The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  ‘But where is everyone?’ I asked, fearing they’d been killed.

  ‘On vacation,’ she replied. ‘It’s summer.’ She pointed to the big yellow sun at the top of her drawing.

  I smiled at her, grateful for the warm days and nights in her imagination.

  My niece must have told Ewa the nature of her quarrel with me; on hearing the taps in the bathroom running, Helena and I went in and discovered Ewa washing Adam’s shirt in the bathtub. She hung it on a cord we strung across my room.

  At just before eight, Ewa kissed me goodnight and led Helena to the door. I tried to give her money for a rickshaw – one of the bicycles mounted with a seat in front that had become common on our island by then – but she refused.

  I propped Stefa up with pillows and spooned soup into her mouth, but she ate with inner-turned eyes and said nothing to me.

  Then – God knows why – I sat at my desk and wrote a list of all the people I had known who were dead, starting with Adam and Hannah. I counted them when I was done: twenty-five. I spent another hour working on the list and came up with two more. But I still wasn’t satisfied.

  Only then did I remember that my mother became a frenzied list-maker after my younger brother was born. Papa and I would find her numbered inventories everywhere around the house. Years later, I asked her about it, and she told me it was the only way she could keep her head above the high water of having two children to raise.

  On a whim, I inserted Erik Honec after my mother’s name, and it was a relief to see my alter ego there; it meant I would escape the ghetto one way or another.

  I settled into Stefa’s armchair for the night. She stirred only once, some time after midnight, needing to pee, and her fever was down a little in the morning. She thanked me in a strong voice when I handed her a cup of hot tea sweetened with molasses and the sugar crystal I’d saved. I felt she’d returned home and kissed her cheek in welcome. After smearing rhubarb jam on her toast, I fed her pieces on the end of a fork. She joked about my aristocratic table manners, which seemed a very good sign, but while I was in the kitchen making myself some ersatz coffee, she called out, ‘Is Adam’s shirt dry yet?’

  I went in to her. Maybe something in my expression reminded her of the truth; her eyes opened wide in horror and she brought her hands to her mouth.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she whispered timidly.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ I said, rubbing her feet through the covers. ‘You’ll tell me whatever you want, and I’ll make no judgements. I promise.’

  I made that vow because I couldn’t bear the thought of being remembered as an unfair uncle after I was gone.

  ‘No,’ she told me firmly. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’

  I stood up and retreated to the kitchen. There was a knock on the door while I was staring mindlessly into my coffee. I found Wolfi, Feivel and Sarah looking up at me from the landing. Their little faces were fearful; I suppose they thought that Adam’s death might have turned me against them.

  ‘Hello, Dr Cohen, we… we came to see Gloria,’ Feivel told me hesitantly.

  ‘She’s not doing so good,’ I replied. ‘But you can come in and feed her if you like.’

  While Feivel and Wolfi spilled seeds into her dish, Sarah carried the budgie’s water cup back from the sink in both her hands, determined not to spill a drop. Her clenched determination gave me an idea.

  ‘Maybe one of you could adopt Gloria,’ I suggested. ‘Adam would want that.’

  Wolfi said, ‘My dad hates pets. And he says birds shit all the time.’

  Feivel gazed down, swirling his foot. Sarah bit her lip, looking as if she wanted to dash away.

  ‘Forget what I said,’ I told them. ‘I was being thoughtless.’

  ‘No, I’ll take her!’ Feivel announced, and he nodded hard when I looked at him, as if to convince us both.

  As the two boys carried the cage downstairs, Sarah looked back at me for a moment, as though to fix me and the apartment in her memory, and I realized – with despair clutching at me – that I’d never see her or any of Adam’s other friends ever again.

  At 9.15, I left Stefa alone to visit Mrs Rackemann. She let me into her shop and locked the door with a firm twist of her hand.

  The forger she’d hired – who went by the name of Otto – had typed me a document on Nazi stationery identifying Erik Honec as Sub-Director for the Warsaw District of the Reichsministerium des Innern, the Ministry of the Interior. I’d suggested the Reich Census Office, but Mrs Rackemann informed me that Otto had advised something more general, in case I ever embarked on another escapade demanding a slightly different government posting.

