The Warsaw Anagrams (11 page)

‘Are there medications that will help?’ I asked.

‘Some ghetto physicians say that a Swiss serum has
produced
good improvements in patients, but it costs a thousand złoty a vial.’

‘My God! Can your father get me some?’

‘Yes, though I don’t know how long it will take him.’

‘I’ll go and see him. I’ll sell Hannah’s engagement ring to raise the money.’

‘No, please, don’t do that!’ she said sharply. Then, sensing she’d only heightened my sense of guilt, she added, ‘I only meant there must be something else you can sell.’

‘Not if I need to raise a thousand złoty in a hurry.’

Sitting on the floor in front of the clothes chest I’d shared with Adam, I opened the bottom drawer, clawed my way past his tangle of underwear and socks, and unhooked the ring from its hiding place. Holding it in my hand made me feel faint. My mouth was as dry as dust.

I held up the ring for Ewa to see. ‘It’s a two-carat diamond with a gold band.’

I got to my knees but was too dizzy to go any further. Ewa helped me up and fetched me a glass of water. After a long drink, I sat down on my bed again.

‘I’d appreciate it if you would sell it for me,’ I told her.

‘Me? My God, Erik, I don’t know anything about selling jewellery.’

‘Neither do I, but you’re a pretty young woman, so you’ll get a better price. You can say it’s yours – for sympathy.’

When I held it out to her, she moved her hands behind her back. ‘No, don’t make me,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll get nervous and ruin things. Please, Erik …’

Tears appeared in her eyes and her shoulders hunched; she had transformed back into her usual self, so I didn’t insist.

When I asked if she knew where Rowy Klaus might be, Ewa glanced at her watch and told me he was giving a piano lesson on Sienna Street, which was in the Little Ghetto, a relatively well-off section of our territory that was separated from the bigger – and poorer – section by Chłodna Street. In fact, Sienna Street was the most elegant address in the ghetto.

I left right away; I needed to question him about Anna and could elicit his advice on selling my ring at the same time. On the way, I got myself deloused at the disinfection bathhouse at 109 Leszno Street.

What unlikely marvels I saw in the shop windows that afternoon while waiting for Rowy! – six big fresh trout lying in a tub of ice; a burlap bag brimming with coffee beans from Ethiopia; and a bottle of Sandeman port from 1922. In the window of M. Rackemann & Sons, Tobacconists was a Star of David made out of twenty-four mustard-coloured packets of Gauloises cigarettes. The design had the unexpected, peculiar beauty of a Dadaist collage.

A blonde young prostitute with caved-in cheeks and frantic eyes soon caught my attention. She stood outside the Rosenberg Soup Kitchen, rubbing her spidery hands together, gazing around nervously, as though waiting for an unreliable friend. Had she been an art student? She dressed like the subject of an Otto Dix painting, with red stockings on her stick-figure legs and a lumpy, fox-headed stole slung around her neck.

When she asked me if I was looking for some affection, I thanked her for her interest but told her she’d have better luck with a younger man.

By the time Rowy emerged, the sun was going down. He was dressed in grey except for a crimson woollen scarf, which coiled around his neck and ribboned behind him in the wind like a banner proclaiming his youth. His walk was eager and untroubled – as though he were bouncing along on daydreams. I hailed him with a wave.

His face brightened on seeing me, which pleased me.

‘Greetings, Erik!’ he said as he approached.

‘I like your scarf,’ I told him, and we shook hands.

‘Ewa – she knitted it for me,’ he replied.

From the way he smiled, I could see he was deeply in love – and that his new way of walking was meant to let the world know. Maybe this was his first great passion.

‘I just found out that you studied with Noel Anbaum,’ I told him.

‘Man, that was years ago!’ he replied in jaunty German, adding in Yiddish, ‘I hope you didn’t come all the way across town just to confirm that.’

‘No. What I really need to know is if you knew his
granddaughter
Anna.’

‘Sure did. She auditioned for the chorus. Noel set it up for her. Why?’

‘She’s dead – murdered just like Adam. And her hand was cut off.’

Rowy gasped, then swept his gaze across the rooftops behind me. He was likely trying to get a glimpse of his future, because he told me in a solemn voice, ‘Makes you wonder if any of us will get out of here alive.’

