Wartime Lies

by Louis Begley

  It took what seemed like a long time before they reached our apartment. I listened to their knocking on other doors off the balcony and to muffled conversations. At last, they knocked on the door to our kitchen. From where I was standing I could hear very well. They were checking Tania’s papers, looking around the kitchen. They spoke no Polish; she answered them in brash, broken German, using the familiar du. She told them they had startled her; she was deep in her game of solitaire. The man in civilian clothes said they wanted a woman with a little boy. The woman had long hair, down to the shoulders. They showed Tania a photograph. They knew the woman and child lived in the building; the landlady had reported their presence to the Polish police. Tania said they should have come sooner. There was such a woman in the next apartment, where they had knocked without getting an answer. She and the boy moved in months ago. But they both went out; she had seen them on the balcony.

  There followed some talk among the men I could not make out, and the civilian asked to see Tania’s papers again. This time they looked at them longer, and asked her to come into the light at the door so they could compare her to the photograph they had with them and the photograph in her Kennkarte. The civilian asked whether she had a young boy or anyone else living in the apartment. Tania laughed the long laugh she used when she teased people who weren’t her friends and said they could look through her small apartment if they were curious. In fact, she was too busy with grown men to have little boys around, and except for the three of them, she was alone. But not for long, a friend was coming; a man, not a woman or a little boy, and he didn’t have long hair. If they wished to wait they could see for themselves. The Germans also laughed and said they might indeed come back to surprise her when she was not expecting company. They talked a moment longer, and then I knew they were leaving: the door slammed; there were heavy steps on the balcony and soon on the stairs, going down.

  Tania remained in the kitchen until they could no longer be heard. I had not moved from my place behind the bedroom door; the vial was still in my hand. Then suddenly she rushed into the room and said, Hurry, we are getting out of this house. They will come back to look for the woman in the apartment next door, they will talk to the landlady, and if that slut is at home she will get her chance to turn us in.

  IV

  TANIA and I arrived in Warsaw, with our money and jewelry still safely adhering to our bodies, on the morning of March 30, 1943. While we slept heavily in a railroad compartment crammed with passengers and bundles, fear mixed with fatigue being the strongest of soporifics, RAF bombs for the second time in three days kept awake the population of Berlin. Later that morning, as we looked for the rooming house near the Central Station that Hertz had recommended, Berliners leaving air-raid shelters and resuming their lives in familiar neighborhoods could discern the face of their city-to-be in bomb craters and behind blackened facades of their houses.

  There was a unifying theme in Hertz’s repertoire of addresses. We were received by a landlady who seemed astonished that a mother and a child were seeking a room in her establishment. Having been told that there was no mistake, that this was the very house Tania had been referred to by a faithful client of hers from Lwów, the landlady, a certain Pani Jadwiga, agreed to take us on the condition that we stay no longer than a week: this was a place for transients, there were no cooking privileges, we would share the toilet with the ladies down the corridor; it would be better if Tania kept me in our room so I didn’t get into people’s way. Rent was payable for the week in advance. The room she gave us was somewhat larger than our last bedroom in Lwów, with an ampler bed, two little settees covered with red plush, some red plush straight chairs, and a dirty rug. We left our suitcases there and went to mail a letter to grandfather, asking him to meet us in the main entrance of the Cathedral; we would be there at noon every day, beginning the day after tomorrow, until he was able to come. Tania didn’t know Warsaw. It was the only suitable monument she could think of that would do equally well in good weather and in the rain.

