I put his clothes away in his chest of drawers, then made onion soup for supper. When the meal was prepared and the table set, I sat with his sketchbook and traced my fingers over his drawings of Gloria till my fingertips were smudged blue and yellow.
In one of his sketches, he’d drawn Gloria with a long brown pipe in her beak and a scruffy grey tuft of feathers on her head. I stared at the page, trying in vain to dispel the nightmares my mind was scripting: Adam beaten by a Nazi guard, run down by a horse-cart…
Stefa came home alone shortly after midnight. Her eyes were ringed by pouches of worry. ‘He’s vanished,’ she told me, dropping down next to me on my bed. Panic hovered around her like a cold mist.
I rubbed warmth into her hands. ‘Listen, Katshkele, did you speak to Wolfi?’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t know anything.’
‘Adam probably snuck out to Christian Warsaw and couldn’t make it back tonight.’
‘Has he been smuggling?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but I’ve heard that many kids his age are. He probably lost track of the time, and it gets dark so early now. He must be in hiding till morning. You’ll see, he’ll turn up here first thing tomorrow. He’s smart – and resourceful.’
I’d practised that little speech until I believed it. And by promising to go out again and look for Adam, I was able to get Stefa to eat some hot soup.
A man clomps through empty streets as if through his own childhood fears, searching across curtained windows and mounds of snow for a way to travel back in time.
A Jewish policeman whose breath smelled of mints stopped me on Nalewki Street. When I explained why I was breaking the curfew, he said matter-of-factly, ‘Kids go missing every day. Just go home and wait till morning.’
‘I can’t,’ I told him.
He toldme that I’d be arrested by the German guards if they spotted me. I walked away from him before he could finish his warning.
I thought it was just possible that Wolfi had lied to Stefa to protect Adam, so I headed to his apartment again. A stinking smell was now coming from the courtyard, and I traced it to a pushcart stored there for the night that must have been loaded with rotting fish during the day. Two bony, desperate-looking cats were tied to one of the wheels, and they stared up at me suspiciously from what looked like a mush of entrails and rice. One of them hissed. I guessed that they were there to keep away rats.
Wolfi’s father answered my knocks in his bare feet and pyjamas, but wearing a woollen coat. Mr Loos was a carpenter from Minsk with coarse, powerful hands, each finger as thick as a cigar. When I told him Adam was missing, he embraced me. For just an instant I went limp in his arms, as if I were a child myself.
After stealing into Wolfi’s bedroom, he carried the boy out to me still asleep, setting him down gently in an armchair of faded brocade. Mrs Loos kissed him awake. The boy gazed up at me with drowsy, blinking eyes. I kneeled to be less threatening.
‘Adam’s gone missing,’ I told him softly. ‘So even if he made you promise not to say a word to anyone, you have to tell me if you saw him yesterday.’
‘Just… just for a minute,’ he stammered. ‘Outside your apartment house.’
‘Thank God. What time?’
‘I’m not sure. Maybe one-thirty or two.’
Mr Loos brought me a chair. I sat down and leaned towards the boy. ‘What did he tell you, Wolfi?’
‘That he was going to buy some coal. And not… not to let you or his mother know.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘That Gloria was freezing to death.’
I hung my head; I should have known that Adam would act recklessly to save her. ‘Do you know where he was going to buy the coal?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘Listen, son, I’m not angry. But you must tell me if you have any idea where he might have gone.’
‘Just one.’
Wolfi explained to me that the apartment house at 1 Leszno Street shared a cellar with a building on Rymarska Street, in Christian Warsaw. Passage across the clandestine border cost five złoty, payable to a guard. Poles carrying goods into the ghetto put on the Jewish armbands with the Star of David that we were forced to wear. Jews heading the other way removed theirs.
Adam had crossed the cellar only once that Wolfi knew about. He’d been paid ten złoty to smuggle out an ermine jacket and bring back a mahogany jewellery box from an antique dealer living near the university. He’d told Wolfi that he had been chosen because of his blond, Aryan looks, which made him less likely to be arrested. That had been about a month before. Wolfi didn’t know who’d hired Adam or the identity of the dealer. But he added that my nephew had been given half a chocolate cake as a reward for executing his mission so quickly.
It had begun to snow – big soft flakes falling atop the wild panic throbbing inside my head. At 1 Leszno Street, I rapped at the front door until the light went on in the caretaker’s apartment.
