The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  Mrs Sawicki wore gold slippers tipped by tiny pom-poms of fur, exactly like the ones on her sleeves. It seemed so ludicrous a fashion that it could only work in the movies.

  ‘Come this way,’ she told me welcomingly.

  Passing an antique wooden dresser and secretary, we reached a large sitting room in the centre of which lay a plush red rug the exact shade of Mrs Sawicki’s fingernails. On opposite sides of the rug were a white leather sofa and three Art Nouveau armchairs whose backs were shaped like lyres and painted gold. The seats and legs were black.

  I was dealing with a woman eager to go well with her furniture and decorations, but it was the space between and around things that put me on edge; having become used to our cramped clutter, this planet of comfort and wealth seemed menacing.

  ‘Sit here, Mr Honec,’ Mrs Sawicki told me, gesturing towards her sofa, which faced away from the windows. The buildings across the street crouched beneath the leaden sky, seeming to shrink away from winter. It was the tropics in here, however; the stove in the corner of the room – adorned with pink and white tiles in a geometric pattern – was radiating more heat than I’d felt in months. As I sat down, I thought bitterly of Stefa, one mile west and shivering under a mountain of blankets. Dislocation – heavy and hopeless – was the feeling that pulsed at the back of my head.

  I was already hot, but I kept my suit coat on to appear more authoritative. I placed my hat beside me.

  Mrs Sawicki sat opposite me in one of her small golden thrones. It was obvious by now that she was royalty in her own imagination, and not at all intimidated by me.

  ‘So, how is life at the Ministry of the Interior?’ she asked, the amused twist to her lips telling me that she regarded my work as unimportant. Leaning forward, she took a cigarette from an ivory box on the glass table between us.

  ‘With all the shipments of Jews coming in, we’ve been busy,’ I replied, standing up and offering her a light. She brushed my hand as she took it – a studied gesture, and a cliché, but the twinge in my gut, like a bolt opening, meant she had achieved her effect. She funnelled the smoke towards the ceiling and crossed her slender legs.

  I’d purchased a pack of Gauloises cigarettes to enhance my deception. Before sitting down, I stuck one in my mouth and lit it, then surveyed the room.

  On the glass coffee table between us I discovered a stack of Film Kurier magazines. The cover on top showed Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor leaning towards a passionate kiss. I remembered how disgusted Dorota had been that Anna and Paweł had had secret trysts at the cinema.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you speak wonderful Polish for a German,’ Mrs Sawicki told me.

  ‘My family moved to Warsaw when I was thirteen,’ I replied.

  ‘How nice for you. Where did your family live?’

  She was probably testing for the ghetto. ‘Tamka Street,’ I answered – it was where my uncle Franz had lived. ‘So my father could walk to his classes. He was a professor at the university.’

  ‘I see. Honec – that sounds Czech.’

  ‘My father was from Prague and my mother from Vienna – which was where I was born.’

  ‘An interesting upbringing, no doubt,’ she observed generously, and yet she smoked with abrupt, irritated gestures.

  Having repulsed her first attack, I grew bolder. By the entranceway to the bedrooms I’d spotted a Japanese watercolour of a yellow finch sitting on a tip of bamboo. Behind the exuberant little bird was a mist-covered mountain. I asked Mrs Sawicki if I could take a closer look.

  ‘By all means,’ she replied, energized by my interest.

  As I stepped up to the watercolour, I brushed my hand against the wall, which proved to be completely dry – as it would be if Anna had been killed here on 24 January.

  ‘It’s by Sakai Hōitsu,’ Mrs Sawicki told me. ‘Japanese, late eighteenth century – Rinpa school.’

  She was happy to show off her knowledge of Eastern art. I watched her smoke. She watched me watching. She adored the small spotlight I focused on her.

  ‘The finch and the mountain seem to be made of the same substance,’ I observed.

  ‘And I believe that substance is called paint,’ replied Mrs Sawicki, grinning.

  A genuinely witty comment, and to please her I laughed.

  All the artwork on her walls seemed to be from the Orient – and to be intended to tell guests that she was a cultured woman who had travelled far beyond the borders of Poland. So I ventured a guess: ‘Was your father in the diplomatic corps?’

