Grylek unfolded his paper and handed it to me. I put on my reading glasses because his letters were tiny and irregular. As I scanned the seven addresses of border crossings he’d jotted down, and the names of their guards, he took out a tin of German cigarettes – Muratti Ariston – and offered me one, which I accepted.
‘Smuggled?’ I asked.
‘You got it!’ he replied, grinning proudly. He lit my cigarette with a theatrical flare to his hand movements, then set the flame to his own and drew in deeply. I had the feeling he’d had dreams of being a Hollywood star when he was younger – and even today enjoyed a dramatic role.
‘Did you learn who asked my nephew to smuggle out an ermine jacket?’ I asked.
‘No luck, though I asked around.’
In my nightmares, Heniek, I have seen Rabe as two men, one of them with a murderous glint in his eyes, speaking Polish, the other a ghetto Puck on the lookout for mischief, and who talks to me in a lilting, happy-go-lucky Yiddish. Still, I’m grateful to him; he made me understand the stakes we were playing for were high.
‘About the list – the names are all anagrams,’ he explained. ‘I’ve altered the street numbers as well.’
‘But I’ll never find the crossings this way!’ I moaned, holding my head in my hands.
‘You will!’ he replied cheerfully, like a magician happy to teach a protégé one of his tricks, ‘because I’m going to explain how it works.’ He opened his right hand to show me numbers written in pairs on his palm. The first coupling was 7-2. ‘When you see seven in an address, change it to two in your head. You got it?’
‘I think so.’
‘And once you know the code, you’ll know all the ghetto’s secrets,’ he joked.
‘I wish,’ I replied.
‘Just memorize the pairs now, and the street names, too. You’ll be able to rearrange them into their real names if you just sit down with a pen and paper for a few minutes. I guarantee it.’
‘I’m not so sure. I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘Look, I’m in no rush. When you tell me you’ve got everything safely in your head, I’ll wash my hand.’
Committing his list to memory proved more difficult than I’d have imagined; I kept thinking of what delight Adam would have taken in this cloak and dagger work. Only after I’d finished – and as Grylek was scrubbing his palm at the sink – did I realize the obvious: my nephew had entered this underworld long before me.
I do not dream that I am aware of, and I don’t believe I even sleep, though I wish I could; there are times when I am so weary of mind and body that I could cry for not being able to disappear into nothingness. Worst of all, blackness never welcomes me when I close my eyes. Instead, sepia afterglows float and jiggle across my vision – of Heniek’s face, his furniture, and all I have seen during the day. It is as if the barrier between outside and inside has faded.
Sometimes I think I may be dispersing slowly into everything I see and hear. I will end as nothing and everything – as the wind, the sound of a dog barking, the concerned gaze of the only man in Warsaw who can see me…
Though perhaps that’s just my hope. Who wouldn’t want a way of leaving the one life we have on earth without disappearing entirely?
Still, there may be benefits to my new nature; now that I am what I am, maybe the past can be bent around to meet the present… As dawn rose this morning, I pictured Adam and myself as childhood friends, flying our kites together in Saski Square, and the deeper I moved into the embrace of all that might have been, the stronger my certainty that it was, in fact, a memory.
Heniek insists on taking down my every word since he says that scribes are not editors, though he promises to add some annotations where necessary and to let me make as many cuts and modifications as I want when I’m finished.
‘I’d like a happy ending, even if there really isn’t one,’ I’ve told him.
‘We’ll see,’ he says, which means, naturally enough, that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe he suspects I have an important favour to ask him when we’re done and is trying to keep his options open. An intuitive man, our Heniek – perhaps even a minor prophet. After all, if he can see and hear me…
By now – judging from his questions – I suspect that his real reason for being so meticulous is that he’s convinced a life-altering, kabbalistic moral to my story is going to burst out of one of my recollections, like a jack-in-the-box manufactured in Gerona or Jerusalem, and he doesn’t want to miss that heart-stopping moment. Isn’t that true, Heniek? (He’s shaking his head, but I can tell from the twist in his lips that he’s lying.)
In times past, I’d have said his neurosis takes the form of hallucinations meant to diminish his sense of powerlessness, but I no longer make such judgements.
I dictate and Heniek writes. It’s our private cabaret act.
