Sunrise would wake me every morning as if I’d been thrust from a moving train. Sitting up, watching the roaches making zigzag journeys across the cracks in the walls, I’d put myself in the killer’s place. He’d obviously wanted a piece of the lives he’d destroyed – as trophies, perhaps. But why a hand and a leg?
And the string – had Adam put it in his mouth or had the killer?
Izzy brought me bread every morning before work, and made me breakfast. Once, standing by the window, he spoke in a hesitant voice of how desperate he was for a chance to apologize to his wife for creating problems in their marriage. Rising to the challenge of his honesty, I confessed all I’d done wrong as a father – a last chance to make amends, I suppose. And a last chance for both of us to reveal secrets we’d kept deep down in our pockets for decades.
Izzy was convinced that he’d made a wrong turn early in his life, when he came back to Warsaw from France. ‘I never found my way back to myself after that,’ he told me.
Opening an envelope he’d brought with him, he took out four sepia-toned photographs of young men posing in front of a ship’s railing. ‘My lovers during the six years I worked on the
As I looked at each of his old friends, Izzy’s eyes grew worried. I realized he needed to show me all he was, and for me to give him my blessing; there was no time left for waiting.
‘You travelled far,’ I told him. ‘That was a very good thing.’
But his error-of-a-lifetime would give him no peace. Through a surge of tears, he whispered, ‘I married Roza to prove to myself I could be the man everyone wanted me to be. I could have had another life – a truer life. Roza, too.’
‘One thing I learned from my patients,’ I told him, ‘is that we
‘Not like me, Erik. I hurt the people I cared for most.’
‘Do you still hear from any of your old lovers?’ I asked, a plan forming underneath my words.
‘One – Louis. Another steward. We write to each other for New Year’s.’
‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Very much.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in Boulogne-Billancourt. That’s why I sent the boys there. He found them jobs. He used to work as an airline mechanic. The boys even stayed with him for a while, though they aren’t aware of what he and I once meant to each other.’
‘When the ark comes for us, you’ll go to him,’ I told him as if it were an order.
‘Erik, I’m too old,’ he replied. ‘And all of me is unravelling. Besides, there’s Roza. I can’t leave her.’
‘Izzy, she’s had a major stroke. She’s not going to get any better, and she doesn’t know who you are. Let her stay with her sister. Or if you have to, take her with you and let her move in with the boys. You’ve punished yourself long enough, don’t you think?’
One evening, Rowy finally told me why Ewa hadn’t visited me; Stefa’s suicide had shaken both her and Helena badly, and the little girl had suffered a diabetic shock. She’d nearly died. The young man added that he and Mikael had kept the bad news from me during the worst of my grief so as not to make me feel any worse. Helena was better now, but still weak.
On the afternoon of Friday, 28 February, eight days after Stefa’s death, a ghetto courier brought me a note from Gizela, the young woman who was looking after my home. She informed me that a lieutenant in the SS had requisitioned my flat a few days earlier. Gizela and her husband were back living with her in-laws. She asked me not to write to her, since she was convinced that all her mail was being read.
Thinking of a Nazi in my bed made me storm out of the apartment, shaking with rage. I ended up only a block from Weisman’s dance school, which started me thinking… Checking my watch, I realized I could make Rowy’s afternoon chorus rehearsal.
The young musician made a fuss over me as soon as I arrived, introducing me to all of his little singers as a great friend of the chorus. I was impressed with his ease with them and how they tugged at his shirtsleeves for his attention.
When I explained my purpose, he asked, ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’
‘Yes, it won’t take long. But I’ll need to see each kid separately – and alone. I don’t want them influencing one another.’
That was a lie: in truth, I was afraid that if any of the children had anything unusual to say about Rowy, his presence would intimidate them.
I talked to the eleven youngsters one at a time, behind the closed door of a dressing room. Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about Adam’s smuggling activities, and the most damning secret they could tell me about Rowy was that he ate half a chocolate bar after each of their performances.
The next day, Saturday, Anka came to my door early in the morning. She refused my invitation for ersatz coffee. ‘I’m in a rush – I make house calls on Saturdays,’ she told me, standing in the doorway. ‘Listen, I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. My nurse friend has been off with dysentery, but I went to see her yesterday and she told me that Anna never showed up for her procedure. She said that she doesn’t know if Mikael keeps records of the abortions. She wasn’t sure of the date Anna was scheduled for, but that the twenty-fourth of January sounded right.’
So Mikael had been telling the truth. Perhaps Anna had gone to see Mrs Sawicki hoping to get more money to pay for her abortion, and on the way home she’d been attacked – except that her mother said there’d been no signs of a struggle on her. Just like Adam. Which meant that the two children had either been caught completely by surprise or had known – and trusted – their killer.
Could Rowy or Mikael be working secretly for the Germans and have obtained authorization to cross the border on a regular basis? After all, if Anna or Adam had met one of them on the Other Side, they would have suspected nothing.
How important is personal geography to our destinies? I ask, Heniek, because the only reason I chose to follow Mikael first was that his apartment on Walowa Street was closer to Stefa’s.
I got to his front door just after nine, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I stood vigil down the block. An elderly man rented me a chair for one zloty an hour.
Mikael came out near noon, dressed smartly in a tweed overcoat and carrying a black leather case. He hailed a rickshaw right away. Rushing into the street, I was able to flag one down myself. I told my driver to follow at a safe distance behind his colleague.
A short time later, Mikael got out on Nowolipki Street and entered the door to a five-storey apartment house. I had my driver drop me fifty paces away and knocked at one of the ground-floor apartments. A boy of thirteen or so, wearing a knitted yarmulke, came to the door. At the back of the room, two old women in dark shawls and headscarfs were working over a stove. The place reeked of boiling cabbage.
‘Are there any clinics in this apartment house?’ I asked the young man; I was guessing that Mikael was carrying medical supplies in his case.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Why would a doctor come here?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied, scowling as if I were a beggar.
I went back outside, stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the facade of the building. A hand-lettered sign in a second-floor window made immediate sense of Mikael’s visit:
I knew nothing about photography, but the case Mikael was carrying must have held his plates or film, or maybe even a camera. He’d probably spend a few hours there developing his negatives.
Realizing that it could take weeks to learn something damning about him or Rowy, I headed off through a fog of self-doubt.
