The Emperor of Lies (21 page)

The frequency of the drops is increasing now. There is dull grumbling from the wall of thunder as he asks Kuper to drive closer. The children stand with their fingers in their mouths, staring at the horse and carriage, and at the old man with his hand in his jacket pocket, like a vision from another age.

He sees that they see, and is clearly embarrassed.

Well carry on playing then
, he cries,
off you go
, he says, and laughs – and when the children, at a nod from Miss Smoleńska, rather unwillingly start to move again, he pulls the tablets out of his pocket and throws them all up in the air –

Heave ho, here we go –

A child detaches itself from the throng. He is maybe ten years old; stocky, with solid thighs and broad shoulders, but quick. He whirls like a tornado across the ground and brings the palm of his hand down wherever a white tablet has landed.

There, and there, and there!
chuckles the Chairman delightedly.

But as with Samstag, only the Chairman’s mouth is smiling. In his eyes there is a piercing, lethal glint. Apart from the energetic boy hunting down the sugar pills, none of the children dare to come closer. They just stand timidly with their fingers in their mouths.

The boy’s name is Stanisław. He arrived at the start of May with a transport from Aleksandrów. His mother and father, sisters and brothers (there were at least seven of them) are all dead. But he probably does not know this. Or does he?

Hej ty tam, podejdź tutaj.

‘You there, come here!’

He says it in Polish, immediately indicating that he has identified Staszek as one of the new children.

And when the boy reluctantly approaches the barouche, he reaches down and cups the boy’s chin firmly in his gloved hand.

Powiedz mi, ile żeś podniósł?

Show me, what have you found?

Staszek opens his fist and shows a handful of white pills. It is impossible to tell which of them are cyanide tablets and which are ordinary sugar pills. Completely impossible: even he could not tell the difference. And the Chairman laughs his big laugh. He wants it to be seen from far and wide how impressed he is with the boy’s efforts.

At that moment, a violent clap of thunder shakes the landscape, and within a minute torrential rain is falling on them.

The operation began at five in the morning on 1 September 1942, on the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.

Police chief Leon Rozenblat was given orders to mobilise his ghetto force just half an hour beforehand. By then, the army transport vehicles had already driven into Bałuty Square: heavy, open lorries like the ones that had carried shoes and sacks of bloody, dirty clothes to the ghetto on recent nights. And in addition, half a dozen tractors with two or three trailers attached.

In the pale dawn light, some of the wooden fences and barbed-wire barricades across the exits from the square into Zgierska and Lutomierska were taken down, new barriers erected and the standard Schupo guard supplemented by members of the security forces.

While all this was happening, the Chairman of the ghetto lay sleeping.

He slept, and dreamt he was a child.

Or to be more accurate: he dreamt he was himself and a child
simultaneously
.

The child and he were competing, aiming stones at bottle tops. The child threw his bottle top, and he himself followed suit with his stone. After a while, he noticed it was getting harder to see. The child threw the bottle top further and further in the full, blazing sunshine, and the stone he was about to throw grew as huge and heavy as a skull in his own hand, so big that in the end he could not grasp it, even if he used both hands.

A wave of anguish swept over him. The game was not a game any longer, but some grotesque test of strength between these two who were both himself.

At the very moment he tried to hurl the giant stone, someone grabbed his arm and said:

Who do you think you are? Aren’t you ashamed of your arrogance?

By then the roar of the lorries’ diesel engines could already be heard, along with the loud clanking of the metal chains that were pulled taut as the towing vehicles slowly moved off down the streets of the ghetto.

*

He said afterwards that what grieved him was not the purge per se; the authorities had in fact prepared him for it in advance. What grieved him was that an operation
on that scale
could begin and be in progress for hours
without anyone thinking of ringing to inform him
.

It was
his
ghetto, when all was said and done. It was their duty to keep him informed.

Miss Fuchs explained later that when the Secretariat received the order, everyone assumed that the Chairman had already
agreed to it
, and that the fact he had not come into the office was simply explained by his preferring to draw up his plans and guidelines in the security of his home.

