The Warsaw Anagrams (26 page)

‘Dr Cohen, please just give my daughter a half-hour of your time. She needs help. I’ll pay you whatever you want.’

I grinned maliciously. ‘Why do you people always think you can buy a Jew with money?’

‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ she replied angrily, but she added in a contrite voice, ‘though I suppose I deserved that.’

‘Look, why should I help you?’

‘Given the unfairness of the world and all that’s happened to your people, maybe you shouldn’t,’ she observed.

Her honesty impressed me. ‘Very well, tell me what’s wrong with your daughter,’ I requested in a business-like tone.

‘A few days ago, she tried to take her own life – with pills. She won’t talk to me about what’s bothering her. She’ll only talk to you.’

‘Me? How does she know about me?’

‘Irene found out you were a well-known psychiatrist before you were …’ She searched for the word; her German was excellent, but she was clearly under an enormous strain.

‘
Emprisonné
,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, imprisoned,’ she agreed.

I discovered that day that Mrs Lanik stepped cautiously through her thoughts, as though searching for hidden motives in herself and others. As a consequence, all her responses were delayed. It was unnerving. I began to believe she led an isolated life – and conversed with very few people.

‘Where is your daughter?’ I asked.

‘She refuses to leave her room. I’m losing my mind.’ She clutched at the collar of her blouse. ‘If … if Irene should die …’

She loves her daughter as I loved Adam
, I thought, and that changed the direction of all my subsequent actions.

‘Mrs Lanik,’ I said more gently, ‘how did you find my address?’

‘My husband is the chief physician for the German forces in Warsaw. It wasn’t hard to locate you.’

‘I don’t have much time. Take me to her.’

On the way up the curving central staircase to the gallery, I told her, ‘I’ll want to bring some things back to the ghetto with me – food mostly.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Find me a dozen lemons – two dozen if you can. I’ll also want cheese and meat, and good bread and coffee. And pipe tobacco – Achmed, if you can find it. And I’ll take you up on your offer to pay me – two hundred złoty per session.’

‘Of course, though it might be difficult to find so many lemons.’

‘If you can’t get them, I’ll need oranges or fresh cabbage.’

Standing in front of her daughter’s door, I faced Mrs Lanik again. To my surprise, I was embarrassed now about my shabby clothing and withered state – suddenly arm in arm with my desire to return to a normal life.

‘I want you to order the Germans to take me home in silence,’ I told her. ‘I won’t see your daughter unless they promise not to speak to me – or hurt me in any way.’

‘Very well. I’ll take care of it.’

‘And tell them not to touch any of the food you give me. You’re going to have to threaten them with reprisals.’

‘Leave it to me,’ she assured me. ‘Can we go in now?’

When I gave my permission, she knocked. ‘Irene …?’ she called softly, but there was no reply. ‘Dr Cohen is here. We’re coming in.’

She tried the door handle, but it was locked.

‘Irene, this is Dr Cohen,’ I began. ‘I don’t have much time. Let me in, please.’

The girl whispered through the door, ‘Only you, Dr Cohen, not my mother.’

Mrs Lanik shook her head violently, as if her daughter was sentencing her for a crime she hadn’t committed.

‘Irene will be safe with me,’ I told her. ‘Sit in the foyer, and when I come out we’ll talk about what I’ve learned. And bring me strong coffee, as well,’ I added, since the efficient heating in the house was making me drowsy. ‘When it’s ready, have your servant knock on the door and leave it on the floor. I’ll come out and get it.’

Mrs Lanik looked back as she crept down the stairs. She gripped the railing hard; I realized she was close to fainting.

I called to Irene through the door in German again, telling her that we were alone. After a few seconds, I heard the latch click. A blue eye peeked in the doorway.

Irene was a willowy girl, and nearly six feet tall, though she had the hunched posture of someone who had been taunted for years about her height.

After opening the door, she marched to the back of the room, anxious to put some distance between us. She had her mother’s short blonde hair and mesmerizing eyes. Her earrings were tiny silver bells.

