Adam Liski
Birth: 4 August 1932.
Weight: Seven pounds four ounces.
Length: Nineteen inches.
Glued near the bottom of the page was a sprig of her son’s downy blond hair. On subsequent pages, I discovered records of his childhood diseases and medical treatments, as well as drawings of his hands and feet, and a portrait of him that she’d done when he was five. She had artistic talent – who would have guessed? Among a series of old sketches of her husband Krzysztof, I also discovered – to my surprise and delight – that she’d drawn me huddled over a book. I was smoking the meerschaum pipe I’d inherited from my father. She must have done it about ten years before. Had I really ever looked that strong and young?
‘Uncle Erik,’ she pleaded, ‘you have to hold on to Adam’s record book for me.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘Just do what I say for once!’
‘All right, I’ll keep it safe. But you’re going to be fine. You just need to stay warm.’
‘Hide it!’ she said in a hushed whisper, as if the Germans would need to know Adam’s height to win the war.
‘I’ll put it under the mattress in my room,’ I told her, but once I was out of sight I slipped it into my coat pocket instead.
I sat with Stefa for a time, smearing schmaltz on her chapped lips and combing the tangles out of her hair. She declined my offer of borscht.
‘Listen, Ewa has been helping me write cards to our friends outside the ghetto,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a courier post them on the Other Side.’
‘Why are you sending notes?’
‘Our friends need to know about… about things with us,’ she replied, unwilling to speak Adam’s name. ‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’
I thought about that. ‘No, thanks. I wouldn’t know what to say.’
I told my niece I had to go out for a while but would ask Ewa to check on her from time to time. Down in the bakery, the young woman promised me she’d do just that.
I was too exhausted to walk anywhere, so I splurged on a rickshaw. My driver was a former chemical engineer named Józef. He wore a red velvet vest under a high-collared russet coat. ‘My daughter made them for my birthday,’ he told me.
When I replied that she was a genius with a needle and thread, he turned away from me as if I’d offended him, but I didn’t ask why; everyone in the ghetto kept a misery on his shoulder that could easily justify odd behaviour.
Though Józef pedalled hard, the younger competition passed us. I spent the journey across town looking through Adam’s record book. Near the end, I discovered lists that Stefa had made of the advantages and disadvantages in the personalities of her friends. I’d never known that she’d been a list-maker, but it didn’t surprise me.
I remember Izzy’s inventory better than all the others because it showed off my niece’s wit.
Advantages: Perfectly manicured hands, delights in his own humour, can fix anything, speaks French, walks as slowly as I do, eyebrows like furry caterpillars, has not an evil bone in his body, hardly ever raises his voice, is easily overcome by my anger, keeps Adam entertained and Uncle Erik out of my hair, has sad eyes (like the surface of a warm lake!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, and is loyal, loyal, loyal.
Disadvantages: Delights in his own humour, is unable to tell when I don’t want to be teased, sulks when he’s yelled at, can hold grudges (despite his denials), walks as slowly as I do, has the table manners of a beagle, will never understand evil people (he excuses my sniping as harmless eccentricity, poor man!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, is too loyal, and encourages Adam to leave his shoelaces untied, lick his plate, play with stray dogs, etc.
Unspoken motto: Once you’re on board, you’re along for the whole ride. Food would most like to have in the ghetto: lox.
Favourite movie star: Jimmy Cagney (his imitation isn’t all that bad, but Cagney in Yiddish sounds a bit meshugene).
Mystery: Was Róźa pregnant when he married her?
Wish for him: May he find a man who appreciates his goodness.
Immediate prospects: Loneliness (given Róźa’s health and the state of the world with regard to his sexual proclivities).
I looked for the list of my own pros and cons, but several pages had been torn out and she must have destroyed it. Most of all, I wanted to know what her wish for me had been.
It didn’t occur to me till much later that Stefa left Izzy’s page for me to see for a reason: so that I wouldn’t take him for granted, which was always what she’d accused me of – and rightly, at times.
She hadn’t destroyed her lists for Ewa, Helena, Ziv and Adam. I read all of them but my nephew’s. I had to close it as soon as I read his first advantage: loves everyone around him, even me.
Józef dropped me near the Chłodna Street crossing to the Little Ghetto; I’d walk from there. As I got out of the rickshaw, he wiped his brow and apologized for being passed by other drivers.
‘We got here in one piece,’ I told him, handing him his payment, ‘which is all that counts at the moment. Besides, my nephew always complained that I moved as slow as a…’
I was about to say tortoise, but Adam – the misery always sitting on my shoulder – held his hand up for me to say no more about our life together. Józef showed me a puzzled look. ‘Some things are best left unspoken,’ I said. I shook his hand and walked off.
Two body collectors cut in front of me almost immediately. They were hauling a dead man wearing only a tattered undershirt. His hair was thick and black, but he had the sunken eyes and cavedin chest of a battered grandfather. His arms were bamboo reeds ending in dirty claws.
Whiskers dusted his chin but his cheeks were hairless – could starvation take away a man’s beard?
The ghetto funeral stretchers were slatted ladders with wheels on one end, but this one also had knotted white tassels – tzitzit – at its corners. That made me curious, and I eavesdropped on the collectors’ conversation. They were talking about a reading a fortune-teller had given one of them.
‘She told me I was going to take a long trip soon,’ the shorter of the two said.
‘Somewhere warm?’ his partner asked hopefully. He wore black spectacles held together by tape; they kept slipping to the end of his nose.
Leaving their cart on the sidewalk, they gazed around, exchanged a few words I didn’t catch, then shuffled over to a wooden stall set up in front of a clothing shop. Inside was a walnut-faced ironmonger sitting on a three-legged stool, surrounded by piles of door handles, keys and rusted junk. On the walls he’d hung hand-sized wire animals – dogs, cats and swans. A naked woman was slumped at his feet, her face angled down and chin pressed against her chest, but he didn’t seem to see her; he concentrated on the wire he was twisting into the shape of a poodle standing on its hind legs.
The woman’s hands – with red, swollen knuckles – were joined together as if she were still holding a beggar’s cup. The spectacled collector spoke to the ironmonger in a whisper. Then, leaning down, he shook the woman, and her head – gaunt and waxy – flopped to the side. He grabbed her ankles. His partner took her arms.
‘Eins, zwei, drei,’ they said in unison.
They lifted her up. Her hips jutted out from around her sunken triangle of sex like shovels.
The ironmonger never looked up to watch her go, but his hands stopped twisting his wire for a few seconds and he closed his eyes.
People go on with their lives the only way they know how. Hannah once told me that and I thought she was being glib, but living in the ghetto convinced me she was right.
As they carried the woman to their cart, the body collectors folded her together, then pulled her apart. Carelessness or a morbid comedy routine?
When they passed, her grey eyes stared at me. I imagined that she wanted to tell me about her life.
If you could say only one thing to me what would it be? I asked her in my mind.
‘I died of th
irst for so many things,’ came her reply. Her voice was shadowed by bitterness and regret.
The dead want us to know what killed them, I reasoned – though maybe I only came to that conclusion because it meant that Adam would want me to learn the identity of his murderer.
‘No, she said it would be cold where I was going,’ the short collector told his partner, resuming their previous conversation.
‘She must have meant you’d be heading off to Mogiła Street!’ his partner replied with a quick laugh, since Mogiła meant tomb in Polish.
They dumped the woman atop the dead man they’d previously collected. The bones of her back – jutting fins – crushed his face, and her head dangled back and to the side, threatening to fall off her spindly neck. Her breasts, shrunken, sucked dry by hunger, were wrinkled pancakes pressed against her ribcage.
No one rushed to cover her. Or to claim her.
CHAPTER 15
Janek’s mother invited me in when I explained my visit. She said I looked faint and brought me a glass of water right away.
