wide that it might have been everything I’d ever felt or thought.
As my craving for him to wake up dripped down my cheeks, I apologized to him. I didn’t want him to think he’d done anything wrong; a child shouldn’t meet death with guilt in his heart.
I intended to embrace the boy and carry him upstairs, but when I lifted his blanket away, I gasped; he was naked, and his right leg had been cut off from the knee down.
CHAPTER 5
The universe was turning around Adam’s missing leg, and I was freefalling through a life that seemed impossible. Do you know what it’s like to see a mutilated nine-year-old? You realize that anything can happen: the sun may blacken and die before your eyes; a crack may open in the earth and swallow the street… Each heartbeat seems proof that all you see and feel is too improbable to be anything but a dream.
A mad revelation: Adam’s death and the fate of the Jews were linked. I stitched that conclusion together out of my panic, wondering how many months were left to us.
I looked frantically around the cart for what had been cut from Adam, as if my heart were on fire. ‘What have you done to my nephew?’ I demanded of the undertaker.
Talking to you, Heniek, helps me recall details I’d long forgotten. I see now how the tall man who’d knocked on our door stepped in front of the undertaker to answer my question. In his white scarf and black trilby, he looked like the ghetto’s answer to Al Capone. He introduced himself as Benjamin Schrei and he told me he was a representative of the Jewish Council. ‘Why don’t we go up to your apartment, where we can talk calmly,’ he suggested.
‘Calmly?’ I bellowed. ‘Do you really think I can talk
I tugged my arm from his grasp. He showed me a hard look, as though he’d already concluded I was going to be difficult. Leaning close to me, he whispered, ‘The Jewish police found Adam in the barbed wire by the Chlodna Street crossing. The Germans must have discarded him there in the night. We cut him free. We need to talk.’
I assumed the police had been unable to extract Adam from the greedy metal coils without cutting off his leg. Of course, snipping the barbed wire would have been easier and quicker, but any Jew who attempted that would have been executed by the Nazis for tampering with our border.
Maybe I flinched on picturing what had happened, because Schrei’s face softened and he said, ‘I’m sorry to have to talk of such matters.’
Was his sympathy genuine? In those first few hours after Adam’s death, everyone seemed to be reading lines in a play.
‘Give me five minutes and then I’ll talk with you,’ I told him.
Heniek, could you have left Adam lying next to you without touching what had been done to him? You look away, as though to say I’ve no right to ask you, but all I mean to say is that I had to know the shape and scope of what had happened.
I reached slowly under the blanket. His skin was hard, like rawhide, and when a sharp edge jabbed into my palm – bone – I jerked my hand back. Sickness lodged in my gut, then rose into my chest, and I leaned over the side of the cart. Afterwards, I drank water out of a tin cup handed up to me by a neighbour.
Looking around at familiar faces in the gathering crowd, I wanted to vanish, but I also wanted to stay in the cart for ever, so that I wouldn’t have to rejoin my life.
Each passing day would now lead me further away from my nephew. I didn’t think I’d survive the growing distance between us.
So many nevers came to me that first day, but I remember that one most of all.
Adam’s right arm was scratched from the sharp metal and twisted at nearly a right angle, the way it must have dangled when he was discarded. His left knee and foot were bent to the outside. His hands had formed fists, but when I tried to uncurl one of them, I heard a crack and stopped tugging.
He must have fought back. I imagined him punching and kicking, and shouting my name.
The death of a child is a single event, but the memory of it expands to cover a lifetime. Nothing I’d ever done – not even as a young man – was free of his loss: not my schooldays with Izzy, not my marriage, not Liesel’s birth.
Ewa appeared out of nowhere. Later, she told me she rushed out to the street when she heard a shriek, but I don’t remember any shouting. Nearly everyone on our block had known Adam since he was a baby; one of them must have let out a cry on seeing him.
Ewa began to wail. Women neighbours rushed to her. I must have entered their group at some point or summoned her to me. I must have asked her to find Stefa and told her where she had gone, but I don’t recall any of that.
Had I thought of our exile into the ghetto as a dream and interpreted it correctly, I’d have lived more cautiously, since I’d have known they moved us on to an island to make it easier to steal our future – and to keep the rest of the world from knowing. I ought to have been among the first to understand!
And I should have guessed that Adam would race across all the forbidden bridges in the world to save Gloria.
When I saw my niece running towards me, I put my hand atop Adam’s head, because his hair was the only part of him that was still soft, and I was terrified I’d forget its silken feel, and I knew I’d have to give up possession of him to his mother now.
Stefa crept forward, hugging her arms around her chest. She looked at her son and then at me with a puzzled expression, as though asking me to explain a great mystery. She didn’t cry. She was enveloped by a dark spell of silence. Her nose was running and her eyes were red. She was panting.
Ewa helped her up into the cart. Stefa kissed my brow and squeezed my hand. It was unlike her to express her affection so openly, but I didn’t think of that till later.
Taking off her mittens, my niece brought Adam’s hand to her cheek, then put it over her mouth and pressed her lips to his palm. She stepped his fingertips over her closed eyelids, and that’s when her first tears came, along with a choking sound.
‘Stefa…’ I began, but my niece’s moans covered my words.
When she embraced Adam, his blanket slid down to his waist. I had to tell her now not to look any lower, but my voice had been swallowed by the terrible strangeness of this moment – the sense that the entire future of the earth and heaven was turning around what was taking place here.
Stefa rocked Adam back and forth as if he were a baby. When she reached down to lift the blanket over his chest again, she saw what had been cut from him and began to howl. The sound was like an animal having its womb cut out.
CHAPTER 6
I’d put Stefa’s woollen hat back on her head, but she was still shivering as though she’d fallen through the ice of a winter lake. She agreed to talk with Mr Schrei, the Jewish Council’s representative, on the condition that her son remain covered and guarded until we’d agreed on funeral plans. Ewa helped me prop up my niece as we trudged upstairs. On our landing, she began coughing as if her lungs were packed with grit.
Behind our closed door, I sat my niece on the bed and smoothed a shawl over her legs, then brought her a cup of the coffee I’d made earlier, lacing it with a little vodka, but she kept her hands knitted together and refused to touch her drink. She bent her head over her lap like an old widow curled around her loneliness, protecting herself from a world where she no longer had a home.
