Advantages: Perfectly manicured hands, delights in his own humour, can fix anything, speaks French, walks as slowly as I do, eyebrows like furry caterpillars, has not an evil bone in his body, hardly ever raises his voice, is easily overcome by my anger, keeps Adam entertained and Uncle Erik out of my hair, has sad eyes (like the surface of a warm lake!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, and is loyal, loyal, loyal.
Disadvantages: Delights in his own humour, is unable to tell when I don’t want to be teased, sulks when he’s yelled at, can hold grudges (despite his denials), walks as slowly as I do, has the table manners of a beagle, will never understand evil people (he excuses my sniping as harmless eccentricity, poor man!), makes me feel motherly when he is down, is too loyal, and encourages Adam to leave his shoelaces untied, lick his plate, play with stray dogs, etc.
Unspoken motto: Once you’re on board, you’re along for the whole ride. Food would most like to have in the ghetto: lox.
Favourite movie star: Jimmy Cagney (his imitation isn’t all that bad, but Cagney in Yiddish sounds a bit meshugene).
Mystery: Was Róźa pregnant when he married her?
Wish for him: May he find a man who appreciates his goodness.
Immediate prospects: Loneliness (given Róźa’s health and the state of the world with regard to his sexual proclivities).
I looked for the list of my own pros and cons, but several pages had been torn out and she must have destroyed it. Most of all, I wanted to know what her wish for me had been.
It didn’t occur to me till much later that Stefa left Izzy’s page for me to see for a reason: so that I wouldn’t take him for granted, which was always what she’d accused me of – and rightly, at times.
She hadn’t destroyed her lists for Ewa, Helena, Ziv and Adam. I read all of them but my nephew’s. I had to close it as soon as I read his first advantage: loves everyone around him, even me.
Józef dropped me near the Chłodna Street crossing to the Little Ghetto; I’d walk from there. As I got out of the rickshaw, he wiped his brow and apologized for being passed by other drivers.
‘We got here in one piece,’ I told him, handing him his payment, ‘which is all that counts at the moment. Besides, my nephew always complained that I moved as slow as a…’
I was about to say tortoise, but Adam – the misery always sitting on my shoulder – held his hand up for me to say no more about our life together. Józef showed me a puzzled look. ‘Some things are best left unspoken,’ I said. I shook his hand and walked off.
Two body collectors cut in front of me almost immediately. They were hauling a dead man wearing only a tattered undershirt. His hair was thick and black, but he had the sunken eyes and cavedin chest of a battered grandfather. His arms were bamboo reeds ending in dirty claws.
Whiskers dusted his chin but his cheeks were hairless – could starvation take away a man’s beard?
The ghetto funeral stretchers were slatted ladders with wheels on one end, but this one also had knotted white tassels – tzitzit – at its corners. That made me curious, and I eavesdropped on the collectors’ conversation. They were talking about a reading a fortune-teller had given one of them.
‘She told me I was going to take a long trip soon,’ the shorter of the two said.
‘Somewhere warm?’ his partner asked hopefully. He wore black spectacles held together by tape; they kept slipping to the end of his nose.
