Without Jaśmin’s supplies, we would need a good deal of cash to bolster our rations of coarse black bread and potatoes, and I decided to look into the possibility of selling off some of the jewellery and silverware I’d brought with me into the ghetto. Through Jewish smugglers who ventured regularly into what we had begun to call
Shortly after that, Adam began foraging with the other members of his gang for chestnuts, dandelion leaves and nettles in the bombed-out lots and abandoned fields throughout the ghetto, turning their afternoons into urban safaris. He usually spent the tiny allowance I gave him on the molasses gloop that passed for candy in our ramshackle Never-Never-Land, though he managed to come home once with half a chocolate cake, earned, he beamed, by teaching a new friend in the chorus to ride a bicycle.
Adam rehearsed with Rowy and the other singers two afternoons a week. Just before Christmas, he also started taking chess lessons from Ziv in the young man’s room at the bakery.
The weather had turned bitter cold by then, and it became common to see shivering beggars and even stone-frozen corpses on the street. The German guards must have hated being so far from home throughout the winter, and they started beating Jews at random to keep themselves entertained. In consequence, Adam’s extensive wanderings left Stefa in a state of nervous exhaustion. She scolded him often, but he’d simply disappear with Wolfi, Feivel, Sarah and his other friends whenever we left him on his own. By this time, he and his playmates had demonstrated that they were able to avoid the Gestapo and the Jewish police far better than any adult, so after a while Stefa and I stopped worrying ourselves sick.
Still, I began to suspect that he and his friends might be up to no good – maybe even smuggling – when Adam came home late one afternoon smelling like manure.
‘Wolfi pushed me into a rubbish heap!’ he told me.
By then I’d heard of kids crawling through sewage tunnels to reach Christian territory and offered him a sceptical look.
‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘You know Wolfi is
‘All right, I believe you,’ I told him, since Wolfi was indeed a handful. I took him by the hand. ‘Anyway, let’s get you clean before your mother comes home or we’ll have no peace tonight.’
Mail was still being delivered, though we had to pay weekly bribes to the postman, and a first letter from Liesel reached me in early January. The photograph she sent showed off what she called her ‘Mediterranean tan’. Her new friend Petrina had short needles of black hair and watery eyes. Her arm was draped over my daughter’s shoulder in a comradely manner, but I could see from the solemn way Liesel looked at her that she had fallen in love.
Liesel had posed that way to tell me what she didn’t dare write.
My daughter asked what we needed, so I scribbled a long list beginning with pipe tobacco for me, pepper for Adam and bitter chocolate for Stefa.
Keeping secrets between us seemed pointless now. ‘May you and Petrina enjoy a happy life together in the land of Homer,’ I ended my letter. ‘Inside this envelope is a kiss from your silly old father, who hopes you forgive him.’
For years, I had feared giving up my expectations for my daughter, but when I posted that letter I felt a lightness of spirit that left me giddy – as if I’d repaired what had been broken. When I later told Izzy about what I’d written to Liesel, he congratulated me – which I knew he would – and I surprised myself by confessing to him that I was only now becoming the father I’d always hoped to be.
That evening, after supper, my nephew and I went for a long happy walk. Our last.
Know this: Adam was a child born under the signs of both the sun and moon. When he was sad, his unhappiness swept over Stefa and me like a desolate wind, turning our spirits to dust. But when he was happy – dancing by himself to a tango on the Victrola, or stretching his little fingers across Bach arpeggios on his mother’s piano, or just sitting at my feet multiplying numbers – we were certain we would be able to outlast the Nazis.
Adam carried Gloria home inside a shoebox during the third week of January of 1941, and the lesson I wish she hadn’t taught us was that even fairy-light creatures can tilt the balance of several lives.
On lifting the lid off his box, my nephew told his mother and me that the manager of the Roth’s Pet Shop had given him the budgerigar free of charge. As to the reason, all the boy had to do was point; Gloria’s left foot was a lumpy grey mass hanging by a thread – a textbook illustration of the ravages of cancer.
