The Emperor of Lies (46 page)

Treachery is something you carry with you constantly, like a knife held close against your heart.

When Adam Rzepin returned from the Reserve after three weeks, Olszer initially refused to put him back on the books.
We’ve no use for defective workers; I don’t know why they persist in sending us these defective workers!

Administrative superintendent Olszer had once been Elder
of the Jews in Wieluń; that had taught him (he said) how to
handle people. The head of the German Schupo unit that supervised Radogoszcz, Abteilungsführer Dietrich Sonnenfarb, also thought he knew how to handle people. He must have stood at the window of his blue show house for a long time watching what Olszer and Rzepin were doing, because as soon as Adam set off to limp back to his work in the sandpit in the hangar, he came out and attached himself right behind him. And they walked a farcical tandem walk, with him dragging his leg behind him just as Adam did – a stiff, rolling movement of the hip, impossible to distinguish from the hunger gait so prevalent in the ghetto.

The German guards laughed – as they were expected to.

Everyone else averted their eyes.

Adam had suddenly become one of those people nobody talks to. It was the fact that he had come back from the Reserve. If you were in the Reserve, you were in a sense already
outside
the ghetto, even if the transport had not yet taken you away. Anybody who came back from the Reserve must have been rejected on some grounds. Or could he have been recruited as an informer?

Since military loads kept arriving for transfer from road to rail, Adam was sent back to the loading bay at regular intervals. And all of a sudden, enormous quantities of cabbage arrived for the ghetto. Ordinary white cabbages, their outer leaves so pale and immature that the heads looked as if they had been wrapped in bandages. Since large areas of the former vegetable depot were under water, Adam and his work gang had to sign out tools – iron bars and hammers and clumsy little wooden mallets, which they used under the supervision of Schalz and the other guards to erect small wooden crates on poles, in which the cabbages could be stacked while awaiting the final stage of their journey into the ghetto. It was a measure of the authorities’ confusion, or at any rate, of the general disarray that was creeping in, that they let their Jewish workers sign out these potentially lethal tools. They would never have done that before.

But then, the ghetto was experiencing a very unusual wintertime thaw. They had to wade through foul, smelly waste water even to get to the hangar; and every day when their shift was over, Olszer ordered them to stack the Heraklite boards up on blocks, so they would not be damaged if the water rose any further during the night. Adam certainly seemed to be the only one in the gang who wasn’t worried about the water. He knew where it had come from, after all. He knew where the tools had come from, too. As soon as he felt the weight of a knife and chisel in his hand, he understood that a higher power had put the tools into his hands.

He spotted Jankiel, Gabriel, the Szajnwald brothers and the others first when the soup cart was brought in. They all avoided his eyes, except Jankiel, who never gave way to anyone. As soon as Jankiel sat down beside him, Adam knew he would have to ask him about Uncle Lajb. But he didn’t say his name, just described how he looked: the high-browed, thin face, the shape of a cycle saddle, with little slits for eyes; and went on to describe the look from those eye nicks, which stared straight at you but still didn’t really seem to be seeing what they were seeing.

Jankiel knew at once who he meant. In return, he could have asked what Samstag and his men had done to Adam in jail, asked why they suddenly let Adam go, asked why he hadn’t been taken into the Reserve like everybody else the Sonder ‘took a fancy’ to. But Jankiel didn’t. Instead he said:

Is it true what they say, that Lajb’s your uncle and it’s thanks to him you got the job here?

And when Adam looked away –

And is it thanks to him that you got the job back again, as well?

*

Many of those at Radogoszcz remembered what it was like the last time there was a soup strike in the ghetto. That was in June 1943, and also in Marysin: in the cobbler’s workshop known as
Betrieb Izbicki
, where they made clogs and basic wooden sandals that were really no more than a wooden sole and an insert with a strap across, which could be produced by the hundred thousand at a negligible cost.

The man in charge, Berek Izbicki, was known in the ghetto as a real
tower of strength
. When the authorities were looking, he did all he could to appear a model of efficiency, but as soon as the Central Labour Office inspectors’ backs were turned, he cut corners all over the place and what was more, treated his workers worse than animals. Izbicki’s
resortka
were put through the strainer daily. While foremen and managers, including Izbicki himself, always got a rich, nourishing stew with vegetables and chunks of cabbage that could be fished out with the ladle, the ordinary workers had to make do with a boiled-to-extinction, watered-down affair that tasted worse than latrine water.

This went on for months, and eventually one of the workers had had enough, threw his soup dish aside and cried:

This is bloody undrinkable, I’m not drinking it.

His outburst was unplanned. Even so, the worker’s comment was passed from mouth to mouth like a secret message, and in the end it reached Izbicki, who was sitting eating his dinner of soup enriched with pickled beetroot and potato. Incandescent with rage, he strode along the line of workers queuing at the soup counter and said:

Who’s been complaining about my soup?

