The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no. For the time being, they leave me alone. But if they hear too much about my activities, especially from a man like you, they’ll make my life hell.’

  ‘Like me how?’

  ‘Spare me the false modesty,’ he replied, annoyance coarsening his voice. ‘You used to be important and you know it. So are we clear or not?’

  ‘I’d never inform on you,’ I told him, offended.

  ‘Maybe not on purpose, but Marcel, the young smuggler you met… he told me you’d mentioned me by name. You can’t do that. So, do I have your word?’ He looked at me coldly. I had the feeling he demanded absolute loyalty from those around him.

  ‘I promise I’ll never use your name,’ I told him.

  ‘Good. Now,’ he said in a softer tone, ‘if you’ll forgive me some advice, don’t use anyone’s real name or address. You’ll end up in the barbed wire yourself if you do.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed all the big machers at the Café Hirschfeld?’ he said, switching to Yiddish. ‘They’re becoming King Midases on our imprisonment. And when their gold is threatened…’ He drew a finger across his throat.

  He spoke Yiddish to convince me I could trust him despite his hostility, but such a ploy only irritated me. ‘Still,’ I told him, ‘I have to find out what happened to Adam.’

  ‘And I want you to!’ he assured me. ‘That’s why I’m here, and why I wrote out my list. Where can we sit together?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘At the kitchen table,’ I replied, gesturing for him to follow me.

  ‘Sorry for speaking to you harshly,’ he said, and when I turned to him, he smiled generously; his fever of anxiety had broken. ‘It’s like this, Dr Cohen,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I’m not naive. Things will go wrong for me sooner or later, but I want to put off that day as long as I can. You see what I’m saying?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I replied. Sitting opposite him, I felt as if I was his opponent in a game that only he knew how to play.

  ‘Your friend Abram made a mistake giving you my real name. Stupid risk. I’ve already had a long talk with him.’

  ‘Abram was upset. I’d just told him about my nephew.’

  ‘Upset?’ Grylek raised his eyebrows questioningly and added, ‘Wouldn’t you say all of us are upset? Look, Dr Cohen,’ he said in a more friendly tone, ‘let me explain how it is. Everyone in my world uses false names. So if you need to refer to me, call me Rabe – an anagram for Baer.’ He lifted out a square of paper from his shirt pocket and started to unfold it, then stopped. ‘You know, if you’re serious about investigating your grandnephew’s murder, you should adopt an anagram too. I thought about it on the way over here. Try Honec – I once met a Czech novelist with that surname.’

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ I replied – at the time, simply to please him.

  Grylek unfolded his paper and handed it to me. I put on my reading glasses because his letters were tiny and irregular. As I scanned the seven addresses of border crossings he’d jotted down, and the names of their guards, he took out a tin of German cigarettes – Muratti Ariston – and offered me one, which I accepted.

  ‘Smuggled?’ I asked.

  ‘You got it!’ he replied, grinning proudly. He lit my cigarette with a theatrical flare to his hand movements, then set the flame to his own and drew in deeply. I had the feeling he’d had dreams of being a Hollywood star when he was younger – and even today enjoyed a dramatic role.

  ‘Did you learn who asked my nephew to smuggle out an ermine jacket?’ I asked.

  ‘No luck, though I asked around.’

  In my nightmares, Heniek, I have seen Rabe as two men, one of them with a murderous glint in his eyes, speaking Polish, the other a ghetto Puck on the lookout for mischief, and who talks to me in a lilting, happy-go-lucky Yiddish. Still, I’m grateful to him; he made me understand the stakes we were playing for were high.

  ‘About the list – the names are all anagrams,’ he explained. ‘I’ve altered the street numbers as well.’

  ‘But I’ll never find the crossings this way!’ I moaned, holding my head in my hands.

  ‘You will!’ he replied cheerfully, like a magician happy to teach a protégé one of his tricks, ‘because I’m going to explain how it works.’ He opened his right hand to show me numbers written in pairs on his palm. The first coupling was 7-2. ‘When you see seven in an address, change it to two in your head. You got it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And once you know the code, you’ll know all the ghetto’s secrets,’ he joked.

