The Emperor of Lies (11 page)

The name of the woman with the headscarf and the handbag in the collective in Franciszkańska Street was Irena, though no one had ever called her anything but Maman, pronounced not in the French way but with equal stress on both syllables.

Ma-mann! Ma-mann!

It was a cry that had echoed right through Vĕra Schulz’s childhood, through stairwells where the high, stone vaulting intensified the noise of the passing trams, and through the empty rooms in the spacious apartment in Vinohrady in Prague, which at this time of day, in the afternoon, was suffused with warm sunlight and the stately sound of ticking clocks. After she had sat all morning practising at the grand piano, Maman would languish and pine the afternoons away. She complained the heat gave her migraine, and rubbed expensive creams into her skin to stop it drying out. Lying on her back, on top of the bedclothes on the wide bed, she would amuse the children by tying coloured ribbons in her hair. Maman had a shock of curly, almost frizzy hair, which with a little effort she could transform into any look she chose. Maman would step into her wardrobe and came out again in a tennis skirt and Mary Pickford hat, or dress up as Mrs Benešová the President’s wife in a tailored suit of ‘English cut’, with a hat that looked like a military cap.

The fact that her mother was always vanishing and coming back as someone else, even if it was only in her piano soirée costume, had implanted in Vĕra from an early age a dread of Maman one day vanishing for good. As long as you look after me properly, I won’t be vanishing anywhere, Maman would joke, but none of the children – as well as Vĕra there were two brothers, Martin and Josel – believed her. For as long as they had known their mother, she had always been leaving them in some way or another.

Arnošt Schulz loved his wife in a more pragmatic way: as you love and care for a desirable ornament. According to him, Maman did not have good or bad days, she had different
personalities
(you did that, as an artist), and the family was instructed to stay on good terms with them all:
Now children, please leave Maman in peace for a little while
, he would say as soon as Vĕra or her brothers raised their voices at the dining table or played too boisterously in their rooms.

After two weeks in the ghetto, Maman had only one of her
personalities
left: a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman sitting crouched under a cloud of frizzy hair, who flinched in terror if anyone spoke to her. She would only eat the
disgusting
soup if someone fed it to her with a spoon, or the way Vĕra did it: soaked a few bits of dry bread in it and popped them in her mouth as soon as her attention was elsewhere.

But how different it was for her energetic husband.

From the very first moment, Dr Arnošt Schulz had made himself the spokesman of the Prague collective. He had set up a system of guards to tackle the local inhabitants’ brazen theft from the new arrivals, and had also composed letters and coordinated petitions to the Chairman’s office to complain about unheated rooms, lack of running water and a latrine-emptying procedure that
resembled nothing so much as a farce
. This last comment was made in his capacity as newly appointed general practitioner at Hospital No. 1 in Łagiewnicka Street where he is, as he puts it,
occupied day and night with saving the lives of people who as a result of the inadequate supply of nutrition in the ghetto lack all the prerequisites for survival
.

For a number of weeks after he sent off this missive, nothing happened.

One day, a slim envelope arrived, stamped with the Chairman’s postmark. Inside was an invitation to attend a ‘musical soirée’ to be held in honour of the new arrivals at the House of Culture in Krawiecka Street, and Arnošt Schulz decided to go with his daughter. He went with mixed feelings and no great expectations, and returned ‘distressed’, as he put it. Vĕra, too, describes the event, in the diary she was keeping fairly regularly at the time:

Evening Revue in the House of Culture

The first people we meet are a group of
politsayen
with armbands and batons [!] who tell us to step aside and let the
honoratiores
through.

I had not expected to find hierarchies like this in the ghetto. It’s as if they have invited us just to show us how little we are worth!

We stood like prisoners behind bars, watching the
honoratiores
arrive. I saw Rumkowski himself, a dour, white-haired man, like a pompous emperor at the head of his praetorian guard. It would have been laughable, but for the fact that everyone in the place leapt to their feet and started clapping.

Then the
show
got under way. A painted backdrop of a synagogue. Some actors dash up on stage and blurt out some lines in loud voices. Since the audience laughs, it must be some kind of joke, but I can’t understand a word. The whole thing is in Yiddish.

Between the comedy sketches there are musical numbers. A Miss B. Rotsztat performs some ‘light romances’ by Brahms on the violin, accompanied by Mr T. Ryder on the piano. Miss B. Rotsztat plays surprisingly well, though her movements are very exaggerated. The embarrassing part is the way the audience reacts – as if it has got to show rapturous delight to prove itself a proper audience.

