The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  She started; she hadn’t expected me to talk about my own life. Drawing her knees into her chest and hugging them, she asked, ‘Is it… is it very bad in there?’

  ‘Yes, it’s bad, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it at the moment.’

  ‘No, maybe there is,’ she declared.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening.’

  I was impressed by her solidarity, but at the time she seemed hopelessly naive.

  ‘Maybe so,’ I told her. ‘But we need to talk about you for the moment. Now, Irene, can you tell me what the murderer looks like in your imagination?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t recognize him, if that’s what you mean. But I sometimes see he has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.’

  A sense of déjà vu made me halt as I reached for my coffee cup. Where had I heard her last words?

  ‘What makes his look so dreadful?’ I asked.

  ‘Something in his eyes – something dark and purposeful,’ she replied, moaning, and she began twisting the hair on top of her head.

  ‘And do you have any idea why he would want to kill you?’

  ‘No, I don’t know!’ she replied in desperation. Taking a deep breath, she tugged out the tangle of hairs she’d twisted around her index finger.

  I grimaced, but she said reassuringly, as if I were the one in pain, ‘It’s all right, Dr Cohen, it doesn’t really hurt. And even if it does, it’s a good kind of pain.’

  ‘Why is it good?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I only know it is.’

  ‘Because you’re the one causing it?’ I asked, hoping I’d come near the truth; I needed to build up her confidence in me if I was going to help her.

  She thought about my theory. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she told me, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  To my subsequent questions, Irene went on to tell me that the killer wasn’t interested in robbing her. She pictured him stabbing her in the heart. She would bleed to death.

  ‘When did you start believing your life was in danger?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Did something unusual happen then?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you get ill? Or did you have a quarrel with your mother or father? Maybe it was something that you-’

  ‘My father is dead to me!’ she interrupted roughly, probably hoping to shock me; perhaps my questions about the timing of her troubles were too threatening, and she wanted to push me away.

  ‘Dead to you, how?’

  ‘He’s never wanted anything to do with me.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I thought you lived here with your-’

  ‘Rolf Lanik is my stepfather,’ she cut in. ‘My father is a radiologist named Werner Koch. He lives in Switzerland, though he visited us here in Poland – once, two months ago.’

  ‘How long has your mother been married to your stepfather?’

  ‘Let’s see, I was six, so that makes… eleven years. He’s a good man. In fact, Rolf is the best thing that ever happened to me.’

  She spoke as though I’d obliged her to defend his honour, which led me to believe he might have been her tormentor, though he might not have been aware of the damage he was doing.

  ‘Why is he so good for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he gets us whatever we need. And I’m in an excellent school for foreigners. He’s kind and generous, and he loves us – me and my mother.’

  ‘And yet he’s made you move to a house that you hate.’

  ‘That’s not his fault, Dr Cohen! Or do you think it is?’ she snapped.

  I was glad that she felt secure enough to reveal her anger. ‘I’m not in a position to say,’ I told her. ‘But tell me, what does your mother think of your new surroundings?’

  ‘Mama? She loves it here,’ the girl replied resentfully. ‘She certainly doesn’t say otherwise.’

  Irene seemed to have concluded that her mother valued their new house – and her husband – more than her daughter.

  Sensing that her father’s sudden appearance two months earlier might have touched off Irene’s current problems, I returned to her mother’s first marriage. The girl told me that it had ended in divorce after six years. She had been four when her parents separated. Her mother had lost everything, and had started a new life in Zurich, where they had relatives. She’d found work as a barmaid in a small hotel.

  ‘Ah, so that explains your Swiss accent,’ I observed.

  Sticking out her tongue and groaning, Irene replied, ‘So you noticed.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t sound too pleased.’

  ‘Should I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I can say is that, in my opinion, your accent is charming.’

  She smiled, hesitantly at first, then broadly, and for the first time she looked relaxed. My compliment changed her; in a voice that raced ahead into her emotions, she went on to tell me that she and her mother had lived for two years in a one-room garret that was infested with bedbugs and had a leaky roof. ‘Mama even lost her reputation,’ she told me, outraged.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Thanks to my dear father,’ she said, sneering.

  To my subsequent questions, Irene told me that he had spread malicious rumours about an affair that her mother had carried on with a Jewish surgeon, which, in their circle, had sentenced her to ridicule. She told me several stories of how her mother had been made to suffer – and how she’d fought back through guile. It was clear that Irene admired her mother and had formed a close identification with her.

  The girl had only seen her father three times since the divorce, the last time in early January when he’d shown up one Friday evening at their home without warning.

  ‘I have reason to believe,’ she told me, using a wily tone that implied she’d done some eavesdropping, ‘that he came here to get money out of my mother.’

  Could he have been blackmailing Mrs Lanik with information about her previous life?

  ‘Did your mother actually tell you that?’

  ‘No, she refused to talk about him with me, but he was looking wasted – as if he was drinking again.’

  ‘Did you have a chance to talk with him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he said hello to me, then spoke to my mother for a few minutes, and then he staggered off.’

  Irene’s replies turned evasive when I asked about her feelings as a child with regard to her father. She clearly wasn’t ready to revisit that part of her past, so I returned to her stepfather. She told me that Rolf Lanik had grown up in Zurich and moved to Hamburg after medical school. He’d fallen in love with her mother eleven years earlier, while vacationing with his parents. Irene had lived in Hamburg with her mother and him before moving to Warsaw. Now, he had an office in the centre of the city and only came home late at night. In a disappointed voice, she added, ‘Once we moved here, he started living a separate life. We hardly ever see him. He works all day, and even in the evenings, too.’

  ‘Tell me a little about him.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘You could start with your first impressions of him.’

  ‘I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He tried too hard. I mean, it was as if he was always kneeling to my level and reaching out to me. But I didn’t want him like that – as a friend. It was so awkward!’ She spoke desperately, as if needing me to confirm that her feelings were justified. ‘I wanted something else. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Rolf never had any children of his own,’ Irene volunteered. ‘I guess he didn’t quite know how to approach me.’

  ‘But he learned?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when did you begin to like him?’

  ‘I think it was when he started reading to me. I’d be in my py
jamas, lying in bed, and he’d take a book down from my shelves and sit with me.’ She smiled gratefully. ‘I loved the sound of his voice, and how he’d look at me expectantly, waiting to see my reaction to the story. I could tell he was really listening.’ Nodding at the rightness of her words, she added, ‘Dr Cohen, when Rolf is with you, you know you have all his attention. Maybe that’s why his patients like him so much.’

  ‘How do you know they like him so much?’

  ‘Because I go to his office sometimes, and I talk with them.’

  ‘So he’s your doctor?’

  ‘He wasn’t when I was little. Though he is now.’ She looked down, as if she’d said something shameful.

  As Irene told me more about her present relationship with her stepfather, I began to suspect that her continued talk of his separate life meant that she might have spotted him with another woman – maybe before or after a medical appointment with him. If so, then she was probably petrified that he would abandon her and her mother – would ‘kill’ their family, in other words. She was likely convinced that history would repeat itself – her stepfather would spread foul rumours about his wife, and she and her mother would become outcasts again. Her father’s sudden appearance may have reinforced that fear. She may have also had good reason to worry that she wouldn’t be believed – and might well be punished – if she informed her mother of her stepfather’s infidelity, since Mrs Lanik undoubtedly shared her daughter’s fears of renewed poverty and ostracism. To Irene, the only way out of her predicament had seemed suicide.

  Of course, my theory could have been wrong, and I was about to probe further into her stepfather’s daily routine when I realized why I’d experienced déjà vu: Irene had repeated what a young patient of Freud’s named Katharina had told him about the face of a man she envisaged whenever she suffered an anxiety attack: He has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.

  If those weren’t the exact words quoted by Freud, they were very close. They were contained in Freud and Brauer’s Studies on Hysteria, a work I’d read several times.

  Katharina had told Freud she’d overseen her uncle making love to the family cook. Could that be why I’d concluded so quickly that Irene might have seen her stepfather with a woman?

  The important question now seemed: was Irene aware that she had quoted a patient of Freud’s?

  ‘Tell me, Irene,’ I asked, ‘have you ever read any works on psychiatry or psychoanalysis?’

  ‘Yes, at my grandfather’s house in Zurich. I think he owns nearly everything Freud ever wrote.’

  Since she showed no sign of having been caught out, I concluded that she’d repeated Katharina’s words unconsciously – had appropriated them because her predicament was so similar. Unsure as to how to proceed, I returned to what might have happened a couple of weeks earlier to start Irene believing that she was under threat.

  ‘Maybe it was a dream I started having,’ she told me. She shifted forward in her seat, as though to commit herself to making deeper revelations, though she put her cushion over her lap again.

  ‘Tell me the dream,’ I requested.

  Gazing into herself, she said, ‘I’m with some children on a meadow. In the green grass are lots of yellow flowers. Each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we’ve already picked, and we start to pick more.’

  ‘How many children are with you?’ I asked.

  ‘At least two, though I think there may be more. It’s hard to tell.’ She looked at me for approval to continue, and I nodded.

  ‘A short man wearing a hat comes up from the town below, and he takes the flowers from us – from me and the children. And then he walks up the hill to a cottage where a friend of his is waiting – a much bigger man who seems almost like a giant.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The man in the hat hands the flowers to his friend, and he receives a loaf of bread in return. And then the man in the hat walks to me and tears off a piece of his bread for me, and I… I look around for the children who’ve been on the meadow with me, so that I can share my bread with them, but they’re gone. And then the dream shifts.’

  ‘Shifts how?’

  ‘I’m standing with the man in the hat on the sidewalk of Krakowskie Przedmieście.’ Irene closed her eyes and reached her hand out as if seeking to touch what she was seeing. ‘In front of me is a curving staircase, and it leads up to the Holy Cross Church. The street is empty. I don’t know where the other kids are, and I’m terrified. And… and that’s when I wake up.’

  Her eyes opened and she looked at me purposefully; she’d undoubtedly read that it was my job to offer an interpretation.

  I looked away, however; I was sure now that Irene had read Freud very closely. The children picking yellow flowers in a meadow had appeared in a dream of his that he’d discussed in a well-known, semi-autobiographical article called ‘Screen Memories’. She was placing her own experiences into the framework of her readings on psychiatry. Whether on purpose or unconsciously, I had no way of knowing, but in either case I suspected that she intended for me to return to Freud’s discussion of Katharina and extrapolate that they faced the same problem. In a sense, she was telling me in coded language, where to look for the origins of her troubles, without directly revealing any of her family’s secrets – and in a way she could be sure I would come to understand.

  ‘Can you see the face of the man in the hat?’ I asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you close your eyes and try to picture him?’

  ‘Of course.’ She did as I asked, but after a few seconds she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Cohen, but I can’t tell you who he might be. I want to, but I can’t.’

  She used the words tell you instead of see or recognize. A slip? Very possibly Irene knew who he was but would risk too much by revealing his identity.

  I was convinced by now that she’d used Freud’s dream because she’d read his interpretation that a girl handing flowers to a man was symbolic of her losing her virginity. I suspected she’d had sex for the first time recently, and possibly with her stepfather. In that case, her guilt – at betraying her mother and threatening to destroy her family’s happiness – had brought on her self-destructive behaviour. She wanted to murder herself, but she’d transposed those violent feelings to an unidentified killer.

  ‘Do you know the children with you in the meadow?’ I asked, thinking they might have been other girls her stepfather had seduced.

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘They’re young – maybe ten or twelve. Like me.’

  ‘So you’re only ten or twelve in the dream?’

  She looked inside herself again. ‘I think so,’ she said hesitantly, ‘but I’m not sure.’

  Was it possible that her stepfather had violated her years earlier and had started again more recently?

  ‘Are the children boys or girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Both, I think. I’m not sure. They’re wearing yellow, so I don’t know.’

  ‘They’re wearing yellow?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘No, I meant that the flowers are yellow. Now I’m confused. You’re confusing me!’

  ‘I’m sorry. Can you identify the bigger man at the cottage who receives the flowers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are he and the man in the hat Poles or Germans? Or maybe from Switzerland?’

  She frowned nastily at me. Was I coming too close to unmasking her tormentor?

  ‘I think they’re Germans,’ she told me, ‘but I don’t know for sure. In any case, I don’t see why it matters.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t. How many times have you had the dream?’

  ‘A few times – I’m not sure.’

  ‘And how do you feel now – remembering it, I mean?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Well, are you glad you told it to me?’

  ‘Am I supposed to be?’ she snapped.

  Her touchy replies made me realize that it would be be
st to stop now – I’d scared her with my probing and she’d tell me little more today. I downed my coffee and looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes past three.

  ‘Irene, for now, I only have one last question.’

  ‘But you’ll come back and see me?’ she asked in a tiptoeing voice. ‘You’re not angry with me?’

  ‘No, I’m not at all angry. And I’ll try to come back. I’ll speak to your mother about that as soon as I leave your room. But listen, Irene, I need you to promise me something or we won’t be able to talk again.’

  ‘What?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘You must not try to take your own life while we’re working together. We must trust each other, and I won’t be able to work with you if I’m worried you might kill yourself if I say the wrong thing.’

  ‘Do you sometimes say the wrong thing?’

  ‘Of course,’ I told her, smiling at her naivety. ‘Everyone does. Though I shall try my best not to.’

  I’d never admitted my failings to a patient so readily before. It seemed a change for the better, and I realized – astonished – that if I survived the ghetto, I’d be a gentler and more effective psychiatrist. Was that reason enough to go on living?

  ‘So do we have an agreement?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, I promise,’ she replied, and she showed me a relieved smile that convinced me she’d been waiting for me to take away her worst option from the beginning.

  I stood up. ‘I’ll need your pills – the ones you took to try to end your life.’

  ‘Mama has them.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘So what’s your last question, Dr Cohen?’

  ‘Imagine that you could tell the man in the hat something, what would it be?’

  She gazed down. ‘I think I’d ask him to give me back my flowers.’

  As I was leaving her room, Irene called to me. ‘Dr Cohen, I’m very sorry about what happened to your nephew. Forgive me for not saying so earlier.’

  Stunned, I stammered a reply, ‘But how… how did you… I mean, who told you what happened to my nephew?’

  ‘Your former patient Jaśmin Makinska,’ Irene replied.