The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  I rubbed warmth into her hands. ‘Listen, Katshkele, did you speak to Wolfi?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘Adam probably snuck out to Christian Warsaw and couldn’t make it back tonight.’

  ‘Has he been smuggling?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that many kids his age are. He probably lost track of the time, and it gets dark so early now. He must be in hiding till morning. You’ll see, he’ll turn up here first thing tomorrow. He’s smart – and resourceful.’

  I’d practised that little speech until I believed it. And by promising to go out again and look for Adam, I was able to get Stefa to eat some hot soup.

  A man clomps through empty streets as if through his own childhood fears, searching across curtained windows and mounds of snow for a way to travel back in time. Take me instead. The words whispered by all the parents of missing children. And even by granduncles, I was learning.

  A Jewish policeman whose breath smelled of mints stopped me on Nalewki Street. When I explained why I was breaking the curfew, he said matter-of-factly, ‘Kids go missing every day. Just go home and wait till morning.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I told him.

  He toldme that I’d be arrested by the German guards if they spotted me. I walked away from him before he could finish his warning.

  I thought it was just possible that Wolfi had lied to Stefa to protect Adam, so I headed to his apartment again. A stinking smell was now coming from the courtyard, and I traced it to a pushcart stored there for the night that must have been loaded with rotting fish during the day. Two bony, desperate-looking cats were tied to one of the wheels, and they stared up at me suspiciously from what looked like a mush of entrails and rice. One of them hissed. I guessed that they were there to keep away rats.

  Wolfi’s father answered my knocks in his bare feet and pyjamas, but wearing a woollen coat. Mr Loos was a carpenter from Minsk with coarse, powerful hands, each finger as thick as a cigar. When I told him Adam was missing, he embraced me. For just an instant I went limp in his arms, as if I were a child myself.

  After stealing into Wolfi’s bedroom, he carried the boy out to me still asleep, setting him down gently in an armchair of faded brocade. Mrs Loos kissed him awake. The boy gazed up at me with drowsy, blinking eyes. I kneeled to be less threatening.

  ‘Adam’s gone missing,’ I told him softly. ‘So even if he made you promise not to say a word to anyone, you have to tell me if you saw him yesterday.’

  ‘Just… just for a minute,’ he stammered. ‘Outside your apartment house.’

  ‘Thank God. What time?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe one-thirty or two.’

  Mr Loos brought me a chair. I sat down and leaned towards the boy. ‘What did he tell you, Wolfi?’

  ‘That he was going to buy some coal. And not… not to let you or his mother know.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘That Gloria was freezing to death.’

  I hung my head; I should have known that Adam would act recklessly to save her. ‘Do you know where he was going to buy the coal?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Listen, son, I’m not angry. But you must tell me if you have any idea where he might have gone.’

  ‘Just one.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Wolfi explained to me that the apartment house at 1 Leszno Street shared a cellar with a building on Rymarska Street, in Christian Warsaw. Passage across the clandestine border cost five złoty, payable to a guard. Poles carrying goods into the ghetto put on the Jewish armbands with the Star of David that we were forced to wear. Jews heading the other way removed theirs.

  Adam had crossed the cellar only once that Wolfi knew about. He’d been paid ten złoty to smuggle out an ermine jacket and bring back a mahogany jewellery box from an antique dealer living near the university. He’d told Wolfi that he had been chosen because of his blond, Aryan looks, which made him less likely to be arrested. That had been about a month before. Wolfi didn’t know who’d hired Adam or the identity of the dealer. But he added that my nephew had been given half a chocolate cake as a reward for executing his mission so quickly.

  It had begun to snow – big soft flakes falling atop the wild panic throbbing inside my head. At 1 Leszno Street, I rapped at the front door until the light went on in the caretaker’s apartment.

  ‘Stop that goddamned banging!’ he hissed.

  He opened the front door a crack. ‘What’s the problem, old man?’ he demanded. A blanket was drawn across his shoulders and he carried a candle in his fist. As he moved the flame towards me, to better see my face, his shadow seemed to fold around us.