Then it’s the Chairman’s big moment, Mr Mordechai Ch. Rumkowski. You could hear a pin drop in the hall; hearing him speak was clearly the real reason everyone was there.

He turns to those of us standing at the back, and he addresses us not in German but in Yiddish, absurdly enough, since very few of us understand the language. Perhaps it was just as well we did not understand, because I have since found out that
the old man
, as they call him here, spent most of his speech telling us off, calling us ‘robbers’ because we haven’t handed over our valuables to ‘his’ bank, because we haven’t turned up at the jobs he has found for us (that clearly doesn’t apply to Papa!), and saying that if we didn’t abide by his rules he would
have us deported
at once – where to? – Doesn’t he understand that we have just
been
deported?

*

Two days after the ‘spectacle’ at the House of Culture, the Chairman pays his own visit to the collective in Franciszkańska Street. The women and children down at the latrines see him coming first, or rather, the children in the yard see the white horse that pulls the Chairman’s carriage come snorting through the wide gateway at a brisk trot. The Chairman himself appears briefly engulfed in the sea of bobbing caps and berets that suddenly surrounds him. But his bodyguards are there straight away, their fists and batons pushing the crowd back far enough for him to move freely again.

First the Chairman inspects the latrines and the long row of washtubs lined up by the cellar door; then he and his retinue of guards set off up the school’s worn marble staircase. He goes along corridor after corridor. In all the places where outdoor clothes have been hung and suitcases and portmanteaux stacked in piles, he orders all the loose bits of clothing to be removed. Suitcases, portmanteaux, handbags: they are all opened and searched. In one of the classrooms, an older woman gives a heart-rending shriek as one of the bodyguards takes out a knife and starts cutting into the mattress on which she has just been lying.

The men of the Prague collective’s newly formed security force come rushing from all directions, chief among them the former clinical consultant at Prague’s Vinohrady Hospital –Dr Arnošt Schulz.

Schulz
: Mr Rumkowski, will you be so kind as to stop these unfortunate proceedings.

Chairman
: Who are you?

Schulz
: Schulz.

Chairman
: Schulz?

Schulz
: We have met. You are merely suffering a temporary lapse of memory.

Chairman
: Ah, Professor Schulz . . . ! As a doctor, you should know that leaving clothes and other loose items lying around attracts bedbugs.

Schulz
: I apologise for this misunderstanding, Chairman. It will be rectified at once.

Chairman
(pointing): We are now going to take these things down into the yard and burn them.

Schulz
: Mr Rumkowski, you cannot treat people’s possessions like that.

Chairman
: Who makes the laws here, you or me?

Schulz
: But this is madness.

Chairman
: I see it as my personal responsibility to deal once and for all with the insanitary conditions that have developed here in the ghetto. All I see on this inspection, apart from the fact that you are flagrantly flouting the rules and regulations I have issued, are the sources of infection you are consciously breeding here in the collective.

Schulz
: If you are concerned about the risk of infection, Mr Rumkowski, you should ensure that there is enough gas for everyone or make sure the latrines are emptied.

Chairman
: It may be that the toilets are cleaner where you come from, Professor Schulz.

Schulz
: Not even animals should be expected to eat the watery soup you give us. The bread is mouldy. What’s more, the lives of women and children are threatened by intruders who come in off the street in broad daylight. The other day, some opportunist thief broke into our medical supplies. Money, blankets, pots and pans – they steal them all, in front of our very eyes.

Chairman
: If you need protection, my
Ordnungsdienst
is at your disposal.

Schulz
: With all due respect, Mr Chairman: your
Ordnungsdienst
is not worth a candle. I have seen some of your men here from time to time. They come at mealtimes; but it feels more as though they are supervising us to make sure we don’t steal soup from you, than anything else. That is why we have set up our own guard!

Chairman
: Your so-called guard is to be disbanded forthwith.

Schulz
: You cannot prevent us defending ourselves.

Chairman
: There is a police force in the ghetto, and it answers to me, and I view any attempt to set up another one as treason. Do you know how we punish treason here in the ghetto, Mr Schulz?

Schulz
: Is that a threat? Are you threatening us?

Chairman
: There is no need for any threats. I may be king of no more than a few latrine tanks in your eyes, Dr Schulz. But I know one thing for sure. One telephone call from me, and you and your family will be deported from the ghetto within twenty-four hours. But I will not make the call. I will let you get away with your insolence, doctor. This time.

Meanwhile, Gertler’s men had carried suitcases and loose items of clothing down to the yard, doused them in petrol and set light to them. Within seconds, the flames were at the height of the first and second floors, where people were hanging out of the windows, watching in disbelief as the fire sent black smoke billowing to the opposite wall of the courtyard. A number of families reported afterwards that they had lost not only clothes and suitcases but also valuable personal items such as gold chains, charms and rings. One member of the collective said the Chairman’s men had also confiscated his winter coat, cut his watch and watch chain from his waistcoat pocket, and stolen his wife’s lace-up boots with winter linings.

At about the same time as Rumkowski was carrying out his inspection of the Franciszkańska Street collective, the Kripo raided the Adria restaurant at Bałuty Square, which had become something of a meeting place for the ghetto’s German Jews. Nine people from the Berlin and Cologne collectives, and five from the Prague collective, were caught red-handed transacting various bits of business. One of the German Jews was trying to sell a complete dinner service, another a set of table silverware. It transpired that all the potential buyers were either informants reporting directly to the Kripo, or members of Gertler’s intelligence team.

This is the way the Jews of the ghetto look after their own.

Vĕra Schulz writes of Rumkowski in her diary, the day after the courtyard bonfire (11 December 1941):

. . . that man is a monster –

His only achievement to date: selling out his own people in record time and stealing or embezzling all they own. Yet still a quarter of a million people look up to him as a god! What kind of human being is it who deliberately sets out to demean and dishonour as many people as possible, simply for his own advancement?

I don’t understand it!

Adam Rzepin naturally had no idea what kind of drugs he had got hold of, or what use could be made of them. On Moshe Stern’s advice, he therefore sought out a certain Nussbrecher – seasoned middleman in all sorts of illicit ghetto deals – and asked for a free estimate.

What Adam did not know was that the market for goods of all kinds had been saturated since the arrival of the foreign Jews, and that the black-market sharks in Pieprzowa Street were fighting like ferrets in a sack these days to hang on to their market share. Every new player in the market was seen as a potential rival. So instead of giving Adam a fair price, Aron Nussbrecher went straight to the newly appointed prison commandant, Shlomo Hercberg, and told him there was a young man by the name of Rzepin who had started selling drugs in the ghetto. Hercberg had just come out of a meeting with the Chairman, in which the latter had reminded him of the need
to clamp down on the growing crime and corruption at any price
, and it occurred to Hercberg that he could usefully make an example of young Rzepin as a warning to others. It helped that he was under nobody’s patronage. In other words, he would not inform on anybody else as a result of himself being betrayed.

The following day, therefore, what turned up at Adam and Lida’s flat was not a handful of lucrative offers but a pair of hefty policemen, and Adam was taken for interrogation to the prison in Czarnieckiego Street.

In common with many others in the forces of law and order in the ghetto, Shlomo Hercberg had his roots in Bałuty. He was what the German-speaking citizens of Łódź called a real
Reichsbaluter
.

He had once had a job as a projectionist at the Bajka cinema on the corner of Brzezińska and Franciszkańska Streets. There were still folk in the ghetto who could remember the way Mr Hercberg had anxiously prowled the pavement outside the cinema before performances in a tight, navy-blue uniform with steel-grey braiding, hoping to catch a glimpse of
society on parade
. Hercberg had loved première evenings. Years later at the dinners at Princess Helena’s, when he himself was part of the small group that constituted ghetto society, he would keep harking back to how in years gone by you could see the leading families from Poznański or Silberstein or Sachs arriving in their luxurious carriages at the big Temple Synagogue or at the concert hall in Narutowicza Street, ready to take their seats in the boxes.

Hercberg was at pains to convince people of his rank. He would boast that he had served as a captain in one of Field Marshal Piłsudski’s cavalry regiments and could, if asked, produce reams of certified copies of call-up and transfer papers, along with doctor’s certificates detailing where and how he had been
wounded in the field
, which field hospital he had been taken to, and where he went for rehabilitation. All these documents were naturally entirely fake; but Shlomo Hercberg knew, just as the Chairman did, that it was not academic titles that counted if you were to build something from scratch, but the ability to invest your office with gravitas and dignity. And if there was one thing Shlomo Hercberg was good at, it was this.

In the Czarnieckiego Street prison, Adam was held in what they called the Pit. The Pit was actually nothing more than a wide, underground space, an
oubliette
with an opening in the ceiling through which the warders could only insert or remove the prisoners by use of a long metal pole with a forked end, rather like fishing for frogs in a pond. At the end nearest the opening there were some basic, iron-framed bunks around the walls, where the favoured prisoners slept. The rest had to squeeze in as best they could at the far end by the latrine trench.

