The Emperor of Lies (49 page)

Aleks told her how work at the cement
and woodchip factory out at Radogoszcz was going; how he and the rest of the
labour brigade were fetched by the local police every morning and marched back
every evening. By some coincidence that might well have been pure chance, the
team of workers was billeted in the very Próżna Street building that the
shomrim
had used. That was where Aleks was taking
her now. It was Sunday, the only non-working day of the week. Among the workers
they passed, Vĕra recognised several former archive employees, and post office
staff whom she sometimes used to run into on the steps or in the queues at the
distribution points round Baluter Ring; they were thinner than ever, if that was
possible, their clothes were torn and more or less ruined, and their shoes were
basically just wrappings of dirty rags. By no means all of them in Próżna Street
were committed Zionists, Aleks studiously informed her even before they got
there. As if that mattered! Here they were, anyway, workers from
all
over the ghetto, jammed in under a single
leaky roof. Vĕra took out some of the produce she and her brothers had been able
to grow on their plot: some hard potato tubers, gherkins, radishes; and some
vegetables she and Martin had bottled and put aside for what they called winter
use – beetroot and white cabbage. Other brigade members brought out what they
had. There was bread; and something they called
babka
or
lofix
, which was ordinary
instant coffee, mixed with some kind of thickening agent, left to set and then
cut up like a cake.

In the glow of the kiln in the middle
of the huge room, they sat talking afterwards about the campaign the communist
goods-yard workers had started. It had a code name, passed from mouth to mouth
whenever more loaded wagons arrived:

Pracuj
powoli . . . !
‘Work slowly.’ The aim was to plod
through every extended or delayed shift.

The order had also gone out for them to
refuse to queue for their dinnertime soup.

There was complete bewilderment among
the German goods-yard command. The stationmaster had gone to Biebow and
complained that the Jews had grown sluggish and valuable cargoes had just been
left. They had even discussed the possibility of increasing the nutritional
content of the soup – no longer
straining
it,
in other words. Biebow had even gone out there himself one day to try to talk
the workers round. The authorities had even suggested that playing march music
through loudspeakers might increase the work tempo!

This made them all laugh, until Aleks
piped up and said he had decided to join the Communists, anyway; Niutek Radzyner
and his associates were the only ones in the ghetto successfully putting up at
least a bit of resistance to the Praeses. Someone else chimed in, arguing the
opposite case, and a heated discussion ensued, continuing until the darkness had
emptied the insect-humming, early summer sky of all its light, and the kiln was
sending sparks high, high in the draught and up into a column of smoke almost
invisible in the dusk. And suddenly, quite spontaneously, someone took up a
song, and someone else joined in a little hesitantly, and all at once, everybody
was singing, quietly at first but then louder and louder, with more and more
conviction:

Man
darf tsi kemfn

Shtark
tsi kempfn

Oi az
der arbaiter zol nisht laidn noit!

Men tur
nisht shvagn

Nor
hakn shabn

Oi
vet er ersht gringer krign a shtikl broit
¹⁶

That night, wrapped in Aleks’s heavy
grey overcoat with its acrid smell of cinders and stale sweat, pressed tightly
against his body to keep warm in the cold, she whispered to him and tried to
look into his eyes, those eyes that were so tired sometimes, but so alert and
attentive, too.

When he saw she was looking at him, he
gave a little smile and said her name, once, very quietly. Vĕra was all he said,
as if the two syllables of her name were something that could be gently taken
apart, and just as gently put back together again. Instead of answering, she
leant over and cupped his face in her hands. That way, she thought, he was
finally within the circle of her arms again: palpable.

And she felt intensely at that moment
that it was not just all his secret words that she longed for, all the forbidden
messages he slipped into piles of paper and into the books he secretly brought
down to her basement room. But all of him, all that he was – his pale face and
implausibly narrow shoulders – she took hold of them now – and she held his
back, too, and his hips and waist. She could not help it. She wanted to possess
him. If the Bolsheviks ever came and liberated them, this was still the only
thing she wanted. She wanted to desire him as she had desired no one else in her
whole life, and as she had not thought it possible to desire anyone at all in
this land of hunger and exile.

*

They called him ‘the boy Shem’; he was
their bodyguard and rat-catcher, and the one – Vĕra was subsequently quite
convinced of it – who saved them all, just in time.

On the first floor of the block in
Brzezińska Street, where they still kept Schmied’s radio in the drying attic,
lived a certain Szmul Borowicz. At one time, boasted Borowicz, he had been a
senior official in the food-distribution department, had a three-room flat and
been able to afford a maid. But then the Palace fell, and Borowicz had had to
relinquish his ‘nice’ job, and like so many others in those uncertain days he
had joined the Sonder, where he quickly rose through the ranks, and now insisted
on being addressed as ‘Captain’.

Every so often, the Kripo came round to
question Borowicz. There was much slamming of doors; the Germans made Borowicz
dash around with keys, opening storerooms in the basement and cupboards in the
flat, to show them what he had inside. But at the end of the process, they never
arrested Borowicz or even took him in for further questioning. From this,
everyone in the block concluded that Borowicz was working as an informer.

That was how the boy Shem came into the
picture. Shem lived with his father on the second floor of the block, in the
flat above Borowicz’s. Whenever the Kripo came to visit, the lad observed
Borowicz’s doings in a pocket mirror he had mounted outside the window, or by
pretending to set his home-made rat-traps outside the concierge’s flat, and
listening under the door. He once saw in his mirror the plainclothes Kripo men
gathering round some papers Borowicz put on the table for their perusal. He also
saw one of the Kripo men hit Borowicz across the face. But then the German
fished in the pocket of his coat and offered Borowicz a cigarette.

Inquisitive as he was, Shem also crept
up to the drying attic with his rat-traps and watched wide-eyed as Vĕra and her
fellow listeners crouched over Schmied’s old radio receiver; and Krzepicki said:
‘We either rope in the boy Shem, or we forget all this right now.’ That was how
the boy Shem first became their
goniec
. While
they listened, he kept watch outside, or down on the stairs with his traps.

At Krzepicki’s suggestion, they put
Schmied’s radio in an old trunk they had brought up to the attic lumber room. It
was the trunk Werner Hahn had brought with him in the transport from Berlin: a
travelling trunk with old-fashioned mountings, which could stand either flat on
the floor or on end. Krzepicki thought it could actually be an advantage to have
the Sonder living in the building where they listened, but it did mean they had
to be prepared to get out quickly, and from that point of view it was better to
keep the radio in a trunk than behind a hearth, where precious minutes were
wasted digging it out and hiding it again.

His observation proved correct. Just a
couple of weeks after they put the receiver in the trunk, the boy sounded the
alert: Borowicz was on his way upstairs with two German policemen. They slammed
the trunk shut, got the boy Shem to lie on top of it, and carried the whole lot
down the stairs with the lad clinging on and shouting and bellowing; and Mr
Borowicz turned round after them and shouted:

I knew that
boy was epileptic, I knew it –

The Germans just stood poker-faced.

But which of them would have touched a
Jew with rabies of their own free will?

That was how they saved themselves and
the receiver. Though it was a ‘close shave’, as Szmul Krzepicki put it
afterwards.

So they moved to a disused coal shed in
the yard of a building in Marynarska Street, opposite Borowicz’s block but with
a wooden fence, which did little to prevent people from seeing in, but at least
gave them some semblance of security.

