Ewa helped her up into the cart. Stefa kissed my brow and squeezed my hand. It was unlike her to express her affection so openly, but I didn’t think of that till later.
Taking off her mittens, my niece brought Adam’s hand to her cheek, then put it over her mouth and pressed her lips to his palm. She stepped his fingertips over her closed eyelids, and that’s when her first tears came, along with a choking sound.
‘Stefa…’ I began, but my niece’s moans covered my words.
When she embraced Adam, his blanket slid down to his waist. I had to tell her now not to look any lower, but my voice had been swallowed by the terrible strangeness of this moment – the sense that the entire future of the earth and heaven was turning around what was taking place here.
Stefa rocked Adam back and forth as if he were a baby. When she reached down to lift the blanket over his chest again, she saw what had been cut from him and began to howl. The sound was like an animal having its womb cut out.
I’d put Stefa’s woollen hat back on her head, but she was still shivering as though she’d fallen through the ice of a winter lake. She agreed to talk with Mr Schrei, the Jewish Council’s representative, on the condition that her son remain covered and guarded until we’d agreed on funeral plans. Ewa helped me prop up my niece as we trudged upstairs. On our landing, she began coughing as if her lungs were packed with grit.
Behind our closed door, I sat my niece on the bed and smoothed a shawl over her legs, then brought her a cup of the coffee I’d made earlier, lacing it with a little vodka, but she kept her hands knitted together and refused to touch her drink. She bent her head over her lap like an old widow curled around her loneliness, protecting herself from a world where she no longer had a home.
I think she had already vowed that her thoughts would never leave her son again – and was on strike against a world where a child could be murdered.
I took Adam’s Indian headdress off our faded leather armchair – I’d been planning to sew on the fallen feather – and invited Mr Schrei, who’d been standing by the door, to sit. Ewa brought him coffee. Taking a first sip, he leaned back with a long sigh, hoping, I think, to convince us of his exhaustion, which irritated me until I realized how awkward this must have been for him. I sat up as straight as I could to fight the urge to hide, and I tried to fill my pipe, but my hands proved too clumsy. Ewa leaned back against the windowsill, watching Stefa with motherly concern. She kept the loop of her amber beads in her mouth. When our eyes met, she shook her head as if to say,
Mr Schrei told us that Adam must have been grabbed by the Nazis outside the ghetto and executed. ‘They tossed him into the barbed wire because they intended for us to find him,’ he said authoritatively. ‘I expect his death was a message.’
‘A message about what?’ I asked.
He leaned forward, his hands propped on his knees. ‘As a reminder of what’s in store for kids caught smuggling – a deterrent, if you will. The Germans have recently begun exercising pressure on the council to curtail illegal commerce. I believe that’s why they… why they cut off Adam’s leg – to frighten us into passive acceptance of our fate.’
‘But I thought that was the only way the Jewish policemen could free Adam from the barbed wire.’
‘I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. In point of fact, Adam was found that way.’
I looked at Stefa. Her lips and eyes were shut tight, and she was swaying gently from side to side, as if imagining Adam in her arms. I wanted to be alone with her, and for night to fall quickly. In the darkness, floating free of all our previous expectations, my niece and I just might find a way to talk to each other that could be meaningful. Maybe she, at least, could find a way forward.
Ewa’s hesitant voice broke the silence. ‘Mr Schrei, how… how did the Germans execute him?’
‘I’m not certain,’ he replied. ‘There are no other injuries that our doctor could see.’
‘We’ll have to find out,’ I told him.
‘Why?’ Stefa asked, opening her eyes.
‘I think we ought to know what the Germans did to him,’ I told her.
‘It makes no difference now,’ she observed. Gazing down, she added, ‘I don’t want anyone but me to touch Adam.’
I knelt by her. ‘No one will touch him,’ I assured her, but I already knew I was lying, and I silently asked for her forgiveness.
My niece pressed her hand to my cheek by way of thanks, then took off her muffler and placed it neatly on the bed behind her. Her gestures – overly precise – gave me gooseflesh.
