Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  Ten or twelve people shared the room, which in normal times would have served as a lounge room. Bundles and boxes were strewn from one end to the other. Some areas were screened by sheets to provide a little privacy, but elsewhere belongings were heaped in untidy piles destined to cause territorial disputes between those who shared this space. Stepping over some of the bundles and weaving between others, Madame Ramona led Elzunia to a corner of the room where a carton covered by a length of black satin served as her table. From the bags that protruded from underneath it, Elzunia saw that this was where Madame Ramona stored her few belongings.

  ‘Give me your hand, child,’ she said. She examined Elzunia’s palm with close attention, as though deciphering an ancient parchment in a foreign language, and traced each line with firm fingers. Holding Elzunia’s hand, she gazed into her eyes with the intensity of a thousand-watt globe.

  ‘I see three lives,’ she pronounced in a faraway voice.

  ‘Passages and tunnels,’ she continued. She gasped and clutched her throat. ‘I can’t breathe.’ She was coughing now, louder and louder, as if her lungs would burst.

  Alarmed, Elzunia wondered whether she should shake her to break this strange episode or bring her a glass of water when suddenly the coughing stopped. Now Madame Ramona leapt to her feet and flailed her arms around as though pushing away invisible flames.

  ‘My feet are on fire!’ Her shoulders heaved. ‘Ah, light at last!’ She sank back in her chair, exhausted.

  Elzunia waited to hear more but the performance was over. Was that all? She had come to find out where her father was and when they would be together again. She also hoped to hear a prediction about the airman who had saved her life.

  Madame Ramona stared at her hand again. ‘You are searching for someone.’

  Elzunia sat forward expectantly.

  ‘You are looking in the wrong places,’ the woman intoned.

  ‘Where should I look?’ Elzunia whispered.

  Madame Ramona shook her head so hard that her earrings bounced against her neck. ‘You must find the right path.’ She released Elzunia’s hand. ‘That’s all.’

  Elzunia couldn’t conceal her disappointment. ‘I thought clairvoyants could see into the future and find missing people,’ she said.

  Madame Ramona gave her a shrewd look. ‘Sometimes people don’t want to be found.’

  A good excuse, Elzunia thought.

  ‘How did it go?’ Lusia asked when she returned. She was bent over her sewing. When she had heard that people on the other side of the wall needed aprons, she bought used sheets, odd buttons and scraps of material from the hawkers and turned them into pretty aprons that proved popular on the Aryan side and provided them with a few zloty for a piece of sawdust bread and occasionally a few grams of butter for Gittel. As the situation became more desperate, those who still had some furs or jewellery left tossed them over the wall to buy food. In exchange for a fox-fur jacket, the Polish vendors tossed back a pat of butter or a loaf of bread.

  Elzunia was hunting in the cupboard for something to eat. Hunger gnawed at her constantly but it was always worse when she came home. She found two army biscuits and a little powdered milk that Edek had brought round. She smiled to herself. That boy was a miracle-worker.

  Chewing each tiny mouthful over and over to make it last, Elzunia described the fortune-telling session. ‘Waste of time,’ she told her mother. ‘She rambled on about tunnels, fires, looking for people in the wrong places and finding the right path. Oh, and something about three lives. Not a word about Father. At least I didn’t have to pay for that mumbo-jumbo.’

  Gittel swallowed the last of her biscuit and climbed onto Elzunia’s lap, nestling in like a kitten. ‘Can I have some mumbo-jumbo, too?’

  The biscuit hadn’t satisfied Elzunia’s hunger and in an attempt to distract herself from the sudden longing to eat a thick slice of bread spread with cream cheese and covered in thick tomato slices sprinkled with chives, Elzunia picked up Gazeta Zydowska. She was scanning the Ghetto newspaper when an item caught her eye. There would be a concert at the Jewish Library that evening.

  The large hall was crowded by the time she arrived and as she made her way to a vacant seat, she recognised the stocky man with the fleshy face and bushy eyebrows sitting in the front row. It was Mr Czerniakow, the President of the Judenrat. He was greeting people around him, and he looked surprisingly approachable.

