The Emperor of Lies (40 page)

Gertler was dead. Perhaps he had been
dead from the very start.)

But Regina Rumkowska was still there,
left behind to wait.

She sat in the hall of the flat at 61
Łagiewnicka Street, her case packed with only the bare essentials, just as
Gertler had instructed, waiting for a car or a carriage or whatever was coming
to fetch her. All around her, the Palace was collapsing. The inspection of all
the office staff ordered by Biebow was already under way, and people from many
different departments were coming and going, all seeking audiences with the
Chairman to appeal to him to ‘spare’ some son or cousin or father-in-law or
niece. Among the many supplicants was the head of finance at the ghetto’s
landvirtshaftopteil
, Dr Ehud Gliksman, who had
come about his son. In the ghetto archive and registry, healthy young archivists
were now being rounded up into labour brigades which, on Biebow’s orders, would
be put to ‘useful’ work in Radogoszcz or wherever useful work was called for.
Pinkas Szwarc,
the forger
, was enlisted to
rush out the new workbooks with photographs that Biebow demanded each of these
new workers should have, and as soon as they had been issued with their new
identification papers, they were marched off to Marysin in long columns under
the command of Jewish
politsayen
, who taunted
them, shouting with great relish:

Ir
parazitn, vos hobn gelebt fun undz ale teg,

Itst
iz tsayt tsu groben in dem shays!

Rirt
zilh af di polkes, ir khazeyrim!
¹³

(
Mr
Gliksman
: But my son is an intellectual, he is not made for hard,
physical labour.
Chairman
: Believe me, Mr
Gliksman, not even I can do anything in the face of the authorities’ decision,
not even I
, Mr Gliksman!)

*

After just a few hours, the child was
back from the diversion of the carriage ride with Mrs Gertler, but no one had
had time to take any notice of him. Miss Dora Fuchs had somehow managed to
organise two independent queues for the petitioners who had troubled to come all
the way from the Secretariat to the Chairman’s ‘private’ office. In the sitting
room, Princess Helena lay behind the screens that had been put up around her
bed. Dr Garfinkel had administered a dose of morphine, but it did not seem to be
helping her much. She lay on her back flailing her arms, trying to fight off
real or imaginary birds, while Mrs Koszmar stood on a stool with a dustpan,
attempting to dislodge the specimens that were roosting in the curtains.

Princess Helena finally fell asleep.
Staszek peeped between the hangings and saw her head lying there by itself on
the pillow, the long, pointed nose sticking up between the two puffy cheeks as
if from two balloon sails. He would have liked to pop those cheeks, but didn’t
dare. He wandered off round the room instead. The birds had gone strangely quiet
– as if they had only just realised someone had moved them.

In one corner of the room stood the
tailor’s dummy, with an almost finished suit hanging from its headless
shoulders; Staszek pulled out one of the long pins that were fastening some of
the pieces of fabric together. He squatted by one of the cages. In the cage sat
a white parrot, a cockatoo, its crest erect. He tried saying something to it.
But the bird just stared at him from under its white fringe, and then turned its
back with a disdainful waddle. Staszek stuck the long pin through the bars and
to his surprise saw its point glide in just below its head. The bird gave a
start and tried to flutter away. When Staszek pulled the pin out again, a thin
trickle of blood drew a pretty brushstroke across the ruffled, white feathers.
The bird itself seemed to be staggering; then it tried to raise its wings as if
to fly, but could not lift the right one properly. Its eyes stared at him in
alarm but without reproach, and its beak gaped wide, as if it had suddenly
decided to start talking.

Staszek cast an anxious look back
towards the screens, but behind them, all was quiet. Princess Helena was still
asleep. He opened the cage door, suddenly unsure what to do with the bird, which
was now just lying there pointlessly on the floor of the cage with its beak open
and its wings pulled up under it. After a bit, he reached in and lifted it out.
For some reason, he found the feel of the spool-shaped body, still warm,
intensely unpleasant. He dropped it at once, and then tried to deal with the
sticky mess of blood in his palm, which also had feathers and some yellow stuff
stuck in it. He would have to go out to the kitchen and rinse his hand in the
bucket, but he did not dare; Mrs Koszmar was still in the hall, trying with Miss
Fuchs’s assistance to show the petitioners to the Chairman’s office; and what
would Princess Helena say when she woke up? And how would he explain the dead
bird?

