The Emperor of Lies (36 page)

We could have
the liberators here before Hanukkah!

He smiled, but somehow the smile didn’t
make it all the way up to his eyes. There was something stern and vigilant in
that way he had of watching her, as if trying to read the effect his words were
having on her.

Her father had repeatedly warned her
not to confide in anyone in the ghetto. Don’t even trust those you know.
Hunger makes informers of us all!

But at that moment, as they made their
way through the avenue of fruit trees behind Praszkier’s workshop in the
strangely smoke-hued October twilight, Vĕra found herself telling Aleks the
dream she had had when she was ill: how in the depths of the dream, she thought
she had seen once more the block of flats in Brzezińska Street where the young
engineer Schmied had lived. There had been an old barrow there, its wheel taken
off but its handles propped against the wall of the building; and just as there
used to be all over the ghetto that once was, the whole area was swarming with
children. They were either standing in the courtyard with their elbows raised
above their shoulders, as if they were on their way through tall grass, or
sitting in the dark entranceways where steps led up into the two stairwells:
hundreds of children squeezed between the walls and handrails, wearing trousers
with braces and torn blouses, with shaven heads and their thin, scabbed knees
drawn up to their chins.

Then she knew this was
the place
.

She knew it with an absolute, unerring
certainty, just as she knew into exactly which book she had glued the sheets of
newspaper Aleks had asked her to archive; for one vertiginous moment the whole
ghetto metamorphosed into one huge archive, the vaulted interiors of the
stairwells and the courtyard walls with scraps of text and secret messages stuck
all over them, and at the very top of the block Schmied had lived in, the light
was still on in the attic with the loose bricks behind which she had seen him
conceal the radio receiver he had put together.

But the children on the steps blocked
her way. It was impossible to get past them. And even if she
could
have got past, she would have lacked the
strength to do so. Maybe that was what prompted her, despite her father’s
warnings, to tell Aleks everything. She would never be able to get all the way
up there on her own.

‘But you’ve still got the key?’ he
asked.

His eyes were so big they seemed to be
glued onto her.

‘Yes, I’ve got the key,’ she answered,
and clenched her hand, just as she had in the dream: her fingers closed tightly
round what she had promised herself nobody outside would ever see.

So in the ghetto there were:
the living and the dead
.

But the thing was, the living were not
necessarily among all those who tramped daily up and down the tall wooden
bridges of the ghetto. Nor the dead necessarily among those who had formerly
tramped the same worn steps but had now been taken out and deported, nobody knew
where.

Pinkas Szwarc, or
Pinkas the Forger
as he was known, was
employed in the Department of Statistics, where his work consisted of preparing
workbooks and passes for all the Jews the Germans still kept at work. It was
Pinkas the Forger
, too, who back in
the days when the ghetto was young was given the task of designing the worthless
coins and notes that were to serve as its internal currency. As well as the
ghetto’s equally worthless postage stamps. On the stamps, the Chairman is
smiling benevolently, in front of a stylised wooden bridge set into a giant
cogwheel. The ultimate symbol of work, power and prosperity in the ghetto.

Unser
einziger Weg
, et cetera.

As well as producing legal tender,
Pinkas the Forger
also painted the
scenery for Moshe Puławer’s Ghetto Revue. The designs may have looked innocent
at first glance: traditional scenes of birch trees and pastures, and ghetto
exteriors of alleyways with ramshackle hovels crowding in, and leaning street
lamps. But closer inspection revealed curious, unsettling details. From behind a
rural earth closet peered the head of a devil. A chariot of angels blowing
shoifer
-horns swept over a roofscape of chimneys,
in billowing clouds of smoke. The Chairman, too, appeared here and there in
various incarnations. Disguised as a rabbi, he stood outside a bathhouse
stuffing protesting children into a big bathtub, or waded out into a river with
a fishing net in his hand, full of people thinly disguised as fish. The Ghetto
Revue was performed in a total of 111 variations between May 1940 and August
1942, and on each of those evenings the ghetto potentates sat through it
listening out for indecent jokes or insulting allusions from the actors,
concentrating so hard on each line that they never noticed the restrained
insurrection going on in the pictures behind them.

When the call came to design the
exhibits for the big Industrial Exhibition,
Pinkas the Forger
saw it as the chance of a lifetime.

The authorities had decided to make the
old children’s hospital at 37 Łagiewnicka Street available as the venue for the
big Industrial Exhibition, but a lot needed to be done before the building could
serve as an exhibition hall. Pinkas arranged for his two younger brothers – both
carpenters – to be commissioned to do the work, and together they set about
breaking up the ground floor of the hospital and shifting out all the rock and
earth.

