‘I told him you were sleeping, but he wants to talk to you,’ Izzy continued, and then he poked around his mouth with his tongue and spat something into his hand.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘A tooth,’ he replied. ‘They’ve been falling out.’
‘Open your mouth,’ I told him.
I looked in. His gums were bleeding and his breath was putrid, like mouldy bread.
‘What the hell is happening in there?’ I asked.
‘Scurvy,’ he replied. ‘I managed to buy some oranges, but they haven’t helped yet.’
‘Lemons would be better,’ I observed.
‘So find me a lemon.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when I eat or talk,’ he replied dryly. ‘So what do you think Schrei wants?’
‘Who gives a damn!’ I replied, and I realized that that was what Stefa would have said. Was that how I would go on – by imitating the sound of her voice in my head? After I’d drawn one tight circle around Genoa, and another around London, I added gruffly, ‘You shouldn’t have told Bina she could help me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she can’t!’ I declared.
‘You know, a little solidarity right now might help,’ he advised me, examining his tooth keenly, as if it were a precious artefact from the Dead Sea.
‘But what could Bina possibly do for me? I don’t want anything to eat, and she doesn’t know who murdered Adam or Anna, and…’
He threw the tooth and hit me on the side of my head. ‘I meant
Izzy made turnip soup while I worked on my list of escape routes. A half-hour later, while we were slurping away, I jotted down the names of the places I’d go if I could live out my fantasies of reaching a tropical paradise – Bangkok, Rangoon, Mandalay…
I wanted to wake up to warmth every day, and green, luxuriant life creeping through every crack in the sidewalk, overgrowing rooftops, walls and barricades. I wanted to eat red and yellow handfuls of tropical fruit for breakfast and spit the seeds into the moist soil of my garden, and watch them sprout, and go swimming in an ocean where fern-tailed seahorses and puckered moonfish peeked out at me from their hiding places in coral thickets. I wanted to wake up to the finch-like cries of boys and girls playing naked on the beach. I wanted to be where no one had ever heard German.
CHAPTER 18
I couldn’t know when I was fifteen or even fifty what would break my heart, could I? I ask that because it often now seems as if I’d always known that Hannah, Adam and Stefa would die before me.
Imagine black dye running off into every memory. Nothing survives that isn’t grey.
CHAPTER 19
Rowy, Mikael, Ziv, the Tarnowskis and other friends came by to check on me over those first days following Stefa’s death, but I remember very little of what they said. The only conversation I remember clearly was Rowy telling me he’d obtained funding to buy new musical scores, as well as cheap fiddles, recorders and other instruments; he’d decided to organize a youth orchestra.
The Adam who resided inside me now made me listen to his plans clearly.
With his eyes focused on a brighter future, Rowy also told me that Ziv had generously volunteered to help him search for talented street performers throughout the ghetto on his day off.
Curiously, Ewa and Helena never visited me.
I tossed words back and forth with all my guests, but most of the time I was thinking of how I’d have preferred to be alone. And how I wished I’d taken Stefa and Adam to be photographed. So many lost opportunities rattled in my head after my niece’s miracle, but I didn’t want to ever free myself from them.
Do I need to tell you why, Heniek? Maybe it’s not a bad thing to risk being too clear on occasion: they were proof of all my niece had meant to me.
Sunday was the funeral. I refused to go. I smoked my pipe and watched the rain pelting my window.
Izzy came over afterwards. He collapsed on my bed, face down, the crook of his arm over his eyes. He was sopping wet. He smelled like mud.
I dropped down next to him and held his shoulder. ‘I’ve decided to help Bina,’ I told him; I wanted to please him.
But he wouldn’t look at me.
I took off his shoes and socks, dried his face and arms, and got him under the covers.
While he slept, I retrieved my dream diary, turned to my list of the dead and added Stefa’s name, shivering with relief. I’d almost forgotten to do that. It scared me how we could forget our most important duties.
That night, I woke with a start and lit my carbide lamp, unsure now whether I’d really added her name. Staring at
I spent most of the next five days in bed. I slept in and out of twisted half-dreams, and their incompleteness gave me the troubling impression that Adam had wanted to tell me more about his thoughts and feelings – things only I would have understood.
I told all my visitors I felt abandoned and fragile, which had the advantage of being both true and what they wanted to hear, since it gave them the chance to offer me sympathetic looks and words of comfort. They also wanted to be reassured that I’d never give up so that they could believe in the quiet heroism of men and women – and more particularly, of the Jews.
I don’t mean to sound cynical about my friends; they were caring people, and they were under no obligation to give up their hopes for a happy ending.
To myself, however, I made the promise that I’d take Stefa’s way out after finding Adam’s killer.
That week, couriers delivered three letters smuggled in from the Other Side – from Christian friends to whom Stefa had written about Adam’s murder. Among them was one from Jasmin, my former patient. At the end of her long and moving letter, she told me she was talking about the wretchedness of the ghetto to whoever would listen – even foreign journalists – and that I mustn’t give up hope of getting out.
She worked only a few blocks away but it was clear by now that we inhabited two separate countries, and that mine would one day disappear from the face of the earth, leaving nothing but a crater of memories for those few who managed to survive.