She smiled at me fleetingly, standing between the head of her bed and a leather armchair positioned for a view out the window, then turned to the side abruptly, as though having just remembered to withhold her feelings. The oblique light from the afternoon sun made crescents of deep shadow under her eyes. The way she held her hands knitted tightly together seemed a bad sign.

She wore modest, impeccably pressed clothes – a silvery-green woollen skirt and an embroidered Ukrainian blouse. I had the sensation that they weren’t what she liked – that she dressed this way to please someone else.

Her shelves were neatly packed with books and stuffed animals. A Picasso print of a sad-faced harlequin was framed behind her bed.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she told me in an unsure voice. She spoke in German.

‘Thank you for letting me in,’ I replied.

She grabbed one of the blue silk cushions from her bed, took off her furry slippers and sat down in the armchair, folding her bare feet girlishly underneath her bottom. Placing the cushion over her lap, she leaned towards the window and gazed at the lawn below as if concerned about what might be taking place down there in her absence. Whether on purpose or not, she gave me a good look at the bald spot at the crown of her head where she must have been pulling out her hair.

A patient’s initial gestures often indicate how forthcoming they intend to be, and Irene had chosen to show me a symptom of her misery before even saying a word.

I sat down on her bed. Though the girl didn’t speak or look at me, I was at ease; this silence between myself and a patient had been a kind of home to me for many years.

‘Now, Irene, I’m just going to ask you some questions. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

I didn’t have much time, so I tried a shortcut that had worked for me in the past. ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?’ I asked. I was hoping she’d accidentally reveal what was pursuing her by telling me her fantasy of escape.

‘You mean, where in Warsaw?’ she questioned.

She was afraid to dream too ambitiously, which likely meant she felt powerless to flee her predicament. ‘No, anywhere,’ I replied. ‘London, Rome, Cairo …’ Finding my professional voice again gave me confidence.

‘I’d go to France,’ she replied. ‘To Nantes.’

I heard Swiss vowels in her reply, though she was speaking High German.

‘Why Nantes?’ I asked.

‘Because my grandparents live there.’

‘Would you feel safer with them?’ I questioned.

Grimacing, she moved her cushion over her chest and clutched it tightly.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

Straining for breath, looking at me directly for the first time, she replied, ‘There’s a constriction in my chest that comes and goes. And when it’s bad, it’s like a big rough hand is pressing down on me. Sometimes I think I’m going to suffocate.’ She fixed me with a desolate look. ‘Dr Cohen, it’s this house … it terrifies me.’

When tears came, she faced the window again, afraid to see my reaction.

‘What about this house scares you?’ I asked.

For a long time, she made no reply. I took out my pipe and examined the bowl to keep from looking at her and making her more uncomfortable.

‘I often think someone is hiding underneath my bed at night,’ she finally told me. ‘Or in my wardrobe, or in the dining room – a person who wants to kill me. I check everywhere I can think of, but it’s too big a house to be sure I haven’t missed something – or that the killer isn’t one step ahead of me.’

A knock on the door startled me. ‘Your coffee, Dr Cohen,’ a woman called out.

I asked Irene to excuse me a moment. Opening the door a crack, I saw an elderly maidservant walking away. On the floor was a wooden tray on which she’d placed an elegant porcelain coffee pot – white, with a black handle – and a matching cup. I carried the tray inside and put it on the girl’s bed.

‘Irene, this is a mansion, and it must have lots of hidden corners and passageways,’ I told her as I poured a first cup. ‘Our deepest fears tend to hide where we have trouble finding them. But I’m going to help you find them.’

She nodded her thanks, but guilt entered deeply into me; who could say if I’d ever come here again? I stole a look at my watch. It was 2.20. I wondered where Rowy and Ziv were at that moment. I decided to stay with Irene until three.

I took a first sip of coffee, but its dark flavour was so redolent of better times that I wasn’t sure I ought to drink it.

‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked the girl.

‘Four months.’ She looked far into the distance out her window. ‘Sometimes I imagine that the killer is outside the house and … and trying to get in any way he can,’ she told me cautiously, and with the effort of recall, as though groping her way through memory. ‘I start worrying that my parents might have left the front door open, which would allow him to get inside, so I check that it’s locked before going to my room. And I end up coming downstairs several times in the night to make sure it’s still locked.’

‘Do you think your parents might leave the door open on purpose – or unlock it after you’ve locked it?’

Those were risky questions, since they touched on her relationship with her parents. Irene faced me and held my gaze, wanting to see the kind of man who would ask them – above all, whether I would give up on her if she spoke to me honestly and revealed something of which other people might disapprove. So I looked at her hard and long. It was an important moment – the hub around which our subsequent conversation would turn. She didn’t flinch or even blink. I began to believe she was a courageous girl.

‘Please tell me what you’re thinking,’ I prodded.

‘I never before imagined that the door …’ She raised a hand over her mouth, assaulted by fear. At length, she said, ‘I love my parents. I want you to know that.’

And yet one or both of them is threatening to hurt you
, I thought.

‘I believe you,’ I told her, ‘but it’s hard to trust even the people we love most when we find ourselves in a new environment. I learned that when I moved into the ghetto.’

She started; she hadn’t expected me to talk about my own life. Drawing her knees into her chest and hugging them, she asked, ‘Is it … is it very bad in there?’

‘Yes, it’s bad, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it at the moment.’

‘No, maybe there is,’ she declared.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening.’

I was impressed by her solidarity, but at the time she seemed hopelessly naive.

‘Maybe so,’ I told her. ‘But we need to talk about you for the moment. Now, Irene, can you tell me what the murderer looks like in your imagination?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t recognize him, if that’s what you mean. But I sometimes see he has an awful face, and he looks at me in a dreadful way.’

A sense of déjà vu made me halt as I reached for my coffee cup. Where had I heard her last words?

‘What makes his look so dreadful?’ I asked.

‘Something in his eyes – something dark and purposeful,’ she replied, moaning, and she began twisting the hair on top of her head.

‘And do you have any idea why he would want to kill you?’

‘No, I don’t know!’ she replied in desperation. Taking a deep breath, she tugged out the tangle of hairs she’d twisted around her index finger.

I grimaced, but she said reassuringly, as if I were the one in pain, ‘It’s all right, Dr Cohen, it doesn’t really hurt. And even if it does, it’s a good kind of pain.’

‘Why is it good?’

‘I’m not sure. I only know it is.’

‘Because you’re the one causing it?’ I asked, hoping I’d come near the truth; I needed to build up her confidence in me if I was going to help her.

She thought about my theory. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she told me, but she didn’t sound convinced.

To my subsequent questions, Irene went on to tell me that the killer wasn’t interested in robbing her. She pictured him stabbing her in the heart. She would bleed to death.

‘When did you start believing your life was in danger?’ I asked.

‘Maybe a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Did something unusual happen then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you get ill? Or did you have a quarrel with your mother or father? Maybe it was something that you—’

‘My father is dead to me!’ she interrupted roughly, probably hoping to shock me; perhaps my questions about the timing of her troubles were too threatening, and she wanted to push me away.

‘Dead to you, how?’

‘He’s never wanted anything to do with me.’

‘I don’t understand. I thought you lived here with your—’

‘Rolf Lanik is my stepfather,’ she cut in. ‘My father is a radiologist named Werner Koch. He lives in Switzerland, though he visited us here in Poland – once, two months ago.’

‘How long has your mother been married to your stepfather?’

‘Let’s see, I was six, so that makes … eleven years. He’s a good man. In fact, Rolf is the best thing that ever happened to me.’

She spoke as though I’d obliged her to defend his honour, which led me to believe he might have been her tormentor, though he might not have been aware of the damage he was doing.

‘Why is he so good for you?’ I asked.

‘Because he gets us whatever we need. And I’m in an excellent school for foreigners. He’s kind and generous, and he loves us – me and my mother.’

‘And yet he’s made you move to a house that you hate.’

‘That’s not his fault, Dr Cohen! Or do you think it is?’ she snapped.

I was glad that she felt secure enough to reveal her anger. ‘I’m not in a position to say,’ I told her. ‘But tell me, what does your mother think of your new surroundings?’