  The musicians were already on stage and there was an expectant buzz in the hall as they tuned their instruments. The edge of the stage was piled with small gifts that people had brought in lieu of payment, and their offerings said as much about the poverty of the donors as about the hunger of the recipients. People had brought whatever they could spare from their meagre rations: two shrivelled potatoes, a chunk of black bread, a tiny dish of beetroot marmalade and three blackened onions.

  Elzunia looked around for the old violinist but he wasn’t in the string section. Perhaps he was ill. A moment later, there was a burst of applause and he walked in front of the orchestra with a slow, proud gait, his violin in one hand, a dazzling white handkerchief in the other. His flag of defiance, she thought.

  ‘That’s Juliusz Szajnberg,’ the man on her left whispered. ‘He’s the soloist tonight. He used to play with the Warsaw Philharmonic. My wife and I never missed a concert.’ He gave a deep sigh for the gracious days that would never come again.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the violinist announced in a voice that sounded surprisingly strong. ‘This evening we will play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major.’

  Shouts of dismay and disapproval erupted among the audience and he held up his wrinkled hand. ‘Please. I know some of you are shocked that we want to play the work of a German composer’ — here he had to hold up his hand for silence again — ‘but we don’t believe in discriminating against great music, nor do we adopt a policy of collective responsibility, like our jailers. And, if you recall, Beethoven also lived at a time when a megalomaniac tried to subjugate Europe. That megalomaniac is gone, and this one, too, will eventually be vanquished, but glorious music lives on forever.’ With that, Juliusz Szajnberg bowed, tucked his handkerchief under his chin and nodded to the conductor to begin.

  From the moment the orchestra struck up the first chords of the familiar concerto, the audience listened in rapt attention as though each note was a delicacy they were determined to savour. Elzunia noticed that all the musicians had written out the score by hand, and wondered how long that must have taken them. As the old violinist swayed in time to the music, his long grey hair brushed against his frayed collar as he played.

  As she watched him, it struck Elzunia that he wasn’t just playing the music; he was the music. It flowed straight from his heart to his fingers and into the souls of the listeners, transporting them to another realm. Nothing existed apart from the music. The musicians, like their audience, were starving, cold and exhausted but for almost an hour their music transcended hunger, weariness and pain. She looked around. Tears glittered in the eyes of some of the listeners. Swept away by the passionate melody that soared from Szajnberg’s fingers, Elzunia felt she was floating on a current of emotion. Gone was the Ghetto, the guards, the war and her missing father. She was running through fields of wildflowers, under a bright blue sky.

  There was silence after the final triumphant notes of the concerto, then the hall exploded in applause. Exhausted as he must have been after his performance, the violinist played an encore. It seemed to Elzunia that it was his soul, not his fingers, that played a Chopin nocturne, which he’d transcribed for the violin. It was forbidden to play the works of this composer and she sensed that the whole audience exulted at this defiance. Like a kaleidoscope that forms different shapes when it has been shaken, Elzunia felt as though something inside her had been rearranged into a lighter, brighter pattern. No matter what the Germans did, they couldn’t crush their spirit. Suddenly everything seemed possible. As she was leaving the hall, she caught sig
ht of Mr Czerniakow again and an idea began to form in her mind. By the time she reached home, she had a plan figured out.

  The next day, after her classes at the hospital were over and she’d finished her shift, Elzunia hurried towards the Judenrat. At the intersection of Chlodna and Zelazna Streets, she stepped onto the wooden bridge that had recently been erected above the street to relieve the congestion. From the bridge, she saw a view of Warsaw that made her heart stop beating. Outlined against the watery sky were the thin spires of St Karol Boromeusz Church with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the square. It shocked her to see how close that other world was, yet how inaccessible.

  At the other end of the overpass stood the guard she had nicknamed Wolfman. He fixed her with his icy expression.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he shouted, tilting her chin with his whip.

