The Emperor of Lies (26 page)

After
di groise shpere
, as the September action was now known, the Chairman was obliged to move out of the hospital. He moved into private accommodation in an ordinary block of flats. The new flat at 61 Łagiewnicka Street comprised two small, adjoining rooms, with a narrower room rather like a corridor between the other two rooms and the kitchen. This room had a tall window running the length of one side, looking out over an enclosed inner courtyard where all manner of old junk had accumulated, and where what seemed like every pigeon in the ghetto came to breed.

Though you didn’t call the Chairman’s rooms mere
rooms
: you said
city apartment
.

The city apartment also had a little box room at the far end of the landing, to which the Chairman held a separate key. He called it his office but seldom spent time there. He spent most of his hours and days exactly as before, in his Secretariat down at Bałuty Square, or in his residence out at Marysin.

Two rooms
. The Chairman slept in one of them, and his wife Regina was supposed to do the same. But Mrs Rumkowska seldom slept there. Since the disappearance of her beloved brother, she either stayed in ‘her’ flat in Zgierska Street, to which no one else had access, or sat pale and listless at the desk in the other room, which everyone referred to as Mrs Rumkowska’s room, even though she refused to move any of her possessions into it or even to lie on the bed the Chairman finally and reluctantly installed there. She generally locked herself in. When Mrs Rumkowska did occasionally emerge, it was as if she were stepping onto a stage. She smiled broadly and touched things distractedly. If anyone addressed her – usually the housekeeper, Mrs Koszmar – she assumed as painless an expression as she could muster, or gave a forced laugh.

But then there was that
third
room, somewhere between the Chairman’s and Regina’s. Though Stanisław never really knew whether it was an actual room, or one that only
came into existence
when the Praeses wished it to.

Every so often, the Chairman took him in there. And then Stanisław would realise that what looked like a narrow corridor from the outside was in fact quite a large space.

Big and cramped at the same time: cluttered with bits of old, wooden furniture that were never used. And then that window, admitting something that might have been light if the panes had not been so plastered with dirt and mud. And there was no proper air in there, either. Staszek tried to breathe, but every breath felt like having a thick, foul-smelling sock forced down his throat. He closed his eyes, and all that was left apart from the smell was the cooing and the delicate rustle of the pigeons’ wings as they rose and fell in the glazed-in courtyard; and then that hateful, wheedling, paternal voice bending down to speak to him, with the same evil breath as the furniture had: a strange blend of pigeon droppings, rotting wood, stale, ingrained cigarette smoke and the particular kind of wax polish with which Mrs Koszmar regularly polished all the cupboard doors and chair arms:

This is a place just for you and me, Staszek, a holy place:

so we need to be able to make ourselves comfortable!

Everyone said he was a Rumkowski now. Princess Helena said it, and Mr Tausendgeld; and Miss Fuchs; and the key man and Fide Szajn who turned up punctually each day, eyes glazed with hunger. As well as the man they all called his benefactor, Moshe Karo.

But nothing could make him think of himself as a Rumkowski. To himself, he had always had only the one name – Stanisław Stein – even though he no longer remembered very well what his real mother had looked like. Just that she used to wear her hair in two long plaits, and that those plaits were done so tightly that looking down from above, you could see the white skin of her scalp. That was what he did when she made him stand straight and still by her while she sewed the Star of David onto the front of his jacket. Then he had to turn round and stand with his back to her while she sewed another star firmly into place. He remembered the smell of her hair. Fresh and soft, with a warm, spicy scent that was all hers. No one else had her smell.

At the Green House they had constantly asked him what he remembered of the time before he came to the ghetto, but he could not answer. It was as if the very effort of remembering blotted out whatever was somehow still there to be remembered.

The Germans. He remembered
them
. And the shame; running like an eager dog by the first jeeps in the column; laughing at the lovely sheen of the vehicles’ matt steel and the soldiers’ helmets; and being grabbed by the scruff of his neck by Krzysztof Kohlman, the cantor of the synagogue, and sent home with a slap on his backside.

Later, the German soldiers had hoisted the cantor up into the big chestnut outside the Catholic church, a tree so old that its bark had been worn and rubbed away so the bare white wood shone through; and at first he had thought it was a punishment because Mr Kohlman had been so nasty to him. But when Mrs Kohlman came out and pleaded and begged for them to let her husband down from the tree, they went to his shop and came back with hammer and nails. They propped a ladder against the tree; one of the soldiers climbed up, tied both Mr Kohlman’s arms to the trunk, and forced his fingers back to hammer nails right through his hands. Then they left him hanging there.

And all the time he could hear his mother saying, sometimes calling out, sometimes in a hoarse whisper:

My children are Christian, my children are Christian, my children are Christian –

Why did she say that? All the Jews in the village had been rounded up on the big grassy area in front of the church, but the church door was shut, as was the door in the churchyard wall; and outside, the fine, cold rain turned everything that had been firm ground into thick, viscous mud. There were soldiers everywhere. They had big black military coats, and you could see shiny droplets of rain dotting the fabric and their helmets, and the rifles they carried on straps slung over their shoulders. Every so often one would take a quick step forward, drag a man or two out of the crowd and set about them with rifle butts, batons or their bare hands.

They went on beating even when the men were on the ground.

And when the men could no longer move, they were dragged off to the far end of the churchyard wall, from where shots continued to ring out, hour after hour.

It was after midnight when the group of women was ordered to move.

Shiny steel helmets and leather coats shouting
schnell
and
raus
, and the wailing chorus of women began to howl louder, and he stumbled between bodies now so saturated that all he could see were big, heavy, stockinged feet, squelching through the mud and missing their footing at every step; and the women talking in loud indignant voices over each other about the children they were being parted from. And about food. And what they could survive on if they had nothing to eat. He had been awfully afraid, and because the fear was everywhere, whatever he saw or touched had also turned to fear. The buses waiting for them turned into nervous, malevolent beasts, juddering with the rage pent up beneath the clattering metal covers of their engine compartments. He tried to keep his eyes straight ahead so as not to feel sick, as his mother had told him to do, but inside him and ahead of him everything was black. He had wet himself. They went on one bus, then another or it might have been the same one again, and the bus bumped around so violently amid the soft and oily warmth of its engine sounds that he felt as if invisible hands were kneading him. And he hadn’t been able to hold on any longer. And his pee-soaked garments had frozen onto the lower part of his body. His teeth chattered, despite his mother holding him clasped tightly to her. And he remembers his mother saying
I wish I had a blanket to keep him warm . . .

But somewhere between the intense desire for a blanket and the blanket’s appearance, as sudden as it was unexpected (quick, nervous hands winding it round him in lots of thick layers), his mother had simply disappeared.

He never saw her again.

*

Those tucking a blanket round his cold body that morning when the buses arrived included Malwina Kempel and nursery nurse Rosa Smoleńska from the Green House. Not that he knew it at the time. In fact, it was several months before he realised he was no longer in Aleksandrów but in
Litzmannstadt Ghetto
. (He wrote in the gently rounded hand that Miss Smoleńska taught all the children:

Litz-mann-stadt Ghet-to –
)

The deported women had initially been taken to a building called Kino Marysin, which was not a cinema at all, but some kind of warehouse with draughty wooden walls and a smell of old potatoes and earth. There he sat with the label that identified his transport number hanging round his neck and the blanket they had wrapped around him, with nothing to eat but a few slices of dry bread and the soup that was brought in clanking vats every day and tasted bitter and nasty, like water you had scrubbed the floor with. After a week had passed, his
benefactor
Moshe Karo came in with a woman in the blue uniform of a nursery nurse, freshly ironed, and read out a whole list of names, and the children whose names were read out had to get up and go with her.

So he had already been in the ghetto when Rosa came to fetch him?

Ghet-to Litz-mann-stadt.

Miss Smoleńska nodded.

So what
was
it then, this ghetto?

Miss Smoleńska had no answer to that. The ghetto was what was
out there
. But he was
in here
now. Saved, as Miss Smoleńska put it.

Were there steel helmets in the ghetto, too?

He had told her before about all the Jews having to go to the square in front of the church, about the rain that meant nobody could see how many of them there were; and about the steel helmets, going around beating everyone they had herded together, only to separate them again. He was scared of those steel helmets, he said; and when he said that, Miss Smoleńska looked as she always did when the children’s questions were too close for comfort or she didn’t know what to answer. Her face lost all expression, and her hands found themselves suddenly very busy.

The Germans are here, but they generally stay outside. As long as we don’t do anything bad, they won’t come in.

They won’t
ever
come in again?

When the war’s over, they’ll never come again.

When will the war be over, then?

But that was a question not even Rosa Smoleńska could answer.

But there was an out there, and it
looked the way the Praeses had decided it should look. The General stood up in
his carriage and pointed, and whatever he pointed at
came to be
. The things that sprang up like that before the two of
them as they went on their
royal inauguration
visit
through the ghetto were: a hospital that had been converted
into a tailor’s to make uniforms; a children’s hospital that had become an
exhibition space; a bolted and barred (and closely guarded) charcoal store; a
vegetable market; and
resorty
, of course,
lots and lots of resorty
.
Here!
said the General, and pointed, and a wide
square spread before them with barriers and gates and sentry boxes and policemen
in tall, shiny boots and caps and yellow-and-white-striped armbands with Stars
of David.
Here
, said the Chairman,
there are thirteen thousand men and women working every
day just to look after my affairs and the ghetto’s business!

Stanisław would have liked the Praeses
to ask him about his brothers, his mother, even Rosa Smoleńska and
Superintendent Rubin at the Green House; he would have liked to talk about
anyone and anything other than what the Chairman was pointing at and ordering
into being.

‘And what happens to all the people in
the ghetto who are going to die?’ he asked in the end, mainly to have something
to say. But the Chairman did not reply. He raised his stick and commanded forth
another shower of factories from the long row of tumbledown buildings and said
all this will be yours one day
.

Staszek finally plucked up his
courage.

‘Is it you who decides who’s going to
die? – Miss Smoleńska says it’s the authorities who decide who’s got to
die!’

But the Chairman still obstinately made
no reply. He was slumped so deep in his carriage seat that his kneecaps were
touching his chin. Along the street through which they were driving, knots of
people had gathered, a mix of policemen and ordinary workers. Some smiled and
waved; some tried to climb into the carriage; and others ran alongside,
attempting to keep pace for no particular reason. The Chairman did not appear
put out by these tributes from the masses; on the contrary, they seemed to put
him in high spirits. He leant forward to the coachman and shouted:
Faster, faster
; and then he shouted to Staszek,
too:

Do you want
to hold the reins?

But the reins the Chairman was offering
him were not real ones, just an excuse to lift him into his lap; and there he
sat now on a stiff, uncomfortable Chairmanly knee and tugged and flicked and
said
whoa
and
gee
up
and anything else he could think of to distract the attention of
the regal General until the Praeses pressed his vast body against his own and
panted like a steam engine right down the back of his neck:

Ty
jesteś moim synem, moim drogim synem –
⁹

*

It always ended with them going to the
room with the dirty light and the pigeons, where the air was so thick it felt
like a woollen sock in your throat; but that was only after everyone else in the
flat had gone to bed.

The Chairman would have asked Mrs
Koszmar to get everything ready. There would be platters of sliced cheese and
fat-edged ham, rolled so they could be filled with radish halves and bunches of
parsley and dill. Flanked by two gleaming slices of lemon were wafer-thin cuts
of smoked, marinated meat which the Chairman speared on the point of a knife and
proffered to his Son, to watch him snap them up in his mouth like a fish. The
Chairman liked to watch while Stanisław was eating, and when Stanisław was
eating, it was as if the Chairman could not control himself, but plunged his
fingers into a jar of sweet, black plum jam and told him to lick and suck the
jam from his fingers like a goat (
tsig
, said
the Chairman, making goat-like slurping noises of his own, with his tongue in
the back of his throat,
tsig, tsig,
tsigerli
 . . . !); and the cloying taste of ripe
plums was so overwhelming that it almost suffocated him, with the alien Praeses
fingers finding their way in, and even deeper in, so deep that he almost choked
and had to grab the Praeses by the arm and squeeze tight to make him stop.
Something that did not seem to trouble the Praeses in the slightest. He merely
smiled, a smile filled with satisfaction and distaste like a surgeon just
embarking on a demanding operation.

But there were also times when the
Chairman came back in after the two of them had just been in the Room, and then
he was like another person. He swept all the platters and plates off the table
and roared that Staszek was
A DISGRACE TO THE WHOLE
HOUSEHOLD
and would have to learn to keep the place clean and stop
leaving it like a pigsty, and he would often finish by calling Regina or Mrs
Koszmar in to tidy up so it looked
RESPECTABLE
again.

The worst of it was that you could
never know who the Praeses would be from one moment to the next. Or to be
precise: in which guise he would reveal himself.

What baffled Staszek was not how the
different parts of the Chairmanly body could be combined in one figure, but what
happened to the other parts in the meantime. Where, for example, did the
happy and high-spirited Praeses
go, the one who
slapped his knee and broke into loud, shrill laughter, like a mechanical toy?
And what happened in the interim to the
troubled
Praeses
, who talked to Staszek as if to a little adult about war and
ghetto business
? Or the
cunning Praeses
, with the cold, calculating,
shifty eyes of a predator? And where did his
hands
go? Those hands that were the most active part of the
Praeses’s body, moving of their own volition, though Staszek made his back stiff
and straight and pulled his head into his shoulders to escape. The hands still
always found their way in somehow. The Chairman smiled with black teeth, his
eyes were glazed and Staszek dared not do anything for fear that the
wrathful Praeses
would grab him up from the sofa
and start to cuff him about the head and shoulders until his head was swimming,
and Staszek threw up and was left sitting like an animal in his own vomit, which
was as grey and colourless as the pigeon droppings piling up against the outside
of window to the courtyard.

You
disgusting little pig
, said the Chairman, smiling his warmest
smile.

Staszek eventually came up with a
different strategy. He made sure to catch the hand
before
it started hitting; caught it and held it as you would hold a
jumping frog on your lap. Then he brought it lovingly to his face and stroked
the rough knuckles against his neck and cheek and chin. At first, the Chairman
seemed entirely nonplussed by this sudden display of dog-like devotion, and if
there had been a blow lying ready in the Chairman’s hand, it was put entirely
off its stroke.

As indeed was the Chairman: who sat
there with his son’s tearful head between his hands, as if it were an object he
had no idea what to do with.

That was another way of doing it.