The Emperor of Lies (31 page)

In September 1942, the authorities announced their curfew,
di geshpere
, or just
di shpere
as it came to be known. The curfew lasted for seven days, and while it was in force, the upper echelons of the ghetto’s ruling elite were ordered to remain in their summer residences and on no account to come into the centre of the ghetto.

From the kitchen window under the lilacs – their flowers now over – in Miarki Street, Regina could see long columns of open army vehicles moving in. They carried German soldiers in heavy gear, sitting with the barrels of their rifles between their knees, their faces under their helmets bored or childishly grinning.

The Schupo had set up a roadblock at the entrance to Miarki Street. She was not quite sure if it was to stop those confined up here from getting out, or those down there from getting in. There were occasional concerted bursts of gunfire from down on the big, open field on the other side of Próżna Street.

More convoys of SS troop vehicles were coming along the road all the time. But there was no sign of the children everyone had been talking about.

The days that followed were chaotic.

Everyone wanted to see the Chairman, but the Chairman claimed he was indisposed, locked himself in the bedroom upstairs and refused to see anyone.

They banged on the door. They called through the keyhole. Miss Dora Fuchs even went down on her knees in front of it and loudly listed all the people who wanted to see him. It’s a matter of life and death, the ghetto’s very survival, you simply can’t abandon us now! Regina was urged forward to the door. She was his wife, after all. For Benji’s sake, she said. But where her brother’s name would previously have unleashed a hail of oaths, this time there was no sound from inside the room.
Is our Praeses actually in there at all?
Helena Rumkowska asked disingenuously. Józef Rumkowski suggested they should just break the door down. But everyone else was against that. Mr Abramowicz said they must exercise restraint. The Praeses had simply retired to gather his thoughts at this crucial juncture. He would be out soon enough.

Eventually, even Gertler came, neatly dressed as always in a suit and tie, but he had some kind of smear (was it blood or dirt?) on his face and the back of his hand, and a putrid, slightly sickly smell, like chemicals or burnt oil, hung about his clothes.

He arrived in the company of Shlomo Frysk, head of the voluntary fire service in Marysin, and Isaiah Dawidowicz, police commander for District No. IV. They had two police officers with them, carrying a huge platter covered with a white linen cloth, and the five of them staggered up the stairs with the platter between them to the Chairman’s room, where Mr Gertler knocked and then announced solemnly to the closed door:

You’ve no idea what luck you are in, Chaim; my wife has just taken some baked apples out of the oven for you – with sugar and cinnamon!

Then they went down to the kitchen and started tucking in themselves. Gertler’s men were in a strange mood altogether. They were boisterous, and laughed all the time, as if to avoid looking at or speaking to each other. But the minute Gertler made the slightest movement, they all fell silent, as if waiting for precise orders.

Gertler seemed to be taking it all very calmly. He repeated the authorities’ assurance that the exclusive aim of the operation was to clear the ghetto of elements unfit for work. No one whose papers are in order will have anything to fear.

But my brother . . . !
objected Regina.

Others, too, wanted to know what had happened to the relatives they had been forced to leave behind inside the ghetto. Gertler raised a hand to ask for silence round the table. The authorities, he said, are naturally the first to regret that there has been violence. They naturally attribute the blame entirely to our own police forces, which were not able to carry out the task they had been given in time.

‘What we would have needed at a time like this is someone to take a firm and resolute
grip
on the situation; a person with some sort of
Praeses temperament
’, he added, with the most fleeting of smiles. As the Chairman chose not to be on the spot and shoulder his responsibility, he had himself in the meantime, along with Mr Jakubowicz and Mr Warszawski, set up a makeshift ‘emergency committee’ to raise funds to buy the freedom of
the hard core of intellectuals
considered indispensable to the continued existence of the ghetto, not all of whom had the liquid capital required. The committee had also, with the tacit support of Biebow and Fuchs, been able to set up a protected area which they were calling ‘the enclosure’, where the men and women to whom the amnesty applied could be brought to safety. ‘And their elderly relations and children, too, of course,’ he added.

‘Where is this enclosure?’ somebody asked.

‘Opposite the hospital in Łagiewnicka Street.’

‘Is it true what they say, that the patients have been taken from all the hospitals?’

