The Warsaw Anagrams полностью

When he called me back in, he told me that Jakub and Jan had voted against letting me work with them, but that he had overruled them.

‘You’ve got three days to learn enough to hold your own,’ he told me in a voice of warning.

I worked hard, but after three days I was still pretty much useless with the tiny screwdrivers and pliers. Chaim came up with a solution, however; I would polish all the watches that he and his colleagues fixed, thereby doing a quarter of our total work. Jan found that acceptable, but Jakub cursed me. He also began referring to me as Dostoevsky’s Jewish Idiot, which he regarded as witty.

One night, about a week later, I awakened to find Jakub leaning over me, whispering Hebrew words I didn’t understand. When I tried to sit up, he pushed me back down. Then he tugged my shoes off my feet.

‘What’ll I wear?’ I asked, moaning.

‘That’s your problem!’

As he crawled back in his bunk, I realized that when we’d first met, he’d studied me for what I had that might be worth stealing.

The camp had an active black market, and in exchange for five days’ worth of the rancid broth that passed for our soup, I was soon able to obtain flimsy leather shoes – three sizes too big – that I stuffed with newspaper.

Jakub then started taking my bread right out of my hands, mocking me when I refused to fight him for it and only stopping when a bigger prisoner put a homemade knife to his neck.

Jakub wanted to punish me as much as he wanted life. Maybe they were even the same thing for him.

Sometimes I think he uttered a magical curse over me on the night he stole my shoes, or on another occasion when I didn’t wake up in time to know he was with me, and that’s why I’m still here.

Before the ghetto, I’d have thought that was impossible, Heniek, but listen…

Jakub’s brother-in-law was a rabbi from Chelm named Kolmosin – a sturdy little red-nosed man, maybe fifty years old. He and Jakub used to pray together on Friday evenings behind a burlap curtain they hung over their adjoining bunks. The rumour I heard was that the rabbi was a descendant of Shabbetai Tzvi, and that he knew powerful incantations that had been passed down from branch to branch in their family tree for twenty generations – incantations that governed life and death. He had bribed the guards to be able to keep a Torah the size of a deck of cards with him, and we often caught glimpses of him huddled over it, making rapid annotations with a tiny pencil. Chaim told me that if he wrote down your name, your destiny would change, and it would be good or bad depending on the nature of the verse in which he had inserted it. In consequence, prisoners would try to win Kolmosin’s good graces by polishing his shoes or darning his socks, or by giving him smuggled cigarettes, sugar or other small gifts. He was the only prisoner I ever saw in a clean white shirt. He lived like a pasha.

Once, in August, I saw the would-be holy man sitting naked on his red velvet cushion and singing to himself. He carried that ridiculous velvet cushion with him everywhere because of his haemorrhoids – which were apparently beyond the control of his magical annotations. Later, he taught the oriental-sounding tune to Jakub and some of the other prisoners. He claimed that he’d learned it in a vision and that it would keep us safe.

I was of the opinion that singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ would produce better results, but maybe Kolmosin had the last laugh; the more I think about it, the more I wonder if he might not have helped Jakub tether me to the earth by writing me into a verse of Torah that would make me return after death. Perhaps I represented an opportunity for him as well, but for what I cannot guess.

Grudgingly, I have to admit that I have come to believe in magic, though I remain an atheist. A paradox? Probably, but what could be more common than that?

On waking and going to sleep, I’d picture Liesel sitting with Petrina on a beach near Izmir. I wrote long letters to her in my head, and while I was polishing watches, I’d often daydream about her, though my favourite fantasy was of Izzy surprising Louis – appearing at his door one day, unannounced. In my mind, the two men embraced for a long time, and then went for an arm-in-arm promenade along the Seine. Sometimes I joined them for tea and cake at Les Deux Magots.

I lived inside my head. For hours at a time, I’d walk through the Warsaw of my childhood and the London of my honeymoon, and the tours I took by myself – and sometimes with Hannah – kept a small pale flame alive inside me.

Come September, I was nearly always freezing, and often sapped of strength by a cold or diarrhoea. My body had become a cumbersome nuisance, and – like most of the men – I longed to be able to discard it.

There were a thousand of us in the camp – a thousand moths caught in a black and red lamp, fluttering against the glass of our Jewish identities.