The Emperor of Lies, page 15
Vos zaynen mir – a flig?
Loz er undz a zkhus gefinen
Oy, es zol shoin zain genuk5
When Rosa Smoleńska went over the whole scene in her mind afterwards, it seemed to her as though the bell on the wall outside the kitchen had jangled all evening, and she had gone up to the piano tuner several times during the performance and asked him to please turn off the racket, and in future keep his hands off things that did not belong to him.
But perhaps the angry, jangling rings had not, apart from that first and only time, been the piano tuner’s work. Perhaps it was just as Miss Estera Daum later said: the Chairman’s staff had been trying to get through to the Green House all evening, but received no answer. Their last attempt had been long after midnight. By then, Rosa had finally managed to get the sweaty, overexcited children out of their costumes and into bed, and even had time to go to bed herself.
Riiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiing … !
went the peremptory signal again.
She heard Superintendent Rubin in the office on the floor below, stamping around in search of the telephone receiver which was somewhere under all the papers and books on his desk; then his voice answering, and immediately assuming a submissive tone, with a yes and an of course and an at once, Mr Chairman. She realised straight away what was happening, pulled on a cardigan over her nightdress and went from room to room, to try to shake some life into the children again:
Hurry up and get dressed, the Praeses is on his way!
Hurry up!
The staff of the Green House normally had between thirty and forty minutes to wash and dress all the children, and comb their hair. That was about how long it took the Chairman to get all the way out to Marysin from his office once Miss Estera Daum had rung to alert them.
The children were by this point so exhausted that she had the utmost difficulty getting them back on their feet. By the time she and Malwina finally had them lined up in fairly neat and tidy rows, with the youngest at the front and the older children ranged in rising order of size on the stairs behind them, the Chairman was already out of his carriage and on his way into the house. Without so much as a glance to his right or left he swept past Mirjam, who was trying to give him the album of illustrated Talmud verses which the children had prepared in case of a visit. But for now, the ghetto’s highest of the high had no eyes for young Mirjam, or any of the other children either; he just handed his hat, coat and walking stick to Chaja and addressed Superintendent Rubin in a loud voice.
Be so kind as to accompany me to your office, Dr Rubin.
Yes, at once … ! And bring the lists of all the children!
Ever since the time in Helenówek, Miss Smoleńska had tried to read the old man’s many shifting moods as one might the weather. Was he calm and pleased with himself today? Or was he once again in the grip of the strange fury that occasionally overcame him?
There were nearly always clues. Like the way he moved his hands: whether they were calm and assured, or restless and fumbling, as they felt for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Or if he had what Chaja Meyer called his ‘joker look’: that knowing little one-sided smile, a hint that he had ideas or plans for one of them, or even one of the children.
But on this late visit she detected no sign. The Chairman appeared strict, grave, resolute. What was more, he was closeted in the office with Superintendent Rubin for an unusually long time. Several hours passed. Then Chaja, apparently acting on orders from the office, started filling buckets with hot water from the big pan in the kitchen, and Miss Malwina went round the tables, laying out towels. It was by then half past two in the morning, and since no contradictory order had been given, the children were still lined up on the stairs. Some were already asleep, their heads propped on each other, or the wall or banisters; or they had subsided into a sitting position on the stairs, like Samstag, who had his hands between his knees and his knees drawn up to his ears like a cricket.
Then the Chairman appeared again. In one hand he had the Zugangslisten Superintendent Rubin had asked for.
Rosa Smoleńska would later remember the empty, lifeless expression on the Chairman’s face, and the fact that when he finally opened his mouth to speak, he could not initially find the words he was looking for. Was it then – only then, having sat in Rubin’s office and gone through the lists of all the children’s names with Rubin – that the full extent of the fate awaiting the incarcerated Jews of the ghetto hit him? Not just the children, but them above all, since the children were his. After that, it was unclear whom he was addressing, the dozing children on the stairs or the staff of the Green House, worn out and short of sleep. But he stammered as he spoke. He had never done that before.
I am only going to say this once, and I shall say it now, to explain once and for all the gravity of the situation in which we find ourselves:
The authorities, whose rules we must all obey, have decided that without exception, everyone in the ghetto must work – including children and young people – and that those who do not work will be sent away from the ghetto immediately.
I do not say this lightly – because I have be no wish to frighten people needlessly – but beyond the borders of the ghetto there is no one who can guarantee the safety of you or any other Jews. Only in the ghetto, under my protection, since I have secured the lasting trust of the authorities, can you be safe.
I have therefore in consultation with Mr Warszawski decided to create special apprentice places for all ghetto children old enough to work. Even those who have not yet had the compulsory health inspection are from now on expected to start as trainee cutters and sewers at the tailor’s workshops of the ghetto!
At his words, a degree of alarm spread among the older children on the stairs.
Have we got to leave? Debora Żurawska was heard to cry from somewhere behind Werner Samstag’s legs. And from behind her, a chorus of muttering. But now the signs were unmistakably there in the old man, the signs she had long since learnt to recognise: the smile at the corner of his mouth, the darting eyes, the hand going in and out of his jacket pocket:
It’s your young lives at stake here, and you dare to set yourselves against me?