  She grinned cagily on telling me that – she plainly adored trying to outwit the Nazis.

  I tilted the stationery towards the light from her desk lamp. At the top of the sheet of off-white paper, the Nazi emblem – an eagle perched on a wreath centred by a swastika – looked sinisterly impressive. And the embossed stamp at the bottom seemed to be the real thing. As I ran my finger over its surface, Mrs Rackemann said, ‘Otto’s pretty damn good, isn’t he?’

  ‘A real pro,’ I agreed.

  ‘He produced papers for the Polish Interior Ministry for several years. He knows what he’s doing – though he wished you’d supplied him with a photograph.’

  ‘I might have lost my nerve if I’d gone home to get one. Besides, a Pole won’t know what to expect, and I’m not planning on identifying myself to any German officials.’

  After I promised her the rest of her payment the next day, Mrs Rackemann handed me a pen for the last detail. I signed my new name with the decisive flourishes I’d practised – a vow of revenge turned to ink.

  Having had hundreds of Christian acquaintances before being forced into the ghetto, I’d decided that a change of appearance was in order before I ventured into the Other Side; after all, if someone recognized me and denounced me, I’d be executed on the spot. So before going home, I bought hair dye at a beauty parlour on Nalewki Street.

  The homemade concoction turned into a frothy, milky-brown cream when I mixed it with water, and it tickled my scalp. I had my doubts about its effectiveness, but when I washed it off, my hair was black and shiny. The contrast with my ghostly skin and deep wrinkles made me look like an aged flamenco dancer clinging desperately to youth. My eyes seemed smaller, too, as if the I inside me were trapped in a deep cave.

  Taking off my clothes and sitting close to my heater, I sponged off weeks of grime as best I could with our mushy ghetto soap. Then I shaved carefully, and dabbed my chin and cheeks with Stefa’s rosewater perfume.

  I dressed in my chestnut-brown woollen suit, which I hadn’t worn since the day I’d moved into Stefa’s apartment, but the heavy fabric sagged clownishly off my shrunken shoulders, so I put on a jumper underneath. I didn’t wear my overcoat because it looked like a rag. Better to freeze than risk ruining my disguise.

  As a last touch, I went to see Izzy to borrow his Borsalino. He’d recently moved his old army cot into his workshop because three newly arrived cousins of his were living in his apartment and he was feeling cornered.

  On opening his door to me, he grimaced. ‘Gottenyu, Erik!What the hell happened to you?’

  ‘I needed a new identity,’ I explained, stepping inside.

  ‘And it involves putting a dead crow on your head?’

  ‘I’m a zookeeper in a Yiddish farce,’ I quipped.

  ‘They keep typecasting you!’ he observed gleefully; even in grief – especially then – Izzy thrived on repartee.

  ‘Tell me the truth – could I pass for the me I used to be?’

  He sized me up, having to choose between humour and honesty. ‘That depends on which you you intend to impersonate,’ he replied. ‘But why would you want to?’

  ‘Never mind that. I’ll need your Borsalino. Where is it?’

  ‘So you’re trying for the romantic lead, after all?’ A lecherous spark went off in his eyes.

  ‘Listen, if I
don’t come back, take any clothing of mine you want. And take my books.’

  ‘If you’re up to something dangerous, I want to know what it is.’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Tell me the condensed version or you can forget my help.’

  After I told him about Anna, and showed him my Interior Ministry papers, he made clicking noises with his tongue – Izzy’s code for a risky adventure – then slipped into the stationery warehouse behind his workshop to fetch his Borsalino. I needed to pee and went to the lavatory, which was a tin bucket hidden behind a folding screen. Hanging from the ceiling were paper arrows pointing towards Moscow, New York, Rio de Janeiro and the North Pole. A bigger one, facing southwest, read: Boulogne-Billancourt: 1,300 kilometres; Izzy’s two adult sons – Ryszard and Karl – both worked as aircraft mechanics in that industrial suburb of Paris.

