dates, and the knowing look she gave me as she pronounced her assessment made it clear just how far they’d already journeyed together.
Soon, the lights flickered for the audience to take its seats. Eight girls and four boys filed up the stairs at the side to the stage, fidgeting and pushing, which made me fear a descent into musical hell. Under Rowy’s raised baton, however, the children’s faces grew serious, and they harmonized their Bach chorales like brothers and sisters. Closing my eyes, I felt as if I’d stopped hurtling through my own displacement for the first time in months; I was just where I wanted to be. I’d landed.
The first encore was Rowy’s own solemn arrangement of ‘
As he took his bows, my nephew looked at me with such adult earnestness that I was overwhelmed with admiration. For the first time, I had the feeling he’d accomplish magnificent things in his life, and I knew then that protecting him was the most important job I could have been given for my time in the ghetto.
The next day, a blistering cold front swept over the city. Adam stumbled around stiff-armed inside two sweaters and his fur-lined coat – a full-fledged member of a corps of Jewish penguins marching through the ghetto to their secret schools. I purchased two stoves powered by sawdust; by now, coal had vanished – hoarded by the Germans. The new stoves proved criminally inefficient, however, and for several nights in a row the temperature in our apartment rose to only seven degrees.
By now, some insidious avian disease had turned Gloria’s left eye milky white, and Adam was sure that the cold front was at fault. He moped around whenever he thought of her being summoned to budgie heaven, and nothing we could do could cheer him up.
I started going to bed with a scarf wound around my head into a
The seventeenth of February 1941, was a Monday. The morning was bitter cold – 14 degrees below zero. Stefa had a sore throat and fever, and she’d developed an acne-like rash on her chest. She finally agreed that Adam could stay home from school. Not that she would join us in taking the day off. She drank down some aspirin and, despite my threats to tie her to her bed, pushed past me to work.
I bundled Adam under a mountain of blankets and, on his insistence, moved Gloria’s cage closer to the heater at the foot of our bed. After the cabbage soup I made for lunch, which he and I ate with our gloves on, Adam put on the Indian headdress his mother had made for him out of chicken feathers and announced he was going out.
‘The hell you are!’ I countered.
‘But I’m bored!’
‘With only a crippled budgie and a whining nine-year-old as company, you think I’m not?’
He gave me his devil’s squint.
‘Nice try, Winnetou,’ I told him, using his Indian name, ‘but the Cohen evil eye doesn’t work on other members of the tribe. Go read.’
‘I’m sick of reading!’ Tears of blackmail appeared in his eyes.
‘Look, Adam,’ I said more gently, ‘when we manage to find some coal, you can go out again.’ Enticingly, I added, ‘I’ll start teaching you algebra today, if you want.’
‘Algebra is for stupid people!’
‘Then go feed Gloria. She looked hungry last time I looked. And I’m sure she’s even more bored than you.’
In point of fact, Gloria looked like she needed a hot bath followed by a couple of shots of Scotch whisky, but then so did nearly everyone I knew.
He sneered at me and started away, so I grabbed him. When he squirmed free, rage surged through me like molten metal and I smacked him on the bottom, harder than I’d intended, knocking him into the cabinets. His headdress tumbled off and lost a feather in front. We looked at each other, stunned, as if a meteor had fallen between us. I slumped down to the floor. My tears frightened him. He wriggled his way on to my lap and told me he was sorry. I whispered that he wasn’t responsible, then picked up his headdress. I told him he could go out and play if he dressed as warmly as possible. When he fetched his woollen hat and asked me to put it on him, I made him promise not to leave our street even if Martians landed on the Great Synagogue and asked by name to meet up with him to negotiate a peace treaty.
After I realized that the sun had set, I put down my book and looked at my watch: 4.27 exactly. I’ll never forget that time.
Adam had been gone more than two hours. I left a note for Stefa on her bed saying I was out looking for him and tacked another note to the front door, telling Adam to fetch the spare key from Ewa at the bakery if he got home before me.
Adam wasn’t on our street, and I couldn’t find him in any of the weedy lots he usually played in, so I went to Wolfi’s parents’ apartment, but my knocks went unanswered. I managed to locate Feivel and two of Adam’s other friends, but they hadn’t seen him. The local shopkeepers all shook their heads at me.
On the way home, I pictured how I’d find Adam warming his hands by our heater, with Gloria crowning his head. I’d tell him I’d never let him out of my sight again, which was the moral to this story as far as I was concerned.
But the apartment was empty. To calm myself, I took the last of my supply of Veronal. I’d have kept trying Wolfi’s parents, but the Nazis had turned off our telephones by then.
When Stefa arrived, she was furious with me for letting her son leave the apartment. Despite her fever and my pleading, she marched out to find him.
Adam’s clothes were always strewn about our room, so I gathered them up. As I was folding his pyjamas, I held the flannel top over my face and breathed in the lavender scent of him. The panic that gripped me was like drowning.
I put his clothes away in his chest of drawers, then made onion soup for supper. When the meal was prepared and the table set, I sat with his sketchbook and traced my fingers over his drawings of Gloria till my fingertips were smudged blue and yellow.
In one of his sketches, he’d drawn Gloria with a long brown pipe in her beak and a scruffy grey tuft of feathers on her head. I stared at the page, trying in vain to dispel the nightmares my mind was scripting: Adam beaten by a Nazi guard, run down by a horse-cart…
Stefa came home alone shortly after midnight. Her eyes were ringed by pouches of worry. ‘He’s vanished,’ she told me, dropping down next to me on my bed. Panic hovered around her like a cold mist.
I rubbed warmth into her hands. ‘Listen, Katshkele, did you speak to Wolfi?’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t know anything.’
‘Adam probably snuck out to Christian Warsaw and couldn’t make it back tonight.’
‘Has he been smuggling?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that many kids his age are. He probably lost track of the time, and it gets dark so early now. He must be in hiding till morning. You’ll see, he’ll turn up here first thing tomorrow. He’s smart – and resourceful.’
I’d practised that little speech until I believed it. And by promising to go out again and look for Adam, I was able to get Stefa to eat some hot soup.
A man clomps through empty streets as if through his own childhood fears, searching across curtained windows and mounds of snow for a way to travel back in time.
A Jewish policeman whose breath smelled of mints stopped me on Nalewki Street. When I explained why I was breaking the curfew, he said matter-of-factly, ‘Kids go missing every day. Just go home and wait till morning.’
