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Authors: Louis Begley

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BOOK: Wartime Lies
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That was our introduction to bedbugs. Tania felt them first. Suddenly, she sat up in bed and said that something strange was happening; she was itching all over. As soon as she turned on the light, we saw them: oblong red dots scurrying from the sheet to the recess between the bed and the headboard. Other red dots were rushing along the
wall, some up to crawl behind the frame of the picture of a stag and dogs, some down to the floorboards. We knew all about fleas. They were omnipresent in Poland; when my father came home from the hospital ward or calls to certain patients, he would undress completely in the examination room and give his clothes to the chambermaid. She would beat them, right outside the kitchen, with the same bat that was used at monthly intervals for whacking away at carpets until not a mote of dust could be seen to rise. That was the best way to get fleas out of clothes that couldn’t be washed, short of catching them with one’s fingers. But it took Tania a while to identify and name these insects that bit but didn’t jump. Since they seemed to dislike the light, we decided to sleep with the light on. Tania said this was just a comical reminder: we were reaching the lower depths. If the Germans didn’t get us, lice would be next.

T
HE
papers were not ready the following week or the next. The season changed while we waited in that house, among its strange tenants and their furtive visitors. Tania went out as little as possible, to buy food, to meet Hertz and give him money while she accepted his excuses, trying not to be noticed, afraid of leaving me alone. I did not leave the apartment at all. At last, Hertz delivered our new papers. Although so much time had passed, once again he advised Tania to leave the city; he thought it was impossible that the Gestapo would let a matter of this sort drop; if somehow they found out about her, eventually they would look in Lwów. They surely knew that Reinhard
spent Saturdays and Sundays there. Hertz also brought her a gift, two vials of cyanide. He said it was good to have it. In case of need, one just bit through the glass, which was thin, and left the Germans and all other troubles behind.

Our departure was now a matter of precise timing and preparations. Tania wrote a short and vague letter to my grandfather, telling him to expect us soon, saying nothing of what had happened. The photograph of the woman in Tania’s new papers looked sufficiently like her, except that it showed very short, wavy hair. Tania went to a hairdresser and had her hair cut and curled. She bought a black coat for herself and a gray coat and cap for me. She worried about how to transport our money and grandmother’s jewelry. Hertz told her to be very careful. There were so many black-market operators on trains that Polish police and even the Feldgendarmerie frequently went through passengers’ handbags and luggage. She decided she would tape the jewelry to my stomach and chest and the bank notes and gold coins to herself. We practiced doing it so that it was all smooth and would not be noticed if we were only frisked. The jewelry had to be wrapped in cotton anyway; otherwise it would dig into my skin. In the new papers, my name was no longer Maciek, and Tania was no longer Tania; I was to be called Janek. Making sure we used the new names without fail would also require practice.

We were ready; there was nothing more that Tania or Hertz thought we should do. Hertz offered to get our tickets and give them to Tania at the entrance to the platform.
That cut down the time we would need to spend at the station. At his suggestion, we were going to take the night train; Hertz said even the Gestapo had to sleep. There was nothing left to do except wait for the afternoon to end. Tania and I sat in the kitchen, in the bleary March light, and played twenty-one for matches. Suddenly Tania stood up, drew in her breath, and pointed out the window to the stairs. Walking up were two Gestapo men in uniform and a third man in a belted civilian coat but wearing black britches and high black boots like the others. Tania put her fingers to her lips and in a whisper told me to hurry to the bedroom, leave the door open, and hide behind the door. I was to listen carefully. If they were taking her away or if they were going toward the bedroom and she shrieked, I should immediately take the cyanide. Keep it in your hand, she said, and keep your hand in your pants pocket.

It took what seemed like a long time before they reached our apartment. I listened to their knocking on other doors off the balcony and to muffled conversations. At last, they knocked on the door to our kitchen. From where I was standing I could hear very well. They were checking Tania’s papers, looking around the kitchen. They spoke no Polish; she answered them in brash, broken German, using the familiar
du
. She told them they had startled her; she was deep in her game of solitaire. The man in civilian clothes said they wanted a woman with a little boy. The woman had long hair, down to the shoulders. They showed Tania a photograph. They knew the woman and child lived in the building; the landlady had
reported their presence to the Polish police. Tania said they should have come sooner. There was such a woman in the next apartment, where they had knocked without getting an answer. She and the boy moved in months ago. But they both went out; she had seen them on the balcony.