They were sitting in there when the
morning news of the landing came through. Outside, warm, heavy rain was falling,
beating on the wooden roof and fence planks. Vĕra later often recalled that
sound, and how hard it had been to make out the voices in the headphones through
the continuous rattle of the rain. Through the slatted walls of the shed she
caught a glimpse of the boy Shem’s top half, soaked through, and thought please
let him sit still for a minute so I can get this, just as the voice at the other
end said
This is the BBC Home Service. Here is a
special bulletin read by John Snagge
:

Early this morning the Allies began the assault on the north-western face
of Hitler’s European fortress . . . The first official
news came just after half past nine when Supreme Headquarters of the Allied
Expeditionary Force, usually called ‘SHAEF’ from its initials, issued
COMMUNIQUÉ
No. 1. This said, ‘Under the command of General Eisenhower
Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied
armies this morning on the northern coast of France . . .’

At that moment, of course, Shem stood
up.

Every detail seemed etched on her
memory: them crouching round the trunk, Krzepicki and Bronowicz beside her, with
that tensing of the back and shoulders you see in children who think they can
make themselves invisible to adults; and Werner Hahn’s eyes growing inside his
skull as the significance of the words Vĕra was translating from English into
German slowly dawned on him.

But how much did Shem understand? Vĕra
could never work out whether that oddly staring, boyish face with the sort of
perpetually seething look was expressing fear or expectation. Whether the cramp
in his deformed body was stopping the immense pressure bulging and bursting in
there from getting out. Or whether it was in fact fear that fettered him. At any
rate, she could see him standing there, taut as a coiled steel spring on the
other side of the wooden planks of the shed wall. The next moment, she could
not. And the expression on Krzepicki’s face was now one of real horror:

Sshhh! Mir muzn avék, di kúmt shoyn!

We have to go they’ll soon be
here!

But it was already too late:

The boy Shem had dragged his paralysed
leg after him (they could see the marks in the yard, as it turned to mud in the
rain, trailing all the way out to the street), and he was standing at the
intersection of Marynarska Street and Brzezińska Street, shouting out loud.
People came rushing, arms outstretched, from gateways and buildings. In a
dizzying moment of clarity, Vĕra realised they were listeners, the whole lot of
them – solitaires who had heard the same news and were rushing out to share it
with each other. Somewhere at the bottom of the heap of people whooping and
hugging and kissing each other was the boy Shem, squashed down into the mud by
his own unwieldy weight and the laughing crowd on top.

*

But it was not the boy Shem who gave
them away.

In the torture chambers of the Red
House, he didn’t say a word. Nor in the confrontation in which they lined up a
handful of entirely innocent people in front of him and told him they would kill
them all if he didn’t tell them who the ‘traitors’ were. Not even when he was
taken out into the yard with his hands tied behind his back and forced down on
his knees in front of the bodies of the other listeners they had already
executed.

You’ve got
one last chance!
said the Kripo inspector, cocking his pistol against
the boy’s temple.
Give us the names of your
accomplices and we’ll let you go.

But behind his anguished, chewing face,
the boy Shem stubbornly held his tongue.

The one who informed on Widawski was in
fact a man called Sankiewicz. Widawski and Sankiewicz had been neighbours for
some years in the house in Podrzeczna Street. They were not close friends, but
had always said hello to each other and exchanged a few friendly words.
Sankiewicz had been one of the many who tended to rely on Widawski to hear the
latest on the ‘world situation’. He had carefully observed from his window the
times of day Widawski came and went, and who he came and went with. But although
everyone in the block knew Sankiewicz was a Kripo
Spitzel
, nobody ever thought he would be the one to inform on
Wadawski.

It was those two worlds again.

At six in the morning the day after the
Allied landing in Normandy, the Kripo swooped. Moszje Altszuler was sitting
eating breakfast with his sixteen-year-old son when the police came storming in,
and naturally he denied any dealings with listeners. Then the Kripo took his son
Aron into the next room and waited until he could stand the screams no longer
and produced the parts of a Kosmos radio receiver from an old sewing-machine
case. Moszje Altszuler, a trained electrician, had made the headphones himself
from copper wire that he would later be found to have stolen from the
low-voltage works that employed him.