  Back in his workroom, he handed me his hat. He already had his muffler on and was buttoning his coat.

  ‘So, what’s your problem, Dr Freud?’ he asked when he was done, lifting those furry eyebrows of his; I must have been showing him a puzzled look.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied; by then, I’d realized that having him join me was the real reason I’d come over.

  ‘Watch this!’ he said, and he pulled a white silk handkerchief from out of nowhere – a trick from his days of performing magic shows aboard the Bourdonnais, the French ocean liner on which he’d worked as a steward in his youth.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  Folding it in a square, he put it in my breast pocket. ‘Now you look a man not to be taken lightly!’ he observed triumphantly.

  ‘Or maybe just a well-dressed zookeeper,’ I retorted.

  Rabe hadn’t yet arrived at 1 Leszno Street. We paid our ten złoty to a teenage guard wearing diving goggles; the cellar had recently become a rickshaw assembly plant and he doubled as a welder. About twenty men and boys – bare-chested and dripping with sweat – were hammering bicycle wheels, filing fenders, patching tyres… Izzy and I headed past them to the back, as we’d been instructed. The smell of burnt rubber and axel grease packed my nose. We climbed up a set of stairs to a scarred wooden door.

  ‘Could it be this simple?’ he asked.

  I turned the brass handle and pushed open the door. We were in a dimly lit hallway. The guard we’d been told about had a grim moustache and dull eyes. He was eating an apple. Looking us up and down, he said in a gruff Polish, ‘Take off your Jewish armbands.’

  Once they were safely hidden in our pockets, he pointed to a rickety wooden staircase at the end of the hallway. ‘One flight up,’ he grumbled.

  We came to a door giving out on a courtyard with a marble fountain at the centre: Pan balancing on one leg and playing his flute. Crossing over the flagstones, we entered the front hallway. Empty wooden crates were scattered around. We pushed through the front door into a sunlit street.

  Izzy and I stopped right away, staring at the buildings around us like dazed insects after a thunderstorm.

  The biggest difference was the smell, though I didn’t realize that until we’d walked for twenty minutes and were standing under the spires of the Holy Cross Church. The pet-shop stink of the ghetto had disappeared.

  We whispered our amazement in Polish; we dared not speak Yiddish outside our own territory.

  Walking ahead, I tried to regain the confident gait of the Before Time – as I’d come to think of the time prior to the German occupation of Warsaw – but I kept lapsing into the hunched shuffle we’d all acquired. The ghetto paso doble, Izzy called it.

  A dozen or so drunken German soldiers were singing disconnected harmonies on a melody I didn’t recognize while wavering along the sidewalk in Zbawiciela Square. Hunching our shoulders, we made ourselves as compact as possible and rushed the other way around the traffic circle.

  ‘We must look like two fucking matzo balls!’ Izzy whispered to me.

  In more favourable circumstances, I’d have burst out laughing.

  Disappearing into the crowds on Marszałkowska Street made me shudder with relief. And good memories cheered me, too; Hannah and I used to come shopping here when we were courting – safe from our nosy parents and their gossip-greedy spies.

  Feeling safe, I punched Izzy on the arm – hard enough to stun him but not to hurt.

  ‘What’s that for?’ he asked, feigning anger.

  ‘For trying to make me laugh in front of German soldiers.’

  ‘So, what other choice do I have?’ he asked, giving a Yiddish lilt to his question.

  I turned in a circle to take in the dimensions of our temporary escape – and to gauge our vulnerability. No one was staring at us. A good sign.

  ‘The thing that troubles me,’ I told Izzy, ‘is that I don’t think anyone on this side of the border knows yet that Adam is dead. They probably don’t want to know anything of what we’re going through.’

  Izzy spoke to me then about how my nephew’s murder had damaged his faith, using his idiosyncratic clockmaker’s metaphors – bent springs, wayward escape wheels… I listened closely to his stop-and-start confessions because I sensed he’d never reveal his heart to me like this inside the ghetto, and I was touched that he would risk talking to me of God, since I’d always been such an obstinate atheist. When he was done, I stared into the despair of his eyes, and it seemed that our friendship was the only way either of us would make it out of the frigid ocean we’d found ourselves in.

  I whispered to him the one-line poem I’d been saving: ‘Children are transformed into adults on passing through the threshold of Gehenna.’

  ‘And what about adults themselves?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll have to think about that.’

  As we walked on, I realized the time had arrived to broach a subject that had come close to drowning our friendship forty years earlier. ‘Listen, Izzy, I’m sorry for disappointing you all those years ago. I was awful to you. Forgive me.’

  He came to a halt, stunned.

  ‘I should have apologized years ago,’ I continued. ‘I was a fool.’

  It was good that we were speaking Polish; it was easier to venture out of my usual self in a language that wasn’t the one I’d been living in of late.

  He gazed down, unsure of how to reply. His jaw was throbbing. ‘You didn’t know what damage you could do. We were both too young to behave like men.’

  For men, he risked using the word mensch, and its Yiddish nuances implied that we hadn’t been ready to be good and generous with each other – let alone, with everyone else.

  He and I stepped a little lighter across the rest of the journey that day, and I realized it no longer mattered that we’d never shared a bed; we were together now. Our renewed closeness was the one thing for which we owed the Nazis our thanks.

  Soon, a troubling question came to me, however: might Adam’s killer also have been freed from previous taboos by the German occupation?

  Paweł’s building was in the Stary Mokotów neighbourhood, an elegant section of the city guarded by broad, bare-limbed linden and birch trees. Two marble caryatids with smashed noses flanked the entryway. The tile floor – a checquerboard pattern – was sticky. The post box for 5B was labelled Sawicki.

  ‘I really hope Paweł’s mother will be as intimidated by Germans as most Poles,’ I told Izzy.

  He and I had reasoned that the boy’s father would be at work.

  ‘Growl at her every now and again – like you do at me,’ he replied, grinning. He gave me a little shove towards the staircase – one soldier to another. ‘Festina lente’ – hurry slowly – he added, shaking a teacherly finger; it was what our Latin professor, Dr Borkowski, used to tell us when the bell rang at the end of class.

  Izzy waited downstairs. On the fifth-floor landing, I untied my scarf, took off my gloves and put on the Nazi armband that Mrs Rackemann had managed to secure for me. The swastika raised gooseflesh, but it also freed my imagination – the paradox of a good deception.

  A
n attractive woman in a pink, floor-length nightgown – with silly carnation-like tufts of fur on her cuffs – answered my knocks. I’d have guessed she was forty, though her chestnut-brown hair was cut in a long fringe, which had the effect of making her look girlish. She had an intelligent face, but hard.

  ‘Mrs Sawicki?’ I asked, taking off Izzy’s Borsalino.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Honec. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m from the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

  I gave my voice the shading of an Austrian accent – I’d decided that, like me, Honec had lived in Vienna for a time.

  We shook hands. Hers was cold but soft, and her long fingernails were painted cherry red; she plainly didn’t need to do housework, even under German occupation.

  ‘Is your husband in?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, he’s at work, but perhaps I can help you. Is something wrong?’

  ‘Nothing terribly important. It’s just that we’ve lost track of a young woman – Jewish. I’m told that you might know her.’

  ‘Unlikely – I don’t socialize with Jews.’

  ‘Very wise,’ I observed. ‘But I’d still like to speak with you a moment.’

  ‘I’m not yet dressed, as you can see.’

  ‘I have my orders,’ I replied stiffly, ‘and I wouldn’t want you to have to come down to our office. It’s way across town.’

  ‘Do you have some identification?’

  I took out Otto’s handiwork and handed it to her. She scanned the text quickly – too quickly, as though trying to convince me she was absolutely fluent in German.

  ‘All right, come in,’ she said, handing me back my forgery but not bothering to hide her frown.

  One test passed. I stepped inside. The floor was handsome, dark parquet, and the scent of fresh paint made my nose itch. I was evidently ready to embrace any clue, no matter how small; I pictured the blood from Anna’s severed hand splattering against the walls, which had been given a concealing coat of whitewash.