The Warsaw Anagrams (20 page)

In any case, she put on her red and gold Moroccan slippers, climbed up on the chair and eased herself down on the window ledge. Her brittle arms must have been trembling under the strain. One after the other, she swung her legs over the rim until she was sitting on it and facing out – a complex manoeuvre. I know that because I tried it myself, and I’d swear in any court that it required a dexterity and strength that were beyond her.

Ziv was on break and sitting outside the bakery, reading a chess newsletter that had been printed in the ghetto; it had an article on Szmul Rzeszewski, one of his heroes.

Did Stefa hear him call out to her not to move, that she was in danger of falling?

‘I’ll be right up!’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me!’

What did she think as she pushed and swivelled herself closer to the edge? Perhaps that gravity was a blessing.

I hope she imagined she was about to see Adam again, but maybe it would have been best if she was thinking nothing at all.

Ziv told me later that she didn’t seem to hear him or even notice he was there.

‘As soon as she hit the ground, she was dead.’ That’s what Professor Engal told me when I returned to the courtyard, which was what he had heard from Ziv. Maybe they wanted to spare me more anguish. Still, thirty feet is a long way for someone to fall, and maybe he was right.

Ziv rushed to her but couldn’t find a pulse. He dashed into the bakery for help. Ewa and several others tried to revive my niece, but it was too late.

Stefa’s slippers had fallen off. Ziv retrieved them while waiting for the Jewish police to come, then sat down in the corner of the courtyard, his head in his hands. He didn’t move from there all afternoon and slept there that night. I brought him a blanket, and he let me cover him with it, but he refused to speak to me or come inside.

I’d learned by then that going on strike against the world’s injustice was a common ghetto strategy. Not that it ever changed anything.

I’d never previously considered that he’d been in love with Stefa. After all, she was seventeen years his senior. Still, if I’d have been paying attention, I’d have understood that the rose blossom and fresh eggs he gave her on the evening of our first Sabbath banquet represented his opening gambit in what was probably a ten-move strategy. And maybe age differences are unimportant to those who live with queens and rooks dancing through their dreams.

My niece’s corpse waited all night for the body collectors. They only came at ten the next morning, explaining that disease and starvation were taking a hundred residents a day and they couldn’t cope. By then, I’d dragged her into the hallway of our building; it had started drizzling. I’d wanted to hire some boys from the street to carry Stefa up to her apartment, but Professor Engal told me that the collectors would resent having to walk up the stairs – and might even refuse.

Stefa’s miracle …

At 3 a.m. on the morning after her death, standing at the window in my room, I looked down at her in the courtyard, and I noticed Ziv jump up and chase after a vague, darting shape. Fearing it was a feral cat or worse, I threw on my coat, hurried downstairs and sat with my niece. Ziv was back tucked into his corner by then, but now he was whimpering to himself. A little later, I looked up to the window of my bedroom, and in the hazy moonlight it seemed the entranceway to a fairytale world, out of which magic had spilled into this place only a little while before. My wonder at how Stefa had found the strength to open her window, climb out on to the sill and jump now seemed to contain everything I’d ever failed to grasp throughout my life – even how men and women could believe in God. And that’s when I realized that miracles do indeed occur, though – unfortunately – they aren’t always the glorious affirmations of transcendence that we have all been led to believe.

I’ll have to be more wary on my excursions. Early this afternoon, Heniek, while you were working at your factory, I crossed the bridge to the Praga district to make sure my old friend Jaśmin was still alive. Unfortunately, the entrance to her apartment house was locked. I waited outside, watching the passers-by, until, finally, after a couple of hours, she appeared at her window, gazing at the powdering of snow that had begun to fall. I stayed there a long time after she went back to whatever she was doing, grateful that Izzy and I hadn’t caused her death. But on the way home, feeling my strength renewed and wanting a small adventure, I decided to go to the Little Ghetto to see what wonders were gracing the shop windows of Sienna Street. A mistake.