  I recognized him: Abramek Piotrowicz, the attorney; his daughter Halina had been a high-school friend of Liesel’s.

  ‘It’s me, Erik Cohen,’ I told him.

  ‘Erik? My God, I wouldn’t have recognized you! But you look pretty good,’ he rushed to add, so as not to offend me.

  When we shook hands, Abram tugged me inside and said, ‘Get out of that damn wind!’ He shut the door and scoffed. ‘This weather… I’m going to Palestine as soon as we get out. And I’m never coming back!’

  I explained the reason for my visit and described Adam, but Abram told me he hadn’t seen any boy fitting his description.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to question the guard who was on duty yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘His name is Grylek Baer,’ Abram replied, adding that he’d be back only at 1 p.m. ‘But I’ll get word to him at dawn. Leave it to me. Let’s speak in the morning.’

  I found Stefa still up when I returned home, seated in the kitchen over half a bowl of cold soup. It was 1.40 a.m.

  Two condemned prisoners wait for sunrise. The man slumps into his chair by the window, where he can watch a dark street emptied of life. Later, when the sky clears, he steals glances up at a dome of stars that seems too distant to provide any orientation to him or anyone else.

  Our exile will never end he thinks. He lets his pipe go out and his feet grow numb.

  The woman sits on her bed, one hand on a homemade birdcage she hates, staring into the milky eye of all she has ever feared.

  At dawn, Stefa disregarded my pleading and headed for Leszno Street. I waited at home in case Adam made it back to us. Just before eight, three sharp knocks on the front door made me drop the book I’d forgotten I was holding.

  Two men stood on the landing, the shorter one in the black uniform and cap of Pinkiert’s, the ghetto funeral service. The other, tall and distinguished-looking, held his hat in his hands.

  ‘My nephew… have you found him?’ I asked in a rush. Inside my voice was our future – Adam’s and mine.

  ‘Are you Dr Erik Cohen?’ the Pinkiert’s man questioned.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We found your nephew’s body at dawn. I’m sorry.’

  I don’t remember anything else from our conversation. Maybe it was as we walked down the stairs to the street that the men told me how Adam had been identified by a secretary in the Jewish Council who was an acquaintance of Stefa’s. Or maybe they told me that only later. My next memory is of standing outside our apartment house. The Pinkiert’s cart – wooden, drawn by a brown mare – was shrouded in shadow. The undertaker – a slender man with a pinched face – spoke to me in a kind voice about catching a chill and did up the buttons on my coat. But I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel anything but the sense that I’d been tugged far out to sea and would make it all the way back to land.

  A single trauma can cripple a person for ever, and when I saw Adam lying in the back of the cart, I knew my life was over.

  A coarse blanket covered his body but left his face exposed. It was turned to the side, as if he’d heard someone call out from the left just before death. His eyes were closed and his hair was mussed. His skin was pasty and yellowish.

  Was it then that the Pinkiert’s man told me how he had been found?

&n
bsp; I climbed into the cart and kneeled by my nephew. The dark gravity of all that had gone wrong drew my lips to his. The stiff chill of our kiss made me shudder.

  I took out my handkerchief and started wiping the grime off his face. I whispered, You’re home now, as if he could hear me – and as if that news would comfort him.

  Whatever made Adam Adam is gone, I thought.

  Six small words, but they couldn’t fit inside my head. They spilled out of me inside a hopelessness so deep and wide that it might have been everything I’d ever felt or thought.

  As my craving for him to wake up dripped down my cheeks, I apologized to him. I didn’t want him to think he’d done anything wrong; a child shouldn’t meet death with guilt in his heart.

  I intended to embrace the boy and carry him upstairs, but when I lifted his blanket away, I gasped; he was naked, and his right leg had been cut off from the knee down.

