The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Uncle Erik,’ she pleaded, ‘you have to hold on to Adam’s record book for me.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Just do what I say for once!’

‘All right, I’ll keep it safe. But you’re going to be fine. You just need to stay warm.’

‘Hide it!’ she said in a hushed whisper, as if the Germans would need to know Adam’s height to win the war.

‘I’ll put it under the mattress in my room,’ I told her, but once I was out of sight I slipped it into my coat pocket instead.

I sat with Stefa for a time, smearing schmaltz on her chapped lips and combing the tangles out of her hair. She declined my offer of borscht.

‘Listen, Ewa has been helping me write cards to our friends outside the ghetto,’ she told me. ‘We’re going to have a courier post them on the Other Side.’

‘Why are you sending notes?’

‘Our friends need to know about… about things with us,’ she replied, unwilling to speak Adam’s name. ‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’

I thought about that. ‘No, thanks. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

I told my niece I had to go out for a while but would ask Ewa to check on her from time to time. Down in the bakery, the young woman promised me she’d do just that.

I was too exhausted to walk anywhere, so I splurged on a rickshaw. My driver was a former chemical engineer named Jozef. He wore a red velvet vest under a high-collared russet coat. ‘My daughter made them for my birthday,’ he told me.

When I replied that she was a genius with a needle and thread, he turned away from me as if I’d offended him, but I didn’t ask why; everyone in the ghetto kept a misery on his shoulder that could easily justify odd behaviour.

Though Jozef pedalled hard, the younger competition passed us. I spent the journey across town looking through Adam’s record book. Near the end, I discovered lists that Stefa had made of the advantages and disadvantages in the personalities of her friends. I’d never known that she’d been a list-maker, but it didn’t surprise me.

I remember Izzy’s inventory better than all the others because it showed off my niece’s wit.

Advantages: Perfectly manicured hands, delights in his own humour, can fix anything, speaks French, walks as slowly as I do, eyebrows like furry caterpillars, has not an evil bone in his body, hardly ever raises his voice, is easily overcome by my anger, keeps Adam entertained and Uncle Erik out of my hair, has sad eyes (like the surface of a warm lake!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, and is loyal, loyal, loyal.

Disadvantages: Delights in his own humour, is unable to tell when I don’t want to be teased, sulks when he’s yelled at, can hold grudges (despite his denials), walks as slowly as I do, has the table manners of a beagle, will never understand evil people (he excuses my sniping as harmless eccentricity, poor man!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, is too loyal, and encourages Adam to leave his shoelaces untied, lick his plate, play with stray dogs, etc.

Unspoken motto: Once you’re on board, you’re along for the whole ride. Food would most like to have in the ghetto: lox.

Favourite movie star: Jimmy Cagney (his imitation isn’t all that bad, but Cagney in Yiddish sounds a bit meshugene).

Mystery: Was Roza pregnant when he married her?

Wish for him: May he find a man who appreciates his goodness.

Immediate prospects: Loneliness (given Roza’s health and the state of the world with regard to his sexual proclivities).

I looked for the list of my own pros and cons, but several pages had been torn out and she must have destroyed it. Most of all, I wanted to know what her wish for me had been.

It didn’t occur to me till much later that Stefa left Izzy’s page for me to see for a reason: so that I wouldn’t take him for granted, which was always what she’d accused me of – and rightly, at times.

She hadn’t destroyed her lists for Ewa, Helena, Ziv and Adam. I read all of them but my nephew’s. I had to close it as soon as I read his first advantage: loves everyone around him, even me.

Jozef dropped me near the Chlodna Street crossing to the Little Ghetto; I’d walk from there. As I got out of the rickshaw, he wiped his brow and apologized for being passed by other drivers.

‘We got here in one piece,’ I told him, handing him his payment, ‘which is all that counts at the moment. Besides, my nephew always complained that I moved as slow as a…’

I was about to say tortoise, but Adam – the misery always sitting on my shoulder – held his hand up for me to say no more about our life together. Jozef showed me a puzzled look. ‘Some things are best left unspoken,’ I said. I shook his hand and walked off.

Two body collectors cut in front of me almost immediately. They were hauling a dead man wearing only a tattered undershirt. His hair was thick and black, but he had the sunken eyes and cavedin chest of a battered grandfather. His arms were bamboo reeds ending in dirty claws.

Whiskers dusted his chin but his cheeks were hairless – could starvation take away a man’s beard?

The ghetto funeral stretchers were slatted ladders with wheels on one end, but this one also had knotted white tassels – tzitzit – at its corners. That made me curious, and I eavesdropped on the collectors’ conversation. They were talking about a reading a fortune-teller had given one of them.

‘She told me I was going to take a long trip soon,’ the shorter of the two said.

‘Somewhere warm?’ his partner asked hopefully. He wore black spectacles held together by tape; they kept slipping to the end of his nose.

Leaving their cart on the sidewalk, they gazed around, exchanged a few words I didn’t catch, then shuffled over to a wooden stall set up in front of a clothing shop. Inside was a walnut-faced ironmonger sitting on a three-legged stool, surrounded by piles of door handles, keys and rusted junk. On the walls he’d hung hand-sized wire animals – dogs, cats and swans. A naked woman was slumped at his feet, her face angled down and chin pressed against her chest, but he didn’t seem to see her; he concentrated on the wire he was twisting into the shape of a poodle standing on its hind legs.

The woman’s hands – with red, swollen knuckles – were joined together as if she were still holding a beggar’s cup. The spectacled collector spoke to the ironmonger in a whisper. Then, leaning down, he shook the woman, and her head – gaunt and waxy – flopped to the side. He grabbed her ankles. His partner took her arms.

‘Eins, zwei, drei,’ they said in unison.

They lifted her up. Her hips jutted out from around her sunken triangle of sex like shovels.

The ironmonger never looked up to watch her go, but his hands stopped twisting his wire for a few seconds and he closed his eyes.

People go on with their lives the only way they know how. Hannah once told me that and I thought she was being glib, but living in the ghetto convinced me she was right.

As they carried the woman to their cart, the body collectors folded her together, then pulled her apart. Carelessness or a morbid comedy routine?

When they passed, her grey eyes stared at me. I imagined that she wanted to tell me about her life.

If you could say only one thing to me what would it be? I asked her in my mind.

‘I died of thirst for so many things,’ came her reply. Her voice was shadowed by bitterness and regret.

The dead want us to know what killed them, I reasoned – though maybe I only came to that conclusion because it meant that Adam would want me to learn the identity of his murderer.

‘No, she said it would be cold where I was going,’ the short collector told his partner, resuming their previous conversation.

‘She must have meant you’d be heading off to Mogila Street!’ his partner replied with a quick laugh, since Mogila meant tomb in Polish.

They dumped the woman atop the dead man they’d previously collected. The bones of her back – jutting fins –