I never made it there; I found a crowd swarming out in front of All Saints Church, and at its centre was a burly butcher hacking away at the emaciated, mud-brown carcass of an old mare. Hot blood kept spurting on to his grimacing face. I could tell from the way the poor beast’s ribcage stood out that she’d been an underfed, work-damned tram horse. A poisonous-looking steam was rising from the wormy ravine of her open belly.

The ghetto devours itself and will never die
, I thought.

I’d never seen a horse without a head and backed away slowly.

‘You’ve grown silent again,’ Heniek tells me.

‘I thought I was telling you about a dead horse,’ I reply.

‘No, you haven’t said a word in twenty minutes.’

Heniek says I can go an hour or more without speaking, even though I can hear my voice clearly and am sure I’m talking to him. He says my silence scares him, because my edges begin to darken, as though I’m being engulfed by a greedy shadow.

Though he tries to wake me from my trances by calling my name, I show no sign of hearing him.

It is our fourth day together by my count. My seventh, according to him. I do not know how so many days disappear.

After Stefa’s husband Krzysztof died of tuberculosis in 1936, my niece would shut herself inside her bedroom and sob. Adam was five then. The little boy once told me that the scrape and click of her turning her key in the lock made him feel like crying out for help, but whose name would he have called? Hearing his mother’s weeping, he’d plead with her to let him in while squatting on his heels by her door. He’d scratch like a cat and jiggle the door handle but nothing could convince her to open up.

After confessing these details, he added, ‘But it’s not so bad. I don’t even cry any more. Though I keep scratching. Or else Mama might forget I’m there.’

Amazingly, he didn’t show any resentment; he was proud of his ability to cope on his own.

Had Stefa been a good mother? Is anyone
always
a positive influence? All I know is that Adam adored her.

When she finally let her son into her room, she’d pretend nothing had happened. They would sit cross-legged on her bed and nibble bread and cheese, and play cards. My goodness, how the two of them could live on cheese. They were like giant mice!

After the boy had won all his mother’s coins, she would open a novel and read aloud to him. Or they’d nap together; her fits of sobbing always exhausted them both.

Ever since she was a teenager, Stefa had devoured detective novels – books by Zangwill, Gaboriau, Groller … ‘It’s like this, Uncle Erik,’ she explained to me once, just after her Krzysztof’s death, ‘mysteries have solid endings. When you finish the last page, a door locks behind you. So people like you and me and Adam, we can’t ever get stuck inside.’

Jumping to the courtyard must have meant that not enough doors had closed behind her over the course of her life; she’d become a prisoner in a story she could no longer go on reading.

Two Pinkiert’s men came for her in the morning. It was drizzling. As they picked her up, the world receded. I was encased in thick glass.

Outside, as their cart trundled away over the cobbles, the tense, grinding sound of the wheels gave me the impression we were fighting a losing battle. Upstairs, I got out my list of the dead and chanted the names of everyone I’d ever loved.

I drank vodka and chanted until my voice was gone.

I wanted my parents to come for me. And I wanted out. So I closed the curtains and crawled into the frozen arms of my blankets. I’d promised to go to Pinkiert’s headquarters to schedule and pay for the funeral, but it was my turn to go on strike.

Turning on my side, I stared at the window through which Stefa had left our world. To die seeing the sky – even if it was heavy with coming rain – would be comforting. Would it be too much to hope for that my niece had looked up instead of down as she fell?

I slept a drugged sleep and awoke unsure of where I was. Sitting over the side of the bed, I let my pee slide down my legs on to the floor. I suppose I needed to feel I still had a working body.

Maybe that’s why the inmates of sanatoriums sometimes soil themselves – to remind themselves they are alive. Pee and shit as the only mirror they have left.

I exist
.

While gazing at myself in the real mirror in the bathroom, I repeated that small incitement to life over and over, but in truth I seemed to be just a vessel for one more breath and then another, an instant in time receding towards a quiet so deep it would never end.

Our thoughts don’t make us alive. Something else does. But what?

