The Warsaw Anagrams (10 page)

‘She shouted that I was a mean-spirited witch.’ In a resentful voice, she added, ‘My daughter used to call me Fraulein Rottenmeier.’

‘Who?’

‘The hideous housekeeper from
Heidi
. That was Anna’s favourite book.’ Dorota sighed. ‘If only … if only I could talk to her just once more – make her understand.’ The impossibility of that made Dorota gaze inside herself. ‘Anyway, she refused to give up Paweł, so we quarrelled, and when my husband joined in …’ She shook her head at the troubling memory. ‘He threatened to use his belt on her. Which was when Anna promised she’d never see her boyfriend again. And maybe that really was her intention. I can’t say. But if it was, then she changed her mind because she started leading a double life.’

‘In what way?’ I asked, concluding that if Anna had given in without a longer quarrel then it was probably because she’d felt the stiff leather sting of her father’s belt before.

‘You know the sort of thing girls do,’ Dorota replied. ‘She’d tell me she was going roller-skating with a girlfriend, then meet Paweł at a cinema. After we moved to the ghetto, I searched her dresser and found photographs of the two of them at a picnic in Saski Gardens.’ She produced another picture from the pages of
Marie Antoinette
and slid it across the table to me as though pushing an evil talisman out of her life.

Anna was laughing freely in the photograph. Paweł was embracing her from behind, though only his hands were visible – his face and arms had been cut away. Given how Anna and Adam had been disfigured, it seemed dangerous for Dorota to have cut away pieces of the young man’s image.

My uneasiness on holding the photograph seemed a bad sign for my own mental state; it was as if the ghetto were compelling me to believe in the power of amulets and spells, like Dorota and so many others.

‘Did Paweł’s parents approve of Anna?’ I asked.

‘My daughter told me they adored her, but I checked on the family and learned that the judge had become a vicious anti-Semite since the Nazi occupation.’

I asked if I could keep the photograph while I hunted for Anna and Adam’s killer, and Dorota agreed. She went on to tell me that Paweł and his family lived at 24 Wilcza Street. ‘He promised to visit Anna in the ghetto. At least, that’s what she told me. He never came or even called that I know of. Then Anna announced that she wouldn’t eat again until she saw him – announced it like a decree! That’s why she lost so much weight and couldn’t wear her ring. My husband started forcing her to eat supper, but after bed she’d sneak off to the bathroom and make herself sick. It took me two weeks to realize that’s what she was doing. By then, she was a living skeleton. Dr Cohen,’ Dorota said, opening her hands as if to make an appeal to reason, ‘her wilfulness was killing our family.’ She hunched forward, circling those secrets of hers again, though this time I sensed it was to hold something back. ‘This will sound strange, but I felt I was living in a house that was falling to pieces. Every shadow was menacing. And Anna’s appearance – it scared me. Once, I stood her in front of the mirror in my bedroom and showed her how gaunt she was, but she insisted she was disgustingly fat. Can you believe it? Of course, she blamed my husband and me for everything – for insisting she eat, for keeping her apart from Paweł. She put us through hell.’

‘Did she ever succeed in speaking with him?’

‘Not that I know of. When I called Paweł’s mother, she told me she’d sent the boy to a boarding school. I told Anna, but she screamed at me that I was lying. She wrote letters to him. I allowed that in exchange for her agreeing to eat again. But she never received any replies – at least, not that I know of.’

I went on to question Dorota about her daughter’s schooling and friends, hoping to chance upon a connection to Adam, and for once, Jewish knitting proved helpful; she soon told me that Anna had been very close to her maternal grandfather, whose name was Noel Anbaum.

‘The musician – he’s your father?’ I questioned.

‘Yes, do you know him?’

‘I saw him perform when I was much younger. Dorota, Anna wasn’t in a chorus, by any chance?’

‘No.’

‘How about your son?’

‘No, why?’

‘Adam was, and I saw your father at the concert.’

When I asked Dorota for her father’s address, she looked at her watch and replied, ‘If you hurry, you’ll be able to catch him playing outside the Nowy Azazel Theatre.’