  Cold sweat ran down her back and she tensed, ready for the blow, when a shot rang out ahead of them. There was screaming and yelling, more shots, and people were running in all directions. Wolfman turned to see what was happening, and, taking advantage of the distraction she slipped away into the crowd.

  One day, God will punish you, she thought, and the words comforted her as she ran, her heartbeat vibrating against her throat. But where was God? And why was He punishing innocent people?

  She didn’t stop running until she reached Grzybowska Street. Before the war, this street had been in the better part of the Jewish district, with wider streets and imposing buildings. This had once been the area of wealthy merchants and wholesale emporiums, where lorries delivered shipments of steel and boxes of exotic fruit from far-off lands. These days, paint peeled off the woodwork of the mansions, which were now coated with grime, and desperate street hawkers replaced the flourishing prewar entrepreneurs.

  Through an arched entrance ornamented with Grecian designs, Elzunia entered the headquarters of the Judenrat. Making her way past the rabbit warren of offices on the ground floor, past the pleading, desperate faces of the petitioners and supplicants who spilled into the corridor to gain an audience with the bureaucrats they hoped would solve their problems, Elzunia started up the stairs.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ a stern voice shouted after her. ‘You can’t go up there.’

  ‘I’m from the hospital, I’ve come to see President Czerniakow,’ she said quickly.

  The man eyed her suspiciously and his gaze rested on her pink-and-white uniform. Everyone knew that the President suffered from heart and liver problems and lumbago, so perhaps he’d asked the nurse to come. ‘Wait here,’ he said and knocked on the door at the end of the corridor. A moment later he emerged and beckoned for her to enter.

  The man behind the desk raised his thick black eyebrows that met above the bridge of his nose, and looked at her with hooded eyes the colour of burnt sugar. He waved a plump dismissive hand at her. ‘I don’t know how you got in but you’ve got no business coming here,’ he said sternly. ‘I thought it was the sister from the hospital come to badger me again. You’d better go.’

  She was about to explain, but, weak from hunger, she felt so light-headed that she began to sway. She would have fainted if he hadn’t hurriedly risen and pushed a chair under her.

  ‘Close your eyes and sit there until you feel better,’ he said kindly.

  When the room had stopped spinning, she opened her eyes and found herself looking at a portrait, and recognised General Pilsudski, the patriotic leader of independent Poland after the last world war.

  President Czerniakow followed her gaze. ‘That portrait goes with me everywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s a reminder that we are still part of Poland. The rest of Poland — like the rest of the world — may have forgotten us and left us to our fate, but we are Poles just the same.’

  His piercing gaze rested on her and he frowned. ‘Who are you and what are you doing here? What do you want?’

  ‘I came to ask you to help our hospital,’ she said. ‘Now that we’ve merged with the Children’s Hospital, things are really desperate. We don’t have enough —’

  Before she could say another word, he groaned and struck his wide forehead with his large hand. ‘Do you know the Greek legend of Sisyphus?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘He spent his life pushing a heavy ball to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll down, so he had to start pushing it up again. Well, I’ve become Sisyphus.’ He sighed. ‘I spend my days begging Commissioner Auerswald to reduce the exorbitant sums he grabs from us, pleading with the Transferstelle to provide us with decent food and not the rotting garbage they dump on us, arguing with the municipal authorities to give us electricity and water, begging our wealthy inhabitants to contribute more money, and having endless meetings and conferences with everyone else. The Commissioner lies to me, the Transferstelle make promises they never keep, the municipal authorities say they’ll provide power but they don’t, and then the next day I have to go through it all again because the Germans keep imposing bigger ransoms and there are more sick, starving and homeless people.’ He passed a weary hand over his fleshy face. ‘My dear young lady, I’m an engineer and a poet, not a politician or a miracle-worker. I must have been insane to take on this thankless task.’

  ‘So why did you?’ Elzunia asked.