The ghetto taught me to ask that question but never gave me the answer.

If you want certainties then I’m afraid you’ll have to read about a different time and place. And different men and women. In Warsaw in 1941, we had none to give you.

A knock at the door woke me to myself. I found Izzy standing on the landing.

‘I just heard about Stefa,’ he told me.

He embraced me so hard he nearly knocked me over.
Afterwards
, we sat together on my bed. I couldn’t speak. But there was nothing to say.

We were old men exiled from the lives we’d expected to have.

When I could talk, I told him where to find money for Stefa’s funeral. He promised he’d organize the ceremony. He put me back to bed.

I awoke on and off all day. He was there watching over me the whole time. Then night fell. I awoke once just after midnight. Fearful, I shouted for Izzy, but he’d gone home. I went to the window. Standing in the darkness, I imagined that if I offered up my life to God, he might spare someone who wanted to live – a child with decades of life left in him. But even if I could convince the Lord to make that bargain with me, how could I decide who was most worthy?

I awoke the next morning to a young woman in bare feet bringing me breakfast in bed. A fried egg looked up at me sceptically from the centre of one of Hannah’s Chinese dessert plates.

‘Time to eat!’ the girl said cheerfully, throwing open the curtains. The light caught the floor and travelled up the blankets to my eyes, making them tear.

The girl had dark hair cut in a pageboy, and an olive skin tone. She wore a man’s coat that fell to her knees. She walked with an upright posture, and gracefully, like a ballerina.

‘Bina – is that you?’ I questioned.

‘That’s right,’ she replied, beaming at me as though I were her prize patient.

‘You can’t be here,’ I told her in a tone of warning.

‘Why not?’ she asked, her eyebrows knitting together theatrically.

‘For one thing, you’ve let in too much light,’ I said, shading my eyes.

She tugged the curtains together but left them open a crack. ‘A little light will make you feel better,’ she suggested.

‘You can’t really think the sun can bring back the dead.’

‘No,’ she agreed, gazing down, adding timidly, ‘not even our prayers can do that.’

‘Just leave,’ I pleaded, but she stood her ground.

‘Will you at least drink some tea?’ she asked in a small voice.

I changed tactics. ‘How on earth did you get in here?’

‘Izzy gave me the key.’

‘You know Izzy?’

After stooping to pick up one of my socks, she replied, ‘I met him yesterday evening when he left your building. And this morning, when he came back, I asked him what was the matter with you. We talked. He’s a nice man. He bought some gherkins from me and my mother.’

She picked up another sock and an undershirt. Without looking at me, she said, ‘I wanted to tell you I’m very sorry about your niece.’

‘Did Izzy come by this morning?’ I asked, passing over her sympathy, since the last thing I wanted was to discuss what had happened.

‘Yes, he brought coal for you. When he came out to the street, he told my mother and me that you slept through his visit.’

It was only then that I noticed that the room was warm for the first time in months.

‘Where the hell did he get coal?’ I questioned.

‘He didn’t tell me.’ She folded my trousers neatly and draped them over the back of the armchair. ‘You need nourishment,’ she observed.

‘My God, girl!’ I snapped. ‘How could you think hunger is my problem?’

She ran into the kitchen. I was sure I’d achieved my goal of making her burst into tears, but I didn’t hear any sobs. When she returned, she sat down in the armchair, on the front edge of the cushion, and looked at me as if ready to wait for me to tell her what to do. Her eyes were so needful that I turned away. After a while, I noticed her staring at my breakfast plate. I didn’t want to be kind to a girl who didn’t have the courage to ask for food when she was famished, so I said nothing.

‘Do you mind if I eat your egg?’ she finally asked in a fearful voice.

‘Be my guest.’

After she’d gobbled it down, she licked the plate. Then she realized how she must have looked and blushed.

Imagine living like an insect for the last six months and worrying about etiquette. Only Jews could raise such absurd children.

I threw off my blanket and kicked my legs over the side of the bed. My feet found the puddle of urine I’d made. Good for me.