The Emperor of Lies (55 page)

The last time he was in the old children’s home in Okopowa Street was when he helped Feldman bring in the coal for the stove in the basement. By then, the Green House had already stopped being a children’s home and been transferred to the vague body that also ran the ‘rest homes’ for the
dygnitarzy
of the ghetto. If there was one place in the ghetto where you might find food hidden away, thought Adam, it was here.

Even so, it felt as though the Green House was surrounded by invisible walls or fences.

He walked past it several times, unable to bring himself to go in.

He was sure Lida had never been held captive there. But there was still something about the visual memory of her naked body, blue with cold, in the doorway of an unfamiliar house, which changed the image of this house, too. Or it could be the thought of all the children who had lived here. He remembered the way they used to stand motionless with their fingers gripping the wire fence round the big field at the back. Pale, shadow-like faces. And yet it was a peacable house. He recalled the shrill sound of children’s voices, shouting and laughing, that used to be audible far and wide around it.

At last he plucked up his courage and went in.

The stench inside almost stupefied him.

Somewhere, he had always been expecting this. One of the buildings would have to contain dead bodies.

People who were too weak to get to the assembly points unaided. People who decided to hide at the last minute. People who, like him, had not had enough food or water with them to keep themselves alive. Unless, of course, the Germans had already searched these houses and killed whoever they found there on the spot, forgetting to take the bodies away afterwards. Because what point was there in dealing with the bodies when the last transports had already left the ghetto?

If the other houses showed clear signs of hasty departure, then the Green House looked totally vandalised. In the kitchen, all the tables had been tipped over, what kitchen equipment was left – saucepans, lids, dishes – had all been pulled out of the cupboards. In the narrow corridor between the front hall and the little room Feldman used to call the Pink Room, the floor had been taken up, leaving a gaping hole in the middle. There was no trace of the piano that used to be in there. It had presumably been confiscated when Biebow decided all the musical instruments in the ghetto were to be handed in and sold; if it had not been chopped up for firewood long before.

Even in here, there was no escaping the smell.

He tore a bit off the curtain that had been tossed onto the upended sofa on the far side of the room, and tied the fabric round his mouth and nose as a mask.

Then he went up the stairs.

He went slowly, pausing at every step to listen.

The last people staying there must have relieved themselves on the stairs, as he encountered dried deposits of human faeces. Along with tattered bits of cloth, pages torn out of exercise books; here the remains of a shoe, a male shoe, with both the heel and the upper torn off.

Upstairs, there was no doubting where the smell was coming from.

With one hand pressing the improvised mask to his face, the other held out to steady himself against the wall, he made his way along the corridor to the superintendent’s room and opened the door with his elbow.

Werner Samstag was lying on his back on the little sofa beside Dr Rubin’s desk. There was no doubting it was him. He was dressed in the newly made but now badly soiled police uniform he had been wearing the day he turned up at Feldman’s house to try to get Lajb’s list of potential assassins and resistance men out of him.

His head must have been resting on the arm of the sofa, but after the shot was fired (or perhaps as a result of the shot) it had slumped down and was now hanging halfway to the floor. It was this, the fact that the head and top half of the body were hanging down while the rest of the body was still lying on the sofa, gave the face a most peculiar look. The left side of the head, where the shot had entered, was black with clotted blood. The rest of the face was puffed up and almost blue in colour, and the tongue was protruding between the lips, so the dead head seemed to be pulling a face at him.

He took a cautious step into the room, and swarms of flies buzzed up from the swollen, stinking body. He saw insects crawling in the open, brown wound in the head, and at the neck. But what interested him most was the pistol still grasped in Samstag’s right hand.

Where had he got the gun?

It was unthinkable that Samstag could have become powerful enough to be able to go around the ghetto armed, like any German.

Someone must have got him the weapon – or used it against him.

Adam was very close to the corpse now. The position of the body had made the blood from the gunshot wound to the head run down the shoulder and the underside of the arm, under the jacket sleeve, emerging from the cuff to run in rivulets down the wrist, which was resting heavily but stably on the floor. The fingers clenched round the pistol butt were also encased in thick, coagulated blood. He wrenched the piece of cloth from his face, wrapped it round his hand to make a glove and tried to prise up the corpse’s fingers one by one, in the hope of removing the pistol.