‘You’ll make it. You’re near the top of my list.’

He fiddled with the splint on his finger. ‘You could be wrong.’

I grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t predict your own death – I won’t allow it!’ The clenched force behind my words made him draw back. I let him go. ‘Sorry, forgive me,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ he replied, and I saw in the depth of his dark eyes that he would have embraced me had we known each other better.

‘I’m not quite myself of late,’ I told him.

‘How could you be? Erik, I …’ He struggled to find the right words, then shrugged defeatedly. ‘I’ve wanted a chance to talk to you, but you left the funeral so quickly, and …’

‘Rowy, I can’t talk to you about my nephew just now. It would end any chance I have of doing anything useful. Now listen, I don’t remember Anna singing at the concert. Was she there?’

‘No. She passed the solfeggio exam, but she never showed up for any rehearsals. A few days later, I went to her home, but her mother said she wasn’t well and was asleep in bed.’

‘So you never talked to her again?’

‘No, I did.’ Rowy put on his gloves. ‘I went back again a few days later because she had a soprano voice worth training, and she’d have added some needed balance to the upper end of the chorus. This time I saw her, and I begged her to go for her check-up with Ewa’s father, but I never heard anything more about her.’

‘How did she seem to you?’

‘Unhappy. And fragile. The poor girl was just skin and bone.’

‘She didn’t by chance mention Adam when you saw her?’ I questioned.

‘No. Did they know each other?’

‘That’s what I have to find out. Rowy, listen, I’ve got something else to ask you that requires a little privacy. Let’s go inside.’

The young man hooked his arm in mine as we walked towards a nearby apartment house. I imagined he was close to his father. The psychiatrist in me would have bet he was the youngest child in his family.

Once we were hidden on the stairwell, I took out Hannah’s ring. ‘Know anything about selling jewellery?’

‘Just that you’ll get a better price outside the ghetto.’ He took the ring and studied it, then handed it back. ‘Inside, it’s become a buyer’s market. I sold Papa’s flute the other day and got next to nothing.’

As I’d guessed, that left me only one choice, but it was too late in the day for an excursion to the Other Side; I’d go in the morning.

I passed Rackemann’s Tobacconists after Rowy left for home, and the French cigarettes in the window gave me the idea that the owner might be able to help me with an important request – or know someone who could. A woman in her fifties, with short, hennaed hair and too much rouge on her puffy cheeks, sat crocheting behind the counter. ‘Is Mr Rackemann in?’ I asked.

She laid her crochet work in her lap. ‘My husband passed away in ’37.’

‘Then you must have made the Gauloises star in the window.’

‘Yes, that was me. How can I help you?’

‘Maybe you can put your hands on something unusual for me,’ I told her. ‘Two things, as a matter of fact.’

I waited an hour for my first request to be fulfilled by Mrs Rackemann. She told me then that my second item would require a great deal more work and would cost me the astronomical sum of 1,300 złoty if I wanted it by the next morning, as I’d indicated. I agreed to that fee, and since I couldn’t pay her the full sum right away, I gave her as a deposit all the cash I had on me – nearly 200 złoty – as well as my gold wedding band.

It was just after five in the afternoon – morbid darkness in the Polish winter – by the time I made it to Mikael’s flat, which doubled as his medical office. In the waiting room, the tiny,
quick-moving
nurse whom I’d met briefly when Adam came for his check-up sized me up from her desk in the corner, and her disapproving look told me I’d failed whatever test she’d conceived for me. She told me in a stern voice that Dr Tengmann was with a patient, but she poked her head into his consultation room to let him know I was here. Too jittery to sit, I stood by the window and watched a water-seller accosting passers-by on the street below. A wooden bar was stretched horizontally across his shoulders, with a tin pail hanging from each end. He wore galoshes wrapped in what looked like birch-tree bark.

We were back in the Middle Ages, and the Nazis had dragged us there – which meant that the question we now needed to ask was: how far back in time would be enough for them?

A young woman with a plaster cast on her wrist soon came in and whispered to the nurse, who instructed her to sit and wait on the green velveteen couch to the side of the window where I was standing.

‘Excuse me, but would you like to sign my cast?’ she asked me after a minute or two, smiling hopefully. She held it up to show me it was covered with signatures.

She wanted to be nice to an
alter kacker
with grey stubble on his chin and dead bats for shoes, so I did as she asked, except that I wrote the name
Erik Honec
in extravagant Gothic lettering – what I imagined a professional writer might do.

She told me her name was Naomi. ‘Are you Czech?’ she asked me.

‘Originally, but I’ve lived in Warsaw for twenty years now.’

My lie was a key clicking open a lock – the rusted one imprisoning me in myself. I felt as if I’d escaped a trap whose existence I’d failed to notice until now.

Mikael Tengmann saw Naomi and two more patients before coming out to see me. It was a few minutes before six. By then, the nurse – Anka – had warmed to me and made us a pot of tea. I was on my second cup and was sipping it – as I’d learned from a Russian friend in Vienna – through a sugar crystal I kept between my teeth. The crystal was a gift from Anka.

‘Hello, Erik!’ Mikael exclaimed, shaking my hand exuberantly. He wore a white medical coat but kept woollen slippers on his feet. ‘Sorry to have made you wait.’

‘That’s all right,’ I replied. I took out what was left of my crystal and sealed it in an old receipt I had in my pocket as though it were a precious gem, which made his eyes radiate sympathetic amusement.

‘I expect you want to talk about Stefa,’ he said.

‘Yes. I’m very grateful you came to see her. I want to buy serum for her. How long will it take you to get some?’

‘A day or two. I know a young smuggler who specializes in medications. I’ll get him right on it. But, Erik …’ Mikael grimaced. ‘It’s expensive – a thousand złoty.’

‘I know – Ewa told me. I promise I’ll have the money for you tomorrow – the day after, at the latest.’

He waved away my concern. ‘I trust you. The important thing is for Stefa to get well.’

Turning to his nurse, who was writing in the office appointment book, he said, ‘Anka, I’m sorry to have kept you so late today. You can get going whenever you want.’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ she replied, smiling warmly. ‘Thank you.’

‘Listen, Mikael,’ I said, ‘I also need to talk to you about a girl named Anna Levine. Rowy Klaus told me she might have come to see you.’

‘Anna Levine? I can’t recall her.’

I took out my photograph and handed it to him. Mikael put on his tortoiseshell glasses, and I noticed now they were on a chain made of linked paper clips.

‘Classy chain,’ I commented.

He laughed brightly. ‘Helena made it for me.’

Jealousy surged inside me, but I hid it as best I could. He studied the photograph. ‘I remember this girl,’ he told me, ‘but Anna wasn’t the name she gave me.’ He handed me back the picture. ‘And she never mentioned any chorus.’

‘That seems odd.’

‘Erik, I think we’ll be far more comfortable in my office,’ he said, gesturing me towards the open door at the back.

I sensed he didn’t want Anka to hear any more of our conversation.

Once we were in his office, he offered me the chair in front of his cluttered desk. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

Behind Mikael were his sensual photographs of the Alps, and I speculated now that they were to remind himself that a monumental natural world – far beyond the control of the Nazis – still existed. And was waiting for him.

Sitting down, I asked, ‘So what name did the girl give you?’

‘I don’t think she even gave me a name,’ he replied, taking off his medical coat and hanging it on a hook. ‘Whatever the case, I didn’t write it down.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she asked me not to take any notes about our conversation.’

He took a cigar from the box on his desk and offered me one, but I was feeling too tired to make the effort. ‘If I remember correctly,’ he continued, ‘she came here without an appointment.’

‘So you’d never seen her before?’

‘No.’ Kicking off his slippers, he sat down and leaned back with a grateful sigh. ‘How do you know her?’ he asked.

I told him about my conversation with Dorota, focusing on Anna’s relationship with Paweł Sawicki. Mikael lit his cigar, sucking in so hard that his cheeks hollowed. He looked like the eccentric doctor in a children’s story – off-kilter and endearing. Or was he making a great effort to appear that way and was someone else entirely? I again felt as though I’d wandered on to the stage set of a play, and that everyone had his lines but me.

When I finished my account, Mikael said in a horrified voice, ‘This place, this time we’re living through, it defies description.’ He stood up, went to the window and opened the pane, taking in a bottle of vodka that had been chilling on the outside ledge.

‘May I pour you a drink?’ he asked, carrying the bottle to his desk.