Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

I left right away; I needed to question him about Anna and could elicit his advice on selling my ring at the same time. On the way, I got myself deloused at the disinfection bathhouse at 109 Leszno Street.

What unlikely marvels I saw in the shop windows that afternoon while waiting for Rowy! – six big fresh trout lying in a tub of ice; a burlap bag brimming with coffee beans from Ethiopia; and a bottle of Sandeman port from 1922. In the window of M. Rackemann & Sons, Tobacconists was a Star of David made out of twenty-four mustard-coloured packets of Gauloises cigarettes. The design had the unexpected, peculiar beauty of a Dadaist collage.

A blonde young prostitute with caved-in cheeks and frantic eyes soon caught my attention. She stood outside the Rosenberg Soup Kitchen, rubbing her spidery hands together, gazing around nervously, as though waiting for an unreliable friend. Had she been an art student? She dressed like the subject of an Otto Dix painting, with red stockings on her stick-figure legs and a lumpy, fox-headed stole slung around her neck.

When she asked me if I was looking for some affection, I thanked her for her interest but told her she’d have better luck with a younger man.

By the time Rowy emerged, the sun was going down. He was dressed in grey except for a crimson woollen scarf, which coiled around his neck and ribboned behind him in the wind like a banner proclaiming his youth. His walk was eager and untroubled – as though he were bouncing along on daydreams. I hailed him with a wave.

His face brightened on seeing me, which pleased me.

‘Greetings, Erik!’ he said as he approached.

‘I like your scarf,’ I told him, and we shook hands.

‘Ewa – she knitted it for me,’ he replied.

From the way he smiled, I could see he was deeply in love – and that his new way of walking was meant to let the world know. Maybe this was his first great passion.

‘I just found out that you studied with Noel Anbaum,’ I told him.

‘Man, that was years ago!’ he replied in jaunty German, adding in Yiddish, ‘I hope you didn’t come all the way across town just to confirm that.’

‘No. What I really need to know is if you knew his granddaughter Anna.’

‘Sure did. She auditioned for the chorus. Noel set it up for her. Why?’

‘She’s dead – murdered just like Adam. And her hand was cut off.’

Rowy gasped, then swept his gaze across the rooftops behind me. He was likely trying to get a glimpse of his future, because he told me in a solemn voice, ‘Makes you wonder if any of us will get out of here alive.’

‘You’ll make it. You’re near the top of my list.’

He fiddled with the splint on his finger. ‘You could be wrong.’

I grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t predict your own death – I won’t allow it!’ The clenched force behind my words made him draw back. I let him go. ‘Sorry, forgive me,’ I said.

‘There’s no need to apologize,’ he replied, and I saw in the depth of his dark eyes that he would have embraced me had we known each other better.

‘I’m not quite myself of late,’ I told him.

‘How could you be? Erik, I…’ He struggled to find the right words, then shrugged defeatedly. ‘I’ve wanted a chance to talk to you, but you left the funeral so quickly, and…’

‘Rowy, I can’t talk to you about my nephew just now. It would end any chance I have of doing anything useful. Now listen, I don’t remember Anna singing at the concert. Was she there?’

‘No. She passed the solfeggio exam, but she never showed up for any rehearsals. A few days later, I went to her home, but her mother said she wasn’t well and was asleep in bed.’

‘So you never talked to her again?’

‘No, I did.’ Rowy put on his gloves. ‘I went back again a few days later because she had a soprano voice worth training, and she’d have added some needed balance to the upper end of the chorus. This time I saw her, and I begged her to go for her check-up with Ewa’s father, but I never heard anything more about her.’

‘How did she seem to you?’

‘Unhappy. And fragile. The poor girl was just skin and bone.’

‘She didn’t by chance mention Adam when you saw her?’ I questioned.

‘No. Did they know each other?’

‘That’s what I have to find out. Rowy, listen, I’ve got something else to ask you that requires a little privacy. Let’s go inside.’

The young man hooked his arm in mine as we walked towards a nearby apartment house. I imagined he was close to his father. The psychiatrist in me would have bet he was the youngest child in his family.

Once we were hidden on the stairwell, I took out Hannah’s ring. ‘Know anything about selling jewellery?’

‘Just that you’ll get a better price outside the ghetto.’ He took the ring and studied it, then handed it back. ‘Inside, it’s become a buyer’s market. I sold Papa’s flute the other day and got next to nothing.’

As I’d guessed, that left me only one choice, but it was too late in the day for an excursion to the Other Side; I’d go in the morning.

I passed Rackemann’s Tobacconists after Rowy left for home, and the French cigarettes in the window gave me the idea that the owner might be able to help me with an important request – or know someone who could. A woman in her fifties, with short, hennaed hair and too much rouge on her puffy cheeks, sat crocheting behind the counter. ‘Is Mr Rackemann in?’ I asked.

She laid her crochet work in her lap. ‘My husband passed away in ’37.’

‘Then you must have made the Gauloises star in the window.’

‘Yes, that was me. How can I help you?’

‘Maybe you can put your hands on something unusual for me,’ I told her. ‘Two things, as a matter of fact.’

I waited an hour for my first request to be fulfilled by Mrs Rackemann. She told me then that my second item would require a great deal more work and would cost me the astronomical sum of 1,300 złoty if I wanted it by the next morning, as I’d indicated. I agreed to that fee, and since I couldn’t pay her the full sum right away, I gave her as a deposit all the cash I had on me – nearly 200 złoty – as well as my gold wedding band.

It was just after five in the afternoon – morbid darkness in the Polish winter – by the time I made it to Mikael’s flat, which doubled as his medical office. In the waiting room, the tiny, quick-moving nurse whom I’d met briefly when Adam came for his check-up sized me up from her desk in the corner, and her disapproving look told me I’d failed whatever test she’d conceived for me. She told me in a stern voice that Dr Tengmann was with a patient, but she poked her head into his consultation room to let him know I was here. Too jittery to sit, I stood by the window and watched a water-seller accosting passers-by on the street below. A wooden bar was stretched horizontally across his shoulders, with a tin pail hanging from each end. He wore galoshes wrapped in what looked like birch-tree bark.

We were back in the Middle Ages, and the Nazis had dragged us there – which meant that the question we now needed to ask was: how far back in time would be enough for them?

A young woman with a plaster cast on her wrist soon came in and whispered to the nurse, who instructed her to sit and wait on the green velveteen couch to the side of the window where I was standing.

‘Excuse me, but would you like to sign my cast?’ she asked me after a minute or two, smiling hopefully. She held it up to show me it was covered with signatures.

She wanted to be nice to an alter kacker with grey stubble on his chin and dead bats for shoes, so I did as she asked, except that I wrote the name Erik Honec in extravagant Gothic lettering – what I imagined a professional writer might do.