The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Thank you, but I’ve discovered I don’t need to drink any more.’

‘Mind if I make some for myself?’

‘Be my guest.’

While he boiled water, I asked him questions about what had happened since I’d left Warsaw the previous March.

Sighing, he replied, ‘Ech, mostly the same old misery. The big excitement was during the summer – the Russians bombed us. Unfortunately, the numbskull pilots missed Gestapo headquarters, but I’ve heard that Theatre Square was turned to rubble.’ He lowered his voice and leaned towards me. ‘The good news is the Americans have entered the war. The Japanese bombed them a week ago according to the BBC – I’ve a friend with a hidden radio.’

‘Why are you whispering?’

He pointed up to heaven. ‘I don’t want to sound optimistic – God might pull some more pranks on us if He thinks I’m being arrogant.’

Heniek’s superstitiousness would have provoked a sarcastic remark from me in times past, but I’d evidently become more patient in death. ‘So where do you work?’ I asked.

‘A clandestine soap factory.’

‘And you have the day off?’

‘Yes, I woke up this morning with a slight fever.’

‘What’s the date?’

‘The sixteenth of December 1941.’

It was seven days since I’d walked out of the Lublin labour camp where I’d been a prisoner, but by my count I’d taken only five days to reach home, so I’d lost forty-eight hours somewhere under my steps. Maybe time passed differently for the likes of me.

Heniek told me he’d been a printer before moving into the ghetto. His wife and daughter had died of tuberculosis a year earlier.

‘I could live with the loneliness,’ he said, gazing downward to hide his troubled eyes, ‘but the rest, it’s… it’s just too much.’

I knew from experience that the rest meant guilt, as well as more subtle and confusing emotions for which we had no adequate name.

He dropped his nettle leaves into the white ceramic flowerpot he used for a teapot. Then, looking up with renewed vigour, he asked after my family, and I told him that my daughter Liesel was in Izmir. ‘She was working at an archaeological site when the war broke out, so she stayed there.’

‘Have you been to see her yet?’

‘No, I had to come here first. But she’s safe. Unless…’ I jumped up, panicked. ‘Turkey hasn’t entered the war, has it?’

‘No, no, it’s still neutral territory. Don’t worry.’

He poured boiling water over his nettle leaves in a slow and perfect circle, and his exactitude charmed me. I sat back down.

‘Excuse my curiosity, Erik, but why have you come back to us?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure. And I think that any answer I might be able to give you wouldn’t make much sense unless I told you about what happened to me in the ghetto – about my nephew most of all.’

‘So, what’s stopping you? We could spend all day together, if you like.’

A mischievous glint appeared in Heniek’s eyes. Despite his grief and loneliness, he seemed to be eager for a new adventure.

‘I’ll tell you a little later,’ I replied. ‘Being able to talk with you… it’s unnerved me.’

Heniek nodded his understanding. After he’d had his tea, he suggested we go for a walk. He carried a bag of potatoes to his sister, who shared a two-bedroom flat with six other tenants near the Great Synagogue, then, together, we listened to Noel Anbaum singing outside the Nowy Azazel Theatre. His accordion made the most brilliant red and gold butterfly-shapes flutter across my eyes – a glorious and strange sensation, but one I’ve gotten used to of late; my senses often run together now, like glazes overflowing their borders. In the end, might they merge completely?Will I fall inside too great a landscape of sound, sight and touch, and be unable to grope my way back to myself? Maybe that will be the way death finally takes me.

Heniek, when I hear the patient hum of the carbide lamp that sits between us, and watch the quivering dance of its blue flame, the gratitude I feel embraces me as Adam did when I told him we would visit New York together. And my gladness at being able to talk to you whispers in my ear: despite all the Germans’ attempts to remake the world, the natural laws still exist.

So I must tell my story to you in its proper order or I will become as lost as Hansel and Gretel. And unlike those Christian children, I have no breadcrumbs to mark my way back home. Because I have no home. That is what being back in the city of my birth has taught me.

First we will talk of how Adam vanished and returned to us in a different form. And then I will tell you how Stefa made me believe in miracles.

PART I

CHAPTER 1