  CHAPTER 5

  The universe was turning around Adam’s missing leg, and I was freefalling through a life that seemed impossible. Do you know what it’s like to see a mutilated nine-year-old? You realize that anything can happen: the sun may blacken and die before your eyes; a crack may open in the earth and swallow the street… Each heartbeat seems proof that all you see and feel is too improbable to be anything but a dream.

  A mad revelation: Adam’s death and the fate of the Jews were linked. I stitched that conclusion together out of my panic, wondering how many months were left to us.

  I looked frantically around the cart for what had been cut from Adam, as if my heart were on fire. ‘What have you done to my nephew?’ I demanded of the undertaker.

  Talking to you, Heniek, helps me recall details I’d long forgotten. I see now how the tall man who’d knocked on our door stepped in front of the undertaker to answer my question. In his white scarf and black trilby, he looked like the ghetto’s answer to Al Capone. He introduced himself as Benjamin Schrei and he told me he was a representative of the Jewish Council. ‘Why don’t we go up to your apartment, where we can talk calmly,’ he suggested.

  ‘Calmly?’ I bellowed. ‘Do you really think I can talk calmly at a moment like this?’

  I tugged my arm from his grasp. He showed me a hard look, as though he’d already concluded I was going to be difficult. Leaning close to me, he whispered, ‘The Jewish police found Adam in the barbed wire by the Chłodna Street crossing. The Germans must have discarded him there in the night. We cut him free. We need to talk.’

  I assumed the police had been unable to extract Adam from the greedy metal coils without cutting off his leg. Of course, snipping the barbed wire would have been easier and quicker, but any Jew who attempted that would have been executed by the Nazis for tampering with our border.

  Maybe I flinched on picturing what had happened, because Schrei’s face softened and he said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk of such matters.’

  Was his sympathy genuine? In those first few hours after Adam’s death, everyone seemed to be reading lines in a play.

  ‘Give me five minutes and then I’ll talk with you,’ I told him.

  Heniek, could you have left Adam lying next to you without touching what had been done to him? You look away, as though to say I’ve no right to ask you, but all I mean to say is that I had to know the shape and scope of what had happened.

  I reached slowly under the blanket. His skin was hard, like rawhide, and when a sharp edge jabbed into my palm – bone – I jerked my hand back. Sickness lodged in my gut, then rose into my chest, and I leaned over the side of the cart. Afterwards, I drank water out of a tin cup handed up to me by a neighbour.

  Looking around at familiar faces in the gathering crowd, I wanted to vanish, but I also wanted to stay in the cart for ever, so that I wouldn’t have to rejoin my life.

  Each passing day would now lead me further away from my nephew. I didn’t think I’d survive the growing distance between us.

  I’ll never measure Adam’s height again.

  So many nevers came to me that first day, but I remember that one most of all.

  Adam’s right arm was scratched from the sharp metal and twisted at nearly a right angle, the way it must have dangled when he was discarded. His left knee and foot were bent to the outside. His hands had formed fists, but when I tried to uncurl one of them, I heard a crack and stopped tugging.

  He must have fought back. I imagined him punching and kicking, and shouting my name.

  The death of a child is a single event, but the memory of it expands to cover a lifetime. Nothing I’d ever done – not even as a young man – was free of his loss: not my schooldays with Izzy, not my marriage, not Liesel’s birth.

  Ewa appeared out of nowhere. Later, she told me she rushed out to the street when she heard a shriek, but I don’t remember any shouting. Nearly everyone on our block had known Adam since he was a baby; one of them must have let out a cry on seeing him.

  Ewa began to wail. Women neighbours rushed to her. I must have entered their group at some point or summoned her to me. I must have asked her to find Stefa and told her where she had gone, but I don’t recall any of that.

  Had I thought of our exile into the ghetto as a dream and interpreted it correctly, I’d have lived more cautiously, since I’d have known they moved us on to an island to make it easier to steal our future – and to keep the rest of the world from knowing. I ought to have been among the first to understand!

