The Warsaw Anagrams полностью

‘Stop that goddamned banging!’ he hissed.

He opened the front door a crack. ‘What’s the problem, old man?’ he demanded. A blanket was drawn across his shoulders and he carried a candle in his fist. As he moved the flame towards me, to better see my face, his shadow seemed to fold around us.

I recognized him: Abramek Piotrowicz, the attorney; his daughter Halina had been a high-school friend of Liesel’s.

‘It’s me, Erik Cohen,’ I told him.

‘Erik? My God, I wouldn’t have recognized you! But you look pretty good,’ he rushed to add, so as not to offend me.

When we shook hands, Abram tugged me inside and said, ‘Get out of that damn wind!’ He shut the door and scoffed. ‘This weather… I’m going to Palestine as soon as we get out. And I’m never coming back!’

I explained the reason for my visit and described Adam, but Abram told me he hadn’t seen any boy fitting his description.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to question the guard who was on duty yesterday afternoon.’

‘His name is Grylek Baer,’ Abram replied, adding that he’d be back only at 1 p.m. ‘But I’ll get word to him at dawn. Leave it to me. Let’s speak in the morning.’

I found Stefa still up when I returned home, seated in the kitchen over half a bowl of cold soup. It was 1.40 a.m.

Two condemned prisoners wait for sunrise. The man slumps into his chair by the window, where he can watch a dark street emptied of life. Later, when the sky clears, he steals glances up at a dome of stars that seems too distant to provide any orientation to him or anyone else.

Our exile will never end he thinks. He lets his pipe go out and his feet grow numb.

The woman sits on her bed, one hand on a homemade birdcage she hates, staring into the milky eye of all she has ever feared.

At dawn, Stefa disregarded my pleading and headed for Leszno Street. I waited at home in case Adam made it back to us. Just before eight, three sharp knocks on the front door made me drop the book I’d forgotten I was holding.

Two men stood on the landing, the shorter one in the black uniform and cap of Pinkiert’s, the ghetto funeral service. The other, tall and distinguished-looking, held his hat in his hands.

‘My nephew… have you found him?’ I asked in a rush. Inside my voice was our future – Adam’s and mine.

‘Are you Dr Erik Cohen?’ the Pinkiert’s man questioned.

‘Yes.’

‘We found your nephew’s body at dawn. I’m sorry.’

I don’t remember anything else from our conversation. Maybe it was as we walked down the stairs to the street that the men told me how Adam had been identified by a secretary in the Jewish Council who was an acquaintance of Stefa’s. Or maybe they told me that only later. My next memory is of standing outside our apartment house. The Pinkiert’s cart – wooden, drawn by a brown mare – was shrouded in shadow. The undertaker – a slender man with a pinched face – spoke to me in a kind voice about catching a chill and did up the buttons on my coat. But I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel anything but the sense that I’d been tugged far out to sea and would make it all the way back to land.

A single trauma can cripple a person for ever, and when I saw Adam lying in the back of the cart, I knew my life was over.

A coarse blanket covered his body but left his face exposed. It was turned to the side, as if he’d heard someone call out from the left just before death. His eyes were closed and his hair was mussed. His skin was pasty and yellowish.

Was it then that the Pinkiert’s man told me how he had been found?

I climbed into the cart and kneeled by my nephew. The dark gravity of all that had gone wrong drew my lips to his. The stiff chill of our kiss made me shudder.

I took out my handkerchief and started wiping the grime off his face. I whispered, You’re home now, as if he could hear me – and as if that news would comfort him.

Whatever made Adam Adam is gone, I thought.

Six small words, but they couldn’t fit inside my head. They spilled out of me inside a hopelessness so deep and wide that it might have been everything I’d ever felt or thought.

As my craving for him to wake up dripped down my cheeks, I apologized to him. I didn’t want him to think he’d done anything wrong; a child shouldn’t meet death with guilt in his heart.

I intended to embrace the boy and carry him upstairs, but when I lifted his blanket away, I gasped; he was naked, and his right leg had been cut off from the knee down.

The universe was turning around Adam’s missing leg, and I was freefalling through a life that seemed impossible. Do you know what it’s like to see a mutilated nine-year-old? You realize that anything can happen: the sun may blacken and die before your eyes; a crack may open in the earth and swallow the street… Each heartbeat seems proof that all you see and feel is too improbable to be anything but a dream.