But Gertler did not answer. He rested his bloodstained hands on the table and got slowly to his feet.
I insist on seeing my father; and my brother Benjamin
, said Regina.
I know they’re still down there.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ was all Gertler said.

He had, as it turned out, already arranged a means of conveyance. A delivery truck of some kind from Litzmannstadt, with big white mudguards, was parked outside with one of its front wheels in the ditch. The driver had a cap with a shiny leather peak, like a common delivery man, and his eyes took on a shifty look when he saw the yellow Stars of David on their chests.
They asked me at the guard post if I was a Volksdeutscher, I said yes, but really I’m a Pole
, he said, looking furtively at Gertler, who told him to stop talking crap.

Regina had never heard a Jew speak to a Pole or Aryan like that; but presumably the driver was just another of those people Gertler had ‘bought’.

She sat beside the reluctant driver with Gertler on her right. Two men from the Sonder helped Dr Eliasberg up into the back. Eliasberg was coming with them because Gertler said there was an acute need for doctors in the zone. Then the driver engaged an angrily grinding gear, and reversed the truck fiercely up onto the rutted road.

She had not been in the centre of the ghetto since the curfew came into force. Then there had been a desperate crush in every street as people tried to get hold of enough food for more than a couple of days. Now it looked like a war zone. Front doors and courtyard gates stood open wide, and the worn and shiny cobblestones were littered with books and prayer shawls, and bed bases and bloody mattresses with protruding springs. She saw no German guards on duty; just remnants of barriers that had obviously been cleared aside in haste.

They got all the way to Łagiewnicka Street before they were stopped by a Schupo officer, who as the van approached had one of his guards step out into the street and hold up his hand. After a quick glance at Gertler, whose Star of David he could not fail to notice, he turned to the driver and asked to see their documents. The driver, his function only now apparent, handed paper after paper through the wound-down window. The guard stepped away to check the documents, then came back again and addressed a question to Gertler, who rattled off an answer in surprisingly authoritative German:

Der Passierschein ist vom Herrn Amtsleiter persönlich unterschrieben.

‘With the Lord’s help, you’ll see that we have managed to save most of them,’ he said to Regina in Yiddish, as the documents were returned to the driver by the guard, who for some unfathomable reason saluted as he let them through.

They drove slowly to the area Gertler had referred to as
optgesamt
, the enclosure. It consisted of a fenced-off forecourt surrounded by tenement blocks, some in such a poor state of repair that parts of their walls had collapsed; where no sheets or blankets had been hung over the holes to keep out the heat and the flies, you could see straight into the overcrowded flats, as if into a beehive. Flocking on the other side of the fence that ran along the street side were the former
Funktionsträger
of the ghetto: administrative staff from the social department and the ghetto
Arbeitsamt
;
kierownicy
; police and fire-service officials with their wives and children; surprisingly quiet and subdued, they were all clustering round the gates, looking at the devastation beyond them.

Opposite them was the hospital – or what had once
been
the hospital – which was being stripped of its contents before the eyes of the trapped Jewish functionaries.

Drip stands, examination couches, benches, medicine cabinets – anything that could be carried – were being taken out through the front entrance by soldiers whose evidently inebriated commanding officers went round pointing and issuing orders. Some of the big carts used by the White Guard for carrying flour and potatoes stood ready outside, and with the help of what remained of the hospital staff, a company of Jewish labourers recruited for the purpose heaved the equipment into them.
Vorsicht bitte, Vorsicht . . . !
shouted one of the officers attempting to supervise the proceedings, though he was far from careful himself as he staggered around on the broken glass.

That pungent, nauseatingly oily smell Regina had been aware of on Gertler’s clothes earlier was tangible in the air here; a burnt smell, like something chemical that has evaporated on heating. Maybe the stench was coming from the looted hospital opposite, or it could be some substance in the fire someone had lit in a pit over by one of the sets of cellar steps inside the enclosure. Around the smoke, billowing darkly into a sky so mercilessly blue it seemed almost colourless, bored and hungry children were milling, boys in jackets and knee-breeches, and girls in what were undoubtedly once-immaculate white dresses, with sashes at the waist, and big, stiff bows in their hair. In every available space there were towering piles and stacks of suitcases and travelling bags, and groups of adults were sitting or lying in the shade of these luggage mountains. Her father was sitting, or rather slumping, in an old deckchair, his face turned to the surging black smoke. Someone had taken pity on him and tied a handkerchief over his head to protect his bald pate from the sun. But his face was already sunburnt, and one hand – lying palm upwards on the armrest of his chair, had swollen to double its usual size.