There followed some talk among the men I could not make out, and the civilian asked to see Tania’s papers again. This time they looked at them longer, and asked her to come into the light at the door so they could compare her to the photograph they had with them and the photograph in her
Kennkarte
. The civilian asked whether she had a young boy or anyone else living in the apartment. Tania laughed the long laugh she used when she teased people who weren’t her friends and said they could look through her small apartment if they were curious. In fact, she was too busy with grown men to have little boys around, and except for the three of them, she was alone. But not for long, a friend was coming; a man, not a woman or a little boy, and he didn’t have long hair. If they wished to wait they could see for themselves. The Germans also laughed and said they might indeed come back to surprise her when she was not expecting company. They talked a moment longer, and then I knew they were leaving: the door slammed; there were heavy steps on the balcony and soon on the stairs, going down.

Tania remained in the kitchen until they could no longer be heard. I had not moved from my place behind the bedroom door; the vial was still in my hand. Then
suddenly she rushed into the room and said, Hurry, we are getting out of this house. They will come back to look for the woman in the apartment next door, they will talk to the landlady, and if that slut is at home she will get her chance to turn us in.

IV

T
ANIA
and I arrived in Warsaw, with our money and jewelry still safely adhering to our bodies, on the morning of March 30, 1943. While we slept heavily in a railroad compartment crammed with passengers and bundles, fear mixed with fatigue being the strongest of soporifics, RAF bombs for the second time in three days kept awake the population of Berlin. Later that morning, as we looked for the rooming house near the Central Station that Hertz had recommended, Berliners leaving air-raid shelters and resuming their lives in familiar neighborhoods could discern the face of their city-to-be in bomb craters and behind blackened facades of their houses.

There was a unifying theme in Hertz’s repertoire of addresses. We were received by a landlady who seemed astonished that a mother and a child were seeking a room in her establishment. Having been told that there was no mistake, that this was the very house Tania had been referred to by a faithful client of hers from Lwów, the landlady, a certain Pani Jadwiga, agreed to take us on the condition that we stay no longer than a week: this was a
place for transients, there were no cooking privileges, we would share the toilet with the ladies down the corridor; it would be better if Tania kept me in our room so I didn’t get into people’s way. Rent was payable for the week in advance. The room she gave us was somewhat larger than our last bedroom in Lwów, with an ampler bed, two little settees covered with red plush, some red plush straight chairs, and a dirty rug. We left our suitcases there and went to mail a letter to grandfather, asking him to meet us in the main entrance of the Cathedral; we would be there at noon every day, beginning the day after tomorrow, until he was able to come. Tania didn’t know Warsaw. It was the only suitable monument she could think of that would do equally well in good weather and in the rain.

We were very hungry, and neither of us wanted to bring food to eat in our room. Tania decided we would go to the Central Station buffet for lunch; our disoriented, out-of-town appearance would not make us conspicuous there, but first we had to buy a street map of Warsaw. We studied it over our meal, Tania saying that we had to figure out the city immediately, so that we could get around without asking directions and attracting attention. Then we walked along a route she had memorized to the Saxon Gardens and sat there for a long time on a bench in the feeble afternoon sun. A woman and a little boy spending an hour or more in the park would not seem unusual. We returned to our rooming house the long way, taking Nowy Świat to Aleje Jerożolimskie. By that time, we were so tired that the vision of the plush settees and the
bed seemed cozy; we didn’t want to return to the station. There was a butcher nearby and also a bakery. Across the street from the house, we found a
mleczarnia
, where one could buy milk and cheese. We pushed a settee to the table, ate our bread and sausage, drank some milk, at last detached the money and jewelry packages from our bodies, and got into bed. Tania said she wasn’t going to look at the sheets; she didn’t care what they were like.

We took the street map of Warsaw to bed with us. Tania decided we had to study it during every free moment, segment by segment, until we knew it by heart, like a poem. We would quiz each other, and we were going to start right away, because one always remembers best the things one learns just before going to sleep. When we finished, Tania said that she knew I was sleepy, but there were so many problems to solve that she had to talk. She couldn’t bear to think about them in silence. Perhaps grandfather would have all the answers, but even so, we had to think through the problems first for ourselves.