  ‘I wish,’ I replied.

  ‘Just memorize the pairs now, and the street names, too. You’ll be able to rearrange them into their real names if you just sit down with a pen and paper for a few minutes. I guarantee it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.’

  ‘Look, I’m in no rush. When you tell me you’ve got everything safely in your head, I’ll wash my hand.’

  Committing his list to memory proved more difficult than I’d have imagined; I kept thinking of what delight Adam would have taken in this cloak and dagger work. Only after I’d finished – and as Grylek was scrubbing his palm at the sink – did I realize the obvious: my nephew had entered this underworld long before me.

  CHAPTER 8

  I do not dream that I am aware of, and I don’t believe I even sleep, though I wish I could; there are times when I am so weary of mind and body that I could cry for not being able to disappear into nothingness. Worst of all, blackness never welcomes me when I close my eyes. Instead, sepia afterglows float and jiggle across my vision – of Heniek’s face, his furniture, and all I have seen during the day. It is as if the barrier between outside and inside has faded.

  Sometimes I think I may be dispersing slowly into everything I see and hear. I will end as nothing and everything – as the wind, the sound of a dog barking, the concerned gaze of the only man in Warsaw who can see me…

  Though perhaps that’s just my hope. Who wouldn’t want a way of leaving the one life we have on earth without disappearing entirely?

  Still, there may be benefits to my new nature; now that I am what I am, maybe the past can be bent around to meet the present… As dawn rose this morning, I pictured Adam and myself as childhood friends, flying our kites together in Saski Square, and the deeper I moved into the embrace of all that might have been, the stronger my certainty that it was, in fact, a memory.

  Heniek insists on taking down my every word since he says that scribes are not editors, though he promises to add some annotations where necessary and to let me make as many cuts and modifications as I want when I’m finished.

  ‘I’d like a happy ending, even if there really isn’t one,’ I’ve told him.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he says, which means, naturally enough, that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe he suspects I have an important favour to ask him when we’re done and is trying to keep his options open. An intuitive man, our Heniek – perhaps even a minor prophet. After all, if he can see and hear me…

  By now – judging from his questions – I suspect that his real reason for being so meticulous is that he’s convinced a life-altering, kabbalistic moral to my story is going to burst out of one of my recollections, like a jack-in-the-box manufactured in Gerona or Jerusalem, and he doesn’t want to miss that heart-stopping moment. Isn’t that true, Heniek? (He’s shaking his head, but I can tell from the twist in his lips that he’s lying.)

  In times past, I’d have said his neurosis takes the form of hallucinations meant to diminish his sense of powerlessness, but I no longer make such judgements.

  I dictate and Heniek writes. It’s our private cabaret act.

  Our growing closeness makes me miss Izzy. More and more, I feel as if we were two halves of something that has no name. Will I ever see him again? And could it be that I’ve returned to tell not just my story, but his as well?

  Heniek undoubtedly has his
own ideas about why I’ve returned, but he doesn’t share them with me. ‘Secrets are my private blessing,’ he told me just this morning.

  As you can see, my host is also something of a poet, and before he retires to bed he sometimes reads me one of his recent verses. The soft, hushed sound of his voice is like wind over stone, which is just as it should be for poems written in a thousand-year-old city that is dying.

  Yesterday, at the end of my first day back in Warsaw, after telling Heniek about Adam’s death, I found it difficult to go on speaking. Craving the reassurance of human warmth, I reached out to take his hand. It was my first attempt to make physical contact with him, because I’d been worried that my touch might prove dangerous to the living.

  To my disappointment, my fingertips did not meet his flesh but instead eased an inch or so into him. To me, this overlapping of our borders felt pleasant – as if I was immersing my fingers in warm water – but not to Heniek. With a shriek, he drew back from me, nearly tumbling off his chair.

  He told me the pain was excruciating, as though his skin were being peeled away.