  We were very hungry, and neither of us wanted to bring food to eat in our room. Tania decided we would go to the Central Station buffet for lunch; our disoriented, out-of-town appearance would not make us conspicuous there, but first we had to buy a street map of Warsaw. We studied it over our meal, Tania saying that we had to figure out the city immediately, so that we could get around without asking directions and attracting attention. Then we walked along a route she had memorized to the Saxon Gardens and sat there for a long time on a bench in the feeble afternoon sun. A woman and a little boy spending an hour or more in the park would not seem unusual. We returned to our rooming house the long way, taking Nowy Świat to Aleje Jerożolimskie. By that time, we were so tired that the vision of the plush settees and the bed seemed cozy; we didn’t want to return to the station. There was a butcher nearby and also a bakery. Across the street from the house, we found a mleczarnia, where one could buy milk and cheese. We pushed a settee to the table, ate our bread and sausage, drank some milk, at last detached the money and jewelry packages from our bodies, and got into bed. Tania said she wasn’t going to look at the sheets; she didn’t care what they were like.

  We took the street map of Warsaw to bed with us. Tania decided we had to study it during every free moment, segment by segment, until we knew it by heart, like a poem. We would quiz each other, and we were going to start right away, because one always remembers best the things one learns just before going to sleep. When we finished, Tania said that she knew I was sleepy, but there were so many problems to solve that she had to talk. She couldn’t bear to think about them in silence. Perhaps grandfather would have all the answers, but even so, we had to think through the problems first for ourselves.

  To start with, what were we to do with the jewelry and the gold and all those bank notes? We couldn’t wear them glued to us all the time, it was too uncomfortable; people got stopped for document checks, and we might be searched. Getting caught with that hoard meant giving most of it away if it was the Polish police, or being taken to the Gestapo if we were caught by the Germans. On the other hand, how could we leave anything of value in this house or any other rooming house we might move to? There was also the question of how to sell the gold or jewelry once we had spent our cash. She couldn’t imagine simply walking into a jewelry shop and putting a couple of rings or a bracelet on the counter. She would be cheated. We needed a reliable crook; that was probably the sort of person grandfather would know. And where would we go when our week here was over? Presumably grandfather would know about that as well. Perhaps we could move in with him. We would need, in any case, a story to explain why she was here with me looking for a place to live. We would use Hertz’s idea. For instance: wife of Polish officer, doctor in civilian life, prisoner of war in a Russian camp, rest of the family killed in bombardments in 1939 or perhaps deported to Siberia. But why did we leave Lwów? It must be that her nerves no longer could stand Lwów after so many losses. That part of the story, she felt, would have to be perfected as she told it. She would see how her audience reacted; she might try it on the landlady here. And how about me, why didn’t I go to school? That I wouldn’t go to school was understood between Tania and me; one couldn’t take my penis where it might be seen, for instance to urinate in the common toilet, never mind what vicious games boys might invent. The reason had to be my delicate, congenital heart condition. I would be tutored privately; that might be an additional reason for coming to Warsaw. Teaching privately was forbidden. It may be that people willing to take the risk would be easier to find in Warsaw than in Lwów. We could not carry our questions and answers further. Tania turned out the light. We would sleep.

  Our rest was interrupted by the now-familiar red visitors. These were big-city bedbugs, more active and more ingenious than their cousins in Lwów. Not content with hustling along the sheet and scurrying up and down walls, they dropped on the bed and on us from the ceiling and swarmed over the plush of the settees and chairs. We even
saw them run on the floor, staying close to the wall. The light Tania turned on restored order. Pressed against each other, we fell asleep. On subsequent nights, when we were less tired and more apprehensive about the insect colonies with which we shared our space, we went to bed with the light on and cloth bands tied over our eyes. Tania called it Warsaw blindman’s buff.

