I hope she imagined she was about to see Adam again, but maybe it would have been best if she was thinking nothing at all.

Ziv told me later that she didn’t seem to hear him or even notice he was there.

‘As soon as she hit the ground, she was dead.’ That’s what Professor Engal told me when I returned to the courtyard, which was what he had heard from Ziv. Maybe they wanted to spare me more anguish. Still, thirty feet is a long way for someone to fall, and maybe he was right.

Ziv rushed to her but couldn’t find a pulse. He dashed into the bakery for help. Ewa and several others tried to revive my niece, but it was too late.

Stefa’s slippers had fallen off. Ziv retrieved them while waiting for the Jewish police to come, then sat down in the corner of the courtyard, his head in his hands. He didn’t move from there all afternoon and slept there that night. I brought him a blanket, and he let me cover him with it, but he refused to speak to me or come inside.

I’d learned by then that going on strike against the world’s injustice was a common ghetto strategy. Not that it ever changed anything.

I’d never previously considered that he’d been in love with Stefa. After all, she was seventeen years his senior. Still, if I’d have been paying attention, I’d have understood that the rose blossom and fresh eggs he gave her on the evening of our first Sabbath banquet represented his opening gambit in what was probably a ten-move strategy. And maybe age differences are unimportant to those who live with queens and rooks dancing through their dreams.

My niece’s corpse waited all night for the body collectors. They only came at ten the next morning, explaining that disease and starvation were taking a hundred residents a day and they couldn’t cope. By then, I’d dragged her into the hallway of our building; it had started drizzling. I’d wanted to hire some boys from the street to carry Stefa up to her apartment, but Professor Engal told me that the collectors would resent having to walk up the stairs – and might even refuse.

Stefa’s miracle…

At 3 a.m. on the morning after her death, standing at the window in my room, I looked down at her in the courtyard, and I noticed Ziv jump up and chase after a vague, darting shape. Fearing it was a feral cat or worse, I threw on my coat, hurried downstairs and sat with my niece. Ziv was back tucked into his corner by then, but now he was whimpering to himself. A little later, I looked up to the window of my bedroom, and in the hazy moonlight it seemed the entranceway to a fairytale world, out of which magic had spilled into this place only a little while before. My wonder at how Stefa had found the strength to open her window, climb out on to the sill and jump now seemed to contain everything I’d ever failed to grasp throughout my life – even how men and women could believe in God. And that’s when I realized that miracles do indeed occur, though – unfortunately – they aren’t always the glorious affirmations of transcendence that we have all been led to believe.

PART II

CHAPTER 17

I’ll have to be more wary on my excursions. Early this afternoon, Heniek, while you were working at your factory, I crossed the bridge to the Praga district to make sure my old friend Jasmin was still alive. Unfortunately, the entrance to her apartment house was locked. I waited outside, watching the passers-by, until, finally, after a couple of hours, she appeared at her window, gazing at the powdering of snow that had begun to fall. I stayed there a long time after she went back to whatever she was doing, grateful that Izzy and I hadn’t caused her death. But on the way home, feeling my strength renewed and wanting a small adventure, I decided to go to the Little Ghetto to see what wonders were gracing the shop windows of Sienna Street. A mistake.

I never made it there; I found a crowd swarming out in front of All Saints Church, and at its centre was a burly butcher hacking away at the emaciated, mud-brown carcass of an old mare. Hot blood kept spurting on to his grimacing face. I could tell from the way the poor beast’s ribcage stood out that she’d been an underfed, work- damned tram horse. A poisonous-looking steam was rising from the wormy ravine of her open belly.

The ghetto devours itself and will never die, I thought.

I’d never seen a horse without a head and backed away slowly.

‘You’ve grown silent again,’ Heniek tells me.

‘I thought I was telling you about a dead horse,’ I reply.

‘No, you haven’t said a word in twenty minutes.’

Heniek says I can go an hour or more without speaking, even though I can hear my voice clearly and am sure I’m talking to him. He says my silence scares him, because my edges begin to darken, as though I’m being engulfed by a greedy shadow.

Though he tries to wake me from my trances by calling my name, I show no sign of hearing him.

It is our fourth day together by my count. My seventh, according to him. I do not know how so many days disappear.

After Stefa’s husband Krzysztof died of tuberculosis in 1936, my niece would shut herself inside her bedroom and sob. Adam was five then. The little boy once told me that the scrape and click of her turning her key in the lock made him feel like crying out for help, but whose name would he have called? Hearing his mother’s weeping, he’d plead with her to let him in while squatting on his heels by her door. He’d scratch like a cat and jiggle the door handle but nothing could convince her to open up.

After confessing these details, he added, ‘But it’s not so bad. I don’t even cry any more. Though I keep scratching. Or else Mama might forget I’m there.’

Amazingly, he didn’t show any resentment; he was proud of his ability to cope on his own.

Had Stefa been a good mother? Is anyone always a positive influence? All I know is that Adam adored her.

When she finally let her son into her room, she’d pretend nothing had happened. They would sit cross-legged on her bed and nibble bread and cheese, and play cards. My goodness, how the two of them could live on cheese. They were like giant mice!

After the boy had won all his mother’s coins, she would open a novel and read aloud to him. Or they’d nap together; her fits of sobbing always exhausted them both.

Ever since she was a teenager, Stefa had devoured detective novels – books by Zangwill, Gaboriau, Groller… ‘It’s like this, Uncle Erik,’ she explained to me once, just after her Krzysztof’s death, ‘mysteries have solid endings. When you finish the last page, a door locks behind you. So people like you and me and Adam, we can’t ever get stuck inside.’

Jumping to the courtyard must have meant that not enough doors had closed behind her over the course of her life; she’d become a prisoner in a story she could no longer go on reading.

Two Pinkiert’s men came for her in the morning. It was drizzling. As they picked her up, the world receded. I was encased in thick glass.

Outside, as their cart trundled away over the cobbles, the tense, grinding sound of the wheels gave me the impression we were fighting a losing battle. Upstairs, I got out my list of the dead and chanted the names of everyone I’d ever loved.

I drank vodka and chanted until my voice was gone.

I wanted my parents to come for me. And I wanted out. So I closed the curtains and crawled into the frozen arms of my blankets. I’d promised to go to Pinkiert’s headquarters to schedule and pay for the funeral, but it was

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