As I looked at each of his old friends, Izzy’s eyes grew worried. I realized he needed to show me all he was, and for me to give him my blessing; there was no time left for waiting.
‘You travelled far,’ I told him. ‘That was a very good thing.’
But his error-of-a-lifetime would give him no peace. Through a surge of tears, he whispered, ‘I married Róźa to prove to myself I could be the man everyone wanted me to be. I could have had another life – a truer life. Róźa, too.’
‘One thing I learned from my patients,’ I told him, ‘is that we all spend our lives living beside the people we could have been.’
‘Not like me, Erik. I hurt the people I cared for most.’
‘Do you still hear from any of your old lovers?’ I asked, a plan forming underneath my words.
‘One – Louis. Another steward. We write to each other for New Year’s.’
‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Very much.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in Boulogne-Billancourt. That’s why I sent the boys there. He found them jobs. He used to work as an airline mechanic. The boys even stayed with him for a while, though they aren’t aware of what he and I once meant to each other.’
‘When the ark comes for us, you’ll go to him,’ I told him as if it were an order.
‘Erik, I’m too old,’ he replied. ‘And all of me is unravelling. Besides, there’s Róźa. I can’t leave her.’
‘Izzy, she’s had a major stroke. She’s not going to get any better, and she doesn’t know who you are. Let her stay with her sister. Or if you have to, take her with you and let her move in with the boys. You’ve punished yourself long enough, don’t you think?’
One evening, Rowy finally told me why Ewa hadn’t visited me; Stefa’s suicide had shaken both her and Helena badly, and the little girl had suffered a diabetic shock. She’d nearly died. The young man added that he and Mikael had kept the bad news from me during the worst of my grief so as not to make me feel any worse. Helena was better now, but still weak.
On the afternoon of Friday, 28 February, eight days after Stefa’s death, a ghetto courier brought me a note from Gizela, the young woman who was looking after my home. She informed me that a lieutenant in the SS had requisitioned my flat a few days earlier. Gizela and her husband were back living with her in-laws. She asked me not to write to her, since she was convinced that all her mail was being read.
Thinking of a Nazi in my bed made me storm out of the apartment, shaking with rage. I ended up only a block from Weisman’s dance school, which started me thinking… Checking my watch, I realized I could make Rowy’s afternoon chorus rehearsal.
The young musician made a fuss over me as soon as I arrived, introducing me to all of his little singers as a great friend of the chorus. I was impressed with his ease with them and how they tugged at his shirtsleeves for his attention.
When I explained my purpose, he asked, ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’
‘Yes, it won’t take long. But I’ll need to see each kid separately – and alone. I don’t want them influencing one another.’
That was a lie: in truth, I was afraid that if any of the children had anything unusual to say about Rowy, his presence would intimidate them.
I talked to the eleven youngsters one at a time, behind the closed door of a dressing room. Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about Adam’s smuggling activities, and the most damning secret they could tell me about Rowy was that he ate half a chocolate bar after each of their performances.
The next day, Saturday, Anka came to my door early in the morning. She refused my invitation for ersatz coffee. ‘I’m in a rush – I make house calls on Saturdays,’ she told me, standing in the doorway. ‘Listen, I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. My nurse friend has been off with dysentery, but I went to see her yesterday and she told me that Anna never showed up for her procedure. She said that she doesn’t know if Mikael keeps records of the abortions. She wasn’t sure of the date Anna was scheduled for, but that the twenty-fourth of January sounded right.’
So Mikael had been telling the truth. Perhaps Anna had gone to see Mrs Sawicki hoping to get more money to pay for her abortion, and on the way home she’d been attacked – except that her mother said there’d been no signs of a struggle on her. Just like Adam. Which meant that the two children had either been caught completely by surprise or had known – and trusted – their killer.
Could Rowy or Mikael be working secretly for the Germans and have obtained authorization to cross the border on a regular basis? After all, if Anna or Adam had met one of them on the Other Side, they would have suspected nothing.
How important is personal geography to our destinies? I ask, Heniek, because the only reason I chose to follow Mikael first was that his apartment on Wałowa Street was closer to Stefa’s.
I got to his front door just after nine, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I stood vigil down the block. An elderly man rented me a chair for one złoty an hour.
Mikael came out near noon, dressed smartly in a tweed overcoat and carrying a black leather case. He hailed a rickshaw right away. Rushing into the street, I was able to flag one down myself. I told my driver to follow at a safe distance behind his colleague.
A short time later, Mikael got out on Nowolipki Street and entered the door to a five-storey apartment house. I had my driver drop me fifty paces away and knocked at one of the ground-floor apartments. A boy of thirteen or so, wearing a knitted yarmulke, came to the door. At the back of the room, two old women in dark shawls and headscarfs were working over a stove. The place reeked of boiling cabbage.
‘Are there any clinics in this apartment house?’ I asked the young man; I was guessing that Mikael was carrying medical supplies in his case.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Why would a doctor come here?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied, scowling as if I were a beggar.
I went back outside, stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the façade of the building. A hand-lettered sign in a second-floor window made immediate sense of Mikael’s visit: Jerusalem Photo Studio – Develop Your Own Pictures.
I knew nothing about photography, but the case Mikael was carrying must have held his plates or film, or maybe even a camera. He’d probably spend a few hours there developing his negatives.
Realizing that it could take weeks to learn something damning about him or Rowy, I headed off through a fog of self-doubt.
On reaching home, the silence of Stefa’s apartment pressed down so hard on me that I fled right away. I ended up at the Café Levone. A middle-aged woman with shoulder-length silver hair, intelligent eyes and silver lily-of-the-valley earrings approached me shortly after I was served my tea. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said with an apologetic smile.
She wore an old black jumper whose fraying sleeves she’d accordion-bunched at her elbow, which I found both comic and attractive.
‘Why is this so difficult?’ she asked, irritated with herself. Her sensitive green eyes drew my sympathy.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ I told her, reaching into my pocket for a złoty.
She waved away the coin I held out. ‘Oh dear, what a ridiculous sight I must be in these old clothes!’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just thought you might like some real sugar.’ She held out to me a handful of brown crystals. ‘I find it’s the only way to keep the ghetto tea from making my taste buds want to run and hide.’
Smiling appreciatively, I picked up a crystal and thanked her. Next to her slender pink hand, mine seemed ungainly and hairy, like an orangutan’s, but that was all right with me because it was a reminder that I was a man and she was a woman. ‘Please, sit,’ I told her, since she, too, looked as if she could use some company.
Once seated, she dropped her crystals into a white linen handkerchief, folded each corner towards the centre, tied it together, and stowed her treasure in her leathe
r bag. Her gestures were quick and practised, which charmed me. When she looked at me again, I put my crystal between my front teeth and took a sip of tea across its smooth surface. She watched me with a serious look, and neither of us turned away for far longer than would be considered appropriate for two Jewish dinosaurs.
Who can explain the ways of the body? My dormant, undernourished shmekele began to grow. And my thoughts turned to hopes long extinguished.
What kind of man would long for sex after the death of the two people he most loved in the world?
The woman introduced herself as Melka Wilner. She told me she knew who I was because her niece Zosia Kleiner was married to Dawid Kornberg, the son of a former neighbour of mine, who just happened to be in Amsterdam on business when we were ordered into the ghetto…
To play by the rules of Jewish knitting, I listened patiently before steering us towards more interesting topics. The rest of our conversation was filtered through the sensual feel of the sugar crystal melting between my teeth.
We ended up talking of travel. I spoke of my honeymoon in London and she told me she had lived in Palestine for five years, from April 1902 to December 1907. She’d married a judge named Timmermann on returning to Poland. ‘He always knew right from wrong, which seemed a good thing until I realized he was always right and I was always wrong!’ She laughed in a burst, and light radiated from her eyes.
I envied how she talked so easily of the events around which her life had turned.
The deed was done in her slender bed, behind a rose-patterned curtain strung from wall to wall; it separated her side of the room from her cousin Zosia’s. Melka sensed my nervousness and took control. She was gentle with me, and her kisses were so passionate that she left me disoriented – as if outside my body. Our acrobatics themselves proved painful, limited by the demands of bodies that had been given bony angles by cramped hunger and age. Still, to our credit, we managed to make a pleasant mess on ourselves and the sheets.
God knows why she chose me.
I floundered like a wounded animal afterwards, in a dim grey twilight between waking and sleep. I was giving Adam a bath, and he was splashing. I knew it wasn’t real, but I wanted to stay with him. I wanted to become sopping wet with the very sight of him.
‘When was the last time you made love?’ Melka asked me, tugging me fully awake.
She was sitting at the foot of the bed. Sensing my confusion, she caressed my leg and repeated her question.
I sat up, already so far from Adam that it petrified me. Trying to disguise my feelings, I replied, ‘As best I can recall, Nero was emperor in Rome.’
She laughed, which made me feel a little better. ‘And you?’ I asked.
‘Three or four days ago,’ she replied. ‘I’ve a… a friend.’
I examined my feelings and couldn’t find bitterness or jealousy. What else had I a right to expect?
‘I’m sorry, Erik,’ she said, rubbing my foot.
‘It’s all right.’
I noticed now the smell of mildew in the room. It seemed to be coming from beneath the bed. I decided not to look.
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Melka requested, smiling encouragingly.
‘Do you really want to know?’ I asked in a tone of warning.
‘Yes. At the very least, we can help each other by listening.’
As I explained about Adam and Stefa, and all the detective work I’d done that had led me to Rowy and Mikael, which now seemed like nowhere, Melka got up and went to the window, peeking through a crack in the curtains. I had the impression she was listening to her own inner voice rather than me, but I needed to confess myself to a person who hadn’t known all the people I’d failed, so I kept on talking.
‘What will you do now?’ she asked after I’d finished.
‘I don’t know. I suppose after I find out who killed Adam, I’ll go back to work at the Lending Library and wait for the Germans to shovel our skinny corpses into the river.’
Melka opened a chink in the curtains again. ‘God, I hate the Polish winter,’ she said, sighing despairingly.