  ‘I’m impressed, Mr Honec!’ she replied, making a small, deferential bow. ‘But it was Grandfather who was the ambassador in the family.’ In perfect German – proving my earlier conclusion about her language skills to be wrong – she added, ‘After finishing his career, he settled in Vienna. Whenever I visited him, he loved to take me out to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, on the Opera Ring. They had the best Sachertorte in all Austria – despite what the owners of the Sacher Hotel would like you to believe. Did you ever dine there, by any chance?’

  Mrs Sawicki was trying to catch me out. Was I not acting my part cleverly enough?

  ‘If you’ll excuse a small correction,’ I told her, emphasizing my Austrian accent, ‘the Imperial is on the Kaerntner Ring. And I’m afraid it was beyond my father’s means.’

  ‘So it is, Mr Honec, so it is.’ Her lips were pursed with amusement again; she was aware that I knew she’d been testing me. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she told me in Polish, ‘I’ll get dressed so we can talk properly.’

  Mrs Sawicki still didn’t seem to regard me as a worthy opponent. As though to prove her wrong, I stubbed out my cigarette as soon as she had swept out of the room and started searching her furniture for anything related to Anna or Adam. In the cabinet below the Victrola, classical symphonies predominated, but I found a record by Hanka Ordonówna with Paweł’s signature on the centre label. Wouldn’t he have taken a favourite recording with him to boarding school?

  In the secretary in the foyer were envelopes printed with Mrs Sawicki’s name in gold lettering, along with a dry inkwell and a puckered old apple that must have been hidden and forgotten, possibly by a younger sibling of Paweł’s. On a sudden whim, I took three envelopes and stuffed them in my coat pocket. In the dresser were linens and a set of Jugendstil silverware in a wooden case. Easing it open, I lifted out six demitasse spoons. When I placed them beside the envelopes, the rest of my visit with Mrs. Sawicki was destined to beat with the damning evidence of thievery concealed in my pocket.

  I’d needed to take something of value from her. I didn’t know or care why. My belly was aching with hunger and anxiety, and that seemed far more important.

  I sat back down when I heard Mrs Sawicki’s footsteps approaching and lit another cigarette. She entered in a tightly fitted long blue dress. Her high heels were black and her lipstick blood red. Her eyes were thickly shaded with dark brown mascara, so that they looked bruised. She’d become the dramatic heroine of an Erich Maria Remarque novel.

  Walking to the coffee table in front of me, she straightened the Film Kurier I’d noticed so that it was flush with the others and then sat opposite me again, joining her hands together in her lap as if afraid to be too expressive; perhaps my presence was worrisome, after all. Maybe her beloved Paweł had murdered Anna – or had been witness to a tragic accident – and she was worried I’d learn the truth and bring scandal on the family.

  I took off my coat because I was sweating heavily. ‘I’ll get to the point,’ I told my host. ‘The missing girl’s name is Anna Levine. I believe she might have come here. Her mother says that your son was her boyfriend.’

  Mrs Sawicki forced a laugh. ‘Paweł would never take a Źydóweczka as a girlfriend.’ She pronounced Jew-girl as if spitting out dirt. I’d have liked to drag her back to the ghetto and leave her to fend for herself for a few weeks.

  ‘Still,’ I told her, ‘I know she came here on the twenty-fourth of January.’

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p; She pinched a piece of lint from the hem of her dress. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘She’d needed to talk to Paweł,’ I observed. ‘She was ill, and she wanted his help.’

  ‘I told you, my son didn’t know any Źydóweczka named Anna.’ Noticing the curl of ash at the tip of my cigarette, Mrs Sawicki moved the crystal ashtray closer to me.

  ‘I’d prefer to keep our talk friendly,’ I told her. ‘Are you sure you never met Anna?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  I tapped the ash on to the rug. She gave me a murderous look but didn’t move. I had the feeling she could have held her hand over a candle flame to spite me.

  ‘I have a reliable witness who told me Anna was here,’ I challenged her; my anger was giving me a kind of reckless courage.

