being in love with someone is not the same as wanting to make love with someone. Andrzej Nelkin wasn't in love with Jessica Rubenstein, as much as people might have thought that they would have made a good match. Despite this new found philosophical attitude though the rejected suitor still wanted to punish the ungracious harlot.

  "The reward that you might think you're getting from doing this will prove to be its own punishment so I'm not that bothered. Though you might still want to see me I don't want to see you anymore after this. I don't want some half-hearted friendship, like our half-hearted relationship. This meal is the last thing you're getting out of this mark. And don't ever come running back with your cup in hand, even when you realise that you've signed you're own death warrant. If you sometimes wonder to yourself late at night Jessica that there might be something wrong with you - there is!"

  Still embittered, though experiencing some form of exaltation through his speech, Andrzej calmly got up and searched for some coins in his pockets.

  "Feel free to finish the wine" he derisively remarked whilst throwing a handful of coins at a wounded Jessica. The bark-brown money scattered and landed on the girl's lap. Andrzej then marched away, dismissively gesticulating with his hand - exclaiming "She's unclean" - at the showy young woman, alerting the other customers that there was a scene occurring. Jessica forced herself to hold back the tears that welled in her already strained aspect, but she crimsoned and couldn't help but appear ashamed and guilty in the eyes of her judgemental audience. Yet Jessica had reason to feel neither shame nor guilt. Her chin sunk into her chest. She glanced up once, briefly, to see Andrzej storming off down the street, taking his buzz from the wine and erection off to Anna Weil, a high-priced prostitute who would make him feel better and special.

  Why did everything seem to go wrong for her? - despite or even especially when she had good intentions - Jessica would wonder to herself later that evening. As the sensible girl lay awake that sizzling night Jessica murkily wondered again whether her past sins were returning to haunt her? Had she not once been scornful of the policeman when young - and to a host of other boys who thought they were good enough for her? Had she not played with their feelings, teased them with hope and flirtation - and enjoyed it even more when crushing those hopes with a cruel word or snub? Andrzej had called her "unclean". Family and friends had turned on her years ago when she went out with Polish boys and men. Her mother had been furious and said it was a sin and what was wrong with this and that Jewish boy - not that she should have been worrying about boys anyway but studying hard at school. Yet Jessica, as proud and difficult as her mother, stubbornly disobeyed her parent's wishes and dismissed what people thought of her. They were all just jealous of her, both her girlfriends and more so the neighbourhood boys - who were quick to bad mouth her behind her back but then smiled and tried to chat her up to her face. Because she was pretty, because she could be sweet and manipulative, Jessica usually got everything she wanted. She guessed she believed in God, but where had been her prayers to Him? Her role-model in her late teens had been Scarlett O'Hara in ‘Gone With The Wind’. Jessica all too easily could indulge and play the puppy-dog suitors off each other (yet, unlike Scarlett, Jessica had no Ashley Wilkes or Rhett Butler in her story; she saw not the tragedy in her own life, so attracted was she to wanting to be the glamorous belle). She even went to a party once and played with her fan and got all the men to sit around her like Vivien Leigh would do in the film - which Jessica hadn't even seen. The girl needed only to pout, look doe-eyed - and no one could say "no" to her. Jessica Rubenstein had been spoiled, selfish, shallow she realised. How desperately the woman now wanted to atone for her past sins.

  The once heroine to her own once novel life sat at the cafe for what seemed like an age. Jessica was now as pale as she had been red when Andrzej had abused her. She nervously fingered the base and stem of the wine glass but drank from it not. A breeze first cooled but then chilled her face a little as she realised how much her brow, underneath her bonnet, had perspired. Jessica took heart from the fact that it was a needful thing what she had just done. A choking feeling of loneliness clouded around her but eventually it mingled with a strange sense of liberation, renewal.

  8.

  When Duritz returned home that afternoon he tried to plough himself into his work. Although he neither owned the concentration or strength to translate long passages from his faded edition of Plutarch's ‘Moralia’ he duly allocated himself the tasks of scanning the notes he had once made in the book - and assembled a group of quotes he could put together as a selection of aphorisms that could be inserted into the back of the book, which Duritz well knew he would neither publish nor even finish.

  "Do not speak of happiness to one less fortunate than yourself."

  "He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God."

  "To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."

  "For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human."

  "True virtue cannot be undermined by Fortune."

  "Trust in speakers often causes us to take in false and pernicious opinions without noticing it."

  The room was fuggy. Such truth and eloquence had once seduced Adam but it dawned upon him in the gloom how naive and worthless such sententions were. Reality, chaos, meaninglessness (whether through the negation of moral value or the negation of meaning through subjectivity and the trappings of language) mocked and ravaged the noble sentiments of his adolescence - of Plutarch, Rousseau, Spinoza, Emerson and the rest of the authors he once idolised. There are no necessary and sufficient properties. Words, words, words.

  Mentally fatigued and sensing a presentiment of abandoning the project, which he did not want to surrender to, Duritz put down his pen, closed his book and decided that he needed some air. He ascended the stairs and ventured out onto the roof of the tenement building. One could see for miles around from the tall block and the air often seemed cleaner, fresher to Duritz on his rooftop refuge. He used to visit here often before he became a policeman. On a clear day one could see the juicy green fields and skirt of the woodlands situated east of the charred city. He could also just make out the silvery rivulet which separated the two, where Adam used to fish as a child. He smiled, remembering his pride and the taste when he would catch a fresh fat trout and bring it home for his mother to grill for him with some fried onions and potatoes.

  Cigarette smoke floated across his face and snapped Duritz out of his reverie. He recognised the aroma. Without even having to look around Duritz knew that Anna Weil had joined him on his (their) rooftop retreat.

  Anna Weil had decided to seek some fresh air and solace herself. She had just seen Andrzej Nelkin, a grunter and thankfully quickie. He was also one of those customers who tried to make himself look like a big fish by paying extra. Anna was all too willing to stroke his ego and act grateful, all the while thinking to herself that he was a nebbish. She was surprised to see Adam Duritz on the roof. There had been a time when they had frequently arranged to meet here though. When he first became a policeman the smugglers who Anna worked for had offered her to him for the night as a gift and form of hush money. Duritz took them up on their offer but, realising that he had known Anna from the neighbourhood and that she now lived in his building, he couldn't go through with it for some reason. They had just talked. Adam soon lost his modesty however and they became lovers for a brief time, although the sex and relationship was casual. Both knew the trappings and disposable reality of the ghetto. You couldn't invest too much emotion, time and energy in each other. She thought him sweet, funny and
intelligent - but also sad; pity and intrigue as much as anything else attracted Anna to the policeman. Their relationship, if one could have deemed it that, soon ended; Adam started to become just like all the rest of them who used Anna or took her for granted. He changed. He developed a callous streak. So too, Adam saw Jessica in the street one day. Anna faded from view. There were no blazing arguments, no melodramatic scenes and few regrets. They just drifted apart by mutual, unspoken consent. Anna had thought about Adam Duritz occasionally though since their parting, particularly lately when she had heard that he'd somehow been temporarily relieved from being a policeman. How? Why?

  Duritz's immediate unconscious reaction to seeing Anna was one of pleasant satisfaction and he smiled at his ex-lover accordingly. As much as he wanted to be alone he wanted company as well. Adam couldn't help but realise how attractive, exotic, Anna had remained. As exploited as the prostitute was in the ghetto in some respects she was also considered untouchable - or at least very expensive. She was protected by the most powerful group of gangsters in the district. She numbered German soldiers, Judenrat officials and policemen among her patrons. The only group who Anna Weil refused to be used by were the vicious and leering Latvians and Ukrainians employed by the SS to police the ghetto. She despised them with a passion, more so than perhaps the Germans even. Although Anna had told no one about the crime, she had been gang raped by a group of them when she first entered the ghetto.

  Her complexion was still pinkish and healthy, as her wavy raven black hair still retained its body and shine. Such was her wealth and diet Anna looked like no other Jewish woman in the district. She was like royalty. Her face was plump, almost chubby. Her eyes were brown and warm, almost sultry. Her full rich lips were ruby red with cheap lipstick, which was in part made from red vegetable dye. A thin plume of smoke rose up from out of the side of her sensuous mouth. She smoked casually yet addictively for cigarettes were, for Anna, still easy to come by. A black leather overcoat, a size too small, emphasised her voluptuous figure with her invitational hips and large, shapely breasts.