The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  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 p
late. 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.

  I asked her to turn away from me while I dressed. While I was buckling my belt, I said, ‘Bina, for the love of God, find someone else.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking at me with a puzzled face.

  ‘Go earn some points with God where you’re wanted!’ I told her.

  But even my bullying didn’t make her cry. Tightening her lips, she did her ballerina walk to the front door and left. She never looked back, thank God.

  Leaning back against the wall for support, I told myself I had saved her from wasting her time on me, but in truth I’d wanted to slice one more wound into the only enemy I could reach.

  Izzy came over again late that afternoon. I was sitting in bed with my dream diary, scribbling a list of all the cities I would have wanted to visit if I weren’t where I was.

  ‘You’re up!’ he exclaimed, astonished. ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘I’m deciding where I’ll go when I get out of here.’

  Only after that reply popped out of my mouth did I realize it was true. I went over what I’d written. Genoa seemed my best option – a former colleague of mine from Vienna was living there, and I could probably catch a steamer to Izmir. Or England. Hannah and I had spent our honeymoon in London – and two other vacations there – and we’d always loved it.

  ‘A man from the Jewish Council came over last night,’ Izzy told me, sitting down at the foot of my bed. ‘He said his name was Benjamin Schrei.’

  The mattress sagged towards Izzy. I felt I was made of broken and rusted metal, and all those useless pieces inside me were sliding in his direction.

  ‘I told him you were sleeping, but he wants to talk to you,’ Izzy continued, and then he poked around his mouth with his tongue and spat something into his hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘A tooth,’ he replied. ‘They’ve been falling out.’

  ‘Open your mouth,’ I told him.

  I looked in. His gums were bleeding and his breath was putrid, like mouldy bread.

  ‘What the hell is happening in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Scurvy,’ he replied. ‘I managed to buy some oranges, but they haven’t helped yet.’

  ‘Lemons would be better,’ I observed.

  ‘So find me a lemon.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Only when I eat or talk,’ he replied dryly. ‘So what do you think Schrei wants?’

  ‘Who gives a damn!’ I replied, and I realized that that was what Stefa would have said. Was that how I would go on – by imitating the sound of her voice in my head? After I’d drawn one tight circle around Genoa, and another around London, I added gruffly, ‘You shouldn’t have told Bina she could help me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she can’t!’ I declared.

  ‘You know, a little solidarity right now might help,’ he advised me, examining his tooth keenly, as if it were a precious artefact from the Dead Sea.

  ‘But what could Bina possibly do for me? I don’t want anything to eat, and she doesn’t know who murdered Adam or Anna, and…’

  He threw the tooth and hit me on the side of my head. ‘I meant you could show a little solidarity towards her, you nincompoop! The girl is starving to death under that big coat of hers.’

  Izzy made turnip soup while I worked on my list of escape routes. A half-hour later, while we were slurping away, I jotted down the names of the places I’d go if I could live out my fantasies of reaching a tropical paradise – Bangkok, Rangoon, Mandalay…

  I wanted to wake up to warmth every day, and green, luxuriant life creeping through every crack in the sidewalk, overgrowing rooftops, walls and barricades. I wanted to eat red and yellow handfuls of tropical fruit for breakfast and spit the seeds into the moist soil of my garden, and watch them sprout, and go swimming in an ocean where fern-tailed seahorses and puckered moonfish peeked out at me from their hiding places in coral thickets. I wanted to wake up to the finch-like cries of boys and girls playing naked on the beach. I wanted to be where no one had ever heard German.

  CHAPTER 18

  I couldn’t know when I was fifteen or even fifty what would break my heart, could I? I ask that because it often now seems as if I’d always known that Hannah, Adam and Stefa would die before me.

  Imagine black dye running off into every memory. Nothing survives that isn’t grey.

  CHAPTER 19

  Rowy, Mikael, Ziv, the Tarnowskis and other friends came by to check on me over those first days following Stefa’s death, but I remember very little of what they said. The only conversation I remember clearly was Rowy telling me he’d obtained funding to buy new musical scores, as well as cheap fiddles, recorders and other instruments; he’d decided to organize a youth orchestra.

  The Adam who resided inside me now made me listen to his plans clearly.

  With his eyes focused on a brighter future, Rowy also told me that Ziv had generously volunteered to help him search for talented street performers throughout the ghetto on his day off.

  Curiously, Ewa and Helena never visited me.

  I tossed words back and forth with all my guests, but most of the time I was thinking of how I’d have preferred to be alone. And how I wished I’d taken Stefa and Adam to be photographed. So many lost opportunities rattled in my head after my niece’s miracle, but I didn’t want to ever free myself from them.

  Do I need to tell you why, Heniek? Maybe it’s not a bad thing to risk being too clear on occasion: they were proof of all my niece had meant to me.

  Sunday was the funeral. I refused to go. I smoked my pipe and watched the rain pelting my window.

  Izzy came over afterwards. He collapsed on my bed, face down, the crook of his arm over his eyes. He was sopping wet. He smelled like mud.

  I dropped down next to him and held his shoulder. ‘I’ve decided to help Bina,’ I told him; I wanted to please him.

  But he wouldn’t look at me.

  I took off his shoes and socks, dried his face and arms, and got him under the covers.

  While he slept, I retrieved my dream diary, turned to my list of the dead and added Stefa’s name, shivering with relief. I’d almost forgotten to do that. It scared me how we could forget our most important duties.

  That night, I woke with a start and lit my carbide lamp, unsure now whether I’d really added her name. Staring at Stefa Liska, I wondered about the power of our names to alter our destiny, until the letters lifted off the paper. Soon, all the names of the dead – my dead – were floating in the pearly blue light, like butterflies kept aloft by a wind made of my own thoughts. The effect was pretty, but I knew it was only an optical trick; and yet the longer I kept my eyes on them, the more Stefa’s and Adam’s names seemed wrong – misspelled or mistakenly given to them. So I started rearranging their sequence of letters, which was when it occurred to me that this must have been why I’d made the list in the first place: to find the new names we ought to have given ourselves to protect us from the Germans and all the evils they’d brought with them.

  I spent most of the next five days in bed. I slept in and out of twisted half-dreams, and their incompleteness gave me the troubling impression that Adam had wanted to tell me more about his thoughts and feelings – things only I would have understood.

  I told all my visitors I felt abandoned and fragile, which had the advantage of being both true and what they wanted to hear, since it gave them the chance to offer me sympathetic looks and words of comfort. They also wanted to be reassured that I’d never give up so that they could believe in the quiet heroism of men and women – and more particularly, of the Jews.

  I don’t mean to sound cynical about my friends;
they were caring people, and they were under no obligation to give up their hopes for a happy ending.

  To myself, however, I made the promise that I’d take Stefa’s way out after finding Adam’s killer.

  That week, couriers delivered three letters smuggled in from the Other Side – from Christian friends to whom Stefa had written about Adam’s murder. Among them was one from Jaśmin, my former patient. At the end of her long and moving letter, she told me she was talking about the wretchedness of the ghetto to whoever would listen – even foreign journalists – and that I mustn’t give up hope of getting out.

  She worked only a few blocks away but it was clear by now that we inhabited two separate countries, and that mine would one day disappear from the face of the earth, leaving nothing but a crater of memories for those few who managed to survive.

  Sunrise would wake me every morning as if I’d been thrust from a moving train. Sitting up, watching the roaches making zigzag journeys across the cracks in the walls, I’d put myself in the killer’s place. He’d obviously wanted a piece of the lives he’d destroyed – as trophies, perhaps. But why a hand and a leg?

  And the string – had Adam put it in his mouth or had the killer?

  Izzy brought me bread every morning before work, and made me breakfast. Once, standing by the window, he spoke in a hesitant voice of how desperate he was for a chance to apologize to his wife for creating problems in their marriage. Rising to the challenge of his honesty, I confessed all I’d done wrong as a father – a last chance to make amends, I suppose. And a last chance for both of us to reveal secrets we’d kept deep down in our pockets for decades.

  Izzy was convinced that he’d made a wrong turn early in his life, when he came back to Warsaw from France. ‘I never found my way back to myself after that,’ he told me.

  Opening an envelope he’d brought with him, he took out four sepia-toned photographs of young men posing in front of a ship’s railing. ‘My lovers during the six years I worked on the Bourdonnais,’ he explained, handing them to me.