dozen smugglers, but no one recognized him.
At the funeral that morning, dread paralysed me, pounding so loudly in my ears that I barely heard the rabbi’s condolences. The ground was stone-frozen, too hellishly hard to make a ditch, though two gravediggers had used their picks to chip away an inch down as a symbolic gesture. Seventeen homemade coffins made of bare planks of wood – the smallest being Adam’s – were stacked around our quiet group, waiting for the spring thaw to be lowered into the earth. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon were six bodies wrapped in rough cloth; their families couldn’t afford coffins.
Ewa, Rowy, Ziv and several other friends stayed close to Stefa during the ceremony. She had the frantic eyes of a lost child, but I didn’t go to her.
Withholding oneself as a way of feeling the pain even deeper.
When Stefa finally looked at me, I saw that she wanted to keep some distance between us as well. Perhaps she was thinking – like me – that it would be impossible to ever forgive me for failing to protect Adam.
Stefa insisted on standing between the pale winter sun and the gravesite. I didn’t understand why until I noticed how her shadow stretched into the soil that would receive Adam this spring. Maybe she imagined that her dark embrace would accompany him into his resting place.
A belief in magic can offer solace, even if we know it is a lie.
At a discreet distance behind Stefa and her closest friends stood a middle-aged woman in a brown headscarf, with a searching, foxlike face. She carried a book, which I found curious. When she noticed my gaze, she turned away quickly.
Adam’s friend Sarah shuffled up to me leading her parents. A merciless wind from Russia was buffeting our little group, and the girl’s hair was swirling in her eyes. I put down the bag I’d brought with me and lifted her up. As I smoothed her hair back, she let her head fall against my chest, then shivered. I kissed her once and thanked her for coming, then handed her back to her father.
Feivel’s mother soon came to me and told me – ashamed – that her son didn’t understand that Adam was dead. ‘He refused to come to the funeral. God forgive me, I couldn’t even get him dressed.’
I kissed her cheek. ‘He’s better off at home.’
She handed me a sketch that her son had done of Adam and Gloria a few weeks earlier. Drawn with scratches of wild colour, the budgie was riding on my nephew’s head. She was nearly as big as Adam.
Wolfi and his father then joined us, and the boy was crying silently. When I embraced him, his emotions loosened my own and I had to let him go. Izzy had guarded my back ever since our schoolyard snowball fights, and he hooked arms with me and took Feivel’s drawing. Turning me round, he had me face away from the grave, which must have seemed scandalous to some, but for me it was a godsend.
Distance was my raft that day.
Izzy whispered prayers to himself in Hebrew, and after a time I hung on to the sound of his voice. Still, I was angry with him, because he’d seen my pain and helped me, and I didn’t want to share my despair or diminish it.
A psychiatrist who can’t cope, and who knows it. I’d fallen off a cliff, and the cliff was everything that Adam and I would never now do together.
After the rabbi delivered his sermon, two Pinkiert’s men carried Adam’s coffin to where gravediggers had fought hard to chip down into the soil. When my turn came to shovel earth atop the casket, I took my nephew’s Indian headdress out of the bag I’d brought with me. On seeing it, I moaned; I’d forgotten about the feather I’d knocked off.
I held it up to Izzy. ‘I should have fixed it. I wanted to put it on his casket.’
He kissed my cheek. ‘Go ahead, Erik. What’s perfect has no place in the ghetto.’
At the funeral of a child, the ground opens underneath you, and you tumble down, and you put up no resistance as the darkness throws its welcoming arms around you, because you cannot imagine sending a young boy or girl alone and naked into the underworld. If you have someone to live for – another son or daughter, a wife or husband – maybe you climb back out of the grave. Or maybe not. After all, people give up all the time.
I used to say they were irresponsible, but I’d been an arrogant fool.
I climbed out of Adam’s grave. Stefa didn’t. In a way, our destinies were as simple as that.
‘I’ll be right back,’ I told her, getting to my feet.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked worriedly.
‘To get a doctor. This has gone on long enough.’
A mother and her teenaged daughter were seated behind a pushcart outside our apartment, selling pickled cucumbers and carrots. The girl wore a Basque beret and a man’s coat, which made me understand we were raising a generation of Jewish children living under the weight of their dead parents. I offered her three zloty to carry a note to Mikael Tengmann. Jumping up, she slipped out of her coat, kissed her mother’s cheek and ran off.
The girl knocked on my door a half-hour later, sweat beaded on her forehead, her beret in her hands. ‘Dr Tengmann says he’ll be here at six sharp,’ she told me.
I gave her a one-zloty tip. Thanking me, she took a pale blue calling card from her pocket and handed it to me. Her name – Bina Minchenberg – was scripted in elegant calligraphy imitating the lion’s-paw shapes of Hebrew letters.
‘Who’s the artist?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid it’s me,’ she replied, making an embarrassed face.
‘You’ve got talent.’
‘I’m also a very good cook,’ she told me, ‘and if you’ll pay me to prepare a meal for you on occasion, I’ll clean your apartment for no extra charge.’
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Fourteen.’
Her big brown eyes were full of hope, but she quickly realized I was going to turn her down and reached for my hand. ‘Dr Cohen, I know what men need – even good men like you.’ She pressed my palm to her breast and, when I tried to jerk it away, gripped it with both hands. ‘I’ll do whatever you want. And I won’t tell anyone. I swear!’
‘Oh, God,’ I groaned, and my shuddering made her finally release me.
‘Our savings have run out, Dr Cohen,’ Bina told me, tears caught in her lashes.
I wanted to shake some sense into her, or simply walk away, but what right had I to judge her? ‘Listen closely, Bina,’ I told her. ‘You’re a brave girl. And you should do whatever you need to do to stay alive. But I’m not who I was. I don’t know if I can-’
‘All I’m asking is a chance!’ she interrupted desperately.
‘Very well, I’ll send for you whenever I need a message delivered or a meal cooked.’
I thought I was lying, but how could I be sure any more of my own intentions? Or the consequences of even my most seemingly harmless actions?
We stared at each other for a long time, and because of what I now knew was possible between us, our solidarity terrified me. I don’t know what she saw, but I saw a girl crawling through the trenches of a long slow war, and whom I was powerless to protect – and whom I resented because of that.
I handed her ten zloty, which made her rise up on her toes and give me a popping kiss on the cheek – transformed into a young girl again.
‘Now go,’ I told her. ‘Your mother must be worried.’
As soon as Bina left, I headed to the bakery in our courtyard. Coming in from the arctic chill, the heat seemed
