Ewa’s hesitant voice broke the silence. ‘Mr Schrei, how… how did the Germans execute him?’
‘I’m not certain,’ he replied. ‘There are no other injuries that our doctor could see.’
‘We’ll have to find out,’ I told him.
‘Why?’ Stefa asked, opening her eyes.
‘I think we ought to know what the Germans did to him,’ I told her.
‘It makes no difference now,’ she observed. Gazing down, she added, ‘I don’t want anyone but me to touch Adam.’
I knelt by her. ‘No one will touch him,’ I assured her, but I already knew I was lying, and I silently asked for her forgiveness.
My niece pressed her hand to my cheek by way of thanks, then took off her muffler and placed it neatly on the bed behind her. Her gestures – overly precise – gave me gooseflesh.
Perspiration had glued her hair to her neck. I reached up to remove her hat, but she stilled my hand. ‘No! I have to keep my thoughts inside!’ she said sharply. Anxious to flee from my intrusion, she got to her feet and took a deep breath. I stood up beside her but didn’t dare touch her. ‘I need to boil some water,’ she said. With a quick look at Ewa, then at Mr Schrei, she added, ‘Please excuse me.’
After a first step, her eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled. I caught her, and Ewa helped me lay her on the bed.
I pressed a cold compress to Stefa’s brow and called her name softly. As she came round, Mr Schrei fetched a glass of water, and Ewa held it to her lips. My niece drank in tiny sips, gazing around the room, surprised to find herself at home.
Ewa helped her sit up. ‘Come, I’ll put you to bed now,’ she said.
‘No, please,’ Stefa pleaded, her brow ribbed with worry. ‘Take me to the kitchen.’
‘She needs air,’ I observed. ‘Sit by the window, Stefa. I’ll open it a crack. You need to sit quietly for a few minutes.’
‘No, I need two towels – one small, one large. Uncle Erik, bring them to me from my wardrobe… the bottom shelf.’ She pointed to her room.
I understood what she intended, but Ewa must have showed her a puzzled look; Stefa took her hand and whispered, ‘I need to wash my son and make him ready for… for…’
She stopped there, unable to say the word burial.
While Ewa led my niece into the kitchen, Mr Schrei stood up. Stepping to the mirror by my desk, he put on his hat and tilted it at a stylish angle. I could see he was proud of being handsome, and I imagined it would be difficult for him to grow old. Like me, in other words, though I’d been vain without the benefit of good looks. Turning to me, he said, ‘Please accept my condolences and those of the council.’ At the door, he added, ‘Just one more thing. We would be most appreciative if you were to refrain from speaking to anyone about your nephew’s missing leg. It could create problems. Please tell your niece and the other woman. I’m sorry, I don’t know her name.’
‘Ewa. What kind of problems?’ I started filling the bowl of my pipe again; I was desperate to smoke.
‘You know how superstitious some of the rural Jews are, about burying a body that’s incomplete… forced to walk the earth as disembodied spirits and all that rubbish.’ He rolled his eyes at the very notion. ‘Spreading news of what’s happened could cause panic. And since this is an isolated case, it’s best if we just… well, I think you know what I mean.’
‘No, actually I don’t,’ I told him.
‘A little discretion will go a long way in keeping things under control,’ he observed.
When he shook my hand to take his leave, I snarled, ‘Do you really believe that keeping things under control is of any importance to me now?’
Outside, the undertaker, whose name was Schmul, told me that I would need to go to Pinkiert’s headquarters to pre-pay the funeral. And that he really ought to get going. I gave him five złoty to have him stay with us until Stefa had had a chance to wash her son. He helped me carry Adam into the courtyard. Then I took a couple of swigs from the vodka bottle I’d carried downstairs, put on my reading glasses, kneeled beside my nephew and adjusted the blanket so that it concealed only his face. You see, Heniek, I had only one purpose left.
CHAPTER 7
Adam was badly scratched from the barbed wire, particularly on his belly and chest, which was where he must have been gripped by the coils. But none of the scratches were bloody, which seemed to indicate that he’d been dead for an hour or so – with his veins and arteries dry – before being discarded.