A sigh ran through the body, as if it was defending itself even in death against any assault. It took some time, but he eventually managed to straighten out the fingers and release the bloodstained weapon.

He carefully wrapped the pistol in the cloth and took it down to the kitchen, where he put the chairs and tables back something like the way they used to be. At least now he had somewhere to sit.

With water from the well in the yard, and another piece of curtain fabric, he cleaned the bore and the butt. It looked like a perfectly ordinary German Luger pistol, the kind all German officers carried in their holsters. Adam Rzepin knew no more about guns than what they looked like and how the people carrying them behaved.

But there were no cartridges left in the magazine.

The bullet that killed Werner Samstag must have been the last.

As a weapon, the pistol was therefore worthless, unless he could find any other magazines hidden up in Rubin’s room somewhere.

He sat there, weighing the gun in his hand, trying to imagine how much he could have got for it if he had been able to sell it on Pieprzowa Street, several thousand marks for sure, assuming anyone had dared to touch it or sell it on. If the Gestapo had got wind of there being real guns in circulation on the black market, they would undoubtedly have blown the whole ghetto sky high.

But really it was of no importance whether Samstag had been given the pistol, or had bought or stolen it. What was important was that he – Adam – now had it in his possession.

And he also had Werner Samstag in his possession.

Two things came home to Adam at the same time:

If the body could be left there, it was possible he might escape detection. The dogs – when they came – would locate the dead body straight away. The Germans with them would immediately have the body brought out and buried or burnt. With any luck, they would then take no further interest in the Green House.

Sitting in the Green House kitchen, as the light faded quickly in the windows around him, he decided to move in with Samstag, who had chosen to come back home in the end. Samstag was welcome to stay on in the Superintendent’s room. As for him, he could live in the cellar.

And just a few days after he installed himself in the Green House, they came. They had dogs with them, as he had suspected they would. The only thing that took him by surprise was that they came so early, before he was awake, and he always woke up long before dawn. He could hear the squeak and scrape of jackboots on the floorboards above. Voices shouting. Loud thuds, the crash of objects being pulled out or knocked over. Someone cursing, long and hard, in German.

He implored Lida to please calm down.

He realised as soon as he set foot in the Green House again that Lida would not tolerate it. The discovery of Samstag’s body had hardly improved matters.

All day she had been constantly on the move, and in the evening she had come crashing towards him again. He was kneeling in what was left of the Green House kitchen, looking through the saucepan cupboards. Dusk had set in, it was dark right up to the shiny tabletops, and all he saw was her outstretched hands, coming through the darkness with the fingers hooked like claws, as if she wanted to scratch his eyes out. Again her face was made of glass, the lips and cheeks petrified into an expression that was not an expression any longer, just an unbearable mask or grimace. He quickly crawled under a table and held up one of its shiny leaves as a shield in front of him.

He never understood where Lida’s fury came from. He had never experienced that hatred while she was alive. Something must have happened to her since she crossed the boundary to the world of the dead, if it was not the mere fact that there was still a boundary between the dead and the living.

Now he is beseeching her, deliberately keeping all his movements gentle and restrained, so as not to awaken the fury in her once more.

But the Germans are right overhead.

The dogs bark and yelp, and their claws scratch at the wooden hatch to the basement.

He hears boots tramping round in circles.

Presumably they are looking for the staple so they can pull up the hatch.

Inside her face of glass, Lida is holding her breath, just like him.

The hatch opens with a creak, immediately above him. A roving beam of torchlight captures bare brick walls, and he sees their veined pattern of cracks for the first time.

Then there is a shout from behind the bright glare of the light:

Franz! Komm zu mir hoch!
– and the asthmatically panting canine jaws that were just leaning over the edge are jerked back on their leads, and the hatch comes down with a loud bang and wreathes him in a cloud of sawdust and old coal dust. In the darkness, he and Lida are once again bodies without weight or dimension.

The Germans rummage about on the floor above for a while longer. He hears wood creaking and squeaking beneath the weight of slow, heavy steps. They are probably on their way down the stairs with the dead body. Then suddenly they are outside the building. There is a different ring to their voices, quickly erased by wind and distance. He thinks he can hear the faint sound of sharp shovel blades. Are they going to bury Samstag here? And what does that mean for himself? Can he stay here? Can the dead hear?