Now it might be assumed that a project
like that ought to arouse suspicion; piles of sand and rubble, larger than
expected and all in one place, point to there being something untoward brewing.
But the German guards keeping an eye on the building site took it for granted
that everything was in order. Everything happening inside the hoardings had,
after all, been decided and approved at the highest level. So when the first
delegation of officers from the Wehrmacht came to inspect the gleaming glass
display cases full of muffs and earmuffs and snowshoes and camouflage uniforms,
they did not know there were already some twenty Jews crouching in the three
underground chambers
Pinkas the Forger
and
his brothers had excavated beneath their feet.

That was the start of what in the
ghetto came to be known as the bunker – a place where the ghetto’s dead could
dwell, and not be confused with those who were still alive. A place, too, where
those who, like the piano tuner, were constantly moving between the realms of
the living and the dead, could pause and rest between journeys.

The piano tuner was used to confined
spaces, anyway.

In all the years that had passed since
he first set foot in the ghetto, he had not grown to a size that would prevent
him climbing inside a piano if the need arose. He turned up at the House of
Culture one morning.
Pinkas the Forger
was
standing on a stepladder painting scattered clouds on a backdrop of unchangingly
blue ghetto sky when the piano tuner came onto the stage with his two threadbare
bags of tuning instruments and his by now equally worn-out question, and Pinkas
did not even bother to take the brushes out of his mouth to reply, merely
pointing in the direction of the concert grand belonging to conductor Bajgelman;
and like an animal that has finally found its way home, the piano tuner opened
the lid of the grand piano and climbed in.

His task accomplished, he tried to make
himself useful in any way he could. He carried Miss Rotsztat’s instrument for
her every time she had a solo evening performance, and helped the Schum twins
get in and out of their stage costumes. He clipped tickets, showed the
high-ranking guests to their reserved seats in the front row, emptied ashtrays,
and chatted to anyone who happened to linger in the foyer.

But then came
di groise shpere
, and when musicians and actors reconvened at the
start of October, only half the orchestra members were there, the children’s
chorus was no more, and of the stage hands only Mr Dawidowicz and his assistant,
clumsy little Herzel (whom everyone used to tease) remained. The House of
Culture, they were informed, would from then on be used exclusively for
prize-giving ceremonies and other such serious events, not for scandalous
revues. Bajgelman was preparing to disband the orchestra. And the musicians were
either too tired or too debilitated by hunger and illness even to think of
carrying on playing.

But the piano tuner refused to give up.
If the
resort
workers could no longer come to
the theatre, he said, then couldn’t the theatre come to them?

*

Although there were no longer any
children’s homes in the ghetto, Rosa Smoleńska was still in the employ of the
Health and Social Department. She sat all day in a dingy corner of Miss Wołk’s
secretariat in Dworska Street, recording applications for milk substitutes for
pregnant women or extra allowances of rationed foods for tuberculosis patients.
But from time to time she also taught languages, arithmetic and Jewish history
to the children of top ghetto officials, at selected factories. She and her
pupils had to make do with whatever space they could find: dusty stock rooms or
some box room the director had made available; and they had to put up with
constant interruptions, like the sound of the factory whistle, or the arrival of
a sudden extra order that meant all available labour had to be mobilised
immediately.

But there were some moments of light
relief. One was when the theatre coach came trundling through the factory gates
during the dinner break and parked itself, to universal cheers, right outside
the watchman’s hut where the factory supervisor liked to lurk with the
foremen.

Obviously it was difficult when ‘on
tour’ to perform more than a couple of the acts from the Ghetto Revue; so they
padded out their
plotki
with a selection of
songs.

Mrs Harel sang the song of
Berele and Braindele
, accompanied on the
violin by Mr Gelbroth. Out in the open air, the pitch of the violin was thin and
brittle, like a thumbnail running down a pane of glass. The next item sounded
better, as the whole troupe broke into the patter song
Tsip tsipele
, with new words by Mr Bajgelman himself, all about the
Soup Lady –
pani Wydzielaczka
. Everyone knew
her! It was the fat, short-sighted woman behind the serving hatch on the first
floor, who dispensed soup to them every day: just skimming the surface of the
soup for people she mistrusted, but dipping her ladle in gloriously deep for
those who had somehow won her respect. Greatly touched to find themselves
featuring personally in the spectacle presented by the unfamiliar band of
players, the whole audience joined in: two hundred women in headscarves, all
together –

Pani
vidzelatske: Ich mayn nisht GELEKHTER

– A
bisele tifer, A bisele GEDEKHTER
¹²

– rattling and beating their spoons in
their soup mugs until director Stech put his hands over his ears and asked the
caretaker to sound the factory whistle to shut them up.