  The struggle against bedbugs became a leitmotiv of our days and nights in Warsaw. At Pani Jadwiga’s there was nothing to be done other than to turn the bedbugs’ night into day. Our term there was too short. In subsequent rooming houses, more was at stake, sleepless nights being worse than nightmares, and the combat became more varied. On some nights, of course, too discouraged or overwhelmed by the number and tenacity of the enemy, we lay awake in the lamplight or simply let the bedbugs feed. But in the day, we went on the offensive. Tania sprinkled foul-smelling powders on the mattress, under the mattress, around the walls. We poured boiling water on suspected nests. We exposed the bed, if the space and the location of the window permitted, to the disinfecting rays of the sun. This activity provided, in addition to a temporary material improvement in our comfort, another war game I did not mention to Tania: in this limited sphere, I could be a hunter and an aggressor, like SS units destroying partisans in the forest or, very soon, rebellious Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw. The SS sometimes had to act in secret. So did we. Our landladies resented any mention of bedbugs on their premises; we were in no position to antagonize them. From that point of view, our favorable experience with chemical agents paralleled that of the Reich. They were the easiest means of murder to conceal. Use of boiling water and, at night, manual extermination of fleeing bugs presented considerable risks and difficulties. The former laid us open to the charge of destroying property by spillage of liquids. The latter often left red blood stains on the wallpaper. Stealth and lies were needed to cover our operations with water. We could sometimes, unobserved, rush the pot from the kitchen we shared with the landlady and the other lodgers into our room; at other times Tania claimed she needed to prepare a hot-water bottle. In one room that we rented we worked undisturbed and undetected: we had permission to make tea or coffee on an alcohol stove within the room, and we boiled as much water as we wanted. I was the principal nighttime executioner of escaping bedbugs. Early on, I tired of scraping dried blood off walls and sheets with my fingernails—it was unpleasant and ineffective—yet working with a wet rag often made the stain worse. The technique I eventually perfected protected the walls. I would corner the bug on the wall with a cupped left hand, sweep it to the floor with the right, and trample it to death.

  Tania’s research, confirmed eventually by my grandfather, led her quickly to conclude that for Jews like us on Aryan papers there was no apparent means of renting an apartment of our own in the capital or, for that matter, in Praga, the suburb on the other side of the Vistula. Perhaps apartments were to be had in Warsaw, possibly even at a price we could afford, but to find one it was necessary to have connections with Poles, and such connections were precisely what we wished to avoid. Therefore, the likes of us were relegated to renting rooms in more or less spacious apartments, usually belonging to more or less elderly ladies of reduced means. These ladies did not necessarily live in shabby buildings; indeed, apartments in buildings below a certain level of petit bourgeois pretension would have been too small to lend themselves to the business. In the apartments we got to know well, a room or two, including perhaps the salon, would be reserved for the landlady, and the other rooms, in some prewar era of greater ease probably intended for children, opening on a long corridor, were at present available to lodgers. Each such room would contain a single bed, sometimes narrow, sometimes quite comfortable (two beds would not have left enough space for other furnishings), a table, a few chairs, a wardrobe, a bookcase, a washstand. At the end of the corridor, there would be, in the best of circumstances, a bathroom with a tub with running water and its own gas or oil heater, used by everyone in the apartment. Next to it would be a separate cubicle containing a toilet, also for communal use. At peak hours, in the morning when the lodgers awoke and after dinner when they prepared for the night, unpleasant questions of priority were apt to arise concerning the toilet. Our policy was to avoid unpleasantness; we made sure to have a chamber pot in our room and could yield politely to those whose needs were urgent.

  The landladies of Warsaw’s communal apartments did not feed their lodgers. One bought one’s own food, kept it in the room as best one could, iceboxes not being in general use, cooked it in the kitchen, and ate it at a common dining-room table or in one’s room, depending on the custom of the place and the lodger’s degree of dourness. And who were these lodgers? Dreary, unmarried office employees, widows and widowers whose apartments had been destroyed in some bombardment, and the deceivers: Jews with Aryan papers.

  My existence continued to be a problem not susceptible to a pleasant solution. Children in these establishments were a rarity; they attracted attention and, therefore, danger. Questions of the sort Tania and I had rehearsed were to be answered before they were asked, so that the inquisitive landlady or fellow lodger would never begin the dreaded inquiry that might lead to the truth: Why did that young woman’s family not take her in, rather than let her and her boy lead a solitary, peculiar life in this place? They don’t seem poor, otherwise how could she afford the rent that we who work, or we who have a little pension, pay with difficulty? She doesn’t work. What kind of pension do young people of her sort have? Could they be Jews? Let’s see if we can find out; it’s amusing to set a trap.

  The days and nights that would teach us these new skills were still to be lived. On the third day after our arrival in Warsaw, we finally saw my grandfather. He was waiting for us at the Cathedral. As always, he was bareheaded; he wore a short black leather overcoat I did not recognize. We embraced, he looked me over, lifted me up for a kiss and said I had grown but was still his little man. Tania put her arm through his and drew us all inside. The Cathedral was nearly empty. We sat down in a pew near a side altar, and she told him what had happened. Grandfather did not cry; he seemed to sink into himself. I saw now how he had changed. Where it was not stained by nicotine, his mustache was as white as his hair; there were folds in the skin on his neck; his shirt collar looked worn and also yellowed as though from smoking. The fingers of his right hand were almost brown; he had probably stopped using a cigarette holder. After a long silence, grandfather said that Reinhard had been a fine man. He hoped that he would have had as much presence of mind himself and as much courage; if grandmother realized what was happening, she surely blessed Reinhard in her last thoughts. He was proud of Tania. The trick was for the three of us to stay alive. With America in the war and the English finally bombing Berlin it made sense to try hard.

  He told us that in Mokotów he had a room and the use of the kitchen in an apartment. The landlady was a pleasant old cocotte, he liked her, and in fact the room wasn’t bad. But he did not think we could move in with him. For one thing, he doubted that the landlady would agree to giving up another room. More important, the only other lodgers were a young woman about Tania’s age and her boy, a little younger than I. He was quite sure they were Jews; the woman had a strange look about her, probably she bleached her hair to make it less red, and there was something too tender about her eyes. He was less sure that they understood about him. Having more Jews than absolutely necessary under one roof made no sense, it multiplied the danger, and this Jewish lady could be a real menace; she acted scatterbrained. He might have moved out on account of her if the place were not so satisfactory in all other ways. He would talk to the landlady; she would recommend something. The landladies all knew one another in this business.

  I complained about his not wanting to look for a place where all three of us could live together, but Tania said he was right. She believed that we were safer without him, and he was safer without us. If the three of us were together, we would be drawing attention to ourselves; all the questions abo
ut our situation, why we were living in Warsaw in a rooming house, why we had no other family or friends, would be multiplied and become even harder to answer. The imperative need to avoid attracting attention, even at a cost as great as this, was another leitmotiv of our existence.

  Grandfather told us he had not had any problems with the police and only minor problems with blackmailers; nothing expensive. Usually, it was some low-life youth who followed him for a while in the street, then asked for a light and said, Pan looks familiar to me, could he help with a little cash? These people had a look one could not mistake when they made their approach, like pimps in the old days. For the benefit of the landlady, so that she would understand where he got his money, he pretended he dealt in leather coats, the height of fashion in those days, on the black market; that is why he was wearing such a strange garment. His supposed black-market activity meant he had to be out of the apartment several hours each day. Being obliged to find someplace to drag himself to each day probably had kept him from going insane; he was so lonely. There was a mleczarnia where he went to eat cheese pierogi and sit over tea. He told Tania that she should not worry about being able to sell a piece of jewelry if she needed to. There was an intelligent jeweler who dealt in everything—stolen goods, Jewish diamonds and gold coins included. The man understood values. When grandfather was short of cash, he paid the jeweler a little visit. He told us he kept a couple of rings taped to his body, just in case it turned out he could not return to the apartment; the rest was hidden under a floorboard he had loosened with a knife. He would show Tania how to do it as soon as we had a place to live. As he talked, the mechanics of existence began to seem less impossible to master. Tania and he agreed that we would meet the next day at the same place, only earlier. He hoped to have addresses of rooms we could look at. When we were about to say good-bye, he started to cry very hard, and as though he had been freed from some restraint that had held him frozen, Tania and I wept with him.