The Warsaw Anagrams полностью

‘I want you to know I think of Stefa and Adam every day,’ she told me, moving her worried gaze over the floor between us. ‘They will be with me always.’

Ewa seemed to speak to me from out of a deep thicket inside herself. I didn’t think it was fair that she should have to lug my dead behind her, and I wanted to tell her that, but her air of defeat angered me. You have your health and your daughter, so you don’t have the right to give up! I wanted to shout.

She sensed my ambivalence towards her and started to cry. After handing me a note she’d meant to send me earlier, she rushed out the door.

The note read: Everything has gone wrong. The happiness we once all had now seems so distant. It’s as if we never had a chance. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry…

Perhaps it was my irritation at seeing Ewa so withdrawn – and at my selfish reaction to her – that awakened me to all I still needed to do. After putting her note under Stefa’s pillow, I brought back to my bed the books on child abuse by Ambroise Tardieu and Paul Bernard that I owned; I was looking for what would motivate a killer to take a boy’s leg and a girl’s hand.

I read until nightfall about kids who’d been raped, beaten and starved – usually by their parents or other relatives – but I couldn’t find any who’d been mutilated like Adam and Anna.

Of the unfortunate children I read about that day, I remember a French girl named Adelina Defert most of all. Her parents had locked her in a small wooden box from the age of eight to seventeen. They’d tied her down, whipped her and burned her with red-hot charcoals, and to torture her further her mother had washed her wounds with nitric acid. When Adelina was finally rescued, her straw mattress was teeming with insects, and the rags she used for blankets were soaked with pus.

Reading about Adelina gave me the idea that her parents would have adored running the ghettos across Poland. An insight? Maybe Adam’s murderer wanted nothing but the pleasure of disfiguring what was beautiful.

Gratuitous cruelty… We have to admit it never goes out of style, and the Nazis had raised it to the level of a philosophy.

All temples are metaphors for the human body; and it was the body that gave birth to the notion of holiness. A professor of mine had told me that in Vienna, but I’d been too young to understand. Now, I realized he’d been right, and what that meant to me now was that the murderer wanted to sever all holiness from the world.

Ziv knocked at my door that evening. He’d come over a few times after Stefa’s death but he always looked as if he was about to burst into tears and only stayed a couple of minutes. Since her suicide, he’d become as pale as ivory, and so gaunt that his pimply forehead jutted out over his eyes.

Under his arm he held his alabaster chessboard. ‘How about a game before bed, Dr Cohen?’ he asked, trying to sound cheerful.

‘I don’t think so. My mind… it’s all over the place.’

He looked so forlorn that I invited him to talk with me in the kitchen. I offered him one of the potato pancakes that Ida Tarnowski had made for me, but he turned me down. Looking at his unhappy face, I said, ‘All right, let’s see if I can beat you this time.’

His reply was a glorious smile.

As we played, I pretended not to notice he was losing on purpose, but not even the village idiot in a Russian novel could make such numbskull moves.

To Ziv, losing on purpose must have meant that we could be generous to each other – why else make such a sacrifice? I guessed that not many people had ever treated him well. And that he’d been building up his courage to give me the gift of his loss since Stefa’s death.

Early the next morning, I took a rickshaw to Ogrodowa Street to question the father of the girl who had died after her abortion; I had to make sure she hadn’t been disfigured.

Mr Szwebel had oily black hair falling over his ears, wild green eyes and a scruffy beard. He wore long flannel pyjamas and a stained old prayer shawl over his shoulders – a Jewish Rasputin. I told him that Mikael Tengmann’s nurse had given me his address, but that he must never tell that to anyone, and he agreed.

When we shook hands, I noticed his fingernails were long and filthy. I feared that his answers to my questions would become manic rants, but throughout our conversation he spoke to me in a quiet and well-considered voice. We sat at his kitchen table, and he poured mint tea for us into slender glasses.

‘I’ve come about your daughter,’ I said to him.

‘I figured that’s what it was.’

‘I understand she had an operation.’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about what took place,’ he replied.

‘But you know that Mikael Tengmann performed it?’