The Emperor of Lies (44 page)

Is there anything you need?

No. Nothing.

I’ll come back tomorrow.

Come when you can. I’ll be fine.

Jakub stands with the door in one hand, the key in the other. His father’s face in half-light, body bent, eyes fixed to the ground. Jakub knows he must shut and lock the door right away, or it will become unbearable. But it feels all wrong to shut the door. A son doesn’t shut the door on his father. And besides, how will his father find his way around in this disgusting hole? Will there even be enough air? Where will he sleep?

Samuel does not move, and neither does his son. They stand there, each in his own indecision, until something clatters in the street outside, something metal caught by a passing boot. Then a sharp voice calling out in Yiddish. The Sonder.

Shut it now
, says his father.

And Jakub shuts the door. It is so difficult to turn the key in the lock that he has to brace his whole body against the door. But still he locks his father up, waits until he thinks the Sonder patrol has passed and then creeps back out into the street.

*

Jakub is walking with his bear through the forest. The forest is full of dense thickets. The bear tamer can hardly see the path in front of him. But at least he has his bear’s paws safely on his shoulders.

Then something happens. The bear tamer turns round, but even though he can still feel the bear’s paws on his back, the bear has gone.

He knows he must walk on regardless.

He walks on and on, and as he walks, he can feel himself turning into a bear. But if he is a bear – then who is his tamer?

Jakub stands there with his innocent bear paws in the air, and has no answer.

Where’s your tamer?
They ask him again and again.

There are four of them, Sonder men, and they have spaced themselves out, as if about to launch themselves at him from four directions at once. And of course it is not the bear tamer they are asking about.

Where’s your father?
they ask him.

There is one policeman in particular. He is blond and blue-eyed, with an oblong face and a mouth composed entirely of teeth. Time and again, the smiling policeman steps in, as if to take cover behind his back; and each time he does so, one of the others steps forward and hits Jakub hard in the face with a baton or an open hand.

Where’ve you hidden your father?
asks the blond man with the shiny teeth, now standing so close behind Jakub that he can feel the man’s hot breath on his neck. There’s something odd about the Polish word order, but Jakub has no time to work it out before the man lets go of his back again and the three others step forward to strike.

After four hours, they let him go.

Somehow he makes it home to Gneźnieńska Street.

His body is whole, at any rate. Nothing is broken. But it is as if his body has lost all its strength. He manages to get as far as the front entrance, but making it upstairs is beyond him. Hala finds him at the foot of the stairs when she comes home from the laundry at about seven that evening. She hoists him onto her back and carries him all the way up the stairs, as if he were a common sack of potatoes.

In the flat, she lights the stove, heats a pan of water and washes his face with a rag. Then she sprinkles something that looks like salt into the water and washes his face again. It also stings like salt, and Jakub cries out and tries to turn his face away. But Hala wedges his head between her legs and carries on rubbing and scrubbing his face. When she finally lets him go, his face is burning as if something has corroded away all the skin. He struggles free, and remembers nothing more. He must have fallen asleep.

That same night, the same four men come and drag them out of their beds.

Was he even sleeping in a bed?

He can’t remember. Only that strange men are pinning him against the wall. They have their batons with them again, and the blows land in his side, the curving part between his chest and his hipbone where it hurts the most. The pain is so acute that it leaves no room for a scream in his windpipe. Instead he throws up: a pale, watery mess. But they do not care. They push his face down into the vomit and press what might be knees or elbows down onto his neck and shoulder blades until he can no longer breathe.

Don’t kill him!

The scream comes from Hala.

Despite the pain, he manages to turn to one side. And he sees his mother reeling back with blood gushing from her nose. One of the men is forcing her body against the wall.

They stand there for a long time, seeming not to move, the policeman’s body pressed against his mother’s, almost as if in gentle embrace. Slowly, the man starts to move the lower part of his body in short, stabbing thrusts. Only then does he see Hala’s face. All that can be seen are two helplessly staring eyes above the hand pressed hard over her mouth and nose.