  And I should have guessed that Adam would race across all the forbidden bridges in the world to save Gloria.

  I will have to warn Stefa not to lift his blanket or she will be as damned as I am.

  When I saw my niece running towards me, I put my hand atop Adam’s head, because his hair was the only part of him that was still soft, and I was terrified I’d forget its silken feel, and I knew I’d have to give up possession of him to his mother now.

  Stefa crept forward, hugging her arms around her chest. She looked at her son and then at me with a puzzled expression, as though asking me to explain a great mystery. She didn’t cry. She was enveloped by a dark spell of silence. Her nose was running and her eyes were red. She was panting.

  Ewa helped her up into the cart. Stefa kissed my brow and squeezed my hand. It was unlike her to express her affection so openly, but I didn’t think of that till later.

  Taking off her mittens, my niece brought Adam’s hand to her cheek, then put it over her mouth and pressed her lips to his palm. She stepped his fingertips over her closed eyelids, and that’s when her first tears came, along with a choking sound.

  ‘Stefa…’ I began, but my niece’s moans covered my words.

  When she embraced Adam, his blanket slid down to his waist. I had to tell her now not to look any lower, but my voice had been swallowed by the terrible strangeness of this moment – the sense that the entire future of the earth and heaven was turning around what was taking place here.

  Stefa rocked Adam back and forth as if he were a baby. When she reached down to lift the blanket over his chest again, she saw what had been cut from him and began to howl. The sound was like an animal having its womb cut out.

  CHAPTER 6

  I’d put Stefa’s woollen hat back on her head, but she was still shivering as though she’d fallen through the ice of a winter lake. She agreed to talk with Mr Schrei, the Jewish Council’s representative, on the condition that her son remain covered and guarded until we’d agreed on funeral plans. Ewa helped me prop up my niece as we trudged upstairs. On our landing, she began coughing as if her lungs were packed with grit.

  Behind our closed door, I sat my niece on the bed and smoothed a shawl over her legs, then brought her a cup of the coffee I’d made earlier, lacing it with a little vodka, but she kept her hands knitted together and refused to touch her drink. She bent her head over her lap like an old widow curled around her loneliness, protecting herself from a world where she no longer had a home.

  I think she had already vowed that her thoughts would never leave her so
n again – and was on strike against a world where a child could be murdered.

  I took Adam’s Indian headdress off our faded leather armchair – I’d been planning to sew on the fallen feather – and invited Mr Schrei, who’d been standing by the door, to sit. Ewa brought him coffee. Taking a first sip, he leaned back with a long sigh, hoping, I think, to convince us of his exhaustion, which irritated me until I realized how awkward this must have been for him. I sat up as straight as I could to fight the urge to hide, and I tried to fill my pipe, but my hands proved too clumsy. Ewa leaned back against the windowsill, watching Stefa with motherly concern. She kept the loop of her amber beads in her mouth. When our eyes met, she shook her head as if to say, I’ll never believe it.

  Mr Schrei told us that Adam must have been grabbed by the Nazis outside the ghetto and executed. ‘They tossed him into the barbed wire because they intended for us to find him,’ he said authoritatively. ‘I expect his death was a message.’

  ‘A message about what?’ I asked.

  He leaned forward, his hands propped on his knees. ‘As a reminder of what’s in store for kids caught smuggling – a deterrent, if you will. The Germans have recently begun exercising pressure on the council to curtail illegal commerce. I believe that’s why they… why they cut off Adam’s leg – to frighten us into passive acceptance of our fate.’

  ‘But I thought that was the only way the Jewish policemen could free Adam from the barbed wire.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. In point of fact, Adam was found that way.’

  I looked at Stefa. Her lips and eyes were shut tight, and she was swaying gently from side to side, as if imagining Adam in her arms. I wanted to be alone with her, and for night to fall quickly. In the darkness, floating free of all our previous expectations, my niece and I just might find a way to talk to each other that could be meaningful. Maybe she, at least, could find a way forward.