But that was not the impression he got when he arrived at Bałuty Square and was met by a delegation of his own staff outside the row of office huts. On the contrary, their staring eyes gave him the feeling they were making a laughing stock of him, as if he had gone from being the highest authority in the ghetto to being pilloried, someone everybody could laugh at:

But Mr Chairman – DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

The child throws the bottle top – but he can’t throw his stone that far.

The bottle top is white and shiny, vanishing through the air like a stroke of lightning. There was no stone in the world that would have enabled him to hit it.

He ought to feel angry that the stakes in this battle are so clearly weighted against him. Everything should really speak in his favour: the heaviness of the stone, his superior body strength; the fact that he is so much older and more experienced and wiser than he was as a child. He should be able to throw that far
but it is still beyond him
.

And what is left is shame. At the fact that he, having amassed so much power, can still achieve so infinitesimally little.

*

When he finally got to the hospital in Wesoła Street it was after eight in the morning and the frantic relatives who had gathered outside the cordon threw themselves at him as if he were their only salvation.

At last
, cried the crowd, or that was what it seemed to be crying:

At last he is here, the man who will free us from this scourge . . . !

At the hospital’s main entrance, SS-Hauptscharführer Konrad Mühlhaus stands supervising the deportation of all the sick and confused patients Rozenblat’s men are now herding them, out of the building. SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus is one of those men who feels he must be permanently in motion, so other people won’t notice how short he is.

He tramps round and round on the spot as he shouts orders like:

Rauf auf die Wagen! Schnell, schnell, nicht stehenbleiben!

Aware of the expectation that he will do something, he grasps his stick more firmly and strides up to the squat Mühlhaus.

Chairman
: What is happening here?

Mühlhaus
: I have orders to let no one pass.

Chairman
: I am Rumkowski.

Mühlhaus
: You could be Hermann Göring for all I care. I still can’t let you through.

Then Mühlhaus is gone; he hasn’t the patience to stand discussing anything with a Jew, no matter who he is or what he calls himself.

And the Chairman is left standing there alone. For a moment he looks as lost and powerless as the poor, broken men and women being carried or led from the hospital entrance to the trailers and the backs of the lorries. And yet he is not one of them. It is clearly discernible: a sort of vacuum, forming around him. Not only the German soldiers but also Rozenblat’s men fall back as if he had the plague.

On the back of the lorry nearest the main building, about a hundred elderly patients are crammed in together, standing up; many of them are half-naked or wearing faded, tattered hospital clothes.

He thinks he recognises one of Regina’s aunts, whom they used to visit on Sundays. He isn’t sure which of the old ladies it is; but he vaguely remembers having boasted to her that they would be able to take the tram all the way to Paris together, and that she laughed delightedly behind her bony hand: Oh Chaim, you can’t expect me to believe that . . . ! Now the woman is stripped naked of everything but the grey hair on her head and her terrified white eyes. Through the hubbub and crush that divides them, the woman shouts something to him and waves her matchstick arms, or perhaps her cries are directed at someone else. He is not sure, and he has no time to make sure, either. The soldier who has just shoved the last batch of patients up onto the truck hears her making a noise just beside him and takes aim at her face with his rifle butt in a wide, swinging action.

The blow lands right in the middle of the woman’s jaw, and something large and messy flies out of her mouth in a spurt of blood.

He turns away, nauseated.

That is when he notices that the hospital entrance is unguarded. The guards stationed there earlier have all rushed to cut off the escape route of a patient trying to get out through a first-floor window. The escapee is wearing a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt far too big for him, which hangs like a curtain over his face and the top part of his body as he falls forward, flailing his arms frantically. (The only reason the man does not plummet straight to the ground is that someone in the room behind him has swiftly leant out and grabbed his ankles.)

He himself seizes his opportunity and slips in through the half-open main door of the hospital, and suddenly the screams and deafening shouted orders are shut off.

Broken glass crunches under the soles of his boots.

He goes slowly up the broad sweep of the spiral staircase, his steps echoing beneath the high, vaulted stonework above him; goes on down the dark corridors, taking a look here and there into the now deserted wards on either side.

When he last came visiting with Regina, there were at least two hundred patients to a ward, two per bed, head to tail like the kings and knaves on a playing card. He remembered how their toothless, two-stalked heads had all smiled, and greeted him as if with a single mouth:

GOOD MORNING, MR CHAIRMAN –

Only Benji had opted to stay silent. He had been standing over by the window, his chin resting in his hand in a studiedly thoughtful pose. Now he was trying desperately to remember the number of Benji’s ward. But in all this upheaval, it is as if the hospital has been turned into an alien place. Unknown, impossible to navigate.

More or less by chance, he spots a doctor’s office at the far end of one of the corridors and steps inside with a sense of relief. On a shelf just inside the door are files of purchase lists and medical notes, and on the desk a telephone, still on the hook.

As he looks at it, the telephone, absurdly, begins to ring.

For a moment he is nonplussed. Should he lift the receiver and answer? Or will the ringing just attract German officers who will throw him out of the building as soon as they see him?

He ends up backing out into the corridor again. And Benji is standing there.

He spots him out of the corner of his eye long before he realises who it is. The ward doors are all open and the light is penetrating the corridors in long, mote-filled columns or tunnels. The light that draws Benji to his attention, however, is coming not from the side, but from above – from the ceiling – which is impossible of course: there are no windows there. Benji is wearing a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt like all the other patients, and leaning forward slightly, wielding a chair, its four legs pointing down the corridor, as if to defend himself from something.

From whom? From him? The Chairman takes a few steps into the impossible light:

Benji, it’s me
, he says, and tries to smile.

Benji backs away. From his twisted lips comes a strange, inarticulate singing or whining sound.

Benji . . . ?
is all he says. He wants his voice to sound full of anxiety and concern, but by the time it gets out of his mouth, it just sounds dishonest and false:

Be-en-j-ii, I’ve come to get you out of here, Be-en-jii . . .

Then Benji hurls himself forward. The four chair legs hit the Chairman full in the chest and Benji immediately drops the chair, as if it he has burnt himself on it, and runs off. But comes to a halt just as suddenly.

It is as if he had run straight into a wall.

Then the Chairman hears them, too. The sound of loud voices –
German voices!
– comes up from the stairwell below, followed by the scraping echo of energetic, booted footsteps. Now Benji does not know which way to go: forward, towards the inexorably advancing German officers, or back, towards the Praeses he fears if anything even more.

But the Chairman, too, is withdrawing, hastily taking cover behind the door of the doctor’s office.

SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus and two of his subordinates walk briskly along the corridor outside, and the next moment, the mechanical creaking of boot soles and rattle of weapons against leather shoulder-belts is swallowed up by the echoes from the stairwell. As soon as the sound of footsteps has died away, the Chairman goes over to the medicine cabinet in the doctor’s room, takes an enamel jug from the bottom shelf and fills it with water from a tap over the sink. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket for one of the white tablets he always carries, puts it in a glass and pours in some water.

When he looks out into the corridor again, Benji is gone. He finds him again in the big ward nearest to the stairs, crouching against the whitewashed wall behind a mountain of ripped mattresses and screens that have been tossed aside. Benji is trembling from shoulder to foot, but he does not look up. The Chairman has to say his name several times with different intonation before he finally looks up through the thick fringe hiding his face.

Here Benji, drink this . . . !

Benji gives him the same drained look of terror that he had when the German officers were close by. The Chairman has to get down on his knees to put the glass to his mouth. Benji presses his lips to it and takes big, urgent gulps, like a child. The Chairman gently puts a hand to the back of his neck to support and help him.

And it is simple. He thinks of his wife. If only everything with her could have been that simple.

Benji looks up at him once, almost with gratitude. Then the poison does its work and his eyes glaze over. A long spasm runs through his body, starting at his head and ending with his heels, which jerk convulsively for a moment, then somehow stiffen in mid-movement. Without really knowing when or how it happened, he finds himself sitting with his brother-in-law’s dead body in his arms.