The Warsaw Anagrams

‘I can’t,’ I told him.

He toldme that I’d be arrested by the German guards if they spotted me. I walked away from him before he could finish his warning.

I thought it was just possible that Wolfi had lied to Stefa to protect Adam, so I headed to his apartment again. A stinking smell was now coming from the courtyard, and I traced it to a pushcart stored there for the night that must have been loaded with rotting fish during the day. Two bony, desperate-looking cats were tied to one of the wheels, and they stared up at me suspiciously from what looked like a mush of entrails and rice. One of them hissed. I guessed that they were there to keep away rats.

Wolfi’s father answered my knocks in his bare feet and pyjamas, but wearing a woollen coat. Mr Loos was a carpenter from Minsk with coarse, powerful hands, each finger as thick as a cigar. When I told him Adam was missing, he embraced me. For just an instant I went limp in his arms, as if I were a child myself.

After stealing into Wolfi’s bedroom, he carried the boy out to me still asleep, setting him down gently in an armchair of faded brocade. Mrs Loos kissed him awake. The boy gazed up at me with drowsy, blinking eyes. I kneeled to be less threatening.

‘Adam’s gone missing,’ I told him softly. ‘So even if he made you promise not to say a word to anyone, you have to tell me if you saw him yesterday.’

‘Just… just for a minute,’ he stammered. ‘Outside your apartment house.’

‘Thank God. What time?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe one-thirty or two.’

Mr Loos brought me a chair. I sat down and leaned towards the boy. ‘What did he tell you, Wolfi?’

‘That he was going to buy some coal. And not… not to let you or his mother know.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘That Gloria was freezing to death.’

I hung my head; I should have known that Adam would act recklessly to save her. ‘Do you know where he was going to buy the coal?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘Listen, son, I’m not angry. But you must tell me if you have any idea where he might have gone.’

‘Just one.’

CHAPTER 4

Wolfi explained to me that the apartment house at 1 Leszno Street shared a cellar with a building on Rymarska Street, in Christian Warsaw. Passage across the clandestine border cost five zloty, payable to a guard. Poles carrying goods into the ghetto put on the Jewish armbands with the Star of David that we were forced to wear. Jews heading the other way removed theirs.

Adam had crossed the cellar only once that Wolfi knew about. He’d been paid ten zloty to smuggle out an ermine jacket and bring back a mahogany jewellery box from an antique dealer living near the university. He’d told Wolfi that he had been chosen because of his blond, Aryan looks, which made him less likely to be arrested. That had been about a month before. Wolfi didn’t know who’d hired Adam or the identity of the dealer. But he added that my nephew had been given half a chocolate cake as a reward for executing his mission so quickly.

It had begun to snow – big soft flakes falling atop the wild panic throbbing inside my head. At 1 Leszno Street, I rapped at the front door until the light went on in the caretaker’s apartment.

‘Stop that goddamned banging!’ he hissed.

He opened the front door a crack. ‘What’s the problem, old man?’ he demanded. A blanket was drawn across his shoulders and he carried a candle in his fist. As he moved the flame towards me, to better see my face, his shadow seemed to fold around us.

I recognized him: Abramek Piotrowicz, the attorney; his daughter Halina had been a high-school friend of Liesel’s.

‘It’s me, Erik Cohen,’ I told him.

‘Erik? My God, I wouldn’t have recognized you! But you look pretty good,’ he rushed to add, so as not to offend me.

When we shook hands, Abram tugged me inside and said, ‘Get out of that damn wind!’ He shut the door and scoffed. ‘This weather… I’m going to Palestine as soon as we get out. And I’m never coming back!’

I explained the reason for my visit and described Adam, but Abram told me he hadn’t seen any boy fitting his description.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to question the guard who was on duty yesterday afternoon.’

‘His name is Grylek Baer,’ Abram replied, adding that he’d be back only at 1 p.m. ‘But I’ll get word to him at dawn. Leave it to me. Let’s speak in the morning.’

I found Stefa still up when I returned home, seated in the kitchen over half a bowl of cold soup. It was 1.40 a.m.

Two condemned prisoners wait for sunrise. The man slumps into his chair by the window, where he can watch a dark street emptied of life. Later, when the sky clears, he steals glances up at a dome of stars that seems too distant to provide any orientation to him or anyone else.

Our exile will never end he thinks. He lets his pipe go out and his feet grow numb.

The woman sits on her bed, one hand on a homemade birdcage she hates, staring into the milky eye of all she has ever feared.

At dawn, Stefa disregarded my pleading and headed for Leszno Street. I waited at home in case Adam made it back to us. Just before eight, three sharp knocks on the front door made me drop the book I’d forgotten I was holding.

Two men stood on the landing, the shorter one in the black uniform and cap of Pinkiert’s, the ghetto funeral service. The other, tall and distinguished-looking, held his hat in his hands.

‘My nephew… have you found him?’ I asked in a rush. Inside my voice was our future – Adam’s and mine.

‘Are you Dr Erik Cohen?’ the Pinkiert’s man questioned.

‘Yes.’

‘We found your nephew’s body at dawn. I’m sorry.’

I don’t remember anything else from our conversation. Maybe it was as we walked down the stairs to the street that the men told me how Adam had been identified by a secretary in the Jewish Council who was an acquaintance of Stefa’s. Or maybe they told me that only later. My next memory is of standing outside our apartment house. The Pinkiert’s cart – wooden, drawn by a brown mare – was shrouded in shadow. The undertaker – a slender man with a pinched face – spoke to me in a kind voice about catching a chill and did up the buttons on my coat. But I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel anything but the sense that I’d been tugged far out to sea and would make it all the way back to land.

A single trauma can cripple a person for ever, and when I saw Adam lying in the back of the cart, I knew my life was over.

A coarse blanket covered his body but left his face exposed. It was turned to the side, as if he’d heard someone call out from the left just before death. His eyes were closed and his hair was mussed. His skin was pasty and yellowish.

Was it then that the Pinkiert’s man told me how he had been found?

I climbed into the cart and kneeled by my nephew. The dark gravity of all that had gone wrong drew my lips to his. The stiff chill of our kiss made me shudder.

I took out my handkerchief and started wiping the grime off his face. I whispered, You’re home now, as if he could hear me – and as if that news would comfort him.

Whatever made Adam Adam is gone, I thought.

Six small words, but they couldn’t fit inside my head. They spilled out of me inside a hopelessness so deep and