A deathly hush descended on the hall and stairway.
Superintendent Rubin took a step forward so he was at the Chairman’s side. Rumkowski’s reaction was to grab the lists out of his hand in exasperation.
The particulars of a number of the children which should be on these lists are missing. I have also just seen with my own eyes that many of the children arriving have been entered under incorrect or even false names … The day the authorities call on me to account for all the children under my protection, we are all doomed! Children! Please now be so good as to come forward one by one when Superintendent Rubin calls you out, tell us your names and where you come from, and then go into the kitchen where Dr Zysman will examine you.
No one wonders why this procedure had to be gone through at three o’clock on an icy cold winter’s morning. They all know that if the occupying authorities had carried it out themselves, considerably worse things could have happened. Even so, some of that same sense of terror and unreality creeps under their skin as Superintendent Rubin clumsily adjusts his glasses on his nose and starts to read the list out loud:
Rubin (reads): Samstag, Werner. Geburtsort: Köln. Vater/Mutter – Unbekannt.
Chairman: And what does Unbekannt mean?
Rubin: Samstag arrived in the second transport. There were no accompanying relatives and he has not been able to tell us of any since.
Samstag: My name’s not Samstag.
Chairman: It doesn’t say Samstag here. It is you, Superintendent Rubin, who wrote in Samstag. Didn’t you? That’s what happened, isn’t it?
Rubin: We thought we ought to give him a surname.
Chairman: What crap! Go on.
Rubin (reads): Majerowicz, Kazimir. Geburtsort: Łódź. Vater/Mutter – Unbekannt.
Chairman: Unbekannt again. How is that possible?
Rubin: It was your order that children who had been separated from their parents were to be brought here.
Chairman: How old are you, Mr Majerowicz?
Kazimir: I’m fifteen going on sixteen, thank you for asking Mr Chairman.
Chairman: It says here that you were born on 12 January 1926.
Rubin: There may be a few mistakes, Mr Chairman.
Chairman: Very well. Next.
Rubin (reads): Szygorska, Mirjam. Vater/Mutter –
Chairman: Let me guess. Unbekannt.
Rubin: How did you know?
Chairman: Do you know what, Mr Rubin. Do you know how many lives your appalling lack of accuracy could cost me in the next few days?
Rubin: No, Mr Chairman.
Chairman: Would young Miss Szygorska please step forward … ?
Mirjam came forward. Since she was still holding the album of illustrated Talmud verses, she tried once again to present it to the Chairman. This time the Praeses, clearly taken aback, accepted the gift. Then he stood staring at her, the smile at one corner of his mouth becoming more marked:
Chairman: And how old is young Miss Szygorska, then?
Rubin (anxiously): Young Miss Szygorska can’t speak, Mr Rumkowski.
Chairman: Talkative or not, perhaps Miss Szygorska would be so good as to answer for herself.
Rubin: Miss Szygorska is eleven, Mr Chairman.
Chairman: She looks big for eleven. Or is this just another attempt to get out of my apprentice scheme?
Rubin: Young Miss Szygorska unfortunately doesn’t have the gift of speech, Mr Rumkowski.
Chairman: Doesn’t have the gift of speech? It seems to me that in other ways nature has been more than generous in its gifts to Miss Szygorska.
Then he takes Mirjam by the arm and drags her roughly into the office. In the doorway he turns and imperiously beckons Chaja to bring him one of the washbowls and a towel, waits impatiently for her to bring them and then shuts and locks the door behind him.
For quite some time they just stand there – frightened, nonplussed – staring at the closed door. After a time they hear faint noises from within. Chair legs scrape; something heavy hits the wall and then rolls slowly across the floor. The thudding and rattling are repeated several times. Then they hear the Chairman’s voice, muffled and angry. And superimposed on it, a descant – Mirjam’s. So she does have a voice, after all! It sounds as if she has something loud and urgent to say, but something or someone stops the words getting out.
Chair legs scrape the floor again, and once more it sounds as if something heavy is hitting the floor or falling over.
Then it goes quiet. Appallingly quiet.
Debora is the first to break out of the collective paralysis. She runs back to the Pink Room and starts pounding the piano keys. Then the rhythm emerges and the whole keyboard bends to the notes of the old Jewish protest song that the theatrical troupe performed earlier:
Tseshlogn, tseharget ales
Tsevorfn, yedes bazunder
Fun khasanim – kales
Fun muters – kleyne kinder
Shrayt, kinder, shrayt aroyf.
Shrayt hekher ahin dort;
Vekt ir dem tatn oyf
Vos shloft er kloymersht dort?
Far dir herstu veynen, klogn
Kinder fun der vig
Zei betn doch, du zolst zey zogn:
Oy, es zol shoyn zayn genuk!6
Kasimir beats time on the drum, loudly. Out in the other room, the younger children are racing round in an increasingly frenzied dance. Natasza Maliniak has put her hands over her ears and is screaming, while Liba and Sara climb up onto the piano and try to grab hold of Debora’s hands from above, as if they were perched on the edge of a well, trying to catch butterflies.