Rosa Smoleńska recognised the piano
tuner straight away. The last time she had seen him, he was sitting on a
stepladder tampering with the bell on the kitchen wall in the Green House. Now
he was perched in just the same position on the baggage rail atop Bajgelman’s
theatre coach, balancing there like a fly on the rim of a jam jar.

When the performance was over and Mr
Gelbroth was going round with his violin case to beg for coins or crusts of
bread, the piano tuner hopped down from the roof of the coach and walked briskly
over to Miss Smoleńska. There were a few things he had to tell her. About the
piano in the Green House. Which was still there, and in good condition, he was
able to inform her. The problem was, he couldn’t get to it any more, because the
house had been converted into an
Erholungsheim
.
Not for the children of the Praeses this time, but for Mr Gertler’s
own people
, who you could hear singing in there,
bellowing at the tops of their voices, and they couldn’t play, either. How could
he get at the piano when the whole place was full of Sonder? Could Miss
Smoleńska tell him that?

He had hardly uttered the word Sonder
before a ripple of unease ran through the crowd, and the youngest female factory
employees started shrieking:

Loyf, loyf! – der Zonderman kimt!!!

Inside the watchman’s hut, two of the
foremen became aware of the danger, and came dashing out, flapping the skirts of
their aprons.
Shoo, shoo!
they cried, as if the
women were a flock of hens that could thus be driven back to their work
benches.

This particular unit of the ghetto
Sonderabteilung was led by a tall, thin man wearing a slightly grubby-looking
chalk-stripe suit, at least two sizes too big for him. The face beneath his
peaked cap was smooth and pale, every bone and muscle visible, from his hairline
down to his pointed chin.

Dokumente!
he shouted at Gelbroth, who was clutching his violin case
as if it were a life jacket or a babe in arms to be defended with his life.

Some of the assembled women were
certainly surprised that this Jewish
politsajt
insisted on addressing the theatre troupe in German. But not Rosa Smoleńska.
Since that early Sabbath morning when the Kohlman brothers from the Cologne
collective had knocked at the door with young Mr Samstag dangling between them,
she had never spoken anything but German with the Green House’s eldest and, one
must suppose, most difficult child. She knew that Samstag had subsequently
taught himself to affect both Polish and Yiddish. But
affect
was precisely the word. It was the same with the German he
was now pretending to speak to Mr Gelbroth. It sounded exactly like the
bombastic German of command and authority, strewn with the odd word of Polish or
Yiddish, that the
dygnitarze
of the ghetto
employed when they were trying to make themselves seem important. But he
couldn’t fool Rosa.

–
Beruf? Oder hast du keine Arbeit?

– Ich bin
Schauspieler.

– Was machst
du denn hier – du shóyte – wenn du Schauspieler bist?

– Ich habe
hier meine gute Arbeit!

– Hörs mal
oyf zum shráien, wir sind nisht afn di stséne!

The piano tuner was hanging wide-eyed
on Miss Smoleńska’s arm.

Samstag
, he whispered, with something like reverence in his voice.
From his newly attained height of someone in command, Samstag looked down at the
piano tuner with a smile which resembled a sack full of shiny teeth.

Samstag ist
leider im Getto kein Ruhetag
, was all he said before handing the
documents back to Mr Gelbroth and leaving the factory yard, his men following in
his wake.

They had made a decision after all,
then, the Sonder:
not
to disperse the crowd,
despite the fact that they very well could have done, and that the regulations
required it. Nor had they taken the fleeing theatrical troupe into custody; they
had let Bajgelman’s coach move on, as it would for the months and years that
followed. More than one
resort
would be cheered
up by these
badchonim
who came and drove away
the constant pangs of hunger with a few dissonant chords on the violin and songs
you recognised and could join in with.

But the piano tuner suddenly looked
very small, huddled there on top of the theatre coach’s mound of props:

Just imagine
Samstag – der shóyte! –

Going and joining
the Sonder!

But then, as he formed his lips to find
the tune for a song about how a lonely orphanage boy came to be a
politsajt
in the army of Gertler himself, his
body and face began to tremble, and not a note emerged. The piano tuner was to
make many attempts at that song, in different keys and registers; but even the
ghetto’s own cement-grey key – hollowed out and emptied of all resonance – did
not seem able to generate the right tune.