From then on, he carries the weapon with him, stuck in the waistband of Feldman’s trousers. The trousers are so big that the pistol slips down between his legs whenever as he makes any sudden movement. He would never be able to run any distance with the weapon on him. But he likes having it there, and he likes taking it out from time to time, to hold it and study it more closely.

Just think. A Jew with a gun.

Every so often, he pretends to put its muzzle to the head of one of the Germans Lida had to dance for. Here, have a taste of your own medicine! he says, screwing the harmless pistol muzzle against a wall or a tree trunk or whatever happens to be to hand. But the right words will not come, and if it is a German temple to which he is pressing the pistol muzzle, it refuses to explode into gunpowder and smoke and blood once he fires the imaginary shot. There is something missing.

It has grown noticeably colder.

The damp is rising from the ground.

In the streets beyond Miarki Street, where the Chairman had his summer residence and the guards from the Sonder’s protection squad once patrolled, oak and maple are ablaze. The maple burns with a brighter flame against the oak’s muted rust-brown; the leaves gleaming with moisture after days of rain or fog, bordered with a touch of silver after clear, frosty nights.

Yes, the frost is coming. He knows he will have to light a fire before too long. If only he can find something to light it with.

For the time being, he is sleeping on some boards he has torn up from the floor of the Green House kitchen and laid out in its cellar; wrapped up in an old horse blanket he retrieved from Feldman’s. But soon it will not be enough. The moisture in the walls is inching higher with every day that passes. It eats into everything it can reach: into elbow creases and groins, under your skin. In the end, it feels as though it is eating into the very marrow of his bones. He can feel it taking hold of his backbone; even clamping his skull in a vice-like grip.

His frosted breath glistens in front of him like a deadly mist.

He has no concept of the day or date. But he can tell by the way the light lies across the fields, brushing out the contours of the remaining foliage between tree trunks and stone walls, that it must be late October or early November.

The overnight frost comes more frequently now, as do the long white streaks of cold fog in the mornings, which sometimes persist until late in the day, as thick as syrup.

He looks at the sun, which is suspended over the horizon as if hanging inside an enormous sheet, swollen and tied at the top. Birds take off from behind stone walls, screeching as they circle in the air; they look like vast, eccentric cartwheels rolling through the sky.

Sitting on the edge of the well outside the Green House one day, he sees a man making his way on foot up Zagajnikowa Street.

Although the man is still so far away that he can make out no more than the outlines of the body, he knows it is Feldman. There is something about the way he bobs into every step and incorporates his whole body into a long, dogged, mechanical jog. No other human being walks that way.

He releases the safety catch of the pistol and puts his left hand under his right arm for support as he takes aim. Keeps his arm stretched out until Feldman is close enough to see what Adam has in his hand.

Feldman stops, stares straight into the muzzle of the gun. Mute, uncomprehending.

Adam does not move either.

Feldman deviates slowly sideways, out of the line of fire. Adam tracks his movements with the pistol. Feldman looks so alarmed that Adam can’t help laughing. He lowers the weapon into his lap.

Where on earth did you get hold of that? says Feldman when he gets closer at last. He seems even more wizened beneath his coat and cap than usual; but he’s the same Feldman.

What took you so long? says Adam.

Feldman explains that they have been kept in their quarters in Jakuba Street the whole time. Some mornings they were divided up into work brigades and marched to various places in the ghetto. Mostly it’s been a matter of clearing out offices and departments. Every day they cleared vast amounts of paper out of filing cabinets and desk drawers and then burnt it all in big braziers. He’d no idea the ghetto had produced so much
paper
, he says.

Then they moved on to the workshops. They dismantled and took away the cutting and sanding machines from the furniture factories in Drukarska and Bazarowa. Some of them even had to demount the big steam-powered washtubs in the laundries, the mangles and the sheet presses. The whole lot was taken out to Radogoszcz and loaded onto trains heading west, away from the front.

So that explains the noises in the night. The convoys of marching men he saw at the limits of his visual range were on their way to the station goods yard.

‘Is there anybody left out there?’ he asks.

‘Out where?’

‘At Radogoszcz.’