Jakub makes an attempt to free himself from the paralysis of pain enveloping him, to reach his mother who is lying curled up against the wall.

But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get out of himself. Then the pain evolves into a dreadful, nauseating numbness – and he throws up again.

*

Jakub unlocks the door to his father’s hiding place.

The darkness of the coal cellar has been absorbed into his father’s face. Around and between them is the acrid smell of freshly produced liquid excrement, so strong that it overpowers even the pungent odour of damp and mould.

It is the smell of total degradation.

For the first time in his life, Jakub Wajsberg is afraid of his father. He is afraid of what the darkness and isolation may do to him. May already have done.

So he takes his time before he unpacks what he has brought.

A small candle, which he puts on the floor between them.

When his father asks what the candle cost, he replies that it was only a few pfennigs. In actual fact it cost one and a half marks at the market on Pieprzowa Street. The compulsory blackout has turned the wax candles sold by the children into a desirable commodity. – Then the bowl of soup, on which Hala has put a lid, to keep it warm. – And the bread.

His father drinks the soup greedily and stuffs the bread into his mouth with trembling hands, even though he knows he shouldn’t. The food is useless if it runs through your body too fast. But in his degradation, Samuel cannot see his own black face; he can no longer see what his own hands and lips are doing.

Finally, they can start to talk.

‘They’ve raised the quota to sixteen hundred men now,’ says Jakub.

Samuel says nothing. Jakub has to fill in for him.

And how many have reported?

‘They haven’t managed to fill the quota,’ he says in answer to his own question.

A couple of nights later, Jakub says:

‘They’ve raised it to seventeen hundred men.’

And what total is the Labour Reserve up to now?

Jakub presses his fingers against the cold stone floor.

And how many have volunteered? his father fails to say, but Jakub says:

‘Women can come forward for the Labour Reserve now, too.’

Samuel Wajsberg’s face is impassive as he hears Jakub say this. Then it is as if the face with its darkness unfolds and pulls itself together.

And Jakub can’t contain himself:

Please, Dad,
don’t let them take Mum.

‘Go now,’ says Samuel, turning his face from the light.

The next day, his father is already standing ready behind the door when Jakub turns the key. He has already packed his few belongings, and he does not let his son across the threshold; he just barges out clumsily, making Jakub stumble backwards.

Where are you going?

That’s enough.

But Mum’s sent some food for you.

I don’t need any more food.

But his father is not nearly as furious and strong as he seemed the minute before. They walk a few hundred metres, then his father staggers and has to support himself against the wall of a building. After another couple of hundred metres, he collapses completely. Jakub grabs him by the coat sleeve and tries to drag him back onto his feet. But it’s no good. He has to get down on all fours and put his arms around his father’s body before Samuel allows himself to be shifted out of his terrible, petrified state.

Slowly, the tandem sets off again.

It is scarcely eight hundred metres from the laundry in Łagewniecka Street to the main entrance of the Central Jail. It takes them a good hour to get there. And as Jakub supports his father, he can’t help but wonder at how it is possible to become so weak. He has brought food every day, hasn’t he; his mother has even been more generous with his father’s portions than she used to be when Chaim was still alive. The slices of the carefully saved loaf have been cut thicker every day.

Hunger weakens. But the darkness is worse. Once it gets hold of a person, it slowly hollows out the strongest of bodies. Jakub thinks that it may not even be his father walking beside him any longer, just some sort of terrible, blind effigy.

At the entrance to the Central Jail stand two German policemen, and alongside them two Jewish police guards posted at the prison gates. One of the guards approaches them with suspicion as Jakub walks up with his father. Jakub tries to think of some suitable words to say, but his father is quicker:

My name is Samuel Wajsberg.

I have come to report for the Labour Reserve.

The face of the distrustful prison guard lights up. He raises one hand and signals to his colleague who is approaching from the other side.
So we’ve decided it’s time to report now . . . !
says the colleague, clearly addressing the German police officers, and as if to show those in power how powerful he is himself, he swings his baton and brings it down heavily across Jakub’s father’s neck. His father flops down like a marionette as its strings are cut. The German police do not bat an eyelid. The suspicious guard prods the body with the toe of his boot. It is as though he dare not quite trust what his colleague has done. Then he takes a short step back.