The fingers of Noel Anbaum’s black leather gloves had been cut away and his crocheted blue muffler had a corner that was unravelling in a
payot
curl, but he still cut a slim, dashing figure – a grey-templed, Roman-nosed Casanova – in his wine-red zoot suit and black gaucho hat. Standing on Nowolipie Street in front of the Nowy Azazel, his right foot up on a fraying green and gold brocade chair that looked as if it had been nicked from a local bordello, he was playing an undulating blues song on his accordion, bellowing the roller-coaster chord changes in and out with his left hand, the wizened fingers of his right coaxing a sensual vibrato out of the chipped and yellowing keyboard. He doubled the melody in his gritty voice, braving an English that was twisted into absurd shapes by Yiddish vowels. One line he must have improvised stuck in my head because he sang it with the provocative bravado of a gunslinger:
If I cabaret on Saturday and curse Herr Hitler all day Sunday, ain’t nobody’s business if I do
…

On the high notes, Noel’s voice sounded like sandpaper being scratched, and its raspy imperfection made me fear he’d teeter off the melody, but he never did. His singing was a kind of high-wire act, which was probably why so many złoty had been tossed into the slate-grey velvet of his accordion case; after all, if his performance were effortless, would it be worth paying for? He himself kept his eyes closed, swaying luxuriously, as though his music were a slow tide carrying him deep into himself.

I threaded through the crowd towards a clearing that had formed around a bearded beggar sitting on the sidewalk about ten paces to Noel’s left. The ribs of the bare-chested man jutted out dangerously, like a galley with its construction exposed, and his caved-in belly was criss-crossed by bloody scabies tracks. The stench of his having soiled himself made me cup my hands over my mouth and nose.

After Noel had finished his song and bowed to his audience, I went to him. ‘My name is Erik Cohen. My wife and I used to see you play at the Esplanade. You were amazing.’

‘That was during a previous lifetime,’ he replied, laughing merrily. ‘As you can see, I’m paying for my past sins in this one.’

‘No, you’re still wonderful!’ I told him.

Smiling gratefully, he shook my hand. His trembled badly. Laying his hat on the seat of his chair, he picked up a Źywiec beer bottle from the ground. As he took a sip, he spotted me eyeing his shaking hand. ‘Damn thing has a life of its own these days,’ he told me. ‘Except when it gets near a keyboard.’

‘I need to talk with you.’

He cupped his hand behind his ear with sweet-natured eagerness and leaned so far towards me that he started to fall over and I had to prop him up. He was a bit drunk.

‘Let’s go somewhere warm,’ I proposed.

‘No, if I get comfortable now, I won’t want to come back out. Let’s stay here.’

‘Listen, Noel, your daughter Dorota came to see me. She told me about Anna.’

His expression darkened.

‘You see why I’d prefer to be alone with you,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, but talking about Anna does me no good,’ he replied.

After he showed me the smile of a man excusing a frailty, he put down his beer, lifted his accordion and started to play, but I grabbed his wrist.

‘Why do you want to torture me?’ he asked glumly, looking at me with so solemn a wish to be understood that I felt ashamed.

‘Please, Noel,’ I pleaded, ‘my grandnephew, Adam, he was also murdered – just like Anna. All I need is for you to tell me why you attended a choral concert at the end of January. Twelve children sang Bach. Adam was one of them. It was—’

‘I remember the concert,’ he interrupted. ‘I was there because of Rowy Klaus – the conductor. He studied piano and music theory with me when he was a boy.’

‘So Rowy invited you?’

‘Yes, we’ve stayed in touch all these years.’

‘Thank you, Noel. I’m grateful.’

As I started away, he called my name and said in a resonant voice, ‘“May the angel who redeems me from all evil bless the children.”’

After I’d nodded my agreement, his eyes fluttered closed and he entered the tide of another song. Its melody rose ghost-like out of my childhood, and though I was unable to identify it at the time, I later recalled that it was Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92, which reads, ‘My eyes have seen the defeat of my adversaries; my ears have heard the rout of my wicked foes.’

A marketplace had formed behind Noel, taking advantage of his popularity, and I zigzagged around shoppers until I was brought to a halt by a group of
ghetto mushrooms
: shoeshine boys sitting on wooden stools, their soot-smudged faces hidden in shadow by the peaks of their woollen caps, their hands stained black. One waif had a shaved head and a crone’s joyless face. Cuttings of an old rug were tied around his feet. He looked at me with dull, lifeless eyes.

I ought to have led him off to buy boots or simply smiled at him, but I didn’t – a measure of how far I’d let exile draw me away from myself.

Passing a small pyramid of cauliflowers in a pushcart, I realized they’d make a tasty supper. My heart soared to have happened upon one good and generous thing.

The seller was a miniature sphinx, of a kind common in Warsaw: though barely five feet tall, and surely in her sixties, she had the coarse, big-boned hands of a locksmith. ‘Two,’ I told her, showing her the smile I’d withheld from the shoeshine boy, but she chose a pair from near the bottom of her pile that were covered with a nicotine-yellow ooze. She held them out to me, asking for four złoty each, as if they were the models of perfection she kept on top.

Frowning, I waved them away. I knew I ought to have simply eased my ten-złoty note and my disappointment back in my pocket and headed off, but I wanted to give her a chance to reconsider – a chance for grace. Though maybe I really just wanted to start a quarrel. ‘Eight złoty for those
meiskeits
?’ I questioned.

‘That’s the price.’

‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’

‘What do you mean?’ she replied, outraged by my implication, raising a cauliflower triumphantly in each gnarled hand.

Taking a giant step towards her, I thrust up my thumb and index finger. ‘How many fingers do you see?’ I demanded.

She leered at me, sensing a deception. ‘Two,’ she replied hesitantly.

‘So you’re not blind, after all – which means you chose the worst ones on purpose! Tell me, what’s it feel like to try to cheat a hungry man?’

Even as I spoke, I was aware that I sounded like a Dostoevsky drunk, but I couldn’t stop myself.

‘You old fool, get the hell out of here before I call my husband! He’ll punch your face in!’

Her contempt backed me into a tight corner, and – stupidly – I chose the easiest way out. ‘Impossible!’ I scoffed at her. ‘Whores don’t have husbands!’

Her cheeks turned red and she leaned her head back, henlike. When she spat at my feet, I charged her, eager to get my hands around her throat and squeeze, but just as I grabbed the collar of her coat I flew forward on to my knees, crying out from the pain.

As I came to myself, I found I was lying on my side, my hands up by my face – a protective position I must have learned as a kid. The burly young man who’d knocked me over was cursing me in Yiddish. Was he her son? I never found out.

‘
Ver di kapore
!
’ I snarled at him. That had been my mother’s way of saying
drop dead
!
I hadn’t used it in half a century.

My attacker continued cursing me, but now in Polish, as if one language wasn’t enough to express all his disdain. I stood up with difficulty and limped away, holding my wrist, which was very tender. Just past Pawiak Prison I stopped at a produce shop and purchased potato skins for soup and three wormy cabbages. I had a good cry in a bombed-out, ground-floor flat, sitting on the rim of the soil-filled bathtub that some clever soul must have been planning to use for planting vegetables in the spring.

Self-hatred stalked me home, though it comforted me to find Ewa and Helena watching over my niece, who was sleeping with her arm over her eyes. Helena looked at my torn trousers and dashed to me as I stood in the doorway, needing reassurance. I lifted her up and pressed my lips to her ear, her favourite spot for kisses.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked.

‘I tripped on a cauliflower,’ I replied, forcing a smile.

After I put the girl down, Ewa asked her to watch over Stefa, then led me into my room as though on a mission, easing the bedroom door closed behind her.

‘I don’t want Helena to hear our conversation,’ she whispered.

‘Very well,’ I agreed. I tossed my bag of potato skins and my cabbages on the bed.

‘Listen,’ she said, brushing a tense hand back through her hair, ‘my father says that Stefa has typhus. And she’s had it a while – maybe too long.’

Ewa continued speaking, but frantic wings of panic were beating at my ears, blocking out her voice. ‘Give me a moment,’ I told her.

She helped me out of my coat and opened my collar. I sat down on the mattress.

‘Over the next few weeks, Stefa will need nursing,’ she told me. ‘I can take over in the evenings, but you may have to quit the Lending Library. Her clothes were infested with lice, of course. To be safe, I had her sheets taken away to be washed. And Papa will have your apartment sprayed with carbolic acid later today. By all accounts, you should be under an order of quarantine, but he managed to avoid that. Listen, Erik, you may be infested, too.’

Her efficiency disoriented me. Ewa – with her small, determined eyes – now seemed one of those timid and reticent women who turn into Joan of Arc when their loved ones are threatened. A useful person in a war.