I don’t mean to sound cynical about my friends; they were caring people, and they were under no obligation to give up their hopes for a happy ending.
To myself, however, I made the promise that I’d take Stefa’s way out after finding Adam’s killer.
That week, couriers delivered three letters smuggled in from the Other Side – from Christian friends to whom Stefa had written about Adam’s murder. Among them was one from Jaśmin, my former patient. At the end of her long and moving letter, she told me she was talking about the wretchedness of the ghetto to whoever would listen – even foreign journalists – and that I mustn’t give up hope of getting out.
She worked only a few blocks away but it was clear by now that we inhabited two separate countries, and that mine would one day disappear from the face of the earth, leaving nothing but a crater of memories for those few who managed to survive.
Sunrise would wake me every morning as if I’d been thrust from a moving train. Sitting up, watching the roaches making zigzag journeys across the cracks in the walls, I’d put myself in the killer’s place. He’d obviously wanted a piece of the lives he’d destroyed – as trophies, perhaps. But why a hand and a leg?
And the string – had Adam put it in his mouth or had the killer?
Izzy brought me bread every morning before work, and made me breakfast. Once, standing by the window, he spoke in a hesitant voice of how desperate he was for a chance to apologize to his wife for creating problems in their marriage. Rising to the challenge of his honesty, I confessed all I’d done wrong as a father – a last chance to make amends, I suppose. And a last chance for both of us to reveal secrets we’d kept deep down in our pockets for decades.
Izzy was convinced that he’d made a wrong turn early in his life, when he came back to Warsaw from France. ‘I never found my way back to myself after that,’ he told me.
Opening an envelope he’d brought with him, he took out four sepia-toned photographs of young men posing in front of a ship’s railing. ‘My lovers during the six years I worked on the
As I looked at each of his old friends, Izzy’s eyes grew worried. I realized he needed to show me all he was, and for me to give him my blessing; there was no time left for waiting.
‘You travelled far,’ I told him. ‘That was a very good thing.’
But his error-of-a-lifetime would give him no peace. Through a surge of tears, he whispered, ‘I married Róźa to prove to myself I could be the man everyone wanted me to be. I could have had another life – a truer life. Róźa, too.’
‘One thing I learned from my patients,’ I told him, ‘is that we
‘Not like me, Erik. I hurt the people I cared for most.’
‘Do you still hear from any of your old lovers?’ I asked, a plan forming underneath my words.
‘One – Louis. Another steward. We write to each other for New Year’s.’
‘Did you love him?’ I asked.
‘Very much.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in Boulogne-Billancourt. That’s why I sent the boys there. He found them jobs. He used to work as an airline mechanic. The boys even stayed with him for a while, though they aren’t aware of what he and I once meant to each other.’
‘When the ark comes for us, you’ll go to him,’ I told him as if it were an order.
‘Erik, I’m too old,’ he replied. ‘And all of me is unravelling. Besides, there’s Róźa. I can’t leave her.’
‘Izzy, she’s had a major stroke. She’s not going to get any better, and she doesn’t know who you are. Let her stay with her sister. Or if you have to, take her with you and let her move in with the boys. You’ve punished yourself long enough, don’t you think?’
One evening, Rowy finally told me why Ewa hadn’t visited me; Stefa’s suicide had shaken both her and Helena badly, and the little girl had suffered a diabetic shock. She’d nearly died. The young man added that he and Mikael had kept the bad news from me during the worst of my grief so as not to make me feel any worse. Helena was better now, but still weak.
On the afternoon of Friday, 28 February, eight days after Stefa’s death, a ghetto courier brought me a note from Gizela, the young woman who was looking after my home. She informed me that a lieutenant in the SS had requisitioned my flat a few days earlier. Gizela and her husband were back living with her in-laws. She asked me not to write to her, since she was convinced that all her mail was being read.
Thinking of a Nazi in my bed made me storm out of the apartment, shaking with rage. I ended up only a block from Weisman’s dance school, which started me thinking… Checking my watch, I realized I could make Rowy’s afternoon chorus rehearsal.
The young musician made a fuss over me as soon as I arrived, introducing me to all of his little singers as a great friend of the chorus. I was impressed with his ease with them and how they tugged at his shirtsleeves for his attention.
