The Emperor of Lies (27 page)

The doors to my rooms are always open, the Chairman would say.

I live a community life. At heart I am just a simple, ordinary Jew.

I have nothing to hide.

In the Chairman’s room, plates piled high with food were set out in rows and on tiered stands: beautifully cut triangular sandwiches with smoked meat and creamed horseradish, eye-wateringly large portions; and cakes,
real
cakes and buns made from
real
flour, sugar and eggs. At the far end of the table, the wine bottles with their pouring spouts stood as if to attention, elegant white cloths tied round their necks.

It was always the same people picking their way round the table.
Resort
heads and administration chiefs, the managers of the Chairman’s many offices and secretariats; Miss Fuchs, Mr Cygielman and Miss Rebeka Wołk. There were also uniform caps with various ‘stripes’. In the crowd he could see Rozenblat’s and other police officers’ caps with red bands, while Commander Kaufmann from the fire brigade had a blue band and the head of the postal service had green. And Princess Helena’s merry laugh hung like a glittering garland over the uniformly grey carpet of male noise. There was much huffing and puffing over the glasses and plates set out on the table. For Staszek, who was expected to keep to the back of the room with the Gertler and Jakubowicz children, it was like watching a play. The General in the middle, loud and purple with alcohol and exertion; and around him this court of invited dignitaries who not so much spoke as delivered lines. Grandiloquent cascades of words, or small, thin, pointed words that tumbled out of them like coins, and hung in the air or were beaten or trampled to pieces by sudden steps, unwarranted backslapping and exaggeratedly loud laughter.

Since the doors were always open, Staszek seized his chance – grabbed a fistful of squishy sandwiches, and took a stroll through the high-ceilinged reception room and on down the stairs to where the key man was keeping guard. Staszek normally only saw him from behind as he sat in his cubicle, his uniformed back and then his neck with its three rolls of hippo flab, topped by a
proper
police cap with a red band. So the key man wasn’t just a key man – he was a policeman, too! Around the sleeve of his jacket he had a white armband with a blue, six-pointed star in the middle, and within the star a white circle enclosed in a V-sign.

The only way in which he could get past this colossus was to slip behind the cubicle down a narrow set of stairs to the cellar. Staszek had already made sure there was a way out from there, along a narrow basement corridor into what must once have been a laundry. There were tubs for washing and rinsing propped along the wall, some with big patches of rust where water must once have gushed into them from taps long since removed. By climbing up onto the edge of one of the empty tubs, he could reach a high window which had been left slightly open. With one hand he undid the hasp that was stopping the window opening fully, got a grip on the outside of the window frame and then forced his head and shoulders as far through as he could. And miraculously enough: before the washtub toppled over, there was someone
out there
to take him under the arms and pull and tug until his whole body was through.

Outside stood the strangest apparition he had ever seen.

A boy of about his own age, face bent forward with a grimace of seemingly constant pain. On his back he carried a cross, made of two beams, one fixed across the other. From the lengths of wood hung bottles, jars and tubes that knocked and chinked together as he tried in alarm to straighten up again But the gaze from beneath the wooden cross was no longer resting on Staszek; it had alighted on the sandwiches he had dropped as he squeezed through the window, which now lay scattered in the dirt. The boy fell on them and stuffed them into his mouth one after another, dirt and bread together, while the bottles, jars and glassware jangled and chimed over him like a tower of ringing bells.

Once he had wolfed them all, he rested back beneath his two beams of wood, patted his stomach and announced in a pompous voice:

I am the Chairman’s son!

Staszek stared at him. Two ulcerated legs, blue with cold, stuck into a pair of muddy
trepki
– how could
this
be the Chairman’s son? But it seemed the bottle boy did not mean it quite as literally as he had made it sound:

In the ghetto, we’re all the Chairman’s children.

That’s what Bronek says.

So I must be the Chairman’s son as well.

Then he began to howl in a loud and harrying hawker’s voice:

EL-I-KSIIIR, EL-I-KSIIIR

Buy yourself a lovely new life

It belatedly dawned on Staszek that the bottle boy was a mobile chemist’s shop. From his wooden cross hung not only bottles and jars but also twists of fabric, shards of mirror, scissor blades and little bits of soap, tied on with rope and string. Above this contraption, the boy’s small, pale face had the look of one scared to death by everything dangling all around him.

‘There’s no chemist’s here any more,’ the Chairman’s
real
son said firmly, in a voice that he tried to make like the Chairman’s, authoritative and dismissive.

But the bottle boy refused to let himself be deflated.

‘It makes no difference,’ he replied. ‘Better to stand where people
think
they’re going to find a chemist’s than anywhere else. That’s what Bronek says, anyway!’

Staszek began to suspect there was something not quite right about the boy. There was something about his eyes; they didn’t seem able to focus on what they were looking at. ‘Do you want something else to eat?’ asked Staszek, fishing a chunk of bread out of his pocket. (He had learnt always to have some food with him – so he had something to pop in his mouth even on days when the Chairman was not entertaining guests.) The bottle collector grabbed the bread and took a big bite. It was only when he had wolfed the whole thing that it struck him as strange for a child he didn’t know to turn up in his territory, and what was more, with his pockets full of food.

But by then, Staszek had made off –

Wait for me . . . !
cried the bottle boy, and dashed after his benefactor; but with the weight of the wooden crossbar on his back it was not easy to run, and the next time Staszek turned round, the whole, huge bottle rack was out of sight, with only the gentle tinkle of glass audible somewhere behind him.

Staszek went on at a more leisurely pace down a potholed, hilly road with low houses and dilapidated wooden sheds on either side. There were people standing selling things all along the street. A windowsill or a doorstep served as a shop counter, with a few scraps of material or metal objects laid out for sale. The house window apertures had no frames in them; some were boarded up with chipboard or had a loose bit of material hanging over them. In a front doorway sat an old man with the stumps of his amputated legs wrapped in coarse sacking. Between his wooden crutches he had spread out a realm of ironmongery, pots and pans with or without their lids. As protection from the raw autumn air he had a curly sheepskin like a waistcoat round his body, and a cap with earflaps, tied under his chin. His eyes were hidden behind a big pair of dark glasses, from behind which he was helplessly scanning the scene.

Staszek stood in front of the blind man and dropped another bit of bread into the lap between the two crutches, and the blind man must have seen the bread fall as clearly as if it were manna from Heaven, for his hands were there at once, feeling around among saucepan lids and handles, and a low
ohhh-hhh
of surprise ran through the crowd that had by then gathered around them. The boy was not only well dressed and apparently clean and healthy; he was also giving alms to the poorest of the poor.

The child himself had forgotten his earlier caution.

‘I wanted to ask the way to the children’s home in Okopowa Street,’ he said in the politest Polish he could muster.

‘
Op-kwa
?’

The man pointed in all sorts of directions, until Staszek realised that this extravagant gesturing was just to hide the fact that behind his dark glasses he was still trying to find out who was asking. Meanwhile, other curious bystanders had come closer, and were no longer in distant, isolated pockets but formed an angry group of people, all with questions to ask:

Who are you? – What are you doing here? – Where have you come from?

Staszek ducked between the shafts of a handcart full of old scrap metal and set off down the road, keeping moving until he thought he was safe.

When he turned round, the crowd was still standing around the blind man, but the man with the cart had been joined by two policemen, and Staszek saw the man raise one arm and point and then all of them, the two policemen included, looked his way.

But no one made any attempt to follow him.

Slowly, all the colour leached from the sky. The buildings became more widely scattered; trees and stone walls took a step back from the edge of the road. There was no electric light to be seen. As darkness started to fall, the temperature dropped. What Staszek at first took to be his own frosted breath turned out to be increasingly thick mist in the air. All sense of feeling began to ebb from his feet and fingertips.

He thought of the Chairman, presumably already out looking for him. He would go with his bodyguards from house to house, asking if anybody had seen
the chosen one
, and before long he would get to the man with the handcart and people would be scared and maybe admit that they had
seen him
. Maybe they would hope to earn some kind of reward that way, or they might say they didn’t know anything, in order to keep out of trouble. Miss Smoleńska always used to say the less you knew, the better. Where the authorities were concerned, at any rate.

Now and then he caught sight of other people in the darkness. Some of them had armbands and uniform caps. What would happen if he stopped them and told them he was the person they were looking for? But they might not believe him, since there were others going around saying they were children of the Praeses. Maybe it would be better to tell it the way it was. That he didn’t know what or who or where he was. The last thing he had done was to sit on a bus with his mother and there were other people there, too, and somebody had come and put a blanket over him because he was wet and cold. But they were strangers, everybody he met in the ghetto was a
stranger
. He had experienced many things with them, but now they had to help him get back home, or at the very least to the Green House where Miss Smoleńska would be sure to tell them who he was, and he needed somewhere to sleep, after all.

But he carried on being nobody; and the darkness that had been out there, outside him, was now inside. Once it had risen up to his eyes, it would be like water. Dark water, deep enough to drown in. He was afraid of the darkness inside himself. It was like when he tried to get to sleep in the evenings. He dared not move because he didn’t know if it was him moving in the darkness, or the darkness moving in him.

When he turned round, he saw a face looming out of the mist behind him. No body, just a pale oval with no recognisable features, hanging in mid-air like a balloon, or the reflection of a candle in a window. The face also had a voice, a very calm, clear, firm voice that asked what someone like him was doing out after curfew. He repeated what he had said about looking for the children’s home in
Oko-powa
Street.

It’s here, just around the corner
, answered the face.

They had stopped outside a gate. Behind the gate, a house stood wreathed in mist. But was it really the Green House?

He didn’t recognise it. He tried to remember. That time all the children had had to line up on the stairs while Superintendent Rubin and Miss Smoleńska counted them all, ten, twelve, fourteen (he was number fourteen?) and then get them to march off to the Big Field where the German soldiers were standing guard around their mud-spattered lorries, their submachine guns raised. It had all been just like that time they had to stand by the churchyard wall and the Nazis had come and taken away all his brothers. He couldn’t remember. It was as if what was happening now had already happened more than once already.

Who are you looking for?
asks the voice.

Staszek shakes his head, and starts to make his own way over to the gate. But the face stops him. The voice is gentler still as it asks again:

Do you want me to ask for anyone in particular?

Staszek is momentarily at a loss. He hasn’t thought that far.

Miss Rosa
, he says eventually.
Miss Rosa Smoleńska
.

Rosa
, says the face, and dissolves into the mist. After a while there is the sound of fists knocking hard on a door: I was to ask for a certain Miss
R-r-r-osa
, he hears the voice say in an exaggeratedly eager voice, and from inside the house comes an equally loud, shrill voice, not answering the face’s question but exhorting someone else:

Miss Roo-osa? Mis Roo-osa? Is there any Miss Roo-osa here?

From inside the house he hears a burst of loud, high-spirited laughter. Male laughter.

When the laughter dies away, all is silence. Some time passes. It is as though everything around him – the white face, the voice and the house – has dissolved into the mist and simply disappeared. From within this void, he hears the slow sound of clopping hooves. For a long time, the white horse is all he can see. The carriage and its occupants are taking their time. They are very close before Mr Kuper’s crooked back and the Chairman, sitting hunched under the closed hood, come into view.

Kuper has already folded down the step, and with an indescribable feeling of relief, Staszek allows himself to be helped up into the carriage. Once again a blanket is wrapped around him. Throughout all this, the Chairman has not turned round or touched him or said so much as a word. With a gentle creak, the carriage moves off again.