He must have got his arm caught somewhere, her father told her, or perhaps somebody trod on it when they were loaded onto the lorries and trailers that awful morning, he couldn’t remember. He could only recall that half a dozen shouting German soldiers had suddenly rushed into the ward. They came at dawn, long before the nurses started coming round to empty the bedpans. Some of the patients had tried to escape – those who could walk unaided – but they had been intercepted straight away by soldiers, or maybe Jewish
politsayen
, who were posted in every corridor. Then all the patients still in the wards, whether they could walk or stand or not, were bundled out of the front entrance and up onto the trailers.

That was all he could remember. Except that Chaim had come in the end. It had been such a relief when Aron Wajnberger finally caught sight of his son-in-law.
Chaim, Chaim . . . !
he had called out from the high trailer behind the tractor.

But Chaim Rumkowski had neither seen nor heard. Having negotiated briefly with one of the SS commanders present, he merely turned and vanished into the hospital building.

And Benji?
Regina grabbed her father by the shoulders, almost shaking him.

But beneath his white kerchief, Aron Wajnberger still had eyes for no one but his son-in-law.
It was as if Chaim had become a stranger to us. It was as if he wasn’t seeing us any longer. Can you explain it, Regina? How is it possible for him to stop seeing us . . . ?

Gertler, meanwhile, had remained at the barrier across the entrance to the enclosure, exchanging jokes with the Jewish guards on duty there, but when two non-uniformed members of the German ghetto administration approached him, he was again obliged to ‘step aside’ for discussions. While Gertler was talking to the Germans, Regina grasped her father under the arms and tried to lift him. She asked the driver to help, since her father could not walk on his own, but the driver drew back nervously. He dared not do anything as long as the Germans were there.

Then Gertler came back. Once they were sitting in the car again, she asked if they could drive on to the hospital in Wesoła Street. Gertler shook his head; that would be impossible. The whole area was shut off.

But Benji
, she implored.

He said he would make enquiries. There was bound to be someone who knew where he had been taken. He would do his very best.

When they drove back to Miarki Street, she saw that the ladder Mr Tausendgeld had propped against the wall so he could peer into Chaim’s window had been taken down; Mr Tausendgeld himself had returned to Józef and Helena’s
działka
and was standing in the aviary with hundreds of winged creatures circling his outstretched right arm. And suddenly she saw how small and meaningless the world they inhabited out here in Marysin was: a doll’s house world perched on the edge of an abyss. Chaim had descended from his self-imposed isolation and was sitting at the kitchen table, propped on his elbows. Opposite him sat a
ganef
about eleven years old, with cheeky little slits for eyes. The eyes fastened on her the minute she stepped over the threshold, and at the same instant the boy opened his mouth for the Chairman to shovel in another bit of the cinnamon-sprinkled, icing-sugar-dusted apple dish that Mrs Gertler had baked, which Chaim, to be on the safe side, had first also dipped into a bowl of fresh, whipped cream.

Regina hated that child from the very first moment, with a silent, dark, irrational hatred she would never acknowledge, still less understand or try to explain.

It was not for anything the child said or did. It was enough for it merely to exist. Something that
ought
to have been inside her was now outside, but it was no fruit she had borne, and from the first moment the child’s gaze latched onto her face, it did not waver from her for a second. She could not bear to have anyone look at her that way. Suddenly, the smiling screen she always held up to others to avoid their intrusions was no help or protection at all.

But
who
was it he saw?

What
was it he saw?

*

Once the state of emergency had been lifted, the authorities let them move from the former office space in the Central Hospital to some pretty basic rooms a few blocks further up Łagiewnicka Street. Opposite their new flat they had one of the few chemist’s shops still operating in the ghetto, and the Chairman used it as a
dietka
for obtaining items like milk and eggs that were normally only available on prescription. The chemist also supplied the nitroglycerine tablets he said he took ‘for my heart’.

For the first few months after the child came, he complained constantly of pains in his chest, and claimed the only thing that brought him any relief was being with the child, and then she would find herself lying awake for hours, listening to their semi-stifled, whispering voices and Chaim’s fake, high-spirited laughter.