I was unable to find any bullet hole or puncture wound, but button-sized, reddish-brown bruises marked the skin over his ribs, all of them between the sleek rise of his right hip and his sternum: a handprint.
I conjectured that the largest corresponded to where a thumb had pressed down, and I tried to match my fingertips to the marks but couldn’t quite spread my hand far enough. Whoever had severed Adam’s leg had been almost certainly a man, and probably larger than I was.
The killer – or his accomplice – must have used his left hand for leverage while he sawed with his right. To have made such deep bruises, he’d have to have pressed down hard on the boy’s chest.
When I imitated what I imagined he’d done, a small shift inside Adam, like a latch opening, made my heart tumble. Leaning down and pressing again, I heard a click – a rib was broken.
I closed my eyes to keep from being sick again. I realized that whoever took Adam’s leg must have leaned over the boy hard enough to crack bone. Why the need to apply so much force? Perhaps his saw had been dulled by age or overuse, and he’d required leverage to cut through bone. Or maybe he had worked in feverish haste and had been careless – either because he risked being spotted or disliked what he was doing.
Had a Nazi ordered a Polish Christian or even a Jew to mutilate Adam?
Anguished by the sweaty confinement of my clothing, I wriggled out of my coat and threw down my hat. Knowing what I had to do next, I gulped down the rest of my vodka.
Peeling the blanket off Adam’s face, I discovered a tiny cut on his bottom lip. A scrape from the barbed wire? With the tip of my finger, I touched it, then gently prised his lips apart. The end of a white string was caught between his teeth. Holding my breath, I pulled at it but it wouldn’t budge.
I couldn’t risk breaking his jaw or scarring his lips. I covered Adam’s face and asked Schmul how long it would take for the boy’s body to become malleable again.
‘Up to three days,’ he replied.
Stefa was more religious than I was and would never wait that long to bury Adam, which created a dilemma. ‘I need for you to get a message to a friend right away,’ I told the undertaker, handing him all the złoty I had left in my pocket, which he refused, saying I’d given him enough. I told him where to find Izzy and what to say to him.
Stefa might appear at any moment, so as Schmul headed off, I turned my attention back to Adam. I could find no bloodstains on his belly, chest, or behind, which was another indication that whoever disfigured him had let the boy’s blood coagulate before starting his work. Yet the murderer or his assistant hadn’t waited very long, for if he had, the capillaries on Adam’s chest wouldn’t have released any blood at all on being pressed and no bruises would have been visible.
Of course, it was possible that Adam had been mutilated right after being killed and had bled profusely but had been carefully washed afterwards. Yet it seemed unlikely that anyone would spend so much time cleaning a Jewish boy soon to be discarded.
A right-handed man – larger than me – who worked as fast as possible because he disliked what he had been made to do or feared being caught.
By now, the vodka was starting to turn my thoughts to mist, so I eased my head back on to the flagstones. And amidst the ceaseless flow of clouds, I saw that Adam’s murder had taken away my terror of death; nothing worse could ever happen to me.
Izzy and Schmul helped me up when they arrived.
‘Any sign of Stefa?’ I asked.
‘None,’ Izzy
replied. ‘You want me to check on her?’
‘No, don’t go. If she hasn’t come down yet, it’s because Ewa managed to convince her to try to get some sleep.’
When I told Izzy what I wanted him to do, he shook his head and held up a hand between us like a shield. ‘I’m sorry, Erik, I can’t – it’s impossible.’
‘Please, look at what they’ve done to Adam. We need to find out what happened.’
After I pulled the blanket off the boy, Izzy reached behind him for the stability of a wall that wasn’t there and nearly tumbled over. We looked at each other across fifty years of friendship; two old men realizing there were no words in any language to describe a loss – and crime – like this.
I held him while he cried. The way he shook pushed me deeply into the past.
He brought me into the present again by standing back from me and wiping his eyes. ‘Erik, I don’t think I can touch him,’ he told me.
