The Emperor of Lies (54 page)

The light came, and went.

He tried to keep count of the days, but found that after a few days he no longer knew if this was his third or fifth day and night down there, or if he had been there even longer.

He stood mostly, or perched, head bowed (so as not to hit the roof) on one of the carved-out steps.

If he slept, he did it in short bursts, and deeply, as if he were unconscious. His sleeping and waking states blurred into each other, and soon it made no difference whether it was light or dark. The one constant was his hunger. The hunger hollowed him out from within, just as the light would have done. It lit up his mouth and gullet and belly. The light of his hunger was dry and white, without substance, but as sharp and blinding as a wound to the eyes.

He wondered how long it would be before Feldman came.

He counted slivers of light, so utterly exhausted now that they multiplied before his eyes. One sliver became a thousand slivers, a single day and night down here became thousands. He realised that if he stayed beneath his covering of earth a single day more, he would lose all concept of what was what. What was inside, what was outside. Space, time.

But still he stayed there.

He thought about the dogs.

Sooner or later, the Gestapo’s hunt for fugitives would bring them out to Feldman’s nursery. They had their lists; they knew who had responded to their resettlement orders and who had tried to hide. They would start in the middle of the ghetto and work their way out towards Marysin.

And when they got there, where would they start looking?

Feldman had been convinced they would content themselves with the house-cum-office and the cellar. That is, the proper cellar. The one under the house. If there was nobody in the house, they probably wouldn’t bother much with searching the garden, and he would be all right. So Feldman thought.

Adam, too, thought the police probably would not find him. But he was less sure about the dogs. That was the thought preying on his mind, day after day –

If they had dogs with them:

Was there any way of covering over that sliver of light which was also his source of air? Would it help, anyway? And how would he cope with being in total darkness, day after day? The thought obsessed him to the point where he thought he could already hear the dogs, panting and tugging at their leashes, hear their claws scraping and scratching at the edge of the wooden cover. How long would it be before he thought he could hear Feldman’s magical three knocks, as well?

He decided to keep his chink of light for now.

Feldman did not come, and he realised in the end that he would have to emerge.

He was frantic with hunger and thirst. If he stayed there a day or even an hour more, he might not even have the energy to push the cover aside, in which case he would have to stay there until he suffocated to death and slowly rotted away.

He observed the chink of light carefully. As the light gradually began to fade, he went up to the top step and heaved up the cover with the back of his neck and both hands.

Outside: mild, damp September evening.

The air: the first breaths: harsh and raw in lungs grown accustomed to dank earth and stone dust. He could hardly propel his legs forward. He was quivering like an eel all over, and when the quivering would not stop, he had to let himself go.

He let himself fall into damp, cold grass and lay there for a while, completely still, breathing and looking up at the darkening sky.

It was so damp that he could hardly see the stars, just a vaguely floating grey mist across the night sky, so indistinct that at first he was not sure if he was seeing anything at all. Perhaps he was seeing light mirages after spending so long in the dark.

After a while, he thought he could make out voices.

There was something strange about the voices, too. They came and went in waves. Sometimes they were close, sometimes they drifted further away. But though at times they seemed very close, he never managed to identify any individual one. He could not even hear what language they were speaking.

The clean-up commando was based in the old tailoring workshop at 16 Jakuba. According to Feldman, there were a hundred men billeted there. Then there was another collective in Łagiewnicka Street, where Aron Jakubowicz was rumoured to be, under the protection of Biebow. That would mean another two to three hundred men. Apart from that, there was no one left in the ghetto. Unless there had been an order to dig trenches, it was doubtful whether anyone from the clean-up commando would have been sent all the way out to Marysin at this time of day.

So whose voices could they be?

Germans’?

Feldman had warned him there was a risk they might decide to use the old nursery as some kind of camp, though he himself did not think it all that likely. The kitchen and office were unusable, and the glasshouse was not exactly suitable accommodation for policemen. It would be safer for them to keep their forces all together in the centre of the ghetto and just come out to Marysin in daylight, to carry out specific tasks.

Or were the voices coming from Radogoszcz Station? Were they still unloading things out there? If so, then why?

Adam walked round the glasshouse a number of times without getting any clearer idea of what he was hearing. Everywhere was dark. But the voices were still talking to each other. Well, more than talking. They seemed to be in some state of agitation that was making them interrupt, or constantly try to make themselves heard above, each other. Still without a single word being distinguishable.

He opened the door of the main building. It gave as he grasped it, as if its hinges were loose or it was starting to rot away. Beneath him the brittle crunch of broken glass. The shards had been lying there since the day Samstag and his men went berserk among the objects in Feldman’s private collection.

The interior was bathed in a peculiar light, softly greenish as if still being filtered through the musty layer of dust and mould that had coated the insides of the aquariums.

He took a teapot from the kitchen in Feldman’s office and filled it to the brim with water from the pump over by the outhouses. He used the water he still had left after quenching his thirst to wash with. First he washed his crotch and thighs; then his torso, armpits and face.

But he did not dry himself. If they came with dogs – and surely it was only a matter of time – then any towels or rags he had dried himself with would put them onto the scent.

Naked and freezing cold, he went back to the office and looked through the ragged bits of clothing Feldman had left behind. When it started getting cold and damp in the autumn, Feldman used to don a pair of broad, baggy sheepskin trousers. They would be too short for Adam, but since they were so wide in the crotch area, he ought to be able to get them on. He found a coat, too, and a blanket that would be good to have as a head and backrest when he leant against the bare stone.

He rolled his own clothes up into a big bundle. He would have to take them back down into the cellar hole with him. Everything he used up here would have to accompany him back down. But he still could not quite bring himself to climb down into the cramped, stinking shaft again. While he was above ground, he had to find something to eat. He rolled himself in Feldman’s blanket and sat there trying to visualise the formerly well-guarded orchards. Which fence led to which orchard enclosure. After all, the evacuation of the ghetto had happened so fast. There was bound to be fruit left unpicked on the trees somewhere.

He waited until it was dark. There were no voices now. The idea came into his head that the whole damp expanse of space out there was holding its breath, ready to cast itself down onto him as soon as he stepped outside. He tried not to tread on any gravel or stones. But the swishing sound as he strode through the damp grass was as loud as a scream to his ears. A low stone wall ran down the hillock from which the earth cellar had been excavated. On the other side of the wall was an area that had been given over to growing beets. He remembered there were some apple trees in a narrow strip of stony ground running between the ploughed beet field and the road past Praszkier’s workshop. He boldly climbed over the wall, and then a wrought-iron fence he did not remember being there before, but it was there now: rusting ironwork protruding like a cage from waist-length grass and thickets of wild raspberry bushes.

He was under the trees now. Their crowns vanished up into the nocturnal haze above him. He could see where the branches started, but not where they ended.

It was deathly quiet all around him. Not even a startled bird, taking off with a rattle of wings. He thought he could see the hanging apples as blobs of deeper darkness within the darkness. Or was he just imagining it, because the thought of there being fruit left on the trees was so intoxicatingly vivid that it vanquished all others?

Grasping the thick trunk with both hands, he tried to shake down the apples. The branches closest to him scarcely moved. Then he gripped the trunk between his legs, managed to get hold of a low-hanging branch, and heaved himself up. But what he had taken for fruit turned out to be nothing more than thicker leaves; the apples were further in, small and unripe. They tasted sour and musty; his palate was soon smarting and his jaws ached. But he carried on eating nonetheless, and then made a tuck at the waist of Feldman’s thick, sheepskin trousers and filled it with all the fruit he could reach.

He stood there, back on the ground under the tree, surrounded by a silence he had cracked apart. But not a sound once the last branch of the tree swung back into place after him. Not a movement beyond his own breathing and the surging of the blood behind his eyes.

Where had all the voices gone?

That night he dreamt he and Lida were trapped inside one of Feldman’s many smooth glass cases. There was so little space between the glass sides that neither of them could move. When he finally succeeded in forcing his head round and his chin down, he saw that his arm and Lida’s breasts and chin were also made of glass, and that their bodies below neck level had fused into a single glass form. Breast, stomach and trunk were glued tightly to each other; their translucent shoulders and heads were just separate enough for them to be able to make out each other’s features.

And neither of them could move.

Mucus, or maybe just unusually thick saliva, was running from Lida’s mouth, and as it ran it set, and froze into glass. He wanted to stretch forward and lick the cold mucus from her lips, but all he could do was turn his face, and then he hit his fragile head on the side of the container.

He licked the green coating on the inside of the container instead.

The coating was unexpectedly thick and rough, but even though it left a nauseating, sweetish aftertaste on his tongue, he could not stop licking the green deposits.

The hunger was aching and tautening in his abdomen now, as if his body when it grew together with Lida’s had swollen into an enormous nodule of glass: a ball of hunger, bulging inside him with its sharp glistening surfaces.

He awoke in the darkness with terrible cramps in his stomach, and manoeuvred himself just in time into the ledge he used as an earth closet before the liquid motion squirted out of him.

In spasm after spasm until his head was swimming.

He wiped himself in a rudimentary fashion with the clothes he had, but knew as he did so that he could not stay down there in his cellar well, however risky it was to climb out.

From then on, he spent at least a few hours a day ‘up there’.

The days were mild. The moisture that enveloped sky and landscape in a cocoon of impenetrable mist in the evenings and overnight lingered on in the daytime as a slight veiling of the sunlight. The houses and wooden shacks with their walls of unpainted timber and roughly jointed corners, the fences and stone field boundaries, the trees with their crowns of autumnal foliage, wet and heavy: everything was softening. The grass faded beneath his feet. Presumably his faintness and hunger were contributing to this sensation of everything mellowing. He felt as if he himself were being dissolved. Or rather being released: into a sort of unreal suspension.