People came and went in the new town apartment, as they had done in the old one in the now derelict hospital building. Dawid Gertler, too, continued to visit with his children and his wife. Even so, it was apparent that relations between the Chairman and his former protégé were not what they had once been. Gertler took every opportunity to point out it was entirely thanks to him they had been able to set up
optgesamt
; that in the regrettable absence of the Chairman, he had not only had to take charge of the tricky negotiations with the Gestapo, but had also had to pay
out of his own pocket
the sum required to buy the freedom of those whose names had not already been taken off the list:

There wasn’t a single złoty of public money available.

Chaim had initially tried to defend himself by adopting a jocular tone:
Watch out for this man!
he would say, putting a paternally protective arm round Gertler’s shoulders.

Gertler seemed on the surface to put up with these reprimands, but everyone knew that even if the Chairman had not chosen to be invisible during the days when
the ghetto was going through its worst ever crisis
, he would still never have been able to negotiate with the authorities. Only Gertler had that power. That was the way it had always been. What riposte did the Praeses of the ghetto ever have other than his never-ending, self-glorifying speeches?

But when the audience was over, Regina noted that the young chief of police had left two men from his own personal security force outside the front entrance of their new apartment. Two extra bodyguards in addition to the six the Praeses already had. From that point on, she knew that everything she or Chaim did would be reported straight to Gertler’s central command, which in turn reported to the Gestapo in Limanowskiego Street. Though she did not like to admit it, this was of course also the reason for Gertler calling on her so often. The Chairman now had a guardian. That was the sole outcome of all his efforts to ‘save the children’ at any cost.

*

Only madmen believe in the possibility of dialogue with the authorities!
Benji used to say when he was standing in the market place to address the crowd.

Death is no less of a death because it happens to be wearing uniform!

What wouldn’t she have given to have her Benji back, even for a few hours.

In the afternoons, Gertler sometimes excused himself from his many urgent duties and came to take tea with her in what she and Chaim had agreed should be
her
room in the new apartment. And Mrs Koszmar served it in the real tea service, just as she had done in the good old days when they had ‘real’ parties.

And in fact, everything could have been real. If only it hadn’t been for the child.

All the time she was chatting to Gertler, it would be prowling round the walls of the room.

She told Mrs Koszmar to give the child something to keep it occupied, but the boy was back after only a few minutes. She could hear his panting breath behind the back of her armchair, and saw him sitting there, squeezed into the cramped space between the seat and the floor. There, right under the seat of her armchair, he had tied both their shoes – hers and Gertler’s – to the chair legs with a couple of short, hard lengths of rope.

The Queen can’t walk!

The Queen can’t walk!

he crowed, in a voice she took to be an imitation of Benji’s. That was the way Benji had screeched at her when they were little: in a voice so shrill that it almost turned falsetto.

For a moment, her eyes saw black.

She could not remember if she had called Mrs Koszmar, or if Mrs Koszmar had come rushing into the room of her own accord. At any rate, a few moments later the child had been whisked away and Gertler was standing awkwardly in the hall, drumming his fingertips uneasily on the brim of his hat:

And as far as your brother is concerned, Mrs Rumkowska, rest assured I shall do my utmost to persuade the authorities to inform me where he could have been taken!

*

It was obvious to her, of course, that Chaim loved this child with a love that was not the sort a father usually feels for his child.

So what kind of love was it?

He would sometimes spend hours in the room he reserved for the two of them, and would sit or lie there stroking and feeding the child. But on other occasions the child constantly displeased him, and he would do nothing but scold and beat it. The strange thing was, the child seemed to adapt even to the Chairman’s beatings. The child absorbed the Chairman’s stern moods and constant suspicion of his character.

The child became the image of his father in every respect. When the Chairman was not there to pamper and spoil it, the mollycoddled child lay haughtily in its bed with the pictures it had drawn of its beloved father draped over its chest and stomach, whimpering
where’s my Praeses, where’s my Praeses?
until she was at her wits’ end and wished she could go in and finish him off, once and for all.

But in the end the front door opened and the Chairman was back, and the two of them could lie there again, enveloped in their perverse love.

The two of them.

And she – rejected, excluded – longed only for someone who could take her away from it all.

*

But the child did have a life of its own.

However disgusting it might seem, there was an inner will there.

The drawings were proof of that.