‘We’ll hope for an early spring,’ I replied, trying to sound encouraging.
‘Maybe you need to let your niece and nephew go,’ she said without turning round. ‘You still have a chance to make a new life.’
‘You can’t be serious?’ I replied.
‘Sorry, what I said was thoughtless,’ she told me, smiling sweetly. ‘Forgive me.’
When she slipped on her pullover, I recognized my cue. After I was dressed, I pressed a slip of paper with my address into her hand, but her easy thank you and friendly peck on the cheek meant that we would never do this again.
My guilt that afternoon and evening was crushing. I drank vodka until I passed out.
Ewa finally came over the next day, Sunday, 2 March, while I was napping off my hangover.
‘I want you to know I think of Stefa and Adam every day,’ she told me, moving her worried gaze over the floor between us. ‘They will be with me always.’
Ewa seemed to speak to me from out of a deep thicket inside herself. I didn’t think it was fair that she should have to lug my dead behind her, and I wanted to tell her that, but her air of defeat angered me. You have your health and your daughter, so you don’t have the right to give up! I wanted to shout.
She sensed my ambivalence towards her and started to cry. After handing me a note she’d meant to send me earlier, she rushed out the door.
The note read: Everything has gone wrong. The happiness we once all had now seems so distant. It’s as if we never had a chance. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…
Perhaps it was my irritation at seeing Ewa so withdrawn – and at my selfish reaction to her – that awakened me to all I still needed to do. After putting her note under Stefa’s pillow, I brought back to my bed the books on child abuse by Ambroise Tardieu and Paul Bernard that I owned; I was looking for what would motivate a killer to take a boy’s leg and a girl’s hand.
I read until nightfall about kids who’d been raped, beaten and starved – usually by their parents or other relatives – but I couldn’t find any who’d been mutilated like Adam and Anna.
Of the unfortunate children I read about that day, I remember a French girl named Adelina Defert most of all. Her parents had locked her in a small wooden box from the age of eight to seventeen. They’d tied her down, whipped her and burned her with red-hot charcoals, and to torture her further her mother had washed her wounds with nitric acid. When Adelina was finally rescued, her straw mattress was teeming with insects, and the rags she used for blankets were soaked with pus.
Reading about Adelina gave me the idea that her parents would have adored running the ghettos across Poland. An insight? Maybe Adam’s murderer wanted nothing but the pleasure of disfiguring what was beautiful.
Gratuitous cruelty… We have to admit it never goes out of style, and the Nazis had raised it to the level of a philosophy.
All temples are metaphors for the human body; and it was the body that gave birth to the notion of holiness. A professor of mine had told me that in Vienna, but I’d been too young to understand. Now, I realized he’d been right, and what that meant to me now was that the murderer wanted to sever all holiness from the world.
Ziv knocked at my door that evening. He’d come over a few times after Stefa’s death but he always looked as if he was about to burst into tears and only stayed a couple of minutes. Since her suicide, he’d become as pale as ivory, and so gaunt that his pimply forehead jutted out over his eyes.
Under his arm he held his alabaster chessboard. ‘How about a game before bed, Dr Cohen?’ he asked, trying to sound cheerful.
‘I don’t think so. My mind… it’s all over the place.’
He looked so forlorn that I invited him to talk with me in the kitchen. I offered him one of the potato pancakes that Ida Tarnowski had made for me, but he turned me down. Looking at his unhappy face, I said, ‘All right, let’s see if I can beat you
this time.’
His reply was a glorious smile.
As we played, I pretended not to notice he was losing on purpose, but not even the village idiot in a Russian novel could make such numbskull moves.
To Ziv, losing on purpose must have meant that we could be generous to each other – why else make such a sacrifice? I guessed that not many people had ever treated him well. And that he’d been building up his courage to give me the gift of his loss since Stefa’s death.
Early the next morning, I took a rickshaw to Ogrodowa Street to question the father of the girl who had died after her abortion; I had to make sure she hadn’t been disfigured.
Mr Szwebel had oily black hair falling over his ears, wild green eyes and a scruffy beard. He wore long flannel pyjamas and a stained old prayer shawl over his shoulders – a Jewish Rasputin. I told him that Mikael Tengmann’s nurse had given me his address, but that he must never tell that to anyone, and he agreed.
When we shook hands, I noticed his fingernails were long and filthy. I feared that his answers to my questions would become manic rants, but throughout our conversation he spoke to me in a quiet and well-considered voice. We sat at his kitchen table, and he poured mint tea for us into slender glasses.
‘I’ve come about your daughter,’ I said to him.
‘I figured that’s what it was.’
‘I understand she had an operation.’
‘Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about what took place,’ he replied.
‘But you know that Mikael Tengmann performed it?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told. He denied it.’
‘You don’t seem angry about that.’
‘Anger is of no help where we live, Dr Cohen.’
‘His nurse, Anka, said you knew your daughter Esther had been pregnant.’
‘Yes.’ He stood up and took a bowl of stewed prunes from the counter, then grabbed a tarnished spoon and handed it to me. ‘Eat something,’ he told me, putting the fruit in front of me. ‘You’re way too thin.’
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 17