In the meantime, he prowled from cage
to cage – to see if there was anywhere he could deposit the dead cockatoo. But
there wasn’t. The other birds had woken up now, in fact, and were circling their
cages frenetically, as if they could scent the smell of death he carried with
him.

Every so often, he made a lunge at some
particularly noisy cage, straddling it and sticking the pin in from above, just
for the satisfaction of seeing what squirted from the bird inside as it clung
frantically to the bars of its cage, unsure where the pinpoint was coming
from.

From behind the bed drapery, a voice
suddenly rang out:

Stasiu,
Stasiulek
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
?
it said, in a surprisingly
soft and silky tone.

Princess Helena was awake. She still
knew nothing about Mr Tausendgeld, but she was starting to feel restless and
impatient, and wanted to talk to her wonderful, beloved nephew –
Staaa-siooo?

He sat astride another cage. Inside it
was a thrush with a lovely yellow beak. He clenched his thighs so tightly that
he felt a pleasant little tickle in his groin, and then plunged the long pin
between his legs with a deep, digging action. He looked down and saw the thrush
dragging a damaged wing. Round and round it dragged the wing, as if standing in
for the second hand on a clock. The shrill outcry from the other cages was
terrible now: a wall of sound in his ears.

Princess Helena realised something was
up. She called through the din of the birds.

Stasiu? Come
here please! What are you doing? Come here,
pleee-ase . . . !

He moved quickly from cage to cage,
knocking as many to the ground as he could, and stabbing at the birds inside,
which were trying to hang in mid-air with helplessly fluttering wings. The pin
slipped in his sticky palm. He had to keep changing his grip. In the end he
abandoned the pin entirely, pulled open a cage door and put in his whole
hand.

Two wood pigeons flew from his touch;
he felt the rustling wing quills of one of them brush the outside of his wrist;
the other pecked between his knuckles.

He pulled back his hand and looked up
to see Regina Rumkowska standing in the doorway. She was fully dressed and had a
suitcase in her hand, but an expression on her face as if she had been standing
there for a long time, waiting for him to look in her direction.

You are evil,
evil, evil
, was all she said, and smiled, as if she had just been
given confirmation of something she had known for a long time.

Dead birds lay everywhere. Where the
rugs were ruckled under the chairs and table in the sitting room, along the
skirting boards in the corridor, in the kitchen doorway. Just inside that
doorway stood the child, looking at its foster mother. The hands holding the
dead parrot were smeared with blood. The boy also had blood on his neck and
cheeks and round his mouth, and this mask of blood distorted his facial
features, lending him an air of slight dismay that could almost be taken for
innocence.

But there was no innocence in his gaze.
The child was observing her with the same expression of defiant, almost
impassioned hatred as it had before. Regina grabbed the boy’s hand before he
could put it to his mouth again – looked for a few moments at the bloody form of
the bird, its pathetic little legs pressed into the downy feathers of its
abdomen, then threw it to Mrs Koszmar who was on her way from the room where
Princess Helena lay. She was still brandishing the dustpan:

There are
more petitioners arriving, Mrs Rumkowska! What shall I do?

Regina did not answer. She took the boy
by the arm and shoved him into the room where the Chairman usually took him,
where he kept his little casket with the loathsome pictures. She locked the door
carefully and slipped the key into the pocket of her dress. When she came back
to the hall, Chaim was standing on the landing, his face as white as a sheet;
behind him stood Abramowicz and the rest of the staff. It fell to Abramowicz to
express what Chaim, his jaw gaping, was clearly trying but not being able to
say:

They’ve taken Gertler; may the God of Israel have mercy on us –

They’ve taken Gertler!

They had also brought with them the
body of Mr Tausendgeld; and Dr Garfinkel immediately pulled back the screens to
give the howling Princess Helena another shot of morphine. But Regina could
think only of Gertler. She sat in the hall with her suitcase, waiting for the
man who would never return, yet who was the only one that could have reunited
her with her dead brother.

