Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

Mrs Lanik looked puzzled. ‘Why Nantes?’

‘Because of your parents.’

‘My parents? But they live in Bordeaux,’ she corrected me.

‘I must have misunderstood,’ I replied, wondering why Irene would have lied to me.

I was also astonished by her capabilities as an actress. How much else had she told me that wasn’t true?

‘Yes, I’ve been thinking of taking a trip with Irene,’ Mrs Lanik told me. ‘Dr Cohen, thank you.’ She grasped both my hands. ‘I’m forever in your debt.’

‘I only hope I’ve helped a little with whatever is troubling her,’ I replied, and as I said that I realized the real reason I’d stayed with Irene: she had needed to be heard, and my willingness to listen to her – to allow even the silence between us to speak to me – was part of a world of solidarity the Nazis wanted to destroy. By staying, I was fighting for all I’d once believed in. And I was asserting my right to live as the man I wanted to be.

‘I’d like for you to see her again as soon as possible,’ Mrs Lanik told me, ‘but my husband is coming back tomorrow. I’ll get word to you when I know he’s going away again. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She escorted me down the stairs. She had two wicker baskets of food waiting for me on the antique wooden table by the front door.

‘I managed to get you fourteen lemons,’ she told me, smiling happily.

Dispersed among red apples, the lemons were beautiful – a composition worthy of Cézanne.

‘You’ll never know how grateful I am for your help,’ I told her.

‘I only hope I’ve chosen well for you,’ she replied, and she handed me an envelope. ‘Here is your two hundred złoty.’

‘Thank you. And one last thing – I’d like to keep your daughter’s pills. She says you have them. If they are in the house, she might somehow find them.’

‘Yes, you’re right.’

While Mrs Lanik was gone, I put my pipe tobacco and two lemons in my coat pocket for safekeeping and examined the eggs, butter, cheese and ham. She’d even put in tins of Russian caviar and French foie gras. She handed me the pills as soon as she returned. I was in luck – Veronal, my tranquillizer of choice.

As I stashed them in my pocket, my relief made me close my eyes with gratitude. The Nazis have lost control of me , I thought – being able to summon death at any time was a guarantee I’d needed since I first saw Adam in the Pinkiert’s cart. Ten pills would be all I’d need, and the end would be painless.

‘What about my German escorts?’ I asked Mrs Lanik. I didn’t see them anywhere.

‘Already in their car, waiting for you.’ Smiling broadly, as people do who’ve been crying and are thankful for the help they’ve received, she said in French, ‘And I’ve told them in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut and their hands off your food!’

The Germans were in the front seat. I got in the back, next to my picnic baskets.

As we took off, the Nazi comedian turned and pointed his gun at my face, vibrating with rage. ‘I might just make a bloody hole where that Jewish nose is!’ he threatened. ‘All I’d have to tell my superiors is that you tried to escape.’

His words sounded practised, which made them less believable. Still, I didn’t dare reply. I looked out my window instead, fingering the coins in my pocket, and after a few seconds he turned away and we started off. He said nothing more to me on the drive back home.

In my mind, I went over what Irene had told me, and all her revelations – whether fictional or real – now seemed to point to the man in the hat who took flowers from Irene and two other children.

Though there may be more than two , the girl had told me.

The distant white blanket of winter sky, the crack of ice beneath the wheels of our car, the ticklish wool of my scarf… All that I saw and felt vanished suddenly, because it was at that moment I realized that Irene had created her dream to fit what she knew about the murders inside the ghetto!

She’d intended for me to find out she’d been lying about Nantes or some other small detail, because she was eager for me to understand that her testimony had been carefully scripted.

Two children had vanished from the meadow; she was talking about Adam and Anna!

Except that Irene could not have learned about Anna’s murder from Jaśmin.

Was it possible that she had witnessed Jewish children being murdered? Maybe she had overheard the killer talking about them. Then, when Jaśmin spoke about me, Irene understood that my nephew was one of the kids who’d vanished.

She’d wanted to identify the killer to me, but couldn’t, which probably meant she was afraid of being murdered herself. By whom? Her stepfather? Maybe the man named Jesion.

Or perhaps even by her real father.

Bina, her mother and her uncle Freddi were waiting for me at home. ‘I’ve brought food,’ I told the girl, handing her the basket I’d carried upstairs.

I sat down on my bed, exhausted. Bina looked between the fresh fruit and me, beaming as if I were a messenger from God. She kissed me on each cheek, and I hugged her back, but I was still deep inside all that Irene had told me. Bina’s uncle – a short, dark, hairy man with a boxer’s build, smelling pleasantly of talc – burst into tears when he told me how grateful he was to be able to move in. Bina’s mother went down on her knees to recite a speech she’d memorized. I felt trapped by their fervent hopes for a better life, so when the girl went down to the courtyard to get my second basket of food from Professor Engal, I retreated into what had been Stefa’s room and locked the door. I’d left my list of the dead on my pillow. I stared at the names for a long time, hoping they would lift off the page and show me more of what I needed to know, but they didn’t.

After putting some supplies for Izzy in one of the baskets that Bina had emptied, I went down to the street with the girl and she hailed me a rickshaw. She kissed me goodbye tenderly; she obviously liked having a benefactor, even if he played the Big Bad Wolf on his own small stage at times.

Izzy danced around when he saw what I’d brought him; unfortunately for me, he made the same rubbery-handed movements that he’d taught Adam as an Indian raindance.

‘Where’d you get all this?’ he asked, picking his excited fingers through the cheeses.

‘A new friend,’ I told him.

I handed him the two lemons I had in my coat pocket. He cupped them if they were the goose’s golden eggs.

While he prepared lemonade, I told him about my session with Irene, ending with how I’d come to believe that she had learned that at least two ghetto children had been murdered. ‘Izzy, I don’t know how, but she knows who’s doing this!’ I exclaimed.

He questioned me at length about my conclusions – a good thing, as it turned out, because my repeating so many details helped us come up with new possibilities and dangers.

‘Irene might even have faked her suicide attempt to convince her mother to send for you,’ he speculated.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I replied. ‘She told me that we can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening in the ghetto, and sending for me was her way of helping – she wants me to use her clues to catch the killer.’

Izzy and I were on our second cup of lemonade by then.

‘We’ve got to go to Krakowskie Przedmieście and look for someone with the name Jesion,’ I told him. ‘Irene implied that he holds the key to solving these murders.’

‘But we don’t have an address and-?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I interrupted, ‘you and I are crossing to the Other Side – early.’