The Warsaw Anagrams полностью

‘Listen, Erik, don’t get your hopes up,’ Heniek told me. ‘If they haven’t come back by now…’

‘Still, where would I go? And I can’t bear the thought of Adam not finding me here if he makes it home. Though there is one thing you can do for me.’

Heniek grinned; he’d known this was coming since I first started dictating to him.

‘All right, what is it you want?’ he asked, amused – but also eager to help.

‘Go to my apartment across the street and get Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams from the bookshelves. It should still be there. Then bring it here.’

‘What if the apartment is locked?’ Heniek asked.

‘Get the building supervisor to open it for you. Tell him you need to return a book to the previous owner.’

Heniek returned a few minutes later with the book in his hand.

‘Open it,’ I told him, excited by the chance to help him.

‘What do we have here?’ Heniek asked with merry surprise on spotting Hannah’s ruby earrings.

He lifted them out and held one up to his ear. ‘What do you think?’ he questioned. He was grinning with delight.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ I told him dryly.

He sat down beside me again. ‘So what do you want me to do with them?’ he asked.

‘I want you to sell them and get money for bribes. I want you to leave the ghetto.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if I-’

‘Listen,’ I interrupted harshly, ‘if you don’t make it out soon, then you won’t survive.’

‘So, our neighbourhood ibbur can see the future now?’ he asked, trying to use humour to mollify me.

‘Heniek, the kids that Lanik murdered… I no longer think that it’s mad to regard Adam’s death and the fate of all the Jews as linked. The Nazis want our children dead because they want to take our future away from us. I see that now – as clearly as I see you. So I don’t need a crystal ball to know that when the Germans run out of patience, everyone here will be packed into cattle cars and deposited at a labour camp – or marched out of town to dig their own graves in a nearby forest.’

‘But if I left, where would I go?’ he questioned.

‘I don’t know. But surely you’ve got an old friend or two on the outside.’

‘Maybe,’ Heniek said, but I could see he meant no.

‘Look, you think I’ve come for a reason. Maybe it’s to save you.’

‘But maybe not.’

‘If you need a better reason than your own life, then go and find Izzy and Liesel for me. Tell them how I died. Say that you were in the camp when I was hanged. Tell them I was ready to go. Kiss them for me and assure them that I met death with my hands in my pockets, that I wasn’t scared.*

* Erik asked me to put down my pen here, but we continued to converse for another minute at my kitchen table, and I include what we said to each other, this time, from my point of view:

‘But what you’ve just said isn’t true,’ I insisted. ‘You wanted to live. You told me so!’ I spoke desperately because I didn’t want him to send me away.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ Erik agreed. ‘Despite everything, I wanted a chance to go on. It was silly.’

‘Don’t you dare be ashamed of wanting to stay alive!’ I yelled.

Erik was quiet for a long time after that, but then, breathing deeply – as though summoning all his resolve – he reached slowly across to me and took my hand.

I could feel him – the roughness of his skin and warmth of his life. And it wasn’t painful.

Both of us were shocked. And reduced by gratitude to what was essential – two men acknowledging that nothing now could hold them apart. Not even their bodies.

I stood up and embraced him hard, and he hugged me back.