Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Why you?’

‘Because I want to play the lead for a change! Besides, I’ve got the candle. You take Marlene.’ He handed me the pistol. ‘If you see anything furry that resembles Mickey or Minnie, pow – right between the eyes!’

Izzy started ahead. I followed close behind. The tunnel was filthy with scum, and the rotting-wood stink was nauseating. The scabs on my knees opened. The air became stale and the heat grew stifling. Hearing a metallic clang behind us, I looked over my shoulder. Blackness pressed against my eyes like a blindfold. We were sealed in.

With my pulse racing, I tried to slip out of my suit coat, but there wasn’t enough room. Panic covered me like netting. I pushed out on the wooden planks of the tunnel. ‘I can’t go on!’ I announced.

‘Erik, if we aren’t there in two minutes, we’ll turn back.’

Water dripping from the ceiling stepped its fingertips across my neck as I edged forward. My ears seemed stuffed, and I felt dizzy. The air became too thin to fill my lungs. Izzy’s candle grew dim and sputtered out. By my count, we had crawled thirty metres.

Purple and red shapes floated around me. My thoughts were arrows flying out in wild directions. ‘Maciej tricked us!’ I said, sucking in air, then sucking again, because my lungs weren’t filling.

‘Give me your lighter!’ Izzy ordered.

‘No, I’m going back,’ I answered between gulps of air. I must have looked like a fish tossed on land. I tried to turn around, but it was too tight.

‘Erik, hand me your goddamned lighter!’ he repeated.

I found only the letter opener in my coat pocket. ‘It’s gone,’ I said, panting. Get out of here now! was what the booming against my ribs meant.

‘You’ve still got it – try in your other pockets!’ he told me.

I found it and held it out. ‘Take it!’

His fingers groped along my arm and snatched it, but he couldn’t raise a flame. Fighting for breath, he whispered, ‘It doesn’t matter. I saw the exit just ahead.’

I could tell he was lying, but before I could say so, my hands gave way and I slipped on to my belly. I was too weak to move and I was falling into darkness.

I awoke pierced by light. Izzy was staring down at me, and his face seemed too big. A young woman with pretty brown eyes was also gazing down at me. Her eyelashes were long and delicate – like fern tendrils.

‘Yes, you’re alive,’ Izzy assured me. ‘We pulled you out with a rope.’

‘Out of where?’ I asked; my memory of the last hour was gone.

‘The tunnel.’

‘And where are we?’

‘Where would you like to be?’

‘London – the British Museum.’

‘Good choice! Anything I can get you?’ he questioned.

‘Some tea. And a scone. And maybe a thunderstorm.’ Strange things to ask for, but I was thinking that there was a lot to be said for English clichés when one has been crushed by German ones.

‘Sorry, we took a wrong turn somewhere near Brussels,’ Izzy replied. ‘We’re back home. How about a week-old sheygets and some ghetto water?’

He sat down beside me and lifted a cup of water to my lips. I drank gratefully. My head was pounding.

‘So, how are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘That I wish I’d gone first. I wouldn’t have made a wrong turn near Brussels.’

Smiling with relief, he helped me sit up. The woman beside him took his cup and held it to my lips again. I felt bruised and tender, as if I’d been stepped on. I looked around the room. Five women sat at sewing tables, pedalling like demons. I held up my hand and waved. Two of them noticed and smiled. They had sympathetic eyes and the same gaunt features we all had – starvation would make us all cousins before the Germans were through with us. Still, the whirring sound of the sewing machines was reassuring – a noble percussion that meant: we Jews are fighting on.

I was lying on a lumpy couch, covered by a woollen blanket. I lifted it up. I was in my underwear. My knees were crusted with blood. And my arm was throbbing – I looked again at the angry burn Mrs Sawicki had given me.

‘Checking on your petzl ?’ Izzy asked, raising his eyebrows.

‘I thought it might be prudent to make sure it’s still there,’ I told him.

The women laughed.

The air had become warm and full. My trousers were folded neatly on the seat of a chair by my head. My coat and shirt were hanging over its back. When I reached for my pants, an old season ticket for the omnibus fell out of my pocket. And just like that, I seemed to have entered one of Papa’s jokes: a skeleton crawls out of his grave five years after burial and finds a receipt in his coat pocket for the trousers that he’d been having altered when he died, so he goes to his tailor, presents the receipt to him and says, ‘So, Pinkus, are my pants ready?’

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the punchline of the joke, but I giggled anyway. Izzy looked at me inquisitively.

‘Too little oxygen,’ I told him, which must have been partially true, but I was mostly giddy at finding myself still alive.

At home, Izzy and I found that Stefa was still unable to leave her bed. After I slipped into fresh clothes, I emptied her chamber pot, and she asked me what had happened to my hair. I reached up to check it was still there. Then I remembered. ‘I needed a disguise,’ I told her.

She sighed as if I required great patience. ‘I’m sore all over,’ she moaned. ‘And my feet are still frozen. Could you make me some hot tea with lemon?’

We had no lemons, so I trudged over to the Tarnowskis’ while Izzy massaged Stefa’s shoulders. As I stood in the doorway, Ida Tarnowski asked about my hair as well. ‘I’m up for a part in a Yiddish production of Don Juan in Hell ,’ I told her, which I thought was witty, but she asked me when I’d know if I’d passed the audition.

‘Sorry, I was just kidding,’ I replied, and I asked her for a lemon, but she told me she couldn’t even remember what one looked like.

I tried several other neighbours without luck. When I returned home, Stefa was snoring and Izzy was flat on his back in my bed, in all his clothes, his mouth open – an ancient cave with hidden gold. I chopped off most of my hair at the bathroom sink and ended up looking like a prisoner of war, which seemed right. Then I left a cup of hot water on my niece’s night table – sweetened with molasses – and climbed under the covers. The sheets were Siberian ice, but I was too exhausted to care.

I woke up when I heard Izzy clomping around the room. He was munching on a piece of matzo. He sat down at the foot of my bed. ‘Your raven has flown away,’ he noted.

‘Gloria told him that Poland was no place for a bird.’

We talked about our next moves. I needed to make some food for Stefa, so he agreed to go to Mikael Tengmann’s office and hand him the thousand złoty, then head to Mrs Rackemann’s shop, pay her what I still owed her and pick up my wedding band. I put Mikael’s money in one of Mrs Sawicki’s envelopes and asked him to note if the physician showed any unease or surprise on seeing her name; it occurred to me now that the killer – who must have lived outside the ghetto – might have had an accomplice inside. And Mikael was one of only two people I knew of who had known both Adam and Anna, the other being Rowy. Maybe one of them was conspiring with Mrs Sawicki.

An hour and a half later Izzy was back. I was frying up some wild onion to add to the borscht I’d made out of two withered old beets.

‘Mikael is getting the anti-typhus serum tomorrow,’ he told me. He stuffed the money in my coat pocket, since my hands were busy, and he put my wedding band down on the counter.