Rosa remembers that Chaja usually keeps the spare keys to the office in one of the kitchen drawers. When she gets back, key in hand, she sees Werner Samstag lying flat on his back on the floor outside the office. He has unbuttoned his flies and is masturbating with long, convulsive movements of his right hand, while the fingers of the left open and close like a throbbing heart. He has caught her eye long before she realises what he is doing, and she sees that he is smiling, in the middle of the long ascent to his orgasm: the shiny, saliva-wet smile, shameless and full of the certainty of the initiated.
Then it happens, the thing she has always known would happen. When she looks up, she sees the piano tuner has climbed to the top of the stepladder again. His face is as black as mud, or as if someone has poured soot over it and then given his eyes and mouth a perfunctory wipe. She can now plainly see that he is considerably older than the fifteen or sixteen she had assumed him to be: a little gnome, a child who has stopped growing and prematurely aged into the body of a grown man. But with skilful hands. It takes him only two seconds to short-circuit the bell with the tuning forks from his sailcloth bags, and the ringing cuts like an acoustic tidal wave right through the house …
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiing –
And suddenly it is as if the entire storm has abated.
Then the Chairman is standing among them again. He is bright red in the face, and his otherwise pedantically neat suit is crumpled and unbuttoned.
Somebody seems to have rung … ?
It is more a question than a statement. It is obvious he does not know what to say.
Through the half-open door to Superintendent Rubin’s office, Rosa can see the enamel bowl Chaja Meyer took in lying upturned in the middle of the floor, surrounded by pools of water. Of Mirjam, who was in there with him, there is no sign.
Superintendent Rubin, says the Chairman.
It sounds as if his most immediate need is a name on to which he can hook his confusion. But once having pronounced that name, he seems suddenly to reach a decision, and repeats his command, with renewed authority:
Superintendent Rubin, you will come with me!
And holds the door and waits for Superintendent Rubin to go in with him, then locks the door behind him again.
Chaja the cook is the first to rally after the shock. In two strides she is at the piano and pulling Debora’s hands away from the keyboard. Rosa Smoleńska goes down on one knee beside Werner Samstag, who is still lying there on the floor with his trousers undone, and though he is twice as tall as she is, she is able to get his loose-jointed body over her shoulder and carry it backwards up the stairs to the dormitories above.
In all the ensuing uproar, nobody remembers Mirjam. It is in fact only long after Rosa and Malwina have got the children to bed again that they realise Mirjam is missing.
They search the whole house. Even the coal cellar, where the piano tuner has made himself a sort of nest, in which he sleeps under a couple of mangy blankets. In the spilt washing water under Dr Rubin’s desk, Rosa later finds the welcoming gift, the album, with the carefully coloured-in pictures of Hagar and Lot ripped out and torn in two.
But they don’t find Mirjam.
At about five in the morning, Józef Feldman comes up to the house as usual, walking his bike with the buckets of coal dangling from the handlebars. Superintendent Rubin hands Feldman a battery-operated torch, and Feldman sets off into the empty dawn to look for her.
As the first light of day reaches over the wall in Bracka Street, he finds the body in an untouched bank of snow between a closed-down grocer’s shop and the no man’s land leading from the wires and watchtowers at Radogoszcz Gate. Mirjam is still wearing the knee-length black coat she had on when she arrived at the Green House. Lying a couple of metres from the body is the suitcase of dresses and rag dolls and black patent shoes that the other children so admired.
It was a mystery to everyone how she could have got out unseen. Perhaps she went out the back way, up the steps from the cellar, which the previous day had been revealed to be in use not only by Feldman but also by the piano tuner; then cut across the yard at the back of the house that was used as a playground for all the orphanage children of Marysin. But instead of turning right, into town, she must have gone left. Perhaps she had been lured by the light and noise coming from Radogoszcz Station, and then unwittingly walked straight into the restricted zone where the German guard with the machine gun in his high tower aimed straight at her.
The shot must have hit the side of her head, by her temple, for the blood lay cast in a wide arc of almost twenty metres across the snow. From the drift of snow that the wind had piled over her body during the night, one arm stuck up in the air like a pole. There was nothing else to be seen of her.
When they carried the frozen body into the boiler room of the Green House, Werner Samstag insisted on coming too. As Rosa and Chaja washed and shrouded the dead body, something happened to young Samstag that Rosa Smoleńska would never really be able to explain. He didn’t say the Kaddish – presumably he didn’t even know the words – but it was as if his face suddenly softened and sank into itself.
Dem tatn oyf, was all he said, and then he curled up beside the stiff corpse.
He adopted the same position as Mirjam, his arm sticking up like an exclamation mark, and was found the next day by Feldman when he came in again with his buckets of coal to get the boiler going. It was below freezing down in the coal cellar, and the insides of the windows had a white covering of frost. Mirjam was dead, but Werner Samstag was alive. He was asleep in the icy cold in the middle of the floor, with his arms clasped around his own body and a bright, utterly peaceful smile on his lips.