But that was just the anteroom. Beyond the barred door, the Pit opened out and branched down through the weathered stone. When the mass deportations from the ghetto began later that year, thousands of men would be held prisoner down in its winding galleries. It was as if deep
inside
, or deep
down
(depending how you looked at it), the ghetto had no end. From the meandering shafts, an incessant moan penetrated to the surface, as if the lamentations of all who had ever been incarcerated down there were entwined into a single monotone that continued regardless of the numbers waiting to be deported or let out.

Every so often, Adam was fetched up for interrogation by Hercberg.

He was taken to the so-called Cinema, which on the surface looked more like a private office than an interrogation room, furnished with everything a
Reichsbaluter
could possibly own in the way of luxury and affluence. There was an upholstered leather suite flanked by ‘oriental’ lamps with silken fringes, a desk with many drawers and compartments, all with keys in them, and a desk blotter with decorative wooden inlays and its own inkwell of real silver. But above all, there was food; the tempter Hercberg had laid out everything a starving prisoner could dream of, in the form of ham and
kiełbasa
, a whole tub of sauerkraut; perspiring cheeses in linen cloths; delicious-smelling fresh bread that the employees of the bakery in Marysińska Street brought in each morning on Hercberg’s express orders.

There now, come in, don’t be afraid . . . !
said Hercberg to Adam Rzepin, smiling a smile as gleaming as the fat on the ham. And when Adam could no longer resist stretching out a trembling hand towards the piece of bread nearest the edge of the plate, Hercberg grabbed the incorrigible sinner by the scruff of the neck –

So . . . even now you can’t keep your hands to yourself, you miserable devil!

– and drove his head hard against the wall.

They abused him constantly. Sometimes with their bare fists, sometimes with long, flat wooden clubs, which they used systematically, working from his backside all the way down the inside of his legs to his ankle bones and Achilles tendons. They wanted to know what he knew about Moshe Stern. They wanted to know who Stern was ‘doing business with’ these days. They had also heard he was mixed up with the dealer Nussbrecher. Who had Nussbrecher offered to take the goods to? Lastly, they wanted to know everything about the people he had stolen from. They wanted the
names
of all the rich Jews from Prague. Adam had stolen their documents, hadn’t he? So of course he knew what they were called.

Adam screamed until he lost consciousness, but Lida added her high note to the song rising up from all the galleries of the Pit; it sounded like the vibrating overtone of a string stretched to breaking point:

Give them nothing, give them nothing
, her voice cut through him.

And so he gave them nothing. No names.

Back in the Pit, Adam dreams of the day many years ago when his father took the whole family to see the sea. They went there from Łódź in a little Citroën lent to them by one of the foremen at the sawmill. Szaja had driven it himself.

Sopot
. That had been the name of the place they went to. It came back to Adam now.

Alone in the flat in Gnieźnieńska Street, Lida is dreaming of the same sea. And her brother is with her in the dream, just as he is with her in everything she says or does; even when she is sleeping or falling.

In Sopot there was a long wooden jetty known as the Pier stretching out into the sea. On either side of the Pier there were beaches with fine, loose sand strewn with mussel shells, and further up the beach, backing onto the promenade, there were tall, bast-fibre huts with awnings in barber’s-pole stripes where the really Rich and Important visitors got changed. Adam remembers several of these Rich and Important people raising their hats to them as they walked along the Pier later that evening, just as if they were not poor people from Łódź, and definitely not Jews.

Lida remembers that when she waded out into the shallow water she suddenly realised the sea was not a flat, even, level surface, the way it looked on postcards. No, the sea was a living creature. The sea moved. It rocked and surged and incessantly heaved itself up onto and over her back and down between her legs and knees. It was constantly changing.

Right now it is like an enormous ball.

She stands there with both arms round the big, shiny sea-ball, but she can’t encircle it completely. The surface of the ball is smooth and wet. But the thing with the sea is that it keeps slipping away. Two palms are not enough to hold on to the sea, and her eyes are slipping, too, and when she manages to raise them at last, she sees the sea floating off, all the way to the horizon.

In her memory, she drinks it all up. In great, deep draughts she swallows down the sea, gulp by gulp, and the sea doesn’t taste like the soup Adam feeds her with, but harsh and salty, and the more she drinks, the more clearly she can feel that there is something to catch in there, something smooth and slippery; and when she gets it in her teeth it’s a fish with a hard, scaly tail that scratches her soft palate and the inside of her cheeks. The fish tastes harsh and sharp and salty, but soft and living, too, and she keeps biting until the bones crunch, and then sucks, running her tongue over rough fish scales and soft, slippery guts.

