The Warsaw Anagrams

The very next day, Izzy and I diagrammed our plans for making it to Lwow, and from there to Kiev, but Jasmin soon made contact with an arms smuggler in the Warsaw Underground, and he told her that he had information that the Germans were building labour camps and military bases all across eastern Poland; in consequence, we ought not to risk our escape just yet. Her smuggler friend would let her know when it was safer to leave.

We stayed with Liza from March all the way to early July. After a few weeks, we were glad not to have to leave, though we knew we would set off as soon as Jasmin gave us the go-ahead – if for no other reason than to stop putting Liza at risk.

Izzy and I stayed close to the farmhouse at all times; we dared not go near the nearest village for fear of being spotted and denounced. Still, sometimes at dawn, before anyone was up, we’d take her dog, Noc, for walks through the fields.

Noc had an extensive Polish vocabulary, and Izzy and I taught him Yiddish, as well.

Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik! Izzy would yell at the beautiful mongrel when he was barking too heartily at some rabbit or squirrel he’d chased into the underbrush. Amazingly, the dog would go all quiet and sit on his haunches, looking back and forth between us with his deep brown eyes full of remorse. Given his luxurious black coat, we joked that he was the reincarnation of a Jewish furrier and had been waiting all this time to learn his true language.

*

A few days after our arrival, Liza purchased insecticide at a local apothecary, and Izzy and I dusted ourselves with the white powder from top to bottom, turning ourselves into foul-smelling snowmen.

Izzy submerged in our bathtub first. When he was done, I stepped into the scalding water, sat down and closed my eyes. And entered paradise. I could not have been happier had I been five years old and embraced by my mother.

I hadn’t been aware of how tense and constrained my body had been – as if I’d been tangled in vines. Away with the lice went months of grime.

Still, I sobbed alone that night, hidden in Liza’s cellar.

Izzy and I wrote just a single letter to our children, fearing that our correspondence might cause trouble for Liza. I told Liesel I’d contact her again when we reached the Soviet Ukraine.

I’d get up every morning to watch the sunrise, grateful for the boundless pink and russet sky, for all that blessed light falling over the earth, for the warm breezes of spring and the butterflies fluttering over the flowers, for eagles and hawks and magpies and all that could fly beyond the control of the Nazis. Grateful, too, for a red fox that I saw late one afternoon, and who stopped to watch me as if I had descended to the earth from out of his sunrise.

The sound of my whispering with Izzy as we fell asleep was like protective netting. We covered ourselves with our voices every night.

He and I fired a few of our lopsided cups and vases in the kiln over those first weeks of refuge. One day, however, Liza decided she would teach me to centre a pot or die trying. She put her hands over mine and moved them through the luxurious wet clay, while that wheel of creation spun round and round between us like a dreidl that would never stop proclaiming the miracle of our escape. If she and I had been younger, maybe we’d have had a chance at another life. But one passes a gate without knowing it, and then there is no point in turning round and starting over. We both knew that and ended up laughing.

Still, it was good to be able to learn a new trade at my age.

Izzy and I were occasionally at each other’s throats over the most meaningless trifles, but we never forgot we were riding on the same raft at the centre of an angry sea, and that made all the difference. We were careful to give Liza enough time for herself and often stayed in our room – teaching Noc the subtleties of Yiddish grammar or tossing him his leather ball – when we would have preferred to be with her.

Imagine having to care for two elderly good-for-nothings. God, what we put that woman through!

It was a small life we had, but anything bigger would have put us at risk. Besides, we were exhausted. We hadn’t realized how depleted we were till we were off our island.

I slept twelve hours a night over those first weeks. And once my stomach adapted to wholesome food again, I made Liza’s dinner plates shine at every opportunity.

My hunger may have been obsessive at times, but Izzy’s nose hadn’t been dulled – like mine – by fifty years of pipe-smoking, and once his sensitive sniffer picked up the scent of good food again, it turned him into a slavering wolf; for a month or so he was unable to hold a conversation if there were even just a few grains of kasha or a smidgen of creamed sorrel still available. He would eye any crumbs Liza and I left over as if they had been stolen from him while he was reaching for the butter or pepper, and you could hear him counting the seconds he regarded as requisite – given our turn-of-the-century notions of etiquette – before he could make a headfirst dive for our plates.

When he was on one of his binges, cannibalism seemed a real possibility. Liza and I kept our distance and advised Noc to do the same.

His scurvy proved no match for his boundless appetite.

In the silence of the forest protecting our farm, I began to believe that as long as there were women like Liza in the world, Jewish history could never come to an end – not here or anywhere else. And that sooner or later, the world would come to its senses.

Liza sold her bowls, mugs and vases at two shops in Pulawy. The owners came once a month to pick out the merchandise they wanted. Jerzy, one of them, selected a Japanese-looking bowl of Izzy’s one day – blue, with calligraphic black strokes near the rim. His first sale. We celebrated with wine that evening.

At night, in bed, Izzy and I would talk about the friends we’d left back in Warsaw. It always seemed strange to us how geography can determine everything during a war. I wondered if I would ever see the city again. And if I’d want to.

In the early hours of the morning, I’d sometimes hear my name being called, as though from downstairs, and I’d try to get out of bed, certain that Liza was in trouble, but I’d find – to my horror – that I was unable to move. My arms and legs were paralysed. Never had I known such helplessness. And then I’d see Izzy’s face lit with crescents of light and dark by the white candle in his hand, and hear him whisper my name, and I’d realize he was waking me again from the nightmare that was being sent to me by all that I’d failed to do.

Twice a week, a stocky labourer and his teenaged son came from Niecierz to work Liza’s land; she had an agreement with them that allowed her to keep half of her fruit and grain. Izzy and I would hide in the cellar whenever we heard their donkey cart rambling down the potholed dirt road that skirted our farmhouse, reading by candlelight until Liza sounded the all-clear, which was a high whistle that would make Noc race up the staircase and bound into her arms.

I started fishing in the early evening in late May, on a quiet bend in the River Wisloka guarded by dense, leafy woodland – mostly paper-barked birches and tall, broad oaks, but also curlicue-branched hazel bushes near the water. Noc would tag along, his tail twirling. He’d try in vain to catch dragonflies in his snapping jaws and watch the dark water around my line as if expecting a river sprite to surface at any moment.

On two occasions, I caught trout big enough to eat.

Izzy and Liza planted a kitchen garden, so that by early June we were able to begin harvesting fresh vegetables. The sweet, earthy smell of our beets carried me back to the days of my childhood when I’d go marketing with my mother. Liza, on sniffing at our perfumed trellis of pink and blue sweet-pea blossoms, would always fake a swoon, like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel overcome by love.

Food had never tasted so good as the meals we ate on Liza’s small patio, listening to the Polish trees and fields speaking in the language of wind from the Ukraine. But no matter how much I ate, crabs of hunger would still sometimes scuttle through my belly during the night. I’d light a candle and creak down the stairs into the kitchen. Often, Izzy would accompany me. We’d sit in our underwear at the kitchen table – little kids gorging on cheese and pastry while their parents lay sleeping.

One warm dawn in late June, I took off all my clothes and lay next to Noc in a potato field. The ground seemed