‘Please, Izzy, it has to be someone who loved him. I can’t let anyone else do this.’
He lifted his hands to explain himself, then lowered them, hopeless.
‘No one else will be as careful as you,’ I told him. ‘I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone.’
Sitting on the ground, he took a tiny pair of tweezers from the small leather case he’d brought with him, then turned to me. ‘For pity’s sake, Erik, don’t watch me.’
Schmul and I waited in the hallway of Stefa’s building. Izzy soon came to us with a two-inch length of white string pinched in his fingers. It bore no traces of blood.
‘Any idea where it’s from?’ he asked, dropping it into my palm.
‘None.’
‘How do you suppose it ended up in Adam’s mouth?’
‘Maybe whoever killed him put it there to tell us something about himself,’ I theorized. ‘A kind of calling card.’
‘You think a Nazi is challenging us to find him?’
‘Maybe. Though it’s just possible that Adam managed to secretly put the string in his mouth – knowing it could somehow identify who did this. He was a smart boy.’
Schmul had overheard us. ‘But Dr Cohen,’ he said, ‘what about his leg? What does that mean?’
‘That? That means whoever did this is not like you or me,’ I replied, ‘or anyone we’ve ever met.’
Stefa and Ewa came to the courtyard a few minutes later, carrying towels, soap and a bucket of hot water. My niece’s eyes were so red that they might have been bleeding.
‘I’ll go to Pinkiert’s and organize everything,’ I assured her. ‘But first tell me if you were able to find out anything at 1 Leszno Street.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.
‘At the place where Adam may have crossed over. Had anyone seen him?’
‘No.’
I left for Pinkiert’s headquarters, which were next to the Jewish Council building on Grzybowska Street, and scheduled a funeral for the next morning at 11 a.m. At 1 Leszno Street, Abram Piotrowicz invited me into his apartment and repeated to me what he’d told Stefa at dawn: the guard, Grylek Baer, hadn’t seen Adam the day before.
‘Then I’ll need a list of secret border crossings,’ I told Abram.
‘Grylek will help. I’ll have someone bring the list to you this afternoon.’
‘And ask him if he knows who hired Adam to smuggle out an ermine jacket.’
I managed to speak to all of Adam’s neighbourhood friends that afternoon. Wolfi swore that he knew of only the Leszno Street crossing, but Sarah, Felicia and Feivel were able to give me the locations of four other places where my nephew might have snuck out. The little mop-haired boy wrung his hands like an adult when we spoke, and through his tears of misery, he bravely confessed that Adam had twice accompanied him ‘overseas’, which made me realize that my nephew had led a double life. Speaking to me with his stunned mother standing behind him, Feivel explained that they’d wanted to steal food, but their nerve abandoned them at the last minute and all they managed to get were handouts of bread and jam from shopkeepers. I kissed the top of his head to reassure him that I wasn’t angry. Still, the mind can be cruel; I wished that he’d died instead of my nephew.
I showed a photograph of Adam to the guard on Krochmalna Street where he and Feivel had passed through to the Other Side, and though he remembered my nephew, he hadn’t seen him in weeks. At the other crossings, no one recognized the boy. I received only one lead: at the last place I tried, the cellar of a dingy restaurant, a tough-looking teenaged smuggler named Marcel suggested I make enquiries at a warehouse on Ogrodowa Street where a tunnel leading to the sewer system had been dug. ‘The passageway is so cramped that only kids can squeeze through,’ he noted. ‘Try to speak to the owner, Sándor Góra.’
I remembered the time Adam came home stinking and thought I now knew why.
As I neared my destination, four youths standing on the roof of an apartment house on the Christian side of the ghetto wall began calling me names and throwing stones at me. Only a moment after I started to run, I took a blow on my shoulder that brought me down to one knee.
The hooligans shouted – laughing – that I made too easy a target. Luckily, nothing seemed to be broken, and my anger gave me strength. Getting to my feet, I rushed on with my coat shielding my head until a woman coming the other way was hit. Shrieking, she toppled sideways, crashing on the pavement.