When he was not lying there with them spread around his bed, he kept them in a little casket Chaim had given him, and was very secretive about them.

One day while he was having his lesson with Moshe Karo, she took the casket out of its hiding place under his bed and forced the lock with a screwdriver.

She thought it her right.

Inside she found not only paper, pencils and crayons but also a collection of little chemist’s bottles with indeterminate contents, and several parcels wrapped in cloth or paper and tied up with coarse string. She opened the parcels. They contained a number of the crumbly little honey cakes Mrs Koszmar had served at their last party.

She ignored the glass bottles for a moment and stared at the drawings. One of them showed Chaim with three hairy growths sticking out of his body in place of arms and legs. He had a face like a swollen red pumpkin, and was lent a distinctly feminine air by the long hair that reached right down to his waist. Beside this Chairman figure was a picture of her, with her queen’s crown on her head, but surrounded by a sea of licking red flames.

At that instant it dawned on her that the glass bottles must contain poison, and the little honey cakes must be poisoned ones that the child intended to put back on the table when no one was looking. The drawing of her head wreathed in flames must be a picture of her burning in Gehenna.

That was it, of course. That was the secret.

The child planned to kill them all.

But where had he got the poison?

She showed Chaim her evidence. But Chaim looked from the chemist’s bottles to the pictures and could see no connection.

What have I always said? A gifted child.

Maybe our son has a real artist inside him?

It was the Sabbath. She had lit the candles and read the blessings over the two loaves, and the child sat at their table with his gaze fixed on hers as usual.

Chaim read the prayer of thanks and the song of praise to the woman and then, with particular feeling,
Ye’simcha Elokim ke-Ephraim ve’chi-Menash
, adding in the pompous, didactic tone he always adopted when addressing the Child: 
. . . as Jacob when he lay dying once told his sons Ephraim and Manasseh that they were to set an example for all Jews, so you too will grow and make sure you become an example to all Jews here in the ghetto . . .

It struck her that Chaim had never spoken to her in anything other than this lofty, high-flown, apocalyptic tone. Even the Sabbath – the only real, only
living
moment they had together – had been turned into a stage for artificiality and death.

Here they sat behind their Faces, and Chaim was the Chairman and told the Wife he had heard rumours
that the Germans had been forced into a major retreat on the Eastern Front, and that if the Highest Lord willed it, there could be Peace by springtime
; and the Child was Evil itself, tossing Scheming Looks from the Wife to the Father; and the Father smiled and said he could remember lying there in his bedroom in Karola Miarki Street, agonising over all the children he had been forced to send away from the ghetto, but at that very moment, an Angel sent by the Highest Lord Himself had come to his chamber and told him –
yes, the Angel of the Lord had told him, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, IN PERSON that this was where the house was to be built, and even if only one of them were to survive, they should still continue building that House
; and when he, comforted by these words, had stepped forth from his Temple of Suffering, he had been telephoned, yes he, Rumkowski, had actually been telephoned by Gauleiter Greiser
IN PERSON
to be told that
just as, say, the free city of Danzig once lived under the protection of the surrounding powers, so this Jewish state, too, might very well have a future existence within the current borders of the Third Reich
; and Gauleiter Greiser had used Herzl’s own phrase,
your Jewish state
, he had said, and why go to the trouble of building that state in the land of Israel when all the
human material
was already in place here in the ghetto, all the machinery and all the equipment? When it came down to it, everything still hung on the work you were prepared to put in. Yes, that was what Gauleiter Greiser had told Rumkowski (Chaim said), and then he winked at the child (and the child winked back); and then Chaim got up from the table and said he intended to go and lie down and enjoy his Sabbath rest for a while, and would the child like to come with him; so then both were on their feet and going into their Room. And just as if this were some gangster film at the Bajka cinema, the slim outline of Gertler’s body leaned out of the wings, and Gertler said in a sarcastic voice
why are you planning to leave the ghetto, you must know you’ll never have it so good as you do now . . . ?
She sees him urbanely blowing smoke out through both nostrils, and then he bends forward and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray she has put ready, and adds in a sober, businesslike tone, reminiscent of Benji’s (and their feet are still tied to the chair legs):

He won’t spare a single one of you, Mrs Rumkowska, not a single one; he’s going to kill you all . . .

And it is the Child he’s referring to now. There can be no mistake about that. It is the Child.