The Emperor of Lies (34 page)

Perhaps it was because she was unused to all this open space. She had been in the ghetto long enough now for everything in it to seem equally dark and cramped; wherever you went, you had to crouch down or make way for others. By contrast, the distances here in the burial ground seemed to her almost unimaginable; and it was certainly unimaginable that the dead already amounted to so many.

*

The typewriter was still there on the little side table when she got back after the mourning period, but in the bed that had been Rabbi Einhorn’s there was now another man, who lay looking at her with blank, expressionless eyes. Beside her typewriter stood the little metal suitcase containing the rabbi’s prayer shawl and books. She would subsequently often wonder what would have happened if she had not opened the case that day. There were so many people dying and leaving useless objects behind them. In the end the whole concept lost its meaning: how could you talk of personal effects when not even death was personal any more?

But she opened the case – perhaps out of respect for the old man. Inside was a little note, written in German in the same type as that on her machine:

Meet me at the foot of the wooden bridge, corner of Kirchplatz/Hohensteinerstrasse, Friday 9 a.m. Please bring the typewriter!

A.Gl.

With this letter, written by a stranger on her own typewriter, began what in her diary she later came to refer to as her
Unterirdisches Leben
, her underground life.

So it was that on a damp, grey-misted morning in early February 1943 she first stepped over the threshold of the Palace. Where the ghetto ended and the barbed wire began, the big black wooden bridge should have risen powerfully five metres above the street, but all that could be seen of it in the mist was the people gathering at the foot of the steps and disappearing up into it as if climbing straight up to Heaven. From above came the interminable tramp of shoes on wet wood, the loud breathing of thousands of human beings hurrying unseen – unseeing – to their anonymous jobs.

Fräulein Schulz?
– The man behind her must have known who she was at once, in spite of the feeble light; or perhaps he had been guided by the Olympia typewriter that seemed to be in such demand, which she was carrying in its case under her arm.

Sind Sie dann für den heutigen Arbeitsinsatz bereit, Fräulein Schulz?

She turned round, as if an actual German were addressing her.

But he did not look as if he meant her harm. His face was smiling. Under the damp brim of his hat were big eyes that grew bigger still, the longer he stared at her. Still without the slightest idea what work he was talking about, she went with him through the mist, first into a poky inner courtyard, then down a set of cellar steps as narrow as a well-shaft. At the bottom of the steps, a solid red door with a big padlock was waiting. The man undid the padlock and pushed the wooden door, which creaked open.

If there had not been shelves or at least props enough to hold them in place, all the books would have poured down over her there and then –

There were books shelved or lying everywhere: on long, sagging bookcases propped against the walls, or on planks of wood or pieces of cardboard that had been laid on the bare stone floor, stacked beside and on top of each other in tall piles, with thicker volumes stuck in below the thinner ones like uneven blocks of stone in a wall.

All this is Rabbi Einhorn’s work, he explained. The rabbi’s own books are only a fraction of what’s here. The rest come from Jewish homes here in the ghetto. We’ve been collecting them since the day the deportations started. The very thought of them ending up in the wrong hands prompted Mr Neftalin the lawyer to secure an acquisition order from the housing department. It requires every concierge or block caretaker to go through all flats, basements and attics vacated by Jewish deportees and see to it that all books and other documents found are brought here, to the archives; and when we say all, we mean literally
everything
, he said, and smiled. We don’t just have books here, but all sorts of other manuscripts and publications. But no one has been able to count them yet, or catalogue them, or find out the names of the people they once belonged to. All that’s still to be done.

Somehow they had managed to wedge in a desk for her among the teetering piles of books. Mr Gliksman brought a couple of warm blankets. Then a light bulb, which he produced from his mouth like a circus clown and screwed into a light fitting high on one of the cellar walls. He clearly took delight in performing such tricks. When she asked for a pencil, he plucked one from behind his ear, and then drew two pieces of carbon paper from the sleeve of his shirt for her to put between the sheets of paper she wound into the typewriter. Every title was to be entered in at least two places: first on standard catalogue cards, then on long lists which would also include the former owners’ names.