Feldman shakes his head.

‘There’s only us, from the special unit. A hundred men at most.’

‘Jankiel.’

‘Don’t know. Jankiel’s dead. Most of them are dead.’

Adam is not convinced. He finds it hard to keep track of who is dead and who is still alive. Szaja,
his father
– he has a vague image in his mind of him in the ranks of a group of men being marched out to the station from the Central Jail. And Lajb? All he can see of him now are rats behind the rusty bars of cages. Even Lida looked more alive than Lajb.

‘I’ve brought you a bite to eat,’ Feldman says.

He unwraps a bundle he has had tied inside his coat, a dirty handkerchief containing dry bread, chunks of sausage amounting to a few hundred grams, two shrivelled potatoes. Adam sees himself touching all these desirable things, not in a rush, not greedily, but like an insect exploring a piece of fruit, slowly, tentatively. It must have taken Feldman weeks to assemble such treasure, saving a little of his own meagre ration every day.

‘How did you know I was here?’ says Adam.

‘I didn’t. I was ordered to come and fetch some spades.’

Adam forgets the simplest things. This time he has forgotten to swallow. The saliva is running down the side of his chin. Feldman reaches forward and wipes it away with the back of his hand.

‘There’s no spade here,’ says Adam. ‘I’ve already looked.’

They sit in silence for a while.

Then Feldman asks him how things are going. Adam says he’s getting by. He goes from house to house. He takes whatever he finds. There’s still fruit in most of the gardens: frostbitten and maggoty apples with a sharp, musty taste. There are also beets to hack out of the ground at the old allotments. He even found a patch of fresh onions. Can you believe it, Feldman? Fresh onions. In one house he found a paraffin stove. But no paraffin. He’s been wondering if he could try lighting it with oil. The can of fuel oil he skimmed from the station is still at the nursery, but he hasn’t dared in case it attracts anybody’s attention. Apart from the Germans, he hasn’t seen a soul the whole time, he says.

All the time Adam is talking, Feldman can’t take his eyes off the pistol on his lap. So Adam has to tell him about Samstag after all. He does not really want to, but he knows he has no choice.

Feldman sits there for a long time without saying a word, so long that Adam thinks he is not going to respond at all. But eventually he says they’ve been talking about Samstag in Jakuba. Some claim to know he went on the very last transport, the one Rumkowski and his family took. Some of his own men say that they were ordered to go and look for him. That the Germans, too, were hunting all over the ghetto for him. That they are scared of him. Biebow most of all. Biebow was even said to have offered a reward for anyone, singular or plural, who could catch him alive.

Adam holds up the pistol.

Feldman just shakes his head.

‘And Biebow . . . ?’

Spends most of his time staggering round the ghetto, drunk. Indulges in his own special brand of sharpshooting. Bare-headed, with his sleeves rolled up, bottle in one hand, service pistol in the other. They have got into the way of saying:
Biebow’s coming
. And taking cover as soon as he comes round the corner. The only one of the former ghetto
dygnitarzy
left is Jakubowicz. He’s been given responsibility for what’s left of the Central Tailoring Workshop, downgraded to
kierownik
, but at least he avoided being deported like all the other top dogs. But now even the Central has been shut down and taken apart – the machinery’s going to
Königs Wusterhausen
; they spent all last week moving it – and Biebow has lost his last confidant, presumably the only Jew in the ghetto to whom he felt he could speak entirely openly.

At length, Feldman gets to his feet.

‘And when are the Russians coming?’ says Adam.

He asks as a child might have asked. With words in poster-print letters, and his hand held out as if he expected Feldman to drop the answer into it.

But Feldman just shrugs his shoulders inside his big overcoat. As if the question has been asked so often that it has become irrelevant. – Maybe they’ll have second thoughts when they get here. Maybe they’ll take the Balkans first. Bulgaria’s already declared war on Germany. The Allies have taken Belgium and Holland, are marching on Paris. It’s only a question of time now. But time, time: what can happen over time?

‘I shall freeze to death before they get here,’ says Adam.

He has no other way of expressing it.

‘You won’t freeze to death, Adam,’ says Feldman. ‘People like you don’t freeze to death.’

Then he turns and heads on down to the old nursery to fetch his spades.