Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

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.

Once seated, she dropped her crystals into a white linen handkerchief, folded each corner towards the centre, tied it together, and stowed her treasure in her leather bag. Her gestures were quick and practised, which charmed me. When she looked at me again, I put my crystal between my front teeth and took a sip of tea across its smooth surface. She watched me with a serious look, and neither of us turned away for far longer than would be considered appropriate for two Jewish dinosaurs.

Who can explain the ways of the body? My dormant, undernourished shmekele began to grow. And my thoughts turned to hopes long extinguished.

What kind of man would long for sex after the death of the two people he most loved in the world?

The woman introduced herself as Melka Wilner. She told me she knew who I was because her niece Zosia Kleiner was married to Dawid Kornberg, the son of a former neighbour of mine, who just happened to be in Amsterdam on business when we were ordered into the ghetto…

To play by the rules of Jewish knitting, I listened patiently before steering us towards more interesting topics. The rest of our conversation was filtered through the sensual feel of the sugar crystal melting between my teeth.

We ended up talking of travel. I spoke of my honeymoon in London and she told me she had lived in Palestine for five years, from April 1902 to December 1907. She’d married a judge named Timmermann on returning to Poland. ‘He always knew right from wrong, which seemed a good thing until I realized he was always right and I was always wrong!’ She laughed in a burst, and light radiated from her eyes.

I envied how she talked so easily of the events around which her life had turned.

The deed was done in her slender bed, behind a rose-patterned curtain strung from wall to wall; it separated her side of the room from her cousin Zosia’s. Melka sensed my nervousness and took control. She was gentle with me, and her kisses were so passionate that she left me disoriented – as if outside my body. Our acrobatics themselves proved painful, limited by the demands of bodies that had been given bony angles by cramped hunger and age. Still, to our credit, we managed to make a pleasant mess on ourselves and the sheets.

God knows why she chose me.

I floundered like a wounded animal afterwards, in a dim grey twilight between waking and sleep. I was giving Adam a bath, and he was splashing. I knew it wasn’t real, but I wanted to stay with him. I wanted to become sopping wet with the very sight of him.

‘When was the last time you made love?’ Melka asked me, tugging me fully awake.

She was sitting at the foot of the bed. Sensing my confusion, she caressed my leg and repeated her question.

I sat up, already so far from Adam that it petrified me. Trying to disguise my feelings, I replied, ‘As best I can recall, Nero was emperor in Rome.’

She laughed, which made me feel a little better. ‘And you?’ I asked.

‘Three or four days ago,’ she replied. ‘I’ve a… a friend.’

I examined my feelings and couldn’t find bitterness or jealousy. What else had I a right to expect?

‘I’m sorry, Erik,’ she said, rubbing my foot.

‘It’s all right.’

I noticed now the smell of mildew in the room. It seemed to be coming from beneath the bed. I decided not to look.

‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Melka requested, smiling encouragingly.

‘Do you really want to know?’ I asked in a tone of warning.

‘Yes. At the very least, we can help each other by listening.’

As I explained about Adam and Stefa, and all the detective work I’d done that had led me to Rowy and Mikael, which now seemed like nowhere, Melka got up and went to the window, peeking through a crack in the curtains. I had the impression she was listening to her own inner voice rather than me, but I needed to confess myself to a person who hadn’t known all the people I’d failed, so I kept on talking.

‘What will you do now?’ she asked after I’d finished.

‘I don’t know. I suppose after I find out who killed Adam, I’ll go back to work at the Lending Library and wait for the Germans to shovel our skinny corpses into the river.’

Melka opened a chink in the curtains again. ‘God, I hate the Polish winter,’ she said, sighing despairingly.

‘We’ll hope for an early spring,’ I replied, trying to sound encouraging.

‘Maybe you need to let your niece and nephew go,’ she said without turning round. ‘You still have a chance to make a new life.’

‘You can’t be serious?’ I replied.

‘Sorry, what I said was thoughtless,’ she told me, smiling sweetly. ‘Forgive me.’

When she slipped on her pullover, I recognized my cue. After I was dressed, I pressed a slip of paper with my address into her hand, but her easy thank you and friendly peck on the cheek meant that we would never do this again.

My guilt that afternoon and evening was crushing. I drank vodka until I passed out.

Ewa finally came over the next day, Sunday, 2 March, while I was napping off my hangover.

‘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.