The studious-looking, wiry-haired young man was uncomfortable discussing Anna with me, but after I told him I suspected that she had been gravely ill, he confessed he’d had a quarrel with her over twenty złoty she’d borrowed from him and couldn’t pay back. They hadn’t spoken since early January.
‘Listen, son, why did Anna need the money?’ I asked.
‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ he replied, which made his mother smack the back of his head. ‘I swear, Mama!’ pleaded the boy, ducking away from her. ‘You know how secretive Anna could be. All she told me was that she was in bad trouble.’
Anna’s other close friend, Henia, lived on Pan´ska Street, near the Noźyków Synagogue, where my mother and I had attended services on high holy days. She answered my knocks dressed for school, in a pretty burgundy jumper and dark woollen trousers. Her cheerful face was framed by blonde braids, which made her look as though she’d stepped out of a Bavarian children’s story. In her hand was a half-eaten hard-boiled egg.
Her mother called out to ask who was at the door.
‘A friend!’ the girl shouted back. To me she mouthed, ‘Wait downstairs.’
She came rushing into the hallway a few minutes later. ‘I’m late,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk as we walk.’ She buttoned her coat and put on a black leather aviator’s hat with sheepskin earflaps, tucking her braids underneath. She looked like a teenage boy.
‘I have to cross over to the Big Ghetto to get to school,’ she explained, ‘and the German guards used to grope themselves when I passed the gate. A big ugly one even tried to kiss me once. Now, they leave me alone.’
She burst out through the door as if to take on the Nazis and the rest of the world, holding her book bag tightly against her chest – undoubtedly to hide the sleek rise of her breasts.
I liked Henia immediately. And do you know why, Heniek? Because survival was shining in her light brown eyes. I blessed her for that.
‘Do you know what was wrong with Anna?’ I asked her.
‘Wrong?’
‘I have reason to believe she was ill.’
‘She wasn’t ill – the idiot got herself pregnant.’
‘That’s impossible. A doctor who examined her told me she wasn’t.’
‘Then he lied to you.’
‘Why would he do that?’ I demanded.
‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she said, irritated. ‘What right do you have to know intimate details about Anna’s life?’
I remembered Mikael begging me not to force him to lie. ‘But her mother said she had gotten dangerously thin,’ I told Henia.
‘Yeah,’ the girl replied, ‘that was quite a feat, wasn’t it? She had everybody fooled.’
I stopped. Henia didn’t. ‘So you’re certain she was pregnant?’ I called after her.
She turned round. ‘Yup,’ she replied casually, walking backwards. ‘Three months along. If you looked really closely, you could kind of tell in the curve right here, even though she wasn’t much more than a skeleton.’ She designed a contour in front of her belly with her hand.
I caught up, then grabbed the strap of her book bag to keep her from rushing ahead. ‘Did her parents know?’
‘No. Anna didn’t trust them. She wanted an abortion. But we didn’t know where to go. We were afraid that if we asked her doctor or any other adult, it would get back to her parents. So she just stopped eating.’
‘But sooner or later, her condition would have become obvious.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Honec, but we have to keep walking – if I’m late for school, the director won’t let me in.’
I let go of her strap. Henia shifted her book bag to her other shoulder and we started off again. ‘Anna read somewhere that starvation can cause a miscarriage,’ she told me. ‘So she could hide her pregnancy and get rid of it at the same time. It was a neat trick – if you don’t mind starving to death, that is.’
‘So did she lose the baby?’
‘No. Though we didn’t talk for a couple of days before she was killed, so I suppose she might have lost it then – or even found someone to give her an abortion.’
‘Do you know if she intended to tell Paweł’s mother?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘And did Paweł ever give her a ring or a bracelet – something valuable?’
Henia shrugged. ‘If he did, she never showed it to me.’
‘Is it possible that Anna got his name tattooed on her hand? Or maybe his initials?’
Henia burst out laughing. ‘Do you think she wanted to look like a sailor, Mr Honec?’