  After I apologized, I was silent for a long time, wondering if even talking to him could prove dangerous – if I might be turning him away from a better and safer path.

  ‘Please, tell me what you’re thinking, Erik,’ he requested, and his tone was so gentle and respectful that I did.

  With a smile of solidarity, that generous man then assured me that there was nothing he wanted more than to help me tell my story.

  ‘I feel sometimes I was born for this,’ he confessed. ‘After all, why have visions of the dead, if you cannot be of any assistance to them?’

  CHAPTER 9

  The evening after my nephew’s death, I apologized to Stefa for allowing Adam to leave the apartment. She received my words with her head down, unable to look at me. Unsure of what next to say, I started to tell her about having spoken to his friends.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ she hollered as if I were a criminal bent on corrupting her. ‘And for the love of God, don’t tell me anything about Wolfi and the others!’

  Climbing into her bed, she hugged Adam’s sketchbook to her chest and closed her eyes.

  ‘Forgive me for being so inept, Stefa,’ I told her, and I sat down next to her. At length, she took my hand and gave it a squeeze. I said nothing more, but the silence was filled with all my unspoken regrets.

  After tucking Stefa in to sleep, I changed Gloria’s water, then covered her cage and turned off the light. The darkness seemed my true home now. I sat by my niece, my hand on her shoulder so that even inside her dreams she would know I was beside her. I thought of her father and mother, who had adored her, and then my parents, and slowly, one by one, the room became peopled with everyone I’d ever loved. Adam brought my wife Hannah to me as though leading her towards a bed of wild flowers, and she was laughing at his merry insistence. Hannah had died just after Adam’s birth, but in my dream the boy was about five years old. He climbed up on to my lap when I summoned him forward. My tears of gratitude dripped on to his hair.

  ‘How’s Gloria?’ he asked me.

  ‘Not so good,’ I replied, and then I awoke and Adam’s death seemed to fill my mouth with blood.

  In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face. Removing the towel that Stefa had draped over the mirror, I stared at the skeleton-sockets I had for eyes, and at my cumbersome, blue-veined hands. Who was this useless man? How had I fallen so far?

  I knew that an emptiness with exactly Adam’s size and shape was awaiting me in my bed, so I fetched a woollen blanket and made a nest for myself in Stefa’s armchair.

  At dawn, I set out for the addresses I’d memorized. I showed my nephew’s photograph to seven guards and a dozen smugglers, but no one recognized him.

  At the funeral that morning, dread paralysed me, pounding so loudly in my ears that I barely heard the rabbi’s condolences. The ground was stone-frozen, too hellishly hard to make a ditch, though two gravediggers had used their picks to chip away an inch down as a symbolic gesture. Seventeen homemade coffins made of bare planks of wood – the smallest being Adam’s – were stacked around our quiet group, waiting for the spring thaw to be lowered into the earth. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon were six bodies wrapped in rough cloth; their families couldn’t afford coffins.

  Ewa, Rowy, Ziv and several other friends stayed close to Stefa during the ceremony. She had the frantic eyes of a lost child, but I didn’t go to her.

  Withholding oneself as a way of feeling the pain even deeper.

  When Stefa finally looked at me, I saw that she wanted to keep some distance between us as well. Perhaps she was thinking – like me – that it would be impossible to ever forgive me for failing to protect Adam.

  Stefa insisted on standing between the pale winter sun and the gravesite. I didn’t understand why until I noticed how her shadow stretched into the soil that would receive Adam this spring. Maybe she imagined that her dark embrace would accompany him into his resting place.

  A belief in magic can offer solace, even if we know it is a lie.

  I am with you – that’s what she was telling her son in the language of shadows.

  At a discreet distance behind Stefa and her closest friends stood a middle-aged woman in a brown headscarf, with a searching, foxlike face. She carried a book, which I found curious. When she noticed my gaze, she turned away quickly.

  Adam’s friend Sarah shuffled up to me leading her parents. A merciless wind from Russia was buffeting our little group, and the girl’s hair was swirling in her eyes. I put down the bag I’d brought with me and lifted her up. As I smoothed her hair back, she let her head fall against my chest, then shivered. I kissed her once and thanked her for coming, then handed her back to her father.

  Feivel’s mother soon came to me and told me – ashamed – that her son didn’t understand that Adam was dead. ‘He refused to come to the funeral. God forgive me, I couldn’t even get him dressed.’

  I kissed her cheek. ‘He’s better off at home.’

  She handed me a sketch that her son had done of Adam and Gloria a few weeks earlier. Drawn with scratches of wild colour, the budgie was riding on my nephew’s head. She was nearly as big as Adam.

  Feivel understood my nephew better than I did, I thought bitterly.

  Wolfi and his father then joined us, and the boy was crying silently. When I embraced him, his emotions loosened my own and I had to let him go. Izzy had guarded my back ever since our schoolyard snowball fights, and he hooked arms with me and took Feivel’s drawing. Turning me round, he had me face away from the grave, which must have seemed scandalous to some, but for me it was a godsend.

  Distance was my raft that day.

  Izzy whispered prayers to himself in Hebrew, and after a time I hung on to the sound of his voice. Still, I was angry with him, because he’d seen my pain and helped me, and I didn’t want to share my despair or diminish it.

  A psychiatrist who can’t cope, and who knows it. I’d fallen off a cliff, and the cliff was everything that Adam and I would never now do together.

  After the rabbi delivered his sermon, two Pinkiert’s men carried Adam’s coffin to where gravediggers had fought hard to chip down into the soil. When my turn came to shovel earth atop the casket, I took my nephew’s Indian headdress out of the bag I’d brought with me. On seeing it, I moaned; I’d forgotten about the feather I’d knocked off.

  I held it up to Izzy. ‘I should have fixed it. I wanted to put it on his casket.’

  He kissed my cheek. ‘Go ahead, Erik. What’s perfect has no place in the ghetto.’

  At the funeral of a child, the ground opens underneath you, and you tumble down, and you put up no resistance as the darkness throws its welcoming arms around you, because you cannot imagine sending a young boy or girl alone and naked into the underworld. If you have someone to live for – another son or daughter, a wife or husband – maybe you climb back out of the grave. Or maybe not. After all, people
give up all the time.

  I used to say they were irresponsible, but I’d been an arrogant fool.

  I climbed out of Adam’s grave. Stefa didn’t. In a way, our destinies were as simple as that.

  If they don’t see that I’m under the ground with my son when they look in my eyes, then what’s the use of telling them? I imagined Stefa was thinking that over the rest of the afternoon, and over the next days as well, because she refused to talk about her son ever again. That afternoon, around 1 p.m., her fever reached 39.2, and I discovered flecks of blood on her pillowcase. I’d sent everyone home by then and was sitting at the foot of her bed.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ I told her, getting to my feet.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked worriedly.

  ‘To get a doctor. This has gone on long enough.’

  A mother and her teenaged daughter were seated behind a pushcart outside our apartment, selling pickled cucumbers and carrots. The girl wore a Basque beret and a man’s coat, which made me understand we were raising a generation of Jewish children living under the weight of their dead parents. I offered her three złoty to carry a note to Mikael Tengmann. Jumping up, she slipped out of her coat, kissed her mother’s cheek and ran off.

  The girl knocked on my door a half-hour later, sweat beaded on her forehead, her beret in her hands. ‘Dr Tengmann says he’ll be here at six sharp,’ she told me.

  I gave her a one-złoty tip. Thanking me, she took a pale blue calling card from her pocket and handed it to me. Her name – Bina Minchenberg – was scripted in elegant calligraphy imitating the lion’s-paw shapes of Hebrew letters.

  ‘Who’s the artist?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s me,’ she replied, making an embarrassed face.

  ‘You’ve got talent.’

  ‘I’m also a very good cook,’ she told me, ‘and if you’ll pay me to prepare a meal for you on occasion, I’ll clean your apartment for no extra charge.’