Looking down, I saw a woman’s body covered from the waist up by a newspaper and two men standing nearby – our building supervisor, Professor Engal, and a Jewish policeman. The policeman held Stefa’s Moroccan slippers, one in each hand.
I clambered down the stairs. Two bricks had been placed atop the newspaper to keep it from blowing away. Kneeling, I tossed them aside.
Ewa told me later that on seeing Stefa’s face I immediately let out a cry for Ernst – my younger brother and her father. I have only the most vague recollection of that.
Silver coins covered her eyes. That’s what I remember clearly.
I began shaking. The Jewish policeman helped me to my feet and told me my niece had jumped.
‘No, no, no – she was too weak to do that,’ I insisted.
He pointed to the window of my bedroom. ‘She sat on the ledge and pushed off.’
Turning round, I noticed Ziv sitting in the corner of the courtyard, rocking back and forth like a lost child. I called to him, but he didn’t answer.
I sat with Stefa for a time, holding her hand, whispering to her about when I’d first seen her as a baby. While clinging to the soft, searching sound of my voice, I realized why she had me keep Adam’s medical history and the portraits she’d drawn of him.
I took the złoty coins off her eyes; I didn’t believe in ghostly ferryboats across mythological rivers. Professor Engal told me they were Ziv’s, so I tossed the money by his feet, hoping to get his attention, but he didn’t stir.
While caressing Stefa’s hair, I apologized to her again for not protecting Adam, speaking to her in Yiddish and Polish, because each language had its own nuances of guilt and remorse, and ways of asking for what could never now be given to me, and I wanted her to hear them all. When I trudged back upstairs to try to figure out how she’d managed to end her own life, I found Mikael seated on my bed. He stood up to embrace me, telling me how sorry he was. He said that Ewa had taken Helena home.
On handing me back my thousand złoty, he said, ‘Stefa had to do it now – she didn’t want to waste the serum. I’ve seen that sort of sacrifice before. I should have warned you. I apologize for being thoughtless.’
I understood then why my niece had been so angry with Izzy and me for finding anti-typhus serum. Maybe she hadn’t been ready to meet Death in a Warsaw courtyard, but she knew she couldn’t wait.
Stefa must have crawled out of bed and used all that was left of her strength to drag our armchair to the window. I know that because two parallel scratches from the chair legs marked the wooden floor. The window had been shut tight to keep out the frigid wind. My niece had been unable to lift a spoon to feed herself, but she must have somehow managed to throw it wide open.
Later, when I questioned Ewa, she swore to me that the door was locked the last time she came to check on Stefa. As always, she’d let herself in with her spare key. There was no sign of anyone having been there to help her commit suicide. Stefa had been asleep in bed.
‘Or she looked asleep,’ I noted.
‘Or that,’ Ewa agreed.
Why did my niece put on her slippers before jumping? True, her feet were always cold of late, but she must have known she’d feel no discomfort soon enough. Maybe she didn’t want the person who found her to see the open sores between her toes. I’d known nothing about that small corner of her misery. She’d hidden quite a lot, as it turns out.
In any case, she put on her red and gold Moroccan slippers, climbed up on the chair and eased herself down on the window ledge. Her brittle arms must have been trembling under the strain. One after the other, she swung her legs over the rim until she was sitting on it and facing out – a complex manoeuvre. I know that because I tried it myself, and I’d swear in any court that it required a dexterity and strength that were beyond her.
Ziv was on break and sitting outside the bakery, reading a chess newsletter that had been printed in the ghetto; it had an article on Szmul Rzeszewski, one of his heroes.
Did Stefa hear him call out to her not to move, that she was in danger of falling?
‘I’ll be right up!’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me!’
What did she think as she pushed and swivelled herself closer to the edge? Perhaps that gravity was a blessing.
I hope she imagined she was about to see Adam again, but maybe it would have been best if she was thinking nothing at all.
Ziv told me later that she didn’t seem to hear him or even notice he was there.
‘As soon as she hit the ground, she was dead.’ That’s what Professor Engal told me when I returned to the courtyard, which was what he had heard from Ziv. Maybe they wanted to spare me more anguish. Still, thirty feet is a long way for someone to fall, and maybe he was right.
Ziv rushed to her but couldn’t find a pulse. He dashed into the bakery for help. Ewa and several others tried to revive my niece, but it was too late.