We were crossing the scruffy park in Grzybowski Square, steering around the low-hanging branches of a hazel tree stripped naked by winter. Henia’s expression turned troubled. ‘There’s something that’s been bothering me,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But I don’t know if I should tell you. Anna wouldn’t like it.’
‘She’s been murdered. What else could go wrong?’
‘Plenty! So why don’t you tell me what you want to know about her and I’ll see how much I want to say.’
I spoke of my nephew’s death until she gripped my arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she interrupted, ‘but please don’t tell me any more about Adam. Since Anna’s murder… Look, what’s been bothering me is that she refused to tell me who the father was, and that started me thinking. I thought it was probably Paweł, but she wouldn’t confirm that – or deny it.’
‘Who else could it have been?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. But listen, whatever you do,’ she said, grimacing, ‘you can’t tell Anna’s parents about any of this.’
‘Why not?’
‘Mrs Levine has a temper. She drinks. And she used to beat Anna with a wet towel.’
‘Why a wet towel?’
‘It hurts like hell but doesn’t leave marks.’ Henia sneered. ‘Anna always said her mother was clever – ugly but clever. She used to call her Fraulein Rottenmeier – from Heidi.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I replied bitterly; Dorota had fooled me; she’d been protecting herself, not her husband. The unflattering photograph of her daughter had been meant to show me that Anna deserved the abusive treatment her mother meted out.
‘No one knows what I’m telling you,’ Henia continued. ‘I’m not even sure Anna’s father knows how bad things were, though she was furious at him for never protecting her. I don’t know how Fräulein Rottenmeier will react if you let on that you know what she was up to. And if you tell her Anna was pregnant…’ Henia groaned to indicate the disaster that would engender.
I stopped to consider whether Anna’s own mother might have been involved in her murder. It seemed impossible, yet so did Adam’s death.
‘No more questions?’ Henia asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Bye, Mr Honec,’ she said cheerfully, and then she strode away.
After a few seconds, I called out to her. ‘Henia, did you lend Anna money?’
She hesitat
ed, then rushed on.
‘You have to tell me!’ I shouted.
She stopped, unsure what to do. Trudging back to me, as though punished, she took off her aviator’s hat. Her face was solemn. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘I’m beginning to understand more about what you children are going through.’
She bit her lip. ‘I gave her twenty złoty. But you can’t tell anyone!’
‘I understand. An abortion is…’
‘No, you don’t understand, Mr Honec! I didn’t care whether she had an abortion or not. I did something unforgivable, something that…’
‘You stole money from your parents,’ I cut in – to relieve her of the need to speak her crime aloud.
‘No, from my younger brother,’ she whispered, and her eyes moistened. She rubbed the tears away roughly, as if she didn’t deserve them. ‘God forgive me, I took two ten-złoty notes out of his wallet. He’d been saving them for months. Mr Honec, he’d even ironed them to make them perfect. He cried for days when they went missing. And my parents were furious with him.’ Henia shook her head at her own treachery.
‘Anna was desperate,’ I told her. ‘You helped her. You were a good friend.’
‘But I betrayed my brother – badly.’
I gazed into the distance, at the brick wall blocking off Próżna Street, trying to read what to say to Henia in our landscape of confinement. ‘On this island, even a mitzvah can cause harm,’ I told her. ‘Though I wish none of us had to learn that.’
‘Making my brother feel hopeless wasn’t a mitzvah!’ she declared, unwilling to be prised free of the moral trap she’d stumbled into. ‘And I couldn’t ever face my parents or brother again if they found out what I’ve done. Never! So you can’t say anything!’
‘I won’t say a word. I promise.’
Henia put her hat back on. ‘Mr Honec, do you… do you have any idea why the Nazis killed Anna?’ At that moment, she seemed a small girl imprisoned high up in the tower of her best friend’s death.
‘No, not yet,’ I replied.
‘Then I want you to do me a favour. If you find out, don’t tell me – at least, not until we get out of here.’
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 14