The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Unfortunately,’ I replied, furious; Schrei had known that Adam’s death had not been an isolated killing and had lied to me. How many more children’s bodies had been defiled? I gulped down the last of my coffee, savouring the burn of the schnapps I’d poured in. While I filled the bowl of my pipe, considering how best to confront Schrei, Dorota gave me a hard look.

‘I’m listening,’ I told her.

Leaning over the table, she circled her arms together, as though around a stash of secrets she’d accumulated since her daughter’s death. ‘Anna didn’t return home on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth of January,’ she began. ‘It was a Friday, and she was supposed to help me prepare our Sabbath dinner. She was found by the Jewish police the next morning.’

‘Excuse me for asking this, but was your daughter naked when she was found?’

‘Yes.’

‘And was there anything special about her hand that was taken?’

She looked at me as if I was insane. ‘It was a girl’s hand,’ she told me resentfully. ‘I’d say that was special, wouldn’t you?’

I lit my pipe, eager for the comfort of an old vice. ‘Were there any wounds on her body?’ I asked from inside the swirl of smoke around me.

‘None.’

‘Was anything in her mouth?’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.

‘I found a piece of string in Adam’s mouth. I think the murderer put it there.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t look. But why in God’s name would the murderer put string in the mouth of the children he kills?’

‘I don’t know.’

It occurred to me then that Adam might have been returning to the ghetto with valuable goods. Wanting to know whether robbery could have been a motive for Anna’s murder – and the theft of her hand – I asked, ‘Did your daughter wear a ring – maybe one she’d worn since she was tiny and could no longer remove from her finger?’

‘No. She had a pretty garnet ring, but she stopped wearing it in the ghetto because she’d lost so much weight that it would slide right off her finger.’

‘How about a bracelet?’

Dorota shook her head. ‘She only ever wore pearl earrings. They were a gift from me – pink pearls dangling from a silver chain. But she didn’t have them on when she was found. They must have been stolen from her. Though they weren’t worth very much – I mean, if you’re thinking that a thief may have killed her. The only thing that anyone might have found valuable was her hand itself.’

‘What do you mean?’

She leaned towards me, her head low to the table, and whispered conspiratorially, ‘The killer may be using parts of our children’s bodies to make something inhuman.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A golem,’ she mouthed, her eyes fearful, as if saying the word aloud might summon one from its hiding place.

‘But why?’

‘To protect us!’ she declared.

I felt cornered by Dorota’s beliefs. ‘My God, woman, your daughter has been murdered! And a real person killed her. Don’t you want to find out who it was?’

‘All right, Dr Cohen,’ she replied with controlled anger, ‘maybe you don’t believe that making such a creature is possible, but what if there’s a lunatic out there who thinks he can?’

She showed me a challenging look, and I had to admit that madness might explain what had been done to Adam. Except that there was a problem with her argument. ‘If a Jew killed my nephew,’ I told her, ‘then how could he have tossed the boy’s body into the barbed wire from the Christian side of the border?’

She tapped her chest. ‘I only know what I sense in here. And I know that there’s more to these murders than we think.’

Eager to steer our conversation towards rational ground, I returned to the details of Anna’s disappearance. ‘Do you know if your daughter had snuck out of the ghetto before being murdered?’ I asked.

Dorota leaned back in her chair. ‘Yes, I’m fairly certain she went to see her boyfriend.’

‘He doesn’t live inside?’

‘No, he’s a Pole.’ Sneering, she added, ‘An Aryan.’

If Anna hadn’t fallen in love with the wrong young man and refused to give him up, she’d still be alive. Although Dorota never spoke those words over the next half-hour, her resentment turned nearly all she said to accusations against her daughter. As we talked, it seemed to me that she would polish her grudge for years.

‘And what makes you feel certain she went to see her boyfriend?’ I asked.

Breathing deeply, as if she were entering dangerous territory, Dorota replied, ‘Let me explain about my daughter.’ She took off her headscarf and held it in her lap. ‘Anna turned fifteen in June, and at her birthday party I looked at her and I realized my little girl was gone. But make no mistake, over the next few weeks, she proved she was still just a wilful child. Belligerent and selfish – that’s how my husband always described her.’ Dorota patted her thinning hair, as though putting her thoughts into place. ‘And he was right – though you must think I’m heartless for saying so.’

‘Not at all,’ I told her, beginning to suspect her husband of ruining his daughter’s life. ‘Children can be difficult in desperate situations. They need our reassurance.’

‘People who only met her once or twice – they didn’t understand what she was like,’ Dorota continued in a frustrated voice. ‘Life was never easy with her – never! I can assure you of that. No punishment could make her do what she didn’t want to. And she believed she was in love with a Polish boy. She couldn’t live without him.’ Dorota shook her head, clearly regarding her daughter’s affection as absurd.

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘Pawel Sawicki. Dr Cohen, how could my husband and I approve? The daughter of a Jewish tailor and the son of a Polish judge? I saw heartbreak ahead. Was I wrong?’

‘I no longer know how to answer that,’ I told her, holding back my criticism; by now, I realized that Dorota had chosen a photograph that would give me an idea of how difficult her daughter could be – and possibly, too, to help convince me that the measures she and her husband had taken to break the girl’s will were necessary.

‘When you told Anna you disapproved of Pawel, what did she say?’ I asked.

‘She shouted that I was a mean-spirited witch.’ In a resentful voice, she added, ‘My daughter used to call me Fraulein Rottenmeier.’

‘Who?’

‘The hideous housekeeper from Heidi. That was Anna’s favourite book.’ Dorota sighed. ‘If only… if only I could talk to her just once more – make her understand.’ The impossibility of that made Dorota gaze inside herself. ‘Anyway, she refused to give up Pawel, so we quarrelled, and when my husband joined in…’ She shook her head at the troubling memory. ‘He threatened to use his belt on her. Which was when Anna promised she’d never see her boyfriend again. And maybe that really was her intention. I can’t say. But if it was, then she changed her mind because she started leading a double life.’

‘In what way?’ I asked, concluding that if Anna had given in without a longer quarrel then it was probably because she’d felt the stiff leather sting of her father’s belt before.

‘You know the sort of thing girls do,’ Dorota replied. ‘She’d tell me she was going roller-skating with a girlfriend, then meet Pawel at a cinema. After we moved to the ghetto, I searched her dresser and found photographs of the two of them at a picnic in Saski Gardens.’ She produced another picture from the pages of Marie Antoinette and slid it across the table to me as though pushing an evil talisman out of her life.

Anna was laughing freely in the photograph. Pawel was embracing her from behind, though only his hands were visible – his face and arms had been cut away. Given how Anna and Adam had been disfigured, it seemed dangerous for Dorota to have cut away pieces of the young man’s image.

My uneasiness on holding the photograph seemed a bad sign for my own mental state; it was as if the ghetto