‘Die, Jew-bitch!’ one of the louts yelled at her in Polish.
Kneeling, I took out my handkerchief and staunched the blood spilling from a deep gash below her ear. A fist-sized chunk of cement lay beside her. She was dazed from the impact. Getting her breath, moaning, she said, ‘I think my collar bone is broken.’
Polish meteorites continued crashing around us. I held my coat over the woman’s face. ‘Can you stand?’ I asked, wanting to lead her closer to the wall, where we couldn’t be hit.
‘No.’
‘I’ll get you to a doctor,’ I assured her, and to test her mind, I asked her what year it was.
‘I should care about the date with my bones broken by Goyim?’ she shot back.
I grinned at her outrage. So did she, then she groaned and bit her lip from the pain.
A tall young man appeared beside me from out of nowhere. Cradling the woman in his arms, he lumbered off. We found safety in an optometrist’s waiting room.
A half-hour later, after the hoodlums had grown tired of target practice, I got on my way, and I soon reached Góra’s office. He was a paunchy man in too tight a suit, with a polka-dot tie and a pink carnation in his lapel. He made his living these days managing an import-export business, he told me with a big noisy laugh. I thought he looked like a circus barker. He reeked of musky-scented cologne.
After I explained my purpose, I handed him my photograph of Adam. As he studied it, he picked his front teeth with the mandarin fingernail on his little finger. Handing the picture back to me, he said, ‘Sorry, never seen him. But there are other tunnels leading into the sewer system. He must have gone through one of them.’ Anticipating my next question, he added, ‘No, I don’t know where any of them are.’
Back at home, I found a stout, pale-skinned young man standing beside the armchair in my room, a hostile look in his small dark eyes. His hands were locked behind his back, and the smoke from his hidden cigarette was ribboning up into the harsh yellow light of the ceiling lamp, where moths had piled up in the cup of glass below the bulb. His camel-hair overcoat was threadbare and the collar of his white shirt was stained. His thick brown hair was chopped short – it looked like porcupine needles. He was good-looking in a hard, Slavic way.
‘You must be Dr Cohen,’ he began, speaking Polish.
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m Grylek Baer.’ He spoke gruffly, as if I’d offended him.
‘Ah, so you’re the guard at Leszno Street,’ I said, compensating for my apprehension with a welcoming tone, hanging my coat on its hook.
‘That’s right.’
�
��How did you get in?’ I asked.
‘Your niece opened the door. She went to bed a little while ago.’
When we shook hands, he gripped mine hard, as though to prove his greater strength. His fingers were heavily callused. I’d have guessed he was twenty, but the sureness of his stance made me believe he might be a good deal older.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I told him.
Grylek’s jaw throbbed and he took a greedy puff of his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the clay ashtray that Adam had made for me and that I kept on the tea table next to my armchair. He took his time, as though considering what he needed to tell me.
More and more I divided the Jews of Warsaw into two categories – those who’d outlast the Nazis and those who’d join Adam. In my mind, Grylek elbowed and shoved his way right to the front of the first group.
‘Were you able to put together a list of border crossings for me?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but before I give it to you, I have to explain how it works.’ He looked at me as though I’d made trouble for him before. ‘You’ll have to be patient, because there are some things you need to know before I can give you what you want.’
‘What things?’
He took off his coat, folded it neatly and placed it on the chair. His shoulders were broad and powerful, as though he’d been a boxer before our exile, and he seemed a man who enjoyed making others wait. He opened and closed his right fist as though testing his own capacities. He wants to let me know he’s capable of violence, I thought.
‘You’re not to mention my name to anyone,’ he began, his tone of warning obvious. ‘And you are not to tell anyone in the Jewish Council about me. Or let on to anyone, in any way, that I was here. I can’t take chances. And if you ever mention who gave you the list that I’m going to give you, I’ll come back for you. Are we clear?’
‘But surely the Jewish leadership all know about what you do,’ I replied.
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 5
