street, since Nazi guards had already shot several children suspected of being black-market couriers, but we now lived on an island of urban caverns and mazes awaiting his exploration, and she had little hope of him sticking to his promise. In truth, he and his friends wandered all over the ghetto.
On stormy afternoons, when he was forbidden to leave the apartment, Adam would sit cross-legged on our bed drawing pictures of animals or practicing his loopy penmanship. Owing to the influence of his Uncle Izzy and his musical mother, he’d often sing to himself, as well. Stefa had begun giving Adam music lessons when he was four or five and had first picked out melodies on her yellowing Bluthner keyboard, which meant that he now had a song catalogue in his head that extended from Zionist anthems like the ‘Hatikvah’ all the way across the Atlantic to Irving Berlin, though his pronunciation of English was nearly unrecognizable and often unintentionally comic.
On those occasions when I demanded absolute quiet, he’d sit dutifully on our bed and do his beloved mathematics calculations, seeking silent comfort in his own love of precision and detail. I can see now that he tried to tiptoe through those first weeks with me. Maybe he had faith that I would eventually hear what he couldn’t say.
On Saturday, 12 October, the inevitable came, and the Nazis ordered all Warsaw Jews inside the ghetto. The caravan of despair along Franciszka ska Street started at dawn. In the late afternoon, while I was watching from the window in Stefa’s room, a Gestapo officer ordered a group of bearded Orthodox grandfathers to remove their prayer shawls and clothes, and do squat thrusts on the street.
‘Bastards!’ my niece mumbled to herself, but just a few minutes later she assured me we were better off this way.
‘You must be joking!’ I told her.
‘Not at all!’ she declared. ‘Now we know we can depend on no one but ourselves.’
Heroic words they were, but I could see nothing positive in the panting desperation of those naked old men, much less in my humiliation for not running out to defend them.
Our spirits began to flag badly, so to cheer us up, Stefa invited some new friends of hers over for Sabbath dinner on 25 October: Ewa Gradman, a shy young widow who worked at the bakery in our courtyard; Ewa’s seven- year-old daughter, Helena, a watchful little girl whose diabetes had left her with the gaunt cheeks and light-filled eyes of a saint in a Russian icon; and Ziv Levi, a saturnine, pimply seventeen-year-old orphan from Lodz? whom Ewa and Stefa had adopted as their pet project. He had just begun an apprenticeship at the bakery and had moved his cot into one of the storerooms.
Ewa baked a sweet-smelling kugelhopf for our party, and Ziv brought along four fresh eggs and a single red rose. The young man presented his gifts to Stefa with such chivalrous formality that Adam started to giggle and I had to chase him out of the room.
As always, our building manager Professor Engal, rapped three times on our door at sundown to indicate the start of the Sabbath.
After our banquet of carp and kasha, Stefa dug a straw hat out of her wardrobe, tilted it at a jaunty angle on her son’s head, and whispered in his ear. He grimaced and squeezed out a hesitant
Cowed by his mother’s insistent glare, Adam began to sing. Unfortunately, he was too nervous to find his true voice, which was unstudied but beautiful.
The boy loved music but was terrified of performing; he only felt comfortable revealing his inner life – and his gifts – to those he loved. Stefa sometimes forgot that he wasn’t a secret cabaret star like her.
I saw in my nephew’s eyes that he was barely treading water, so, after the first verse, I jumped up and shushed him with whirling hands. ‘
Stefa, furious, looked back and forth between her wristwatch and me. Faking a laugh, she said, ‘But you can’t be serious – it’s only nine!’
‘The boy needs his sleep,’ I told her. ‘And in point of fact, so do I.’
Adam looked at me with a face compressed by fear, his straw hat in his hands.
Stefa jumped up, glaring. ‘If you don’t mind, Uncle Erik, I’ll make the rules in my own home! Especially when it comes to my son.’
‘Very well, make all the rules you want – but without me!’ I snapped back, and I took a first step towards the coat rack, intending to walk off my anger, but Adam burst into tears and bolted into his mother’s room.
I rushed to him, but when I caressed his cheek he turned away from me. I assured him that I didn’t want an angel for a nephew. ‘Especially since I’m an atheist, and I have no intention of going to heaven,’ I joked.
Pity an old man with little experience of children; my attempt at levity only made him cry harder. While I was apologizing to him, Stefa appeared in the doorway, her hands on her hips. ‘Now you’ve done it!’ she began. ‘As if the boy didn’t have-’
‘He shouldn’t have to sing for me or anyone else!’ I cut in. ‘You know he doesn’t like it.’ Hoping to ease the tension between us with a little humour, I added, ‘Besides, I think we can do without him singing
‘All you do is bully him!’ Stefa yelled vengefully. ‘You scare him half to death!’
She was right, of course. ‘All that ends now,’ I told her, and I surprised myself by adding, ‘I’m through punishing him.’
Tears welled in my niece’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been difficult,
She nodded her acceptance of my apology, unable to speak. I took Adam in my arms and kissed his brow. Stefa eased the door closed on the way out.
Adam and I talked together in whispers, since it made our friendship more intimate. I dried his eyes and spoke to him of the journeys I’d take him on when we got out of the ghetto. New York was the city that crowned his dreams, and he stood on his toes when we talked of riding up to the top of the Empire State Building, showing me how he’d look out across the widest horizon in the world.
Lying with my arm around Adam that night, I saw that my father had been haunting my mind to remind me I was failing his great-grandson. And myself, of course.
CHAPTER 2
I’d come to the ghetto planning to read all of Freud one more time, and eager to write up several case studies, but within two months I’d given all that up. It was strangely easy. As if all I had to do was hop on a tram headed into the countryside instead of the city centre.
One minute, a man can think of nothing but leaving behind seminal works that will be read in London and Vienna for decades, the next he is waiting outside a soot-covered grammar school for his nephew, examining a ripped seam on one of his two pairs of trousers and wondering if he still knows how to use a needle and thread.
Now that Adam and I were friends again, he’d tell me about his day as we walked home from school. He’d start in a cautious monotone, testing my interest, but each of my questions would encourage him to pick up his rhythm, so that his account would soon be zooming downhill at top speed. Sometimes he’d launch himself across a bridge of thought where I didn’t know how to follow. His words would whizz past me like honeybees.
To have a buzzing little nephew telling me stories that I didn’t have to understand or interpret was to be in a state of grace.
Adam and I soon got into the habit of visiting Izzy after school and having lunch with him. My old friend had had