  She stood up and walked to the window, her steps precise, barely controlling her rage. When she turned, her eyes targeted me. ‘Paweł and the girl went out a few times,’ she told me, ‘but as soon as I found out, I put a stop to it.’

  ‘And Anna came here on the twenty-fourth of January.’

  ‘How could I possibly remember the exact date? In any case, when she came to my door, I told her that Paweł was at boarding school, but the silly girl didn’t believe me. She insisted on coming in – she even had the nerve to search his room without my permission.’ Mrs Sawicki grimaced. ‘She stank up the apartment – for a week it smelled like a stables in here.’

  Because we have no hot water, and we have run out of proper soap, I wanted to shout at her. Instead, I said, ‘Jews are filth.’

  ‘No, Mr Honec, if they were just filth,’ she replied in a lecturing voice, ‘they wouldn’t represent such a danger to us. I’m afraid they’re much more than that.’

  ‘Then how would you describe them?’ I asked.

  ‘As a subversive story that has finally come to an end.’

  Her words rattled me, and I nodded my agreement to cover my unease. ‘If only you’re right,’ I told her. ‘Now, do you know where Anna went after she left here?’

  ‘Back to her stables,’ she replied, grinning as if she’d made another witticism.

  ‘Did she say if she was going to meet a friend?’ I asked.

  ‘She told me nothing. She was only here a minute – less than that…’

  ‘Did you see anything special on her hands – a ring or a bracelet?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘Think back, if you can.’

  ‘What are you implying?’ she bristled. ‘You can’t possibly think she was wearing anything my son had given her! Mr Honec, this was just a minor fling for Paweł. It meant nothing.’

  I stood up and handed her my photograph of Adam. ‘Have you seen this boy?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘His name was Adam. Did Anna mention a boy with that name, by any chance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she give you anything? A letter?’

  Mrs Sawicki glared at me over her nose as if I was trying her patience. I took a last puff on my cigarette and crushed it out on the windowsill. Tears welled in her eyes.

  ‘If you’re holding something back from me,’ I threatened, ‘then your husband will lose his job.’

  ‘Mr Honec, it’s clear to me that you don’t understand the Poles. We’re a proud people who have been oppressed for centuries, and we don’t like being given orders by foreigners.’ She was sitting up straight – she regarded herself as heroic and was posing for later recall.

  ‘Who’s giving orders?’ I asked in an amused voice. ‘I’m just asking questions.’

  ‘Questions can be orders under certain circumstances.’

  ‘You’re a clever lady, Mrs Sawicki.’

  ‘You better believe it!’ she exclaimed, as if she were giving me a warning.

  ‘But I don’t need to be clever,’ I told her. ‘Because I make up the rules as I go.’ I knocked my dead cigarette on to the parquet with the back of my hand.

  The tendons on her neck stood out threateningly. ‘You are, I suppose, aware you have no manners?’ she demanded in an aristocratic voice.

  ‘I’m only rude when my patience is being tested,’ I retorted.

  ‘The Jewish slut gave me a photograph for my son,’ she admitted. ‘She’d written something on the back, but I burned it.’

  ‘What did she write?’

  ‘I don’t read Paweł’s correspondence!’ she snarled.

  It was my turn to laugh.

  ‘I don’t appreciate being ridiculed by old Austrians!’

  ‘Then who do you enjoy being ridiculed by?’ I asked with a provocative smile.

  ‘Who or what I enjoy is not your concern.’

  ‘That’s true – nothing about you concerns me,’ I shot back with deadly contempt, ‘except what you know of Anna Levine.’

  ‘I didn’t read what she wrote!’ she shouted.

  ‘Mrs Sawicki,’ I said more gently, ‘if we banter back and forth, we’ll just keep offending each other. Just tell me what Anna wrote to Paweł.’

  She straightened the shoulders of her dress, considering her options. At length, she said, ‘She wrote that she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called. She had important news for him. She begged him to call her or at least send her his new address.’

  ‘Which he never did, because you never told your son that Anna had come here.’

  ‘Of course, not. Why would I help her trap my son?’

  ‘So you were worried he really was in love with her,’ I observed.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Do you really think a fifteen-year-old knows what love is?’