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘I honestly believed I’d be able to negotiate with the Germans and improve conditions for our people in the Ghetto.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Some people think I did it for personal aggrandisement.’

  Elzunia had heard people revile him as a German puppet. Some even accused him of being a collaborator. He sounded sincere but sincere people could be misguided. It was too complicated to sort out.

  ‘And what about the hospital?’ She had to remind him of the reason for her visit. ‘If we don’t have medicines, bed linen and food for the patients, what’s the point of having a hospital?’

  When she had finished listing the problems, he looked at the slender girl in her pink-and-white uniform and said sternly, ‘For such a young girl, you’re very persistent, coming here and haranguing me like this …’

  Elzunia’s heart sank but President Czerniakow suddenly smiled.

  ‘I must say, you’re a breath of fresh air in this Augean stable. I’ll see what I can do.’

  She thanked him and felt like skipping out of the office. She was almost at the door when he spoke, as much to himself as to her. ‘Sometimes I feel like the captain of the Titanic, shuffling the deckchairs while the ship is sinking.’

  Twenty-One

  Lech looked preoccupied. ‘Something’s brewing,’ he told Elzunia. He’d been pacing outside the nursing school, waiting for her to come out. ‘The Germans have brought in special units from the east, and people reckon they’re planning something big.’

  There were other things he’d heard as well. Like Bolek’s story about the death squads. He avoided his cousin these days. He didn’t want to be reminded about his past blackmailing activities, and Bolek never lost an opportunity to mock him for being a Jew-lover. But when they’d run into each other in Krakowskie Przedmiescie the previous day, Bolek couldn’t resist showing off what he’d found out. He swore it was true because a German from one of those units from the east had told him all about it. He said his squad had been sent to the Soviet Union on a special mission to machine-gun Jewish men, women and children and throw their bodies into pits. Einzatzgruppen, the squads were called. Whatever that meant. Bolek had gone into hideous details that made Lech feel sick, but he didn’t believe a word of it. Random sadism and violence were one thing, but lining up hundreds of women and children in front of pits and gunning them down in cold blood was too far-fetched. This was 1942, not the Dark Ages. The German had obviously spun Bolek a tale and he’d swallowed it. Still, Lech had noticed an influx of Ukrainian, Litvak and Latvian auxiliary units in town over the past few days and he felt uneasy.

  Elzunia looked up, blinked in the sunlight and took in a happy breath of summer. This dail
y walk from the lecture hall to the hospital was her only chance of enjoying these brilliant July days. She looked up at the cloudless blue sky and felt the sun on her face. At least the Germans couldn’t deprive them of the pleasure of a summer’s day. She wished Lech hadn’t spoilt her mood.

  ‘This place thrives on gossip,’ she said. ‘The other day I heard someone talking about mobile vans where they’re supposed to be gassing people. There’s no end to the stories. If you believed them all, you’d go crazy.’

  Her eyes today reminded Lech of the sea in Sopot. He’d been about nine years old and it was the only time his parents had ever taken him on a holiday. He could still remember running along the long wooden pier that jutted into the dark blue water. The day had ended with a belting, because he couldn’t understand where the waves started and where they ended, and he kept asking questions that his irritated father couldn’t answer, but he’d never forgotten the colour of the sea, pools of which seemed to fill Elzunia’s eyes. If only he could make her safe. ‘Maybe those stories are true and maybe they’re not, but you’d be better off in my room than in here. You could sleep on the sofa and I could sleep on the floor. I’d smuggle you inside so no one would know you were there.’ He said it all in one breath.

  She stared at him. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘If you came to stay with me, you’d be safe.’

  She jumped aside to dodge a bicycle rickshaw. Sweat was pouring down the chalk-white face of the elderly cyclist who coughed and wheezed as he pedalled between the beggars propped up against the buildings and the throng milling in the streets. A shot rang out, and someone screamed.

  No longer aware of the sunshine, Elzunia felt that she would suffocate in this oppressive place where shots, screams, yells and curses had become the soundtrack of their lives.