To start with, what were we to do with the jewelry and the gold and all those bank notes? We couldn’t wear them glued to us all the time, it was too uncomfortable; people got stopped for document checks, and we might be searched. Getting caught with that hoard meant giving most of it away if it was the Polish police, or being taken to the Gestapo if we were caught by the Germans. On the other hand, how could we leave anything of value in this house or any other rooming house we might move to? There was also the question of how to sell the gold or jewelry once we had spent our cash. She couldn’t imagine
simply walking into a jewelry shop and putting a couple of rings or a bracelet on the counter. She would be cheated. We needed a reliable crook; that was probably the sort of person grandfather would know. And where would we go when our week here was over? Presumably grandfather would know about that as well. Perhaps we could move in with him. We would need, in any case, a story to explain why she was here with me looking for a place to live. We would use Hertz’s idea. For instance: wife of Polish officer, doctor in civilian life, prisoner of war in a Russian camp, rest of the family killed in bombardments in 1939 or perhaps deported to Siberia. But why did we leave Lwów? It must be that her nerves no longer could stand Lwów after so many losses. That part of the story, she felt, would have to be perfected as she told it. She would see how her audience reacted; she might try it on the landlady here. And how about me, why didn’t I go to school? That I wouldn’t go to school was understood between Tania and me; one couldn’t take my penis where it might be seen, for instance to urinate in the common toilet, never mind what vicious games boys might invent. The reason had to be my delicate, congenital heart condition. I would be tutored privately; that might be an additional reason for coming to Warsaw. Teaching privately was forbidden. It may be that people willing to take the risk would be easier to find in Warsaw than in Lwów. We could not carry our questions and answers further. Tania turned out the light. We would sleep.

Our rest was interrupted by the now-familiar red visitors. These were big-city bedbugs, more active and more
ingenious than their cousins in Lwów. Not content with hustling along the sheet and scurrying up and down walls, they dropped on the bed and on us from the ceiling and swarmed over the plush of the settees and chairs. We even saw them run on the floor, staying close to the wall. The light Tania turned on restored order. Pressed against each other, we fell asleep. On subsequent nights, when we were less tired and more apprehensive about the insect colonies with which we shared our space, we went to bed with the light on and cloth bands tied over our eyes. Tania called it Warsaw blindman’s buff.

The struggle against bedbugs became a leitmotiv of our days and nights in Warsaw. At Pani Jadwiga’s there was nothing to be done other than to turn the bedbugs’ night into day. Our term there was too short. In subsequent rooming houses, more was at stake, sleepless nights being worse than nightmares, and the combat became more varied. On some nights, of course, too discouraged or overwhelmed by the number and tenacity of the enemy, we lay awake in the lamplight or simply let the bedbugs feed. But in the day, we went on the offensive. Tania sprinkled foul-smelling powders on the mattress, under the mattress, around the walls. We poured boiling water on suspected nests. We exposed the bed, if the space and the location of the window permitted, to the disinfecting rays of the sun. This activity provided, in addition to a temporary material improvement in our comfort, another war game I did not mention to Tania: in this limited sphere, I could be a hunter and an aggressor, like SS units destroying partisans in the forest or, very soon, rebellious
Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw. The SS sometimes had to act in secret. So did we. Our landladies resented any mention of bedbugs on their premises; we were in no position to antagonize them. From that point of view, our favorable experience with chemical agents paralleled that of the Reich. They were the easiest means of murder to conceal. Use of boiling water and, at night, manual extermination of fleeing bugs presented considerable risks and difficulties. The former laid us open to the charge of destroying property by spillage of liquids. The latter often left red blood stains on the wallpaper. Stealth and lies were needed to cover our operations with water. We could sometimes, unobserved, rush the pot from the kitchen we shared with the landlady and the other lodgers into our room; at other times Tania claimed she needed to prepare a hot-water bottle. In one room that we rented we worked undisturbed and undetected: we had permission to make tea or coffee on an alcohol stove within the room, and we boiled as much water as we wanted. I was the principal nighttime executioner of escaping bedbugs. Early on, I tired of scraping dried blood off walls and sheets with my fingernails—it was unpleasant and ineffective—yet working with a wet rag often made the stain worse. The technique I eventually perfected protected the walls. I would corner the bug on the wall with a cupped left hand, sweep it to the floor with the right, and trample it to death.

BOOK: Wartime Lies
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