Like almost everything else in the Warsaw ghetto, Stefa’s apartment house was blown up by the Nazis during the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, then levelled by the Russians when they took control of the city. All those rutted old streets – and all we had suffered – were gone. Except inside our heads.
Some day, weeds and trees will have covered up all the rubble. And after that, when the developers have enough złoty, buildings will go up – even steel and glass hotels with fountains in the lobby. Tourists will spread their gaze over an urban landscape being born again, and they will whisper to their children, Hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned here for years, but the kids will see only the maze of construction in front of their eyes and an army of helmet workers scurrying back and forth. They’ll ask if they can go swimming now in their hotel pool.
And why shouldn’t they?
Those who feel guiltiest will try to make us doubt the existence of all the bones that lie buried under the Polish topsoil and all the ash scattered through the Polish forests.
A walnut tree that was two feet high. Starting again like the rest of us.
An old man passing in the street spotted me staring at the spindly trunk and identified it. I’d thought it was a hazel. ‘No, it’s definitely a walnut,’ he told me, and he smiled at me as if it was a good omen.
I guess we’ll know if he’s right when we see the kind of nuts it gives us, five or ten years from now. Sometimes we need to wait a long time to know the meaning of what’s happening right at this very second.
I found the walnut tree growing out of the earthen pit where the courtyard of Stefa’s building had been.
I looked for Erik all over the city, but I never found him. How long must ibburs wander the earth? I’ve asked learned rabbis from Paris, Marseille and Istanbul, but none could tell me. ‘Their time may not be like ours,’ one of them explained to me, but I already knew that.
I like to think that Erik found Adam and Stefa, and during the easy days of summer, when the high, midday sun turns the rooftops to gold, I can almost convince myself that he must have. At night, however, when I’m listening to the rise and fall of Noc’s breathing, and beyond him to the loose web of silence that means that he and I are alone in a city that was once mine and no longer is, I trust only loneliness. I’m not much good at happy endings, just as Erik sensed.