When the cobbler who had thrown down his soup somewhat awkwardly raised his hand, Izbicki grabbed him by the shoulders and slapped him across the face with the back of his hand.

But then the unthinkable happened:

Instead of submitting to his punishment, the recalcitrant cobbler raised his hand and hit Izbicki so hard that the man fell flat on the floor.

In the general amazement that ensued, a handful of local police came charging in, batons raised; but instead of dispersing as usual, the workers just stood there, as if glued to the ground, and when Izbicki struggled back to his feet and tried to push and shove his workers towards the counter where the soup ladies were waiting, first one, then another responded by simply slipping out of the queue and returning empty-handed to their work place.

The first soup strike was a reality.

This was considered such a grave crisis that the Chairman was summoned, and he took several on-the-spot disciplinary measures that were supposedly ‘fair’ because they included all parties. First, Izbicki was reprimanded for using physical violence on one of his employees. Then the recalcitrant cobbler was threatened with the withdrawal of his workbook and ration card if he continued his attempts to incite rebellion. Nor were there any further obstructions. The cobbler obediently swallowed down his soup, hung on to his workbook, and so he and his family were able to keep body and soul together for a little while longer.

But in the ghetto, the little words ‘soup strike’ had taken hold.

And the workers had something to remember.

For even if it is the case that a worker has nothing he can stake, not even his own life, and nothing to bargain with since his employer has nothing to give anyway, there is nonetheless power to be won from that simple little act of
sitting down and refusing your soup
 . . . A last little window of possibility suddenly opening, even after his final bit of strength has been exhausted. Even young Jankiel was heard to say day after day:

Think, if we could just sit down and say no . . . !

The soup strike at Izbicki’s in the summer of 1943 followed a long, hard winter, and in Marysin and at Radogoszcz nobody cared about the workers’ conditions: everyone was busy toiling and carrying and heeding the supervisor’s orders. But then spring came again, another wartime spring. And as if there was some form of diabolical intelligence squatting on the far side of the barbed wire that had devised it all expressly to torment the residents of the ghetto, food suddenly began arriving in the railway goods yard.

For four whole years, the ghetto had been crying out for potatoes; not the rotten, frozen, slimy, stinking tubers that used to turn up every so often, but proper potatoes. A few patches of rot didn’t matter, as long as they were firm and hard, by all means with traces of
real
soil on their skins, so you at least had some conception of the rich, firm, loose yet slightly moist topsoil from which they had been dug.

No one had seen such a potato for four years. But now here they were. First it was all the cabbage, at least a tonne of it; every wagon full to the brim of plump, palest green globes, looking like ‘children’s heads you felt like scrubbing behind the ears’. And then the potatoes, real potatoes; enough wagonloads of them to fill up the old storage bins in Jagiellońska again. And lots of other greens and vegetables: spinach, French beans, turnips.

Shouts from down at the loading bay:
The Germans have reinvented the onion at last!

And pickled beetroot. Inconceivable amounts of pickled beetroot.

By then, altercations had already broken out among the unloaders as to who should take the first batch to the depots. Unloading inside the depot, out of sight of the supervising steel helmets, was the first point at which skimming could start.

As they queued for their soup, too, the mood was one of cautious but well-founded optimism, and the tired old jokes were delivered in an unusually lively tone:

be interesting to see if the soup’s taken a detour past the cabbage today

or if the cabbage happened to end up in the soup on its way out of here by mistake,

if so, it’s Praeses cabbage, you know the flavour:

tastes as if it’s gone off, but you fart gold, genuine article –

But there was no cabbage in the soup. No sign of any potato either. Just the usual tepid, starchy slops, as foul as ever. Jankiel was standing behind Adam, and behind him came the rest of the soup-cart queue, stretching interminably. Here and there an optimistic head craned, trying to assess from the reaction of the people at the front what the soup tasted like today. Then Jankiel turned to face them, raised his billy can over his head and dashed it to the ground with full force.

I’m not eating this shit . . .

Strike
: everyone stared as if bewitched at the young man with the freckles and the scrubbing-brush hair. His eyes were wild but there was a hint of something else deep inside. What? – Defiance? Hope? – Sonnenfarb had immediately crawled out of his showy blue coop. He was followed in the usual sequence by Schalz and Henze.

Someone here refusing his soup . . . ?

Sonnenfarb did not need to wait for the answer to know who the culprit was. Jankiel’s billy can was still lying where he had hurled it – just in front of him.

Like a hammer thrower, Sonnenfarb cast the weight of his enormous bodily bulk backwards; then his hand came round and Jankiel fell as if he had been clubbed. Schalz followed this up with a rifle barrel to the fallen boy’s head:
Sieh zu, dass Du deinen Arsch hochkriegst und deine Suppe verputzt sonst mache ich dir Beine . . . !