You’ve done your job, he says to Jakub. Go home now.

Adam Rzepin had moved in with Józef Feldman at the old nursery business in Marysin the year before, in March or April. Neither of them could have said subsequently exactly when or even why it happened that way. They simply agreed it would be more practical for them both like that. Józef cleared a space for him to sleep between the buckets and troughs in the far corner of one wall of the greenhouse. This was where customers in times past would have wandered round choosing from the selection of apple and pear saplings, their root balls wrapped in sacking. He put an old mattress down on the stone floor, and added some jute sacks and a horse blanket, and here Adam Rzepin lay, watching day break over the low garden wall and send shards of light cascading from the broken glass vessels on the shelves above him. The light was returning.

On paper, Adam Rzepin was still officially living with his father in the ghetto, but Szaja now only had the kitchen, another family having laid claim to the living room. Adam would go and visit his father in Gnieźnieńska Street every few days. Adam normally only carried his workbook around with him. He left his bread coupons in the bureau drawer in Szaja’s kitchen. And it was Szaja who saw to exchanging them for the small ration that was available. His father insisted on weighing everything on the scales each time Adam came, and made sure each loaf was divided exactly in half, even though Adam often brought his own food: potatoes skimmed from the carts, turnips, cabbage and beets that had been dug up during the winter months. The new lodgers eyed them enviously from the living room. Rzepin’s son must have links at the very top, with
di oberstn
; how else could he breeze in with all these precious things?

Adam had learnt to be cautious. The place was crawling with Sonder, all the way out to Marysin. To be on the safe side, even when he was walking the short stretch from Feldman’s to the Radogoszcz Gate, he always tried to stick with some of the others in his work brigade, generally Jankiel Moskowicz and Marek Szajnwald, and the latter’s two younger brothers, who also did loading and unloading work in the railway goods yard.

Jankiel was fourteen, fifteen at most; with hair like a scrubbing brush and a wide band of pale freckles across the bridge of his nose that made him look even younger. Jankiel still had not learnt how to stay unobtrusive, and also save energy, by keeping quiet as he worked. He had theories about everything, and missed no opportunity to give them an airing. ‘This lot’s all come from the Eastern front,’ he declared, for example, when a convoy of military material came jolting up Jagiellońska Street; even some whole tanks with mud in their caterpillar treads, and whirring gun turrets. ‘They’re lucky they managed to get their artillery out, but if they think they’re going to be able to set up a new front here, they think wrong. Stalin’ll just drive straight over them with his armoured division.’

But it wasn’t just retreating German artillery that was being taken out via Radogoszcz, it was also most of the material produced in such breathtaking quantities by the ghetto industries all that winter and spring. Door pieces, window panels, gables, sometimes whole roof trusses were lashed to the backs of the lorries that made their way to the goods yard in a steady stream. A whole city in motion.

And there was the constant demand for more labour.

A few privileged workers came on the tram, and its two coupled carriages could be seen gliding in over the wide, muddy flatlands every morning. But most of the new recruits came on foot, some of them still in their shirts and sleeve protectors, as if expected back at their office and counting-house desks later in the day.

(Some of those recruited by force had wild stories to tell of Biebow turning up in person to make sure all the office employees left their places of work. He went to the coupon department. And to the Chamber of Trades and Inspection he had set up himself, where he announced to a shocked assembly of accountants that either their boss Józef Rumkowski must put thirty-five fit and healthy workers at his disposal immediately, or Herr Rumkowski would have to come out to Marysin himself and break bricks.)

‘They’re making cement board,’ announced Jankiel proudly one day, ‘
Hera-klite!
’

Jankiel had tried to talk to some of the Palace employees –
the lawyers
as he called them – in the hope of getting messages via them to Communist comrades who still worked in the ghetto. But it was a strained, tired and sickly bunch that was sent to Radogoszcz that winter; few of them would be any good as couriers. Mr Olszer had hardly had time to put them on his books before they collapsed with hunger and exhaustion, and had to be cared for in the makeshift cottage hospital the Chairman had been given permission to set up on the site.

Not even Harry Olszer had his own office. He didn’t even have a desk until Oberwachtmeister Sonnenfarb, on the orders of the stationmaster himself, lent him the little ‘radio table’ he had in the security hut out by the loading platform. Mr Olszer now sat at this table registering new arrivals, with one arm shielding his eyes from the rain or whirling snow.

Eventually some experienced construction workers from Drewnowska put up a hangar-like wooden structure a little bit further down the goods yard. The hangar was ninety metres long and three metres tall, with overhanging eaves five metres wide or more. Some of the Palace workers were ordered to the warehouse, where they had to take sand and carry crushed bricks to the pit where the cement mixers stood. The cement mixers were under the supervision of Polish workers who were brought in by train every morning. Adam recognised some of them from when they worked in the loading bay; some had even been in the habit of smuggling cigarettes and medicines into the ghetto. But none of the Poles gave any sign of recognising him now. They just went on feeding and tipping the cement mixers, and did not raise their eyes even when it was time for the compound to be poured into the prepared frames.

Moulding Heraklite boards was what the hangar had been built for. A mixture of cement, crushed brick and wood chips was poured into wooden moulds. Then men came forward with long rakes and smoothed off the top. After a couple of hours, the foreman and engineers came along to test the compound with wooden sticks to see if it had set.

It was important to the Germans, this! In the first two weeks of March alone, while the hangar was being built, no fewer than four delegations came out from Litzmannstadt. Biebow and his men came to inspect progress. Then the special commission of
Fachleute
that Biebow had set up, led by Aron Jakubowicz. Even the Jewish engineers were brought by car, remarkably enough. Adam could see their terrified faces through the back and side windows as the motorcade drove by. As if they were being somehow taken hostage by the Germans.

And in March, it was the Chairman’s turn.

Adam had every reason to remember that day, not only for the consequences it had for him personally; but also because that was the day it really dawned on him that the war was nearing its end. Nothing but what happened to the Chairman could convince him of that. Not the panicky building of
Behelfshäuser
; not the whine of the air-raid sirens echoing across the empty sky every night; not the trenches being dug behind the walls of Bracka Street; not even the now almost daily rumours, spread by Jankiel and his comrades, that Russian liaison officers were secretly gaining entry to the ghetto at night for meetings with the Communist resistance. But when they turned round and went for the
highest of the high
, the Chairman himself; when things had
gone that far
, then he knew . . .

By that stage, the Poles and the German engineers had a prototype house ready. As the finished houses would, the prototype measured three metres by five metres and was built of Heraklite panels, painted blue, the windows inserted as if someone had simply walked past and stamped them in place on the walls. Sonnenfarb fell in love with it from the first moment. He at once shifted all his old kit there from the security hut on the goods yard platform, had Olszer’s ‘radio table’ brought back, and fixed the old yard bell to the outer wall. He called it his ‘show house’, perhaps in part because of its dazzling blue colour.

The German security team at Radogoszcz had never changed over the years – at least not since Adam started. Two Schupo guards, Schalz and Henze; three if you counted Dietrich Sonnenfarb, who however made a point of showing himself among the rabble as little as possible. But when the soup cart arrived – or when it was time for a change of shift – Sonnenfarb condescended to stick a hand out of the window to ring the bell. Apart from that, he only emerged to go to the privy, which he did as a matter of course after eating the lunch he brought with him. Adam and the other workers would stand there fantasising about what delicacies he might have in his clattering tins and containers every morning, and they always paused in their work to watch Sonnenfarb, after his meal, roll his vast bodily bulk in the direction of the goods yard’s ‘Aryan’ latrine, marvelling that a person could take in so much food at one sitting that he was obliged to ‘empty himself’ to make room for more.