In his office, the Chairman sat
crying:

He was like a
son to me, the closest thing to a proper son I’ve ever had . . .

And in its room, the child sat laughing
among all the pictures it had drawn of dead and mutilated birds.

Speech by Hans Biebow to factory directors and
commissioners of the ghetto, held at the House of Culture,
7 December
1943 (reconstruction)
¹⁴

Functionaries,
Ressort-Leiter,
workers of
the ghetto –

(
Mr
Auerbach! Do please be seated.
)

It has
long been my intention to address you, but various difficulties have arisen
to prevent me doing so before now. I shall speak slowly and clearly so that
those who do not speak German can nonetheless understand, or be helped by
others to understand, what I say.

It has
come to my notice that there has been unrest in the ghetto. This unrest is
primarily the result, as I understand it, of certain irregularities
regarding food distribution. It is self-evident that where food supplies are
concerned, the German people must be provided for first, then the rest of
Europe, and the Jews last of all.

Since I
took charge of the ghetto and its administration three-and-a-half years ago,
one of my main tasks has been to make provision for food supplies. You have
no idea what a strain it has been for me to find sufficient labour for the
ghetto every day. Only labour can ensure the continuing transport of food to
the ghetto.

I
readily admit that some of the methods of distribution introduced by my
Jewish representatives have unwittingly benefited those who already have
food at the expense of others who do not. There have been some appalling
cases of improper practice in which individuals have greedily helped
themselves or even, in the worst cases, sold on what limited provisions
there were. To clamp down on this criminal trade once and for all, I have
declared the current coupon system null and void, and brought in a single
system for the allocation of extra rations. From now on, those who work at
least 55 hours a week will have their workbooks stamped with the letter
L
(for
Langarbeiter
), and I
am announcing here and now that it is the duty of every
Ressort-Leiter
to
enforce the new regulations, and I assure them that any attempt to abuse
this certification system, or to produce certification in the names of
people who are no longer resident in the ghetto, will have repercussions
they could not have dreamt of – they will in fact be forced to step down
from the stage of Life.
¹⁵

This
applies to
Ressort-Leiter
but it also
applies to every level of decision-maker involved in the testing process
[
die Prüfungen
] or assessment of continued
validity for all work permits.

Workers, representatives of departments and secretariats –

For
almost four years now, you have lived incarcerated behind barbed wire. In
the course of those years, some of you have speculated as to whether this
situation will change. I can assure you that this will not happen. The
leadership
[die Führung]
in Berlin is firm
and resolute, and we will win this war which the enemies of the German
people have forced us to wage.

In this
regard I must underline very clearly that the supervision of the ghetto is a
police matter, the primary responsibility being that of the Kripo and Herr
Auerbach, and whatever authority he and the SD choose for delegation to the
ghetto’s own forces of law and order. We used to cooperate very well with
Dawid Gertler. Unfortunately Dawid Gertler has been forced to leave the
ghetto. His successor will be Marek Kligier. Kligier is in continual contact
with us and with the security services. Let me remind you that when the
Special Section
[Sonderabteilung]
searches
a property – which will happen increasingly often in future – this search
has been ordered, or at the very least approved – by us, and it is the
Sonder’s unconditional duty to confiscate or take charge of both objects and
individuals found to be outside the rules applying to all production in the
ghetto from this moment forward.

In the
matter of production, let me mention the additional demands and measures
that have been imposed on us. The so-called testing process [
die
Prüfungen
] – that is, the recruitment and
registration of former clerical and departmental employees for the labour
commandos inside and outside the ghetto – which has already begun will
proceed at the required pace. In the immediate future we will need five
thousand workers for a project assigned to us by the department of Speer’s
Ministry [the Ministry of Armaments and War Production] responsible for
emergency housing in war-damaged areas of the Reich, and our factories will
be producing moulded Heraklite boarding for all this prefabricated
housing.

For any
of you who might happen to have objections to these measures – or see this
labour effort as temporary or of short duration – I emphasise that
recruitment will continue.

We will
continue to need workers.

We will
need workers ad infinitum, for as long as the war effort lasts.