One day he thought he heard distant gunfire. Isolated shots at first, followed by a rattle of machine-gun fire.

The firing went on for perhaps twenty minutes, with interruptions of varying lengths. He listened intently to hear whether the echo was dwindling and the firing getting closer. But that didn’t happen. After a time, everything went quiet and he forgot what he had heard almost immediately.

Another day he thought he saw some figures moving, out on the open field next to the cemetery. About a dozen men: they seemed to be walking in single file. In the pale haze of the sun, the outlines of their bodies blurred together, and eventually they were completely gone.

He thought about Feldman.

Why didn’t he come? Were the Germans keeping him shut up all the time, or under such strict supervision that there was no chance of slipping away? Or worse still: had they caught him trying to get out to Marysin again and shot him?

He knew he couldn’t discount the possibility.

If Feldman didn’t come, he would have to fend for himself.

Day by day, to the extent his strength allowed it, he widened the scope of his exploration.

The area on the far side of the earth cellar, where he had struggled in the dark to wrench down the wizened, unripe apples, was one of smallish wooden houses and shanties, gradually submitting to overgrown oblivion. Many of them were previously occupied by proper ‘city dwellers’, people with
plaitses
. If they did not live there themselves, they had ‘rented out’ their properties to people with even better contacts. A man called Tausendgeld had acted as intermediary.

The doors and windows of some of the houses were now open wide to the autumn light.

Abandoned rooms: bedrooms with overturned beds, the coils sprouting from their sprung bases; wardrobes with open doors and half the contents spilling out; trampled articles of clothing and bed linen littering the floor. In the kitchens, however, little or nothing of worth.

Of worth meant edible. In an unlocked kitchen cupboard, he found a bit of dry bread, mouldy, and so hard he could hardly get his teeth into it. He tried holding the whole thing in his mouth, but even that failed to soften it.

In another house he found a tin of beans. It took him several hours’ labour with a stone and a big chisel to get it open, only to see the putrid, fermenting contents fizz up over his wrist in a poisonous foam. The smell was so nauseating that it persisted even after he had washed his hands in cold water from the well and scrubbed them with sand.

In a third house he came across some money in the bottom of some drawers. Rumkies. The three drawers of a cabinet had all been lined with oilcloth, tacked into place, and under the oilcloth layer were banknotes, hundreds of them, carefully smoothed flat so not even the tiniest bulge showed. He stood there with the worthless ghetto marks in his hand, and when he thought about somebody scrimping and saving year after year to amass all this ridiculous paper currency in the belief that they would be able to buy something with it one day, he began to chuckle. He tottered from room to room for a while with the worthless notes in his hand, hooting and cackling with laughter. Eventually he made himself calm down. If he carried on like this, wasting his energy on hysterical outbursts, he would soon have no strength left.

He had got right down to Marynarska, to the corner of Zbożowa Street. On the other side of the block was the Central Jail, where the mighty Shlomo Hercberg once reigned supreme, and where those consigned to the so called Labour Reserve were later taken. He was standing there wondering whether the jail could possibly still be in use, perhaps as a barracks, when the sky was suddenly rent by a tremendous crash.

Three planes in close formation at alarmingly low altitude.

He fell headlong to the ground and covered his head with his arms.

The next second, almost as an afterthought, the air raid sirens began to wail over Litzmannstadt. The noise went on, as piercing as saw blades. Then the sky was cut apart by another violent crash, and the three planes climbed steeply from the rooftops straight up into the sky again; this time followed by the heavy, somehow lagging rat-tat-tat of air defence batteries somewhere far away.

He lay there in the middle of the road, where the pressure wave had thrown him. He had never seen foreign fighter planes at such close range before. A kind of euphoria spread warmth from the pit of his stomach right out to the smallest finger joint. So their liberators must be very close by, perhaps only a few kilometres away.

After a while the sirens stopped, as if the sound had furled into itself, and excited voices began shouting all around him in Polish and German. He turned his head and saw two Wehrmacht soldiers come running out of a building at the corner of the road, some two hundred metres away. Seconds later, a tank emerged into the road, presumably from a hiding place in the courtyard of the Central Jail. It stopped for a time with its gun barrel pointing straight at him. Then there were soldiers’ bodies moving in front of and behind the tank, and its gun swivelled to one side, slow and dignified.

He knew the German soldiers would have seen him if they had not been in such a hurry, and so frightened themselves. And if he had not been lying down. As soon as they were out of sight, he chanced it: stood up, and made for the nearest building at a crouching run.

He should have realised what risks he was taking.

The stillness of the ghetto – the deserted streets, the empty blocks of flats – it was all an illusion.

In each and every one of the apparently empty buildings he passed, there could be a German soldier lurking, tracking him with telescopic sights or the barrel of a rifle.

He must never let himself forget that.