On the way back, Sonnenfarb would always kick some worker who happened to be standing in his way, or stick his freshly wiped backside in the air and pretend to fart out his contempt.

Adam had long since learnt to put up with this routine dishing out of physical and verbal abuse. He hardly noticed it. Nor did he hear the shouted German commands any longer, the hysterical Germanic
issuing of orders
which went on constantly over their heads; over the screeching of wagons switching into the siding; the clang of hatches being opened; metal against metal. The only thing worth keeping your ears pricked up for was the announcement of the midday soup. When Sonnenfarb stuck his big, podgy hand out of the window of his blue show house and started tugging at the clapper of the bell (which had been screwed to the wall in exactly the same position as it had been on the former guard hut), Adam, too, paid attention.

One of Jankiel’s theories was that the food transports they had to unload were only for the powerful, well-placed residents of the ghetto; that even the soup they were fed each day was thinned down so the concentrated version could go to
them
.
Let’s see if the soup’s taken a detour past the cabbage today
, he would say, as Sonnenfarb yanked on the clapper.

Then Schalz walked by and smacked him on the head, so he spilt his soup in front of hundreds of shocked workers. But Jankiel was never one to show his fear. He just gave a slight bow. As if the German guards had, by knocking the soup out of his hands, given him the opportunity for yet another circus trick to display the consummate contempt
he
felt for
them
.

It had been decided that the Chairman would conduct his muster that day:
eine Musterung des nach Radegast zugeteilten Menschenmaterials
, as the
Chronicle
puts it.

The workers of the so-called Labour Reserve were standing in Kino Marysin, huddling up as the snow and rain drove through the gaps in the ill-fitting boards that constituted its walls.

There was disquiet among the group. A representative of the office workers Biebow had ordered out demanded that all the women workers be allowed to return to their ‘normal jobs’; or at least work indoors or with some protection from the wind. One of the male workers complained that their hands and fingers were being cut to shreds by the chips of brick; that the soup they were served was so thin you could see a coin in the bottom of your tin (if you’d had a coin to chuck in).

Dear Jews, dear fellow-sufferers, brothers and sisters
began the Chairman, but even by then, some of the workers had had enough and started to elbow their way out of the crowded barn. Though Sonder men ordered out to police the event made a half-hearted attempt to block the way, the first workers were soon followed by more. People went back to their workplaces, and the officials from the Central Labour Office who were supposed to be keeping a written record of the muster stood there helplessly with their long lists of names.

Strike
, muttered someone;
this amounts to a withdrawal of labour . . . !

But what help was that?

The weather had been extremely changeable for some days. One instant the sun would be shining from a sky clearing so rapidly from grey to brilliant blue that it almost hurt your eyes. The next second, banks of driving rain or snow swept in from the wide plain all around. Within a minute, the fields on the other side of the barbed-wire compound and watchtowers were brushed as white as zinc, and suddenly there was nothing to see but the snow, which at that moment – as the workers bent once more over their hods and wheelbarrows – seemed to be swirling up from inside the ground itself.

In view of the weather, the Chairman had been expected to return to the electrically heated security of the office in Bałuty Square after the abortive muster. Instead, he made Kuper turn the carriage and head to Radogoszcz in a cloud of driving snow.

Insisted on inspecting the cement factory, too
, as Jankiel put it later.
Though none of it was anything to do with him. It was Biebow’s and Olszer’s project!

The snow that had fallen in such volume a short time before had turned to thick, heavy slush, being made slushier still by all the barrow wheels, boots and clogs constantly moving around the building site. Two men carrying hods of sand slipped, one of them pulling the other down as he fell. At the same moment, one wheel of the Chairman’s carriage stuck fast in the mud, and Kuper got down.

That was when Adam saw that something was not as it should be.

The bodyguards who always surrounded the Chairman were nowhere to be seen. The Chairman had risen to his feet in the carriage, but sat down again when he saw how alone he was.

From up on the wooden scaffolding that supported the hanger roof, someone suddenly shouted: