The Warsaw Anagrams (7 page)

I held him while he cried. The way he shook pushed me deeply into the past.

He brought me into the present again by standing back from me and wiping his eyes. ‘Erik, I don’t think I can touch him,’ he told me.

‘Please, Izzy, it has to be someone who loved him. I can’t let anyone else do this.’

He lifted his hands to explain himself, then lowered them, hopeless.

‘No one else will be as careful as you,’ I told him. ‘I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone.’

Sitting on the ground, he took a tiny pair of tweezers from the small leather case he’d brought with him, then turned to me. ‘For pity’s sake, Erik, don’t watch me.’

Schmul and I waited in the hallway of Stefa’s building. Izzy soon came to us with a two-inch length of white string pinched in his fingers. It bore no traces of blood.

‘Any idea where it’s from?’ he asked, dropping it into my palm.

‘None.’

‘How do you suppose it ended up in Adam’s mouth?’

‘Maybe whoever killed him put it there to tell us something about himself,’ I theorized. ‘A kind of calling card.’

‘You think a Nazi is challenging us to find him?’

‘Maybe. Though it’s just possible that Adam managed to secretly put the string in his mouth – knowing it could somehow identify who did this. He was a smart boy.’

Schmul had overheard us. ‘But Dr Cohen,’ he said, ‘what about his leg? What does that mean?’

‘That? That means whoever did this is not like you or me,’ I replied, ‘or anyone we’ve ever met.’

Stefa and Ewa came to the courtyard a few minutes later, carrying towels, soap and a bucket of hot water. My niece’s eyes were so red that they might have been bleeding.

‘I’ll go to Pinkiert’s and organize everything,’ I assured her. ‘But first tell me if you were able to find out anything at 1 Leszno Street.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.

‘At the place where Adam may have crossed over. Had anyone seen him?’

‘No.’

I left for Pinkiert’s headquarters, which were next to the Jewish Council building on Grzybowska Street, and scheduled a funeral for the next morning at 11 a.m. At 1 Leszno Street, Abram Piotrowicz invited me into his apartment and repeated to me what he’d told Stefa at dawn: the guard, Grylek Baer, hadn’t seen Adam the day before.

‘Then I’ll need a list of secret border crossings,’ I told Abram.

‘Grylek will help. I’ll have someone bring the list to you this afternoon.’

‘And ask him if he knows who hired Adam to smuggle out an ermine jacket.’

I managed to speak to all of Adam’s neighbourhood friends that afternoon. Wolfi swore that he knew of only the Leszno Street crossing, but Sarah, Felicia and Feivel were able to give me the locations of four other places where my nephew might have snuck out. The little mop-haired boy wrung his hands like an adult when we spoke, and through his tears of misery, he bravely confessed that Adam had twice accompanied him ‘overseas’, which made me realize that my nephew had led a double life. Speaking to me with his stunned mother standing behind him, Feivel explained that they’d wanted to steal food, but their nerve abandoned them at the last minute and all they managed to get were handouts of bread and jam from shopkeepers. I kissed the top of his head to reassure him that I wasn’t angry. Still, the mind can be cruel; I wished that he’d died instead of my nephew.

I showed a photograph of Adam to the guard on Krochmalna Street where he and Feivel had passed through to the Other Side, and though he remembered my nephew, he hadn’t seen him in weeks. At the other crossings, no one recognized the boy. I received only one lead: at the last place I tried, the cellar of a dingy restaurant, a tough-looking teenaged smuggler named Marcel suggested I make enquiries at a warehouse on Ogrodowa Street where a tunnel leading to the sewer system had been dug. ‘The passageway is so cramped that only kids can squeeze through,’ he noted. ‘Try to speak to the owner, Sándor Góra.’

I remembered the time Adam came home stinking and thought I now knew why.

As I neared my destination, four youths standing on the roof of an apartment house on the Christian side of the ghetto wall began calling me names and throwing stones at me. Only a moment after I started to run, I took a blow on my shoulder that brought me down to one knee.

The hooligans shouted – laughing – that I made too easy a target. Luckily, nothing seemed to be broken, and my anger gave me strength. Getting to my feet, I rushed on with my coat shielding my head until a woman coming the other way was hit. Shrieking, she toppled sideways, crashing on the pavement.

‘Die, Jew-bitch!’ one of the louts yelled at her in Polish.

Kneeling, I took out my handkerchief and staunched the blood spilling from a deep gash below her ear. A fist-sized chunk of cement lay beside her. She was dazed from the impact. Getting her breath, moaning, she said, ‘I think my collar bone is broken.’

Polish meteorites continued crashing around us. I held my coat over the woman’s face. ‘Can you stand?’ I asked, wanting to lead her closer to the wall, where we couldn’t be hit.

‘No.’

‘I’ll get you to a doctor,’ I assured her, and to test her mind, I asked her what year it was.

‘I should care about the date with my bones broken by
Goyim
?’ she shot back.

I grinned at her outrage. So did she, then she groaned and bit her lip from the pain.

A tall young man appeared beside me from out of nowhere. Cradling the woman in his arms, he lumbered off. We found safety in an optometrist’s waiting room.

A half-hour later, after the hoodlums had grown tired of target practice, I got on my way, and I soon reached Góra’s office. He was a paunchy man in too tight a suit, with a polka-dot tie and a pink carnation in his lapel. He made his living these days managing an
import-export
business, he told me with a big noisy laugh. I thought he looked like a circus barker. He reeked of musky-scented cologne.

After I explained my purpose, I handed him my photograph of Adam. As he studied it, he picked his front teeth with the mandarin fingernail on his little finger. Handing the picture back to me, he said, ‘Sorry, never seen him. But there are other tunnels leading into the sewer system. He must have gone through one of them.’ Anticipating my next question, he added, ‘No, I don’t know where any of them are.’

Back at home, I found a stout, pale-skinned young man standing beside the armchair in my room, a hostile look in his small dark eyes. His hands were locked behind his back, and the smoke from his hidden cigarette was ribboning up into the harsh yellow light of the ceiling lamp, where moths had piled up in the cup of glass below the bulb. His camel-hair overcoat was threadbare and the collar of his white shirt was stained. His thick brown hair was chopped short – it looked like porcupine needles. He was
good-looking
in a hard, Slavic way.

‘You must be Dr Cohen,’ he began, speaking Polish.

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m Grylek Baer.’ He spoke gruffly, as if I’d offended him.

‘Ah, so you’re the guard at Leszno Street,’ I said, compensating for my apprehension with a welcoming tone, hanging my coat on its hook.

‘That’s right.’

‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

‘Your niece opened the door. She went to bed a little while ago.’

When we shook hands, he gripped mine hard, as though to prove his greater strength. His fingers were heavily callused. I’d have guessed he was twenty, but the sureness of his stance made me believe he might be a good deal older.

‘Thank you for coming,’ I told him.

Grylek’s jaw throbbed and he took a greedy puff of his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the clay ashtray that Adam had made for me and that I kept on the tea table next to my armchair. He took his time, as though considering what he needed to tell me.

More and more I divided the Jews of Warsaw into two categories – those who’d outlast the Nazis and those who’d join Adam. In my mind, Grylek elbowed and shoved his way right to the front of the first group.

‘Were you able to put together a list of border crossings for me?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but before I give it to you, I have to explain how it works.’ He looked at me as though I’d made trouble for him before. ‘You’ll have to be patient, because there are some things you need to know before I can give you what you want.’

‘What things?’

He took off his coat, folded it neatly and placed it on the chair. His shoulders were broad and powerful, as though he’d been a boxer before our exile, and he seemed a man who enjoyed making others wait. He opened and closed his right fist as though testing his own capacities.
He wants to let me know he’s capable of violence
, I thought.

‘You’re not to mention my name to anyone,’ he began, his tone of warning obvious. ‘And you are not to tell anyone in the Jewish Council about me. Or let on to anyone, in any way, that I was here. I can’t take chances. And if you ever mention who gave you the list that I’m going to give you, I’ll come back for you. Are we clear?’

‘But surely the Jewish leadership all know about what you do,’ I replied.

‘Maybe yes, maybe no. For the time being, they leave me alone. But if they hear too much about my activities, especially from a man like you, they’ll make my life hell.’

‘Like me how?’

‘Spare me the false modesty,’ he replied, annoyance coarsening his voice. ‘You used to be important and you know it. So are we clear or not?’

‘I’d never inform on you,’ I told him, offended.

‘Maybe not on purpose, but Marcel, the young smuggler you met … he told me you’d mentioned me by name. You can’t do that. So, do I have your word?’ He looked at me coldly. I had the feeling he demanded absolute loyalty from those around him.

‘I promise I’ll never use your name,’ I told him.

‘Good. Now,’ he said in a softer tone, ‘if you’ll forgive me some advice, don’t use
anyone
’s real name or address. You’ll end up in the barbed wire yourself if you do.’

‘But why?’

‘Haven’t you noticed all the big
machers
at the Café Hirschfeld?’ he said, switching to Yiddish. ‘They’re becoming King Midases on our imprisonment. And when their gold is threatened …’ He drew a finger across his throat.

He spoke Yiddish to convince me I could trust him despite his hostility, but such a ploy only irritated me. ‘Still,’ I told him, ‘I have to find out what happened to Adam.’

‘And I want you to!’ he assured me. ‘That’s why I’m here, and why I wrote out my list. Where can we sit together?’ he asked eagerly.

‘At the kitchen table,’ I replied, gesturing for him to follow me.

‘Sorry for speaking to you harshly,’ he said, and when I turned to him, he smiled generously; his fever of anxiety had broken. ‘It’s like this, Dr Cohen,’ he said as he sat down. ‘I’m not naive. Things will go wrong for me sooner or later, but I want to put off that day as long as I can. You see what I’m saying?’

‘Absolutely,’ I replied. Sitting opposite him, I felt as if I was his opponent in a game that only he knew how to play.

‘Your friend Abram made a mistake giving you my real name. Stupid risk. I’ve already had a long talk with him.’

‘Abram was upset. I’d just told him about my nephew.’

‘Upset?’ Grylek raised his eyebrows questioningly and added, ‘Wouldn’t you say all of us are upset? Look, Dr Cohen,’ he said in a more friendly tone, ‘let me explain how it is. Everyone in my world uses false names. So if you need to refer to me, call me Rabe – an anagram for Baer.’ He lifted out a square of paper from his shirt pocket and started to unfold it, then stopped. ‘You know, if you’re serious about investigating your grandnephew’s murder, you should adopt an anagram too. I thought about it on the way over here. Try Honec – I once met a Czech novelist with that surname.’

‘I’ll consider it,’ I replied – at the time, simply to please him.

Grylek unfolded his paper and handed it to me. I put on my reading glasses because his letters were tiny and irregular. As I scanned the seven addresses of border crossings he’d jotted down, and the names of their guards, he took out a tin of German cigarettes – Muratti Ariston – and offered me one, which I accepted.

‘Smuggled?’ I asked.

‘You got it!’ he replied, grinning proudly. He lit my cigarette with a theatrical flare to his hand movements, then set the flame to his own and drew in deeply. I had the feeling he’d had dreams of being a Hollywood star when he was younger – and even today enjoyed a dramatic role.

‘Did you learn who asked my nephew to smuggle out an ermine jacket?’ I asked.

‘No luck, though I asked around.’

In my nightmares, Heniek, I have seen Rabe as two men, one of them with a murderous glint in his eyes, speaking Polish, the other a ghetto Puck on the lookout for mischief, and who talks to me in a lilting, happy-go-lucky Yiddish. Still, I’m grateful to him; he made me understand the stakes we were playing for were high.

‘About the list – the names are all anagrams,’ he explained. ‘I’ve altered the street numbers as well.’

‘But I’ll never find the crossings this way!’ I moaned, holding my head in my hands.

‘You will!’ he replied cheerfully, like a magician happy to teach a protégé one of his tricks, ‘because I’m going to explain how it works.’ He opened his right hand to show me numbers written in pairs on his palm. The first coupling was 7-2. ‘When you see seven in an address, change it to two in your head. You got it?’

‘I think so.’

‘And once you know the code, you’ll know all the ghetto’s secrets,’ he joked.

‘I wish,’ I replied.

‘Just memorize the pairs now, and the street names, too. You’ll be able to rearrange them into their real names if you just sit down with a pen and paper for a few minutes. I guarantee it.’

‘I’m not so sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘Look, I’m in no rush. When you tell me you’ve got everything safely in your head, I’ll wash my hand.’

Committing his list to memory proved more difficult than I’d have imagined; I kept thinking of what delight Adam would have taken in this cloak and dagger work. Only after I’d finished – and as Grylek was scrubbing his palm at the sink – did I realize the obvious: my nephew had entered this underworld long before me.