We made it to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street at just past one in the afternoon. I recognized the balding shop manager who’d sold me a floral pin for Liesel two years before, but he didn’t know me, which was a relief. Still, Mrs Sawicki had unnerved me and I fumbled Hannah’s ring when I took it out of my pocket. It crashed on to his wooden desk.
He snatched it up with an agile hand. ‘Got ya!’ he exclaimed.
‘Thanks,’ I told him.
‘You needn’t have worried,’ he observed. ‘Diamonds are a lot harder than people.’
A surprising comment. Izzy looked at me sideways, which meant don’t let him trick you into saying anything about yourself.
The jeweller put a loop in his eye and turned the ring to catch the diffuse winter light from his window. At length, he said, ‘I’ll give you two thousand seven hundred for it.’ His toothy smile meant that he was giving me a great deal.
‘It’s worth three times that,’ I stated for the record.
‘Not to someone in your position,’ he retorted.
The moist chill at the back of my neck was my fear that he did remember me – and knew I was a Jew. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, figuring I might try to intimidate him.
‘You badly need cash or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Three thousand five hundred,’ Izzy said, ‘or we go elsewhere and you lose big.’ He spoke with a Jimmy Cagney snarl to his words.
‘Your bodyguard?’ the jeweller asked me, smirking. His comment was meant to put Izzy in his place, since he wasn’t quite five foot four even on his best day.
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been his bodyguard for sixty years,’ my old friend replied.
And then he took a gun out of his coat pocket.
‘Shit!’ the jeweller exclaimed, jumping up from his stool.
‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ I whisper-screamed at Izzy.
‘Protecting us,’ he replied calmly.
‘Don’t shoot me!’ the man pleaded. Taking a step back, he held up both his hands as if to stop an onrushing carriage.
The pistol was bulky and black – and stunningly dangerous. ‘Does it work?’ I asked.
‘You bet,’ Izzy told me happily. ‘It’s German, and I just cleaned it the other day.’ He jiggled it: ‘Very sensitive – might even go off accidentally…’ Here, he targeted his vengeful eyes on the jeweller – ‘and kill the rudest person in the room. Now who do you think that might be?’
‘There’s… there’s no need for violence,’ the man assured him in a trembling voice.
‘Glad we agree,’ Izzy replied. He kissed the barrel of the gun, then held the tip to his ear, pretending to listen closely. ‘Right, you got it, baby,’ he said, as if he were a hitman speaking to his girlfriend. He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘Marlene wants to know if we get our three thousand?’ he asked. ‘She’s concerned. And when she’s concerned, it’s best to pay attention. You got that?’
‘I understand. I’ll give you… two thousand nine hundred.’
The jeweller still wanted to bargain? This was craziness! Izzy caught my glance and raised his shoulders to prompt my reply. I could see he was looking forward to bragging about his performance.
‘It’s a deal,’ I said.
‘It’ll take me at least an hour to get the money,’ the jeweller told us. ‘Come back at two-thirty.’
‘Why in God’s name did you bring a gun?’ I asked Izzy as we hurried away. I was stomping over the cobbles, worried that someone had seen his weapon through the shop window.
‘You should be thanking me,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘I’ve cured your paso doble!’
I scowled at him, which made him flap his hand at me as if I was being a pest. ‘Look, Erik, ‘Did you really think I was going to venture into a city run by anti-Semitic cavemen with just Yiddish curses to defend us? Sorry, but I ain’t that meshugene.’
‘Where’d you get it anyway?’ I asked, conceding his point.
‘It was Papa’s. It’s an 1896 Model 2 Bergman – five millimetre.’ Whispering, he said, ‘Feels damn good in my hand. Maybe I was born to be a gunslinger!’
‘Do you really know how to use it?’
‘Erik, it doesn’t require a doctorate from the Sorbonne,’ he replied, snorting. ‘It takes a five-round clip – couldn’t be easier. Besides, you learn a lot about a pistol when you take it apart and give it a cleaning. It’s a lot simpler to put back together than a Swiss cuckoo clock, I can tell you that!’ He took my arm. ‘I thought it was a good touch my kissing the pistol – and calling it Marlene. Nobody would think a Jew would do that.’
As we walked down Spacerowa Street, Izzy and I debated whether the jeweller would keep up his end of our bargain. We could easily believe that his greed would win out over his anger – and whatever suspicions he had about us – but we also knew he might simply pick up the phone and call the police. So we decided to keep watch on his shop from a fabric store down the street. We chose that particular locale because Izzy was eager to buy a few yards of tweed for a warm pair of winter trousers.
If no police showed up, we’d go back to get our money at 2.30.
I wanted to wash the burn on my arm with cold water, and the shop owner was kind enough to let me use the sink in his loo, where I inspected the damage. Mrs Sawicki was right – there’d be a scar. My skin was throbbing. Splashing water on it did little good.
Back at my post by the front door, I discovered that the coast was still clear. As the minutes clicked past, I began to believe that I’d been needlessly apprehensive. Hope that one has chanced upon the road back to the way things used to be is apparently a strong desire in those who’ve been locked outside their previous lives.
Izzy was looking at different herringbone patterns on the counter, delighted with his range of options. The mystery of Anna’s connection to Adam was still nagging at me, and after a couple of minutes I went to him.
‘Imagine you’re fourteen years old,’ I whispered. ‘You’re in trouble, and you need your boyfriend’s help, but he’s in Switzerland and his mother has just treated you like an insect. You can’t talk to your parents, because you’re a prisoner in their home. So where do you go?’
He closed his eyes to consider my question. ‘I’m not sure, let me think about it,’ he finally replied. A couple of minutes later, after he’d picked out the fabric he wanted, he called me over and said, ‘Erik, Anna would have gone back to the one person who’d treated her well – Mikael Tengmann.’
‘That’s what I figured,’ I replied, ‘except that Mikael’s nurse told me she was never at his office. But let’s assume he did see her, and that she wanted to talk to him again, where would she have gone to see him?’
‘At his home.’
‘No, I don’t think so – his office is in his home.’
A half a minute or so later, when I peeked out the door, a Gestapo officer was standing outside Jawicki’s, about fifty paces away. He was putting on black leather gloves. Parked next to him was a black Mercedes.
I realized we’d been fools not to simply leave this part of town and offer Hannah’s ring to another jeweller. We were colossal amateurs at this life of subterfuge.
‘Is there a back door that leads to some other street?’ I asked the owner, who was ringing up Izzy’s purchase.
He frowned at me, and I could see he thought that we were up to no good.
Grinning in what I hoped was a charming way, I told him I’d spotted someone I owed money to walking down the street; a stupid lie, but what could I say?
He told me there was only the front door, so I made Izzy pay quickly and then steered him there. ‘The Gestapo are on to us,’ I whispered. ‘When we get outside, don’t look towards Jawicki’s. Just walk slowly to the right.’
Stepping on to the sidewalk, we heard no screams or whistles, but after twenty or so paces, when I looked back to see what was happening, the Gestapo officer had his gun drawn and was staring at
me; the jeweller must have told him what we looked like. My turning round had only confirmed that we were the suspects he was after.
I must have groaned or given away my panic in some other way; Izzy looked back.
‘We’re fucked!’ he whispered.
‘We’ve got to run!’ I told him.
We took off west on Szucha Street and made it to Rakowiecka before Izzy’s arthritis made him double over. Panting, he pushed me off. ‘Get going!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll shoot the Nazi when he gets close.’
I felt as if everything I’d ever lived for were turning slowly around this one moment, but I wasn’t about to let Izzy sacrifice himself for me.
‘I’m too tired to run,’ I replied. ‘You’re stuck with me.’
By now, the Gestapo officer had turned the corner – no more than sixty yards from us. He was in good shape, and young. A sense of doom pounded in my chest.
‘Erik!’
Izzy had stumbled forward into the doorway of an apartment house and was waving me towards him.
