Our growing closeness makes me miss Izzy. More and more, I feel as if we were two halves of something that has no name. Will I ever see him again? And could it be that I’ve returned to tell not just my story, but his as well?
Heniek undoubtedly has his own ideas about why I’ve returned, but he doesn’t share them with me. ‘Secrets are my private blessing,’ he told me just this morning.
As you can see, my host is also something of a poet, and before he retires to bed he sometimes reads me one of his recent verses. The soft, hushed sound of his voice is like wind over stone, which is just as it should be for poems written in a thousand-year-old city that is dying.
Yesterday, at the end of my first day back in Warsaw, after telling Heniek about Adam’s death, I found it difficult to go on speaking. Craving the reassurance of human warmth, I reached out to take his hand. It was my first attempt to make physical contact with him, because I’d been worried that my touch might prove dangerous to the living.
To my disappointment, my fingertips did not meet his flesh but instead eased an inch or so into him. To me, this overlapping of our borders felt pleasant – as if I was immersing my fingers in warm water – but not to Heniek. With a shriek, he drew back from me, nearly tumbling off his chair.
He told me the pain was excruciating, as though his skin were being peeled away.
After I apologized, I was silent for a long time, wondering if even talking to him could prove dangerous – if I might be turning him away from a better and safer path.
‘Please, tell me what you’re thinking, Erik,’ he requested, and his tone was so gentle and respectful that I did.
With a smile of solidarity, that generous man then assured me that there was nothing he wanted more than to help me tell my story.
‘I feel sometimes I was born for this,’ he confessed. ‘After all, why have visions of the dead, if you cannot be of any assistance to them?’
The evening after my nephew’s death, I apologized to Stefa for allowing Adam to leave the apartment. She received my words with her head down, unable to look at me. Unsure of what next to say, I started to tell her about having spoken to his friends.
‘Stay away from me!’ she hollered as if I were a criminal bent on corrupting her. ‘And for the love of God, don’t tell me anything about Wolfi and the others!’
Climbing into her bed, she hugged Adam’s sketchbook to her chest and closed her eyes.
‘Forgive me for being so inept, Stefa,’ I told her, and I sat down next to her. At length, she took my hand and gave it a squeeze. I said nothing more, but the silence was filled with all my unspoken regrets.
After tucking Stefa in to sleep, I changed Gloria’s water, then covered her cage and turned off the light. The darkness seemed my true home now. I sat by my niece, my hand on her shoulder so that even inside her dreams she would know I was beside her. I thought of her father and mother, who had adored her, and then my parents, and slowly, one by one, the room became peopled with everyone I’d ever loved. Adam brought my wife Hannah to me as though leading her towards a bed of wild flowers, and she was laughing at his merry insistence. Hannah had died just after Adam’s birth, but in my dream the boy was about five years old. He climbed up on to my lap when I summoned him forward. My tears of gratitude dripped on to his hair.
‘How’s Gloria?’ he asked me.
‘Not so good,’ I replied, and then I awoke and Adam’s death seemed to fill my mouth with blood.
In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face. Removing the towel that Stefa had draped over the mirror, I stared at the skeleton-sockets I had for eyes, and at my cumbersome, blue-veined hands. Who was this useless man? How had I fallen so far?
I knew that an emptiness with exactly Adam’s size and shape was awaiting me in my bed, so I fetched a woollen blanket and made a nest for myself in Stefa’s armchair.
At dawn, I set out for the addresses I’d memorized. I showed my nephew’s photograph to seven guards and a dozen smugglers, but no one recognized him.
At the funeral that morning, dread paralysed me, pounding so loudly in my ears that I barely heard the rabbi’s condolences. The ground was stone-frozen, too hellishly hard to make a ditch, though two gravediggers had used their picks to chip away an inch down as a symbolic gesture. Seventeen homemade coffins made of bare planks of wood – the smallest being Adam’s – were stacked around our quiet group, waiting for the spring thaw to be lowered into the earth. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon were six bodies wrapped in rough cloth; their families couldn’t afford coffins.
Ewa, Rowy, Ziv and several other friends stayed close to Stefa during the ceremony. She had the frantic eyes of a lost child, but I didn’t go to her.
Withholding oneself as a way of feeling the pain even deeper.