If Adam at that moment could have got his own skinny body between the rifle barrel and Jankiel’s naked head, the skin quivering like the surface tension on a bowl of water, he would have done it. Schalz slowly put a bullet into the bore of his rifle. Jankiel grimaced, baring the teeth in his bottom jaw. But no shot was fired. Suddenly everyone in the queue, both ahead of the boy and behind him, dropped their soup cans on the ground. The clatter of hundreds of billies hitting the ground at the same time was so deafening that even Schulz lost his head and turned round, his rifle barrel raised.

There was panic in his eyes.

Keine Mittagspause mehr, keine Mittagspause
, he bellowed, waving his rifle in the air.
Los zur Arbeit
. . .

The crowds went back to work. But everything was sluggish now. More trains were arriving in the siding, but despite the angry shouts of the German guards, the unloaders moved extremely slowly towards their work stations, and after a couple of hours, Sonnenfarb rang the bell to mark the end of the shift.

By then, rumours had already spread to the centre of the ghetto that soup strikes had broken out. They had stopped work in Metallager I and II in Łagiewnicka Street, and at the saddlery at Jakuba.

And the water in the ghetto rose, and went on rising.

Night after night, the meltwater rose from the dead earth.

Adam took care of the tools that chance had put in his hand. Now he had a knife, a chisel, a mallet and a hammer, and carried them with him, hidden in the waistband of his trousers the way he had once taken medicaments and messages to Feldman. Nobody suspected anything, because of that rolling hip movement he has been putting on since his stay in the Pit. One of those useless individuals, unserviceable for future labour, who for some unexplained reason have found favour with the authorities and been allowed to stay. One of the survivors, or perhaps just one more of the living dead? One day, he decided he had had enough of all the limping, and broke out of the marching column when it was on its way back into the ghetto.

Where’re you off to?
Jankiel called after him.

(He kept his eyes peeled, that Jankiel.)

They’ll shoot you if you go that way!

But he went anyway.

At Radogosccz Gate, the melted snow came halfway up the watchtower and the soldier at the top looked out over his own mirror image onto a roving, disintegrating expanse of water. The boundary fence that divided ghetto from city was a fence no more, just a piece of wire stretched across nothingness.

At nights, the searchlights were sometimes switched on: a scoop of bright light rose from the ground to the drenched sky, as the solitary guard up there in the tower raked his machine gun over anything that moved out there:

tra-atta-tata-tatta-ta-ttaaa . . .

It was said that under cover of night, Jews tried to swim across those sections of the wire that were now under water. In actual fact, the duty guard was shooting rats. The guards with a sense of humour said things had got so bad now that even the rats in Litzmannstadt were trying to escape the ‘Bolshevik invasion’.

In the light from the two mirrors, water and sky, Marysin looked rather like an ancient face, its features alternately protruding and being smoothed flat again. The telegraph poles along Jagiellońska and Zagajnikowa ran across the watery mirror like long wheel spokes. Spread among the spokes, the tin roofs of houses and workshops drifted between wind-ruffled floes of water.

What was left of the Green House was keeping itself passably well wedged up on its slope, and the cemetery was still behind its walls, and Józef Feldman’s nursery with its toolshed and glasshouse gables lay a little further along.

But the old willow outside Praszkier’s workshop, at the crossroads where Okopowa met Marysińska, was nodding there like a Medusa head with its long, delicate green branches floating on the surface of the glassy water. If you could have seen the whole ghetto from above, you could have drawn a line from the cartilaginous willow all the way over to the cesspits where the latrine carriers unloaded and emptied out their barrels.

Everything in between had been dissolved by water.

Adam thought at first that the stench was coming from the cesspits, but this smell was unlike the harsh, austere, saltpetre smell from the faecal beds: it was thicker, with the addition of something musty, something nauseously sickly.

The forecourt led him up onto more solid ground. This was where what had once been the ‘workshop’ stood. A long row of wooden buildings with stables and outbuildings ended in a larger, free-standing building that was originally a coach shed. The big vehicle access door of one of these weather-bleached wooden buildings had come unlatched and was banging in the wind.

Adam thought as he approached it that someone should have oiled the hinges.

Then he realised the hinges were not the source of that loud and piercing sound. The source of the stench also became clear. It was rats.

Lajb had aged in the few years that had passed. From a distance, you could have taken him for one of those Polish farmers who spent all day out in the fields, until their skin was burnt black by the sun. But this was not sunburn. At close quarters, the skin looked swollen, as if there was some discharge beneath it, and that discharge was on its way up. The eyes that used to be naked and pale grey were now embedded in puffy, bulging skin, and his bald pate was a shiny red, and wet, almost like a grindstone.

Lajb sat at a long table he had dragged into the middle of the coach shed, and in cages all around, rats ran up over and under and along the walls, or clung to the bars with claws and sharp teeth, hissing.

Treyf . . . !
was all Lajb said, and it was unclear if he meant the rats or Adam, who had stopped in the doorway, overcome by the formidable stench.

In the sludgy, dirty-grey half-light, he saw Lajb get up from the table and stuffed his hand into a big, black glove. In his other hand, he picked up a wooden pole with a claw-like fluke at the end, and used it to unlatch the door of one of the cages. The rat inside clung instinctively to the underside of the pole. Then Lajb made a lightning grab for the creature with his other – gloved – hand; he turned the rat’s body over and slit open its belly with a single violent thrust of the blade.

He opened the belly wide over a slop pail he had slid into position with his foot. The other rats were like creatures possessed as soon as they scented the blood and guts; and for a moment it was impossible to see, still less hear, for all the rattling and screaming whipped up by the caged animals. With a long, precise manoeuvre involving both hands, Lajb then chucked out the contents of the slop pail, letting blood and intestines splash the bars of the cages; next he put his blade into the still quivering body of the rat and skinned it with a single, practised stroke.

Then he turned his burnt and naked face towards Adam:

I know you’ve come for the list of the people who tried to kill the Chairman –

Take it now, there won’t be much time later . . . !

Adam had already seen the money Lajb had laid out on the table in neat bundles and piles: coins in one pile, notes in another; like in a bank or a counting house. Proper currencies, too: złoty and Reichsmarks and green American dollar bills. Some of the notes were so creased that they looked as if they had been crumpled up in pockets or coat linings for decades before being retrieved and smoothed flat by careful fingers.

Lajb wiped the blood from his hands on a rag he seemed to keep under the seat of his chair for the purpose, ran his bloody hand over his mouth and took out a bundle of notebooks with oilcloth covers, which he laid out and then straightened up on the table, just as he must have done with the money. Or the parts of his bicycle when he used to take it to bits, laying everything out separately, down to the last little nickel-plated screw or frame component: scrupulously, with the same restrained, precisely judged movements as a rabbi setting the Seder table or a kosher butcher jointing and cutting up his meat.

(And when the authorities issued the order for all the bicycles in the ghetto to be handed in, Lajb had been first in the queue at the collection point in Lutomierska Street to hand his in. That was the month of the first soup strike, and Lajb had naturally also been there at Izbicki’s just before, noting down the names of all the troublemakers in his black books. Adam could remember the look on Lajb’s face, the day he had to surrender his bicycle. Vaguely apologetic, subservient; but above all,
proud
. As if it gave him satisfaction, even though this time it was a blow to him personally, to see once again the forces of law and order triumph over unbridled, unregulated disintegration.

And then there was the reward:
the money
he got in return: and it made no difference how small or insignificant the sums were, or that there was nothing to buy with them –)

But Adam was not looking at the money on the table. He was looking at the wall of cages: behind each row of bars a tangle of twisted, tormented animal bodies; and for a minute he wondered what would happen if he were able to unlatch all the cages simultaneously. What would happen if – maybe only for a moment – all this arduously contained chaos were set free?

But the restless creatures are moving so rapidlyly that it is impossible to hold on to the slightest thought; and the smell is so disgusting that he can’t even imagine about anything
beyond
it – however fleeting and transient it may be.

Adam no longer sees the cages and bars. All he is aware of is a wave of trembling animal bodies moving from one end of the room to the other.

And even Lajb’s face, as it bends over the wads of notes on the table, is like an extension of this choking wave motion. Lajb head on rat body. Over and over again, the head loses its shape, widens into an ingratiating smile at one moment, only to be encveloped in an expression of blood-suffused, violent hatred the next. Lajb himself – or what is left of his voice above the screech of the animals – is speaking in a calm, almost paternally intoning tone. As if it all came down to a bit of practical management. And
tired
– yes, even the constantly alert supervisor Lajb is tired when it comes to handing over the results of his work so someone can carry it on after him:

Adam, listen carefully now –

When your name comes up on the list of those to be deported, don’t obey, but take this money and try to find a safe place to hide.

Ask Feldman – he’ll help you.

They’ll say all the ghetto residents have got to move to another, safer place. They’ll say the ghetto’s too close to the front. That it’s not safe here. But there’s no safer place than here. There never has been.

There is nowhere else at all but here.

Adam tries to put down the bundles of notes and the handwritten notebooks Lajb has given him. But there are no unoccupied surfaces here to put anything on. And by the time he realises this, he has hesitated too long.

When Adam gets out after him, his uncle Lajb is already halfway down to Zagajnikowa Street. Only now does Adam see what he has been seeing all this time but not had time to register. Lajb is walking barefoot through the water. He has no longer even got the shoes that he was once so proud of.