And in his cell, Adam can also feel his mouth filling with the taste of fish, harsh and salty like nothing he’s tasted before; and he must have screamed because all of a sudden he hears the guards outside.

They come rushing in a jangle of keys, arms already raised to strike.

Shut up you devil,

Or do you want to be sent away as well!

And they stick down the pole with the long snare at the end, and when he shrinks back to avoid getting the hook in his face, it has turned into a calloused warder’s hand that grabs the scruff of his neck and rams his face into the cell floor. An intoxicating numbness rises from the back of his neck. His mouth is full of blood and he can barely swallow. But when he does, everything tastes of fish, and he is one big blood-dream of fish and living water.

*

When they came for him, Adam Rzepin had been in the Pit for over four weeks. One of the warders who came to unlock the grille had a form with him. Adam had to give his name, address and father’s name. Then they got the pole with the snare and hauled him up.

It was cold outside! A month before, there had only been grey slush in the streets; now the whole ghetto was encased in smooth, gleaming white snow. He saw the sun sparkling on the banks of snow, the light so sharp and blinding that he could scarcely tell earth from sky.

There was as much commotion in the fenced prison compound as in any market place; people were dragging heavy suitcases around with them, or carrying mattresses and bedclothes strapped to their backs. But there was none of the incessant, busy hubbub of the market. People moved almost reluctantly, like rows of convicts; strangely quiet, disciplined. The only sound plainly audible in the clear, frosty morning was the hollow, bell-like clatter of the pots and pans hanging from belts and luggage straps.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked one of the guards.

‘You’ve had it, you’re being sent away,’ said the guard, and without further ado handed Adam’s workbook to an official sitting at a desk to one side. The official briskly stamped the document, and a minute later Adam was given a bit of bread and a bowl of soup, and ordered to go and wait at the far end of the compound, where around a hundred men were already standing guard over their possessions.

That’s how it is
, said one of the other prisoners, who already had his food and was gnawing at his bread with almost toothless jaws.
They’re letting the foreigners into the ghetto and sending us residents away
.

Adam opened out his papers and looked at the stamp:

AUSGESIEDELT

it said in big, black letters all over the top half of his work log, where his name, address and age had been filled in by hand.
Resettled.

Then suddenly, and somehow reluctantly, everything fell into place.

They hadn’t brought him up from the Pit to let him go, but to deport him from the ghetto.

Adam looked round. Several of the men inside the compound knew each other, or at any rate seemed superficially acquainted, but as the ritual of calling the names, stamping the papers and dishing out the soup and bread continued, none of them said so much as a word. It was as if they felt ashamed to see each other there.

Adam realised they must be waiting for the contingent of deportees to be big enough to march off. Where to? To assembly points somewhere else in the ghetto, or all the way to Radogoszcz? If he were deported, what would happen to Lida? Would he ever see her again? In his nervousness, Adam wolfed his piece of bread whole. It was dark and surprisingly juicy: the first proper meal he had had for a month. He felt his stomach being warmed by the soup.

That was when he caught sight of his uncle Lajb on the other side of the fence.

*

When Uncle Lajb still lived with them, he had a bicycle. He had been the only one in the whole of Gnieźnieńska Street to own a bicycle, and, just to prove what a remarkable possession it was, he would get it out, take it to pieces and lay out all the parts on a piece of oilcloth. Each component separately: the chain, the tools in their case with special pleats and slots for every spanner and clamp. Then he would put the bike back together again, with the local children all standing round him in the yard, watching.

Several evenings a week were devoted to this ritual. But never the Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, Lajb stood with his face to the wall, prayer book in hand, praying. Lajb spoke the Eighteen Blessings with the same ceremonious precision as that with which he took his bicycle apart and reassembled it. When he put on his prayer shawl he spoke the blessing over the prayer shawl; when he put on the
tefillin
he thanked God for the gift of the phylacteries. Each element separately. And Adam thought when he saw Lajb’s face at prayer that it looked just like the cycle saddle with its little eyelet holes, and the tendons in his neck just like the two-pronged front fork sticking down to the hub round which the prayer wheel spun with its smooth-running spokes, imperceptibly and silently. Without wanting to be or indeed being aware of it, Lajb always stayed at the centre of the circle. Wherever he went, people gathered round and regarded him with reverence and admiration. Back then in Gnieźnieńska Street, it had been little boys. This time it was prison guards. They were approaching Lajb as if he were some holy rabbi. Just a few minutes later, a happy guard came over to Adam with some freshly stamped documents, his whole face beaming with joy: