The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  Izzy began explaining what we’d done. Jaśmin said nothing, though when he told her how he’d stood up to address Lanik, she began hiccupping – an old sign of failing nerve I recognized from our sessions.

  ‘You can drop us any time you want and get on your way,’ I told her when Izzy had finished. ‘We’ll still be grateful for the help you’ve given us.’

  She took her eyes off the road for just an instant and brushed my cheek. ‘You once told me, “Terror traps us all from time to time, but the important thing is not to let it build walls around us.”’

  ‘I remember,’ I told her, but in truth I’d said that to most of my patients.

  ‘Do you recall what you did then?’ she asked, showing me an eager look.

  ‘No, I’m sorry. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘You stood up from your chair and came to me on the couch. You’d never done that before. You were probably breaking all the rules. In any case, you reached out your hand to me, as though you were inviting me to dance. That terrified me more than anything. I closed my eyes and turned away. But you didn’t move. You were showing me I could count on you. After maybe twenty seconds, I opened my eyes and took your hand. You’ll find this hard to believe, but I think that was the first time I’d really touched anyone – the first time I was sure that another person was real. That moment changed everything. And you… You kissed my cheek – to acknowledge my bravery, I think. And then you went back to your seat. After lighting your pipe, you said in that professional voice of yours, “Now, where were we…?”’

  Tears dripped down Jaśmin’s cheeks and she gripped the steering wheel tightly.

  Jaśmin waved away my effort to find adequate words of reply and smiled. ‘I’ve already figured this out, Dr Cohen. We’ll go to my sister’s farm. No one will be able to find you there. We’ll have some time to think of what to do next.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I told her, astonished that the small mitzvah I’d done for her twenty years before could change the direction of my life at this very moment.

  ‘So where’s your sister’s farm?’ Izzy asked.

  ‘Between Warsaw and Lublin, just east of Puławy.’

  ‘Puławy, great!’ exclaimed Izzy like a boy eager for adventure, leaning over the front seat. ‘I wonder if anything is left of the art collection in Czartoryski Palace.’

  From the wild exuberance in his eyes, I realized he was running on nervous energy.

  ‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to visit the palace,’ Jaśmin told him. ‘The Nazis have sent most of the Jews of Puławy to labour camps, but there’s still a small ghetto, and the Germans are everywhere. We’ll have to avoid the city.’ She put her hat down on the seat. ‘I don’t suppose you two have any false identity papers.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’d better steer clear of the main route.’

  We drove on wretched backroads over the next hour and a half and twice had to push and curse our way out of mud – all to no avail it soon seemed, because after detouring around Żelachów, we came around a sharp turn only to meet up with two German soldiers conversing by their motorcycles at a railroad crossing. They were less than a hundred yards away and spotted us immediately, so it was too late to turn round. One of them flagged us down.

  ‘Be a dear,’ Jaśmin said to me as she eased the car towards them, ‘and give me my hat.’

  I handed it to her and she put it on.

  ‘Eccentricity tends to startle our Aryan rulers,’ she explained.

  As soon as we’d come to a halt, Jaśmin rolled down her window. The soldier who’d signalled for us to stop opened his eyes wide with curiosity on seeing such a grand lady behind the wheel.

  In faulty but charming German, Jaśmin told him, ‘I don’t suppose you know if we’re on the right road to Puławy, dear boy?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Wait a minute.’

  He conferred with his colleague and then gave her directions to the main road.

  ‘Thank you – you’re a sweetheart,’ she told him, waving coquettishly, and then, giving him no time to reply, she started off.

  I counted the seconds before the soldiers would begin firing, but they never did. Had they intended to ask for our papers? On reaching a count of thirty, I turned around, but the Germans were already facing away from us and talking together – probably about what a peculiar people they’d conquered.

  Jaśmin was glancing in the rear-view mirror to confirm we weren’t being followed.

  ‘Who knew Sarah Bernhardt was driving us to safety!’ Izzy told her.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I seconded.

  ‘Thank you both, but I seem to have peed in my knickers,’ she confessed.

  We pulled over after a mile and gave her a chance to dry herself and regain her composure. ‘Was I really good?’ she asked hesitantly, hidden behind the car, and when we nodded, she began to laugh, so that we did too.

  The sun was peeking through a cavern of dark clouds. On both sides of the road were apple orchards. This valley would be a sea of pink blossoms in a month.

  ‘Poland is a beautiful country,’ I remarked to Izzy.

  ‘Yeah, just don’t get attached to it,’ he replied. ‘We’re not staying long.’

  It was four in the afternoon by the time we entered the gravel driveway of Liza’s farm. I was asleep in the back.

  I awoke to a woman with friendly brown eyes peering at me. She was so close that I could smell the wet wool in her blue and red tartan tam.

  Had I died and gone to Scotland?

  ‘Dr Cohen – time to get up,’ the woman told me in a sing-song voice.

  I sat up, still half asleep. Behind my Scottish fairy godmother stood Izzy and Jaśmin, talking together. A big black dog was jumping between them and barking.

  ‘I’m Liza, Jaśmin’s sister,’ the woman told me sweetly. ‘Welcome to my home.’

  Liza’s farm rose up a small slope from the grassy bank of the River Wieprz, across a thick wood from the village of Niecierz. An eighteenth-century stone house with two tiny upstairs bedrooms, it had originally been a second barn for a large manor house that lay a half-mile east and which wasn’t visible because of a low hill topped by a copse of spruce trees. Liza lived alone; her husband had died a few years earlier and her son and daughter, now adults, lived in Kraków.

  The floors were hexagonal terracotta tiles – darkly lustrous with age – and the furniture was all heavy wood. The whitewash on the walls shone with grey-blue tonalities in the slanting afternoon light. The ceiling upstairs was so low that I could touch it by standing on my toes.

  There was no electricity and no phone. We were in the Poland of our ancestors.

  Izzy and I moved our things into the spare bedroom. It was freezing, but Liza soon got a coal fire going in the iron parlour stove, then opened her husband’s wardrobe and said, ‘Take whatever you want.’

  We found thick woollen coats and scarves.

  Liza was a potter. Her workshop was in the apple cellar, which was empty at this time of year but still smelled like cider. We drank good coffee for the first time in months and gorged on her while sitting around a stone table in her kitchen. I kept anxious thoughts away by watching the two sisters closely – Jaśmin so stylish and regal, and Liza in men’s trousers and a moth-eaten yellow sweater. I could see they adored each other in the way they laughed over nothing and gave each other complicitous, sideways glances. Over the next few months, they would often seem telepathic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that each one was living out the life the other might have had.

  Liza told us that first afternoon that she would teach us how to use a potter’s wheel. We would be her assistants for as long as we lived with her. She assured us she was happy to have company.

  When I pointed out that we were putting her life in danger, she shrugged as if the risk were of no importance.

  Jaśmin told us she would stay the night, but would have to leave at dawn.

  ‘I have to get back to Warsaw. Tomorrow’s Frida
y, and if I’m not at the gallery on time, the owner will think it’s suspicious. I’ll come back on Saturday afternoon.’

  That evening, over our early supper, I told the sisters about Irene and how she had heard Jaśmin speak about the ghetto, though I omitted that the girl had led me to Jesion and Lanik. I believed then that I held that information back because I didn’t dare speak of Adam’s murder in my fragile state. Now, I realize I was also protecting Irene; if Liza or Jaśmin were ever arrested, the less they could reveal about the girl the better.

  CHAPTER 29

  The very next day, Izzy and I diagrammed our plans for making it to Lwów, and from there to Kiev, but Jaśmin soon made contact with an arms smuggler in the Warsaw Underground, and he told her that he had information that the Germans were building labour camps and military bases all across eastern Poland; in consequence, we ought not to risk our escape just yet. Her smuggler friend would let her know when it was safer to leave.

  We stayed with Liza from March all the way to early July. After a few weeks, we were glad not to have to leave, though we knew we would set off as soon as Jaśmin gave us the go-ahead – if for no other reason than to stop putting Liza at risk.

  Izzy and I stayed close to the farmhouse at all times; we dared not go near the nearest village for fear of being spotted and denounced. Still, sometimes at dawn, before anyone was up, we’d take her dog, Noc, for walks through the fields.

  Noc had an extensive Polish vocabulary, and Izzy and I taught him Yiddish, as well.

  Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik! Izzy would yell at the beautiful mongrel when he was barking too heartily at some rabbit or squirrel he’d chased into the underbrush. Amazingly, the dog would go all quiet and sit on his haunches, looking back and forth between us with his deep brown eyes full of remorse. Given his luxurious black coat, we joked that he was the reincarnation of a Jewish furrier and had been waiting all this time to learn his true language.

  *

  A few days after our arrival, Liza purchased insecticide at a local apothecary, and Izzy and I dusted ourselves with the white powder from top to bottom, turning ourselves into foul-smelling snowmen.

  Izzy submerged in our bathtub first. When he was done, I stepped into the scalding water, sat down and closed my eyes. And entered paradise. I could not have been happier had I been five years old and embraced by my mother.

  I hadn’t been aware of how tense and constrained my body had been – as if I’d been tangled in vines. Away with the lice went months of grime.

  Still, I sobbed alone that night, hidden in Liza’s cellar.

  Izzy and I wrote just a single letter to our children, fearing that our correspondence might cause trouble for Liza. I told Liesel I’d contact her again when we reached the Soviet Ukraine.

  I’d get up every morning to watch the sunrise, grateful for the boundless pink and russet sky, for all that blessed light falling over the earth, for the warm breezes of spring and the butterflies fluttering over the flowers, for eagles and hawks and magpies and all that could fly beyond the control of the Nazis. Grateful, too, for a red fox that I saw late one afternoon, and who stopped to watch me as if I had descended to the earth from out of his sunrise.

  The sound of my whispering with Izzy as we fell asleep was like protective netting. We covered ourselves with our voices every night.

  He and I fired a few of our lopsided cups and vases in the kiln over those first weeks of refuge. One day, however, Liza decided she would teach me to centre a pot or die trying. She put her hands over mine and moved them through the luxurious wet clay, while that wheel of creation spun round and round between us like a dreidl that would never stop proclaiming the miracle of our escape. If she and I had been younger, maybe we’d have had a chance at another life. But one passes a gate without knowing it, and then there is no point in turning round and starting over. We both knew that and ended up laughing.

  Still, it was good to be able to learn a new trade at my age.

  Izzy and I were occasionally at each other’s throats over the most meaningless trifles, but we never forgot we were riding on the same raft at the centre of an angry sea, and that made all the difference. We were careful to give Liza enough time for herself and often stayed in our room – teaching Noc the subtleties of Yiddish grammar or tossing him his leather ball – when we would have preferred to be with her.

  Imagine having to care for two elderly good-for-nothings. God, what we put that woman through!

  It was a small life we had, but anything bigger would have put us at risk. Besides, we were exhausted. We hadn’t realized how depleted we were till we were off our island.

  I slept twelve hours a night over those first weeks. And once my stomach adapted to wholesome food again, I made Liza’s dinner plates shine at every opportunity.

  My hunger may have been obsessive at times, but Izzy’s nose hadn’t been dulled – like mine – by fifty years of pipe-smoking, and once his sensitive sniffer picked up the scent of good food again, it turned him into a slavering wolf; for a month or so he was unable to hold a conversation if there were even just a few grains of kasha or a smidgen of creamed sorrel still available. He would eye any crumbs Liza and I left over as if they had been stolen from him while he was reaching for the butter or pepper, and you could hear him counting the seconds he regarded as requisite – given our turn-of-the-century notions of etiquette – before he could make a headfirst dive for our plates.

  When he was on one of his binges, cannibalism seemed a real possibility. Liza and I kept our distance and advised Noc to do the same.

  His scurvy proved no match for his boundless appetite.

  In the silence of the forest protecting our farm, I began to believe that as long as there were women like Liza in the world, Jewish history could never come to an end – not here or anywhere else. And that sooner or later, the world would come to its senses.

  Liza sold her bowls, mugs and vases at two shops in Puławy. The owners came once a month to pick out the merchandise they wanted. Jerzy, one of them, selected a Japanese-looking bowl of Izzy’s one day – blue, with calligraphic black strokes near the rim. His first sale. We celebrated with wine that evening.

  At night, in bed, Izzy and I would talk about the friends we’d left back in Warsaw. It always seemed strange to us how geography can determine everything during a war. I wondered if I would ever see the city again. And if I’d want to.

  In the early hours of the morning, I’d sometimes hear my name being called, as though from downstairs, and I’d try to get out of bed, certain that Liza was in trouble, but I’d find – to my horror – that I was unable to move. My arms and legs were paralysed. Never had I known such helplessness. And then I’d see Izzy’s face lit with crescents of light and dark by the white candle in his hand, and hear him whisper my name, and I’d realize he was waking me again from the nightmare that was being sent to me by all that I’d failed to do.

  Twice a week, a stocky labourer and his teenaged son came from Niecierz to work Liza’s land; she had an agreement with them that allowed her to keep half of her fruit and grain. Izzy and I would hide in the cellar whenever we heard their donkey cart rambling down the potholed dirt road that skirted our farmhouse, reading by candlelight until Liza sounded the all-clear, which was a high whistle that would make Noc race up the staircase and bound into her arms.

  I started fishing in the early evening in late May, on a quiet bend in the River Wisłoka guarded by dense, leafy woodland – mostly paper-barked birches and tall, broad oaks, but also curlicue-branched hazel bushes near the water. Noc would tag along, his tail twirling. He’d try in vain to catch dragonflies in his snapping jaws and watch the dark water around my line as if expecting a river sprite to surface at any moment.

  On two occasions, I caught trout big enough to eat.

  Izzy and Liza planted a kitchen garden, so that by early June we were able to begin harvesting fresh vegetables. The sweet, earthy smell of our beets carried me back to the days of my ch
ildhood when I’d go marketing with my mother. Liza, on sniffing at our perfumed trellis of pink and blue sweet-pea blossoms, would always fake a swoon, like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel overcome by love.

  Food had never tasted so good as the meals we ate on Liza’s small patio, listening to the Polish trees and fields speaking in the language of wind from the Ukraine. But no matter how much I ate, crabs of hunger would still sometimes scuttle through my belly during the night. I’d light a candle and creak down the stairs into the kitchen. Often, Izzy would accompany me. We’d sit in our underwear at the kitchen table – little kids gorging on cheese and pastry while their parents lay sleeping.

  One warm dawn in late June, I took off all my clothes and lay next to Noc in a potato field. The ground seemed solid below me – incapable of giving way – for the first time in a year.

  Izzy and I were in the cellar on 7 July, helping Liza stack her freshly fired pottery on her shelves, when we heard two cars approaching. By now, we knew the routine. We crept behind the kiln, out of view. She rushed upstairs and closed the cellar door behind her. Two men soon entered through the front door, and Liza began talking German, but we couldn’t make out her words.

  After a few seconds, she shouted, ‘Get out of my house!’

  I listened for a gunshot. Instead, a German yelled, ‘Where are you hiding him?’

  Him… I understood the significance of that right away; whoever had denounced us to the Nazis had only spotted one of us.

  When Liza screamed, I jumped up.

  ‘Stay here!’ I whispered to Izzy.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded, gripping my arm.

  There was no time to explain. I leaned down. ‘Go to Louis when you get out of here.’

  When I kissed him on the lips, he held me for a startled moment, then kissed me back.