  ‘Do you?’ I asked pointedly.

  ‘Mr Honec, you can be very annoying.’

  ‘In any case, it’s curious that Anna disappeared just after visiting you,’ I told her.

  ‘I know nothing about what happened to her after she left here.’

  ‘Write down Paweł’s new address for me.’

  She went to the secretary in the foyer, took out a sheet of paper and scribbled quickly. Paweł’s boarding school had an address in Zurich. Folding the paper in four, I put it in my pocket, and on a hunch, I said, ‘Did you think you’d fool me so easily?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Paweł is still here in Warsaw, isn’t he?’

  ‘Wait here.’ She disappeared through the door at the side of the sitting room and returned with an envelope bearing a Zurich postmark. Taking out the letter, which was written on thin blue paper, she handed it to me. ‘If you look at the date and signature, you’ll see Paweł wrote it two months ago.’

  She lit another cigarette as I confirmed what she said. Her contemptuous stare gave me an exaggerated sense of being nowhere close to where I wanted to be. I had the feeling the world was speaking to me, but at a pitch so high that I couldn’t hear the message. I handed her back her son’s letter, though, like Anna, I wasn’t convinced that everything was as it seemed.

  ‘Now get out of my apartment,’ she ordered harshly, ‘or I’ll call my husband and have you arrested. He’s an important judge, and Governor Frank is a family friend. So if you think you will ever do anything to hurt my Paweł, then you are…’

  ‘If Governor Frank were such a friend,’ I cut in, ‘then why did you tell me the truth about Anna? You have to know that I suspect that you might be behind her disappearance. Or is it your son who’s responsible?’

  Mrs Sawicki shot me a hateful look. ‘I only told you about the girl because she means nothing to me or my son – dead or alive.’

  ‘I never said she was dead!’ I declared.

  ‘Hah!’ she sneered. ‘If you think you’ve caught me out, then you’re a fool, Mr Honec. You must suspect she’s dead or you wouldn’t be here. In any case, I can’t imagine why she means anything to the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

  ‘That, Mrs Sawicki, is no concern of yours,’ I told her with poisonous calm, and before she could come up with a reply, I went to retrieve my coat and hat from the sofa.
r />   When I returned to the foyer, it was clear from her contemptuous face that we had nothing more to say to each other. I nodded by way of goodbye and reached for the door handle, turning away from her. A mistake. I felt a burn near my elbow. She’d pressed something through my sweater into my skin. Stinging with pain, I swung out my arm and caught her on the mouth with the back of my hand, knocking her into the wall. Righting herself, she dropped her cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with the toe of her shoe. Reaching up to her lip, which was cut, she took some blood on to her fingertip and licked it.

  Tears of shock and pain had welled in my eyes. I wiped them away roughly.

  ‘Now you’ll never go anywhere again without a scar from me!’ she told me, and she laughed in a triumphant burst.

  Mrs Sawicki was treacherous enough to have murdered Anna, and she was obviously given to violent outbursts, but why would she have taken the girl’s hand?

  Might Paweł have been so passionately in love with Anna that he gave her a precious family heirloom – a bracelet – without thinking of how angrily his mother would react? After all, Mrs Sawicki had become particularly defensive when I’d mentioned Anna’s jewellery. Maybe Anna had kept the gift concealed from her mother and friends. On the day she ventured out of the ghetto, she somehow sealed the clasp so that it couldn’t be taken from her without also taking her hand.

  And yet with a judge for a husband, Mrs Sawicki would have found a legal way to recover any keepsake that Paweł had given Anna. She would have claimed, in fact, that the girl had stolen it. No government official would have believed Anna’s word against hers.

  Furthermore, it seemed impossible that Mrs Sawicki could have had anything to do with Adam’s murder. How would she even have known of his existence?

  In the lobby, I took Izzy’s arm and rushed him away, sure that we’d be in danger as long as we remained nearby. Despite myself, I’d begun to fear that Mrs Sawicki could stop my heart with a single, well-directed thought.

  She was gazing down at us from her balcony as we crossed the street. And all that day she would wheel above my thoughts like a bird of prey.