When I explained my purpose, he asked, ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’
‘Yes, it won’t take long. But I’ll need to see each kid separately – and alone. I don’t want them influencing one another.’
That was a lie: in truth, I was afraid that if any of the children had anything unusual to say about Rowy, his presence would intimidate them.
I talked to the eleven youngsters one at a time, behind the closed door of a dressing room. Unfortunately, none of them knew anything about Adam’s smuggling activities, and the most damning secret they could tell me about Rowy was that he ate half a chocolate bar after each of their performances.
The next day, Saturday, Anka came to my door early in the morning. She refused my invitation for ersatz coffee. ‘I’m in a rush – I make house calls on Saturdays,’ she told me, standing in the doorway. ‘Listen, I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. My nurse friend has been off with dysentery, but I went to see her yesterday and she told me that Anna never showed up for her procedure. She said that she doesn’t know if Mikael keeps records of the abortions. She wasn’t sure of the date Anna was scheduled for, but that the twenty-fourth of January sounded right.’
So Mikael had been telling the truth. Perhaps Anna had gone to see Mrs Sawicki hoping to get more money to pay for her abortion, and on the way home she’d been attacked – except that her mother said there’d been no signs of a struggle on her. Just like Adam. Which meant that the two children had either been caught completely by surprise or had known – and trusted – their killer.
Could Rowy or Mikael be working secretly for the Germans and have obtained authorization to cross the border on a regular basis? After all, if Anna or Adam had met one of them on the Other Side, they would have suspected nothing.
How important is personal geography to our destinies? I ask, Heniek, because the only reason I chose to follow Mikael first was that his apartment on Wałowa Street was closer to Stefa’s.
I got to his front door just after nine, but I didn’t go in. Instead, I stood vigil down the block. An elderly man rented me a chair for one złoty an hour.
Mikael came out near noon, dressed smartly in a tweed overcoat and carrying a black leather case. He hailed a rickshaw right away. Rushing into the street, I was able to flag one down myself. I told my driver to follow at a safe distance behind his colleague.
A short time later, Mikael got out on Nowolipki Street and entered the door to a five-storey apartment house. I had my driver drop me fifty paces away and knocked at one of the ground-floor apartments. A boy of thirteen or so, wearing a knitted yarmulke, came to the door. At the back of the room, two old women in dark shawls and headscarfs were working over a stove. The place reeked of boiling cabbage.
‘Are there any clinics in this apartment house?’ I asked the young man; I was guessing that Mikael was carrying medical supplies in his case.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Why would a doctor come here?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied, scowling as if I were a beggar.
I went back outside, stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the façade of the building. A hand-lettered sign in a second-floor window made immediate sense of Mikael’s visit:
I knew nothing about photography, but the case Mikael was carrying must have held his plates or film, or maybe even a camera. He’d probably spend a few hours there developing his negatives.
Realizing that it could take weeks to learn something damning about him or Rowy, I headed off through a fog of self-doubt.
On reaching home, the silence of Stefa’s apartment pressed down so hard on me that I fled right away. I ended up at the Café Levone. A middle-aged woman with shoulder-length silver hair, intelligent eyes and silver lily-of-the-valley earrings approached me shortly after I was served my tea. ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said with an apologetic smile.
She wore an old black jumper whose fraying sleeves she’d accordion-bunched at her elbow, which I found both comic and attractive.
‘Why is this so difficult?’ she asked, irritated with herself. Her sensitive green eyes drew my sympathy.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ I told her, reaching into my pocket for a złoty.
She waved away the coin I held out. ‘Oh dear, what a ridiculous sight I must be in these old clothes!’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just thought you might like some real sugar.’ She held out to me a handful of brown crystals. ‘I find it’s the only way to keep the ghetto tea from making my taste buds want to run and hide.’
Smiling appreciatively, I picked up a crystal and thanked her. Next to her slender pink hand, mine seemed ungainly and hairy, like an orangutan’s, but that was all right with me because it was a reminder that I was a man and she was a woman. ‘Please, sit,’ I told her, since she, too, looked as if she could use some company.