I joined him in the dark hallway. My throat felt as if it had been scraped with a rasp. The burn on my arm was aching.
‘You think he saw us come in here?’ Izzy asked in a whisper.
‘Probably. And anyway, people on the street noticed and will denounce us. Come on,’ I said, grabbing his arm, ‘let’s get out of here!’
We pushed through the rear door into the courtyard, which had been dug up to make a garden, though winter had starved it to a barren tangle of skeletal vines and brambles. A strongly built, middle-aged woman in a dark headscarf, plaid overcoat and frumpy woollen slippers was bent over in the far corner, pulling out metal stakes around which clung the withered tendrils of dead sweet peas. Behind her, the remains of tomato plants tortured by the wind and cold crumpled against a rusted trellis. The woman’s torn gloves dangled from the rim of her lopsided wooden barrow, which looked like a relic from the Iron Age.
Today, in my mind, I see her as though she were symbolic of all the women who bear misery with lips sealed to silence.
She looked up at Izzy and me, staring at my armband.
‘We mean no harm,’ I assured her in Polish.
She picked up her spade, but not in a threatening way. She stood with it, her posture rigid, as though she were posing for a portrait. I threw down my armband. ‘We’re not Nazis,’ I told her, opening my hands. ‘We’re in the Resistance and we’re in trouble.’
The woman’s face showed the indifference of stone. After leaning her spade against her barrow, she bent over, pulled out another stake and tossed it with a harsh clang into the pile she’d made.
Izzy and I were still gasping for breath. To be sixty-seven years old in the Polish winter is to know the limits of the body.
‘Thank God we didn’t go far away from Jawicki’s,’ Izzy told me.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘If we’d come back only when we were supposed to, the Mercedes would have been hidden around the corner. We’d have never known that that son-of-a-bitch called the Gestapo until it was too late.’
A brick wall, five feet high, separated us from a second apartment house at the back. A cane-work chair had been put there – for kids to hoist themselves over the wall and take a winter shortcut to the next street, most likely.
‘Come on!’ I told Izzy, pointing to the chair. ‘Let’s try our luck.’
We’d just started forward when the door behind us opened. Out stepped the Gestapo officer who’d been chasing us. He was holding a pistol.
CHAPTER 13
‘Don’t move!’ our assailant ordered in German.
He was no more than twenty years old, with copper-coloured hair shining under his cap and long blond eyelashes. He’s just a rabbit of a boy, and if I don’t lose my nerve…
‘I’m from the Reich Census Bureau,’ I told him, ‘and this man is helping me.’
He looked at my swastika armband on the ground and frowned. ‘I know who you are, so shut up and put up your hands!’
We did as he said, but Izzy gave me a sideways look, as if he was about to pull the cord of some mad plan.
‘Not yet!’ I whispered to him in Polish; I thought I could still talk my way out of this.
‘Shut your snout!’ the German yelled.
Below my frantic heartbeat, I heard the metallic scratch of another stake landing in the woman’s pile. She was still gardening – it might have been comic under other circumstances.
‘Stay still!’ the Nazi ordered Izzy. ‘And you, get on your knees!’ he told me.
‘If you let us get on our way,’ I told him, ‘I’ll give you five hundred złoty.’
‘If you want a bullet in your head, keep talking!’ he growled.
I thought he was going to search me for the pistol that the jeweller must have warned him about, but when I was kneeling he jabbed the muzzle of his gun into my ear. Panic surged through me from my legs up to the top of my head. My bladder opened, and in a trembling voice, I said, ‘You’re too young to want my death on your conscience.’
‘I told you to shut up!’ he shouted. ‘And don’t move!’
‘You!’ he snarled, turning to Izzy, ‘throw down your gun! And do it slowly.’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy lifting it out.
‘That’s it… Toss it near my feet.’
The pistol landed by the German and made a little hop. It’s over for us now, I thought.
Behind us, a window squealed open. I closed my eyes, and a deep silence opened around me. I imagined I was falling into it, and I wanted to keep falling – for each second to stretch towards the infinite. Who wouldn’t want more time?
‘You!’ the Gestapo man called to the woman behind us. ‘Get over here!’
I opened my eyes to find the Nazi sneering at her. ‘Who gave you permission to dig up this courtyard?’ he demanded.
I realized that boys holding guns were brutalizing women all over Europe.
She made no reply. She clutched her thoughts deep inside her – as though they were children she’d never give up to an enemy.
‘Do you speak a little German?’ the young man demanded of her.
‘Ja,’ she replied indifferently, wiping her runny nose.
He licked his lips. ‘Go to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street. You understand?’ When she nodded, he added, ‘Tell the Gestapo officer there to come right here. And don’t dawdle. If he’s not here in two minutes, I’ll put a bullet in your friend’s head!’
She took two steps, then swivelled around with quiet grace. Standing at the centre of a world over which no man had any power, she opened her eyes wide enough to hold all her fury and raised her spade.
The German was staring down at me. He’d already forgotten about her.
In the second before she swung, she drew her lips back over her chipped brown teeth. I’ll never forget her look of spiteful hate; the transformation seemed worthy of a devil in a painting by Bruegel. Then I heard her sharp intake of breath. So did the Gestapo officer. Turning, he caught the blow on the side of his face. With a guttural scream, he fell to one knee. His cap landed several feet away, on a patch of muddy ice. Clamping his hand over his battered and bloody ear, he pointed his gun at her, but before he could pull the trigger, she clouted him again, grunting. It seemed an act of vengeance against years of mistreatment. His nose and cheekbone shattered. I’d never heard bone breaking before, but the crack was unmistakable. An explosion of blood splattered over my face and on to my coat. I wiped the spray off my cheeks as the German fell forward on to his belly, his hands splayed out, his fingers arched like a crab’s legs. His breaths came in desperate gulps. While trying to raise himself, he groaned. He spoke in a low grumble, as well. I made out the word unrecht – wrong.
Did it seem wrong to him that an illiterate Polish woman hadn’t followed his orders?
I stood up. The German’s right hand had curled around his gun. I stepped down hard on it, and the crunch of his fi
ngers was the sound of the new identity I was making for myself. Shrieking, he collapsed forward. ‘God, no!’ he shouted.
Bending down, I took the pistol. I pointed it at his head. I expected him to look at me, but he pressed himself down into the ground. His lips moved. Maybe he was praying to the earth – or to whatever god he hoped was watching.
We’ll never know if I’d have fired; carefully, patiently, as though all of nature were on her side and nothing could go wrong, the woman put one foot on each side of the Nazi’s legs. I knew what she was about to do, but I didn’t stop her. Instead, I took a step back to give her room.
Regret for that comes to me only infrequently, and only when I think of his parents.
It isn’t that hard to murder a man. A silently enraged Polish woman taught me that.
And yet it must have seemed impossible to the German. How could he meet death in a rusted curve of Slavic iron, five hundred miles from home?
The brutality of her strike made Izzy gasp, then reach for me.
She opened a gash so deep in the Nazi’s forehead that I saw a white flash of bone before blood flooded the wound. His life sluiced down his cheek and spilled on to the earth. With a gurgling sound, he tilted to his side and his jaw fell open.
Heniek, what do you suppose young men think of when they know that they will never again see their home, and the fifty years of future they’d counted on is gone?
What could I have done differently…?
Ask my parents to forgive me for dying young…
No, I don’t know either. I went to my death already an old man. The expectations are different.
The youth’s head sagged. His eyes were open but saw nothing.
The woman was alone in the world with Izzy and me. We three shared the fractured skull of a young man whose name we would never learn. With our eyes, we passed the finality of his death between ourselves like a crust of hard bread.
Izzy picked up his gun.
It was the puddle of blood spreading beneath the young German’s head that made me want to run. I imagined the brown icicles that would hang from his chin that evening. I reached into my coat pocket and handed the woman the demitasse spoons I’d stolen from Mrs Sawicki. She took them in her dirt-encrusted hand and nodded her thanks.
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 12