In a slanting column of light, full of dry shadows and particles of dust from the stone, she made a first attempt at putting the stacks of books into some sort of order. On some of the shelves, the books were already sorted – either by subject or in piles and bundles by the premises they had come from: tatty, well-thumbed copies of the Tanak; old prayer books, some so tiny that they could easily be sewn under the facing of a shirt or into the folds of a kaftan; photograph albums with pictures of men and women in their best clothes at long tables set for meals, or of schoolchildren on outings, in short trousers and knee-socks; schoolbooks with sums; grammar books in Polish and Hebrew; almanacs going back several decades; railway timetables; translations of novels by Lion Feuchtwanger, Theodor Fontane and P. G. Wodehouse.

She scrupulously entered all the names and titles on the index cards she had been given.

The problem was that not all the items could be classified as books. What was she to do, for example, with private account books – there were hundreds of them – ordinary notebooks with oilcloth covers, in which housewives had entered and totted up the cost of everything they bought?

Aleksander Gliksman came and went, but so quietly that she scarcely noticed him. She would look up from what she was doing and find the cellar empty; but the next time she looked up, he would be standing beside her again, looking at her with those big eyes that seemed to grow bigger the longer he looked. Sometimes he brought food, perhaps in addition to the daily midday soup a slice of bread with a scraping of margarine, or some wafer-thin radish slices. Sometimes they ate together, and once she asked him why it was so important for her to use the back entrance, and to come and go without being seen.

She had expected an evasive answer, but he was surprisingly candid. ‘The archive is the heart of the ghetto,’ he said. Only people who enjoy the highest level of patronage are given positions here. Vĕra was not one of those, and if it ever got out that she had not got her position by ‘the usual route’, there was a risk that someone else would lay claim to her job (even though the head of the archives, Mr Neftalin, entirely approved of her appointment there). And in her case there were also special circumstances, he said, making a clumsy little move, as if to lift her arthritis-crippled hands into his lap. But there was no need for him to spell it out. Everyone knew the dangers of harbouring or employing a person classed as unfit for work.

Even so, Mr Gliksman did occasionally take her up ‘into the open air’. After long days in the dark confines of the cellar, the great archive room on the first floor was a miracle of light and space. In the middle of its wide floor stood a big wood-burning stove, its flue running across the ceiling and out through one of the wide windows. The stove clearly threw out a lot of heat, as the archivists all worked in their shirtsleeves or blouses. There were five rotating card indexes. They stood in a row, like big, tombola drums, with doors in the sides that opened outward, like cupboards. Inside were the index cards for all the residents of the ghetto, sorted both alphabetically by name, and by residential address. The archive drums were locked and sealed every night, and it was said that the only person with a key to the safety lock apart from the Chairman himself was Mr Neftalin, lawyer and head of the archive department. It was Mr Neftalin who solemnly unlocked the drums again each morning. The rest of the archive staff sat at long workbenches round the constantly clattering and rotating drums, sorting copies of letters and minutes into envelopes and brown folders.

The four windows of the archive room looked out over the Church of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary and the bridge across Hohensteinerstrasse. With every passing day, the light from the sun as it rose behind the bridge and the church’s double spires extended further across the floor of the archive room, and the blinds were gradually lowered until the whole room was sunk in a curious, dark-grey, almost unreal half-light. But every morning and evening the blinds were wound up again, and once more there was no boundary between the great room with its archive drums and the square with its huge wooden bridge. The people making their way up or down the bridge steps sometimes passed so close that they looked as if they were on their way straight through the room.

*

No. 1 Worker FRIEDLANDER, DAWID (sixteen) is sentenced to four months in the HOUSE OF CORRECTION for potato theft. Proof in this case provided by three potatoes intended for Kitchen no. 9 (Marysińska), found to be unlawfully in the trouser pocket of the accused.

No. 2: Tailor’s apprentice KAHN, LUBA (nineteen) is sentenced to three months in the HOUSE OF CORRECTION for theft of reels of thread and darning wool to a total value of 45 ghetto marks. Wool and thread were recovered during a body search, unlawfully concealed in the shoes of the accused.

It’s built to last for an eternity, the Chairman’s Palace
, says Aleks, showing her the copy of the report of court proceedings he is about to insert into one of the brown archive files.

One week’s verdicts are summarised on two carbon-copy pages; a total of nineteen sentences passed, in cases varying from theft and burglary to attempted embezzlement. But Aleks is so indignant that his hands are shaking.

What’s the point of handing down a sentence of four months or more if you don’t believe the ghetto will last that long? Aren’t we, with our imbecilic judicial system, just reinforcing the will of the authorities: that we stay here behind their barbed wire until the world goes under and we Jews are wiped out to the last man?

– No, go on you poor fellow, steal your potatoes! By quelling your hunger, at least you’ve proved you are a free man!

Aleksander Gliksman has a very strange way of talking. Whenever he is agitated or even just eager, he thrusts his head forward like a tortoise from its shell, and stares at her with an obstinate, persistent glare, as if challenging her to contradict him.

Really it’s a wonder he hasn’t been deported yet, Vĕra often thinks. Unless the secret lies in his hands. As soon as Alex has his fingerstall on, the archive documents whirl through his hands. There was something boyish, formal, almost ceremonious in the way he counts and weighs up facts. When they are alone down in the cellar, he shows her in confidence the world map he has been piecing together over a number of years on sheets of waste paper. In the archives, as everywhere else in the ghetto, paper is strictly rationed, and the various sections cannot be allocated fresh supplies until Mr Neftalin makes a formal application to the materials office. But somewhere in the vaults, Gliksman has come across discarded registration lists from the time when this part of Poland was under the administration of the Russian Empire and the Tsars: documents tied up with coarse string which have lain so long in draughty, damp conditions that the sheets have stuck together, creating bales as thick as bricks.

Now, on documents covered in old Cyrillic script, he sketches out for her with broad pencil strokes what has happened to the Russian front line since Stalingrad.

– Six top generals taken prisoner and the Wehrmacht in retreat on all fronts, he says, and shows her on his map sections how the battle for Kharkov unfolded; then indicates with thick pencil lines how General Zhukov went on to send his troops in a wide pincer movement down into the Caucasus.

Because the map is made up of loose sheets of paper, identifiable only by a number code at the top of each, it can be taken apart after every revision and hidden away. Gliksman uses a special code. He calls the German army
Paulus
, or just
Pl
, after General Friedrich Paulus who was forced into such ignominious capitulation at Stalingrad. (Aleks has come up with the idea that they ought to institute a new public holiday, a
Pauli Day
, to commemorate this battle.)
Azbuk
, or
Az
, stands for the Russian army, after the old Slavic name for the Cyrillic text flowing in dense, even greyness down the sheets of waste paper reused for the map. Larger towns or fortifications are labelled
VG
– an abbreviation of
Velikiy Gorod
: ‘big city’ – followed by the three letters
pad
, for
padať
, to ‘fall’. It was always the Germans who fell. If the Germans did
not
fall, or if the Wehrmacht mounted a counter-offensive and regained lost ground, Alex simply crossed out the three letters
pad
. For Gliksman’s map was a
biased map
: Russian losses were only marked in the form of missed or postponed victories.

Where did you get all this from?
But Aleks has no answer to questions like that. He stretches his hand wide in a gesture of helplessness and looks like a schoolboy caught scrumping apples. On another occasion, he thumps his temple with his hand and says:

You keep it all in your head as a rule . . . !

And then does his usual trick of playing with the words:

You have to keep a cool head . . . !

He has drawn the whole North African coast on four or five sheets, the background Cyrillic text a brownish smudge running through the deserts of Libya:

(Since Kasserine, Rommel’s been reinforcing his armoured divisions in North Africa. The battle for Tunis is going to be decisive . . .)

But of course his maps were based on others. She realised later that this was a sort of test, a loyalty test. After that, newspapers and other documents start turning up in the room in the cellar, along with all the books. Every morning when he unlocks the door for her, she finds more bits of newspaper tucked under or between the piles of books or the boxes of index cards.
Litzmannstädter Zeitung
mainly: copies abandoned by, or stolen from, German police officers or administrative inspectors who have had reason to visit the ghetto. In them, the Wehrmacht’s retreat is described as just a tactical ploy to ‘straighten out’ certain sections of the front. But not even propaganda minister Goebbels’s proclamation of ‘total war’, filling two whole pages on 19 February 1943, can conceal the Germans’ desperate situation.

There was other material to study. Documents, official communications, proclamations: pages torn out of illegal newspapers, sometimes so soggy and decaying that they could scarcely be read at all. (Presumably they had been in the bottom of a vegetable box or a crate of potatoes for so long that they had taken on the same colour and texture as the rotting greens.)

A few documents, however, were intact, such as a copy of the Polish resistance movement newspaper
Biuletyn Informacyjny
, in which he showed her an appeal, designed to look handwritten, with capital letters and big spaces: