The Emperor of Lies (57 page)

He stays three days in the room in Młynarska Street. In that time, the rain turns back to snow several times over, and on the morning of the third day the temperature plummets. He is woken by the cold long before it is light. The cold is surrounding his body inside Feldman’s sheepskin coat like a ring of repelling metal. Encased in this ring of steel, he can scarcely move. He cannot feel the skin of his face when he touches it. He has lost all sensation in his fingers and toes. He has experienced severe cold before – but never like this. Hauling himself with great effort into a slumped sitting position, he sees that the moisture has covered the inside of the window with a stiff chequering of ice. Everything is steaming frostily. Not just his mouth as he breathes, but also the ceiling, walls and floor. He reluctantly leaves the bed to find something to eat. In one of the flats, the snow has blown in through the window and built a barrage half a metre high between the bed in the corner and the grimy stove. The ill-fitting window is banging to and fro on its squeaky hinges, the air all around filled with that senseless straining, whining, squealing – sounds without any human meaning.

He knows with utter certainty that if he stays in here a minute longer he will die. He has already searched every flat in the block and found nothing to eat. He knows he needs to think rationally:

In the Green House he has hoarded away what little he has been able to spare. Leftover bits of dry bread; a few spoonfuls of cornflour and rye flour he scraped out of the bottom of some old storage jars; some frozen beets and turnips he dug up at the abandoned allotments. Apples: rotten on the side that has been lying on the ground, but quite edible otherwise.

Those provisions should last him at least a few more weeks. But if the cold continues he will have to have a fire. So does it make any difference if he lights one here, or in the wood-burning stove in the Green House? If the Germans are anywhere nearby, they will smell the wood smoke wherever he is. In that case he’d be better off going back at the Green House. Once there, he also has more chance of getting away or staying hidden if they turn up again.

And what makes him think, strictly speaking, that they are looking specifically for him? Or that they have time to look for anyone? Or reason to? They may have heard the shot but not been able to work out where it came from. Maybe the body is still there – unseen – in the foul, frozen water in the cramped inner yard of the briquette store.

Not particularly likely. But he has to admit it is entirely possible.

So as dusk sets in, he gathers up his few things, puts the German soldier’s rifle across his body on its strap, takes his two sacks of wood and lugs them out with him.

The cold continues. He finds himself crunching slowly over ice. The wind slaps a burning mask of freezing cold to his cheeks and forehead.

Before long, his fingers grasping the sacks have gone entirely numb.

He is so faint with hunger that his legs will hardly carry him. The will to keep moving is still there, but that will is struggling in a vacuum.

He can’t sit down, either.

He thinks of what his father used to say, about it once being so cold in the ghetto that the saliva froze in people’s mouths. Would they find him here, then, the way he had found Samstag? Where he dropped, on his way home with his pathetic sacks of wood. Stolen goods, what’s more.

So he pushes on. The night sky is like a helmet, pulled low over his brow. Beneath it, his gaze opens only a narrow tunnel ahead of him. He moves through it without stopping or looking round to check there is no one else out there in the darkness, beneath the sky helmet, to see him and follow him.

He goes past Praszkier’s workshop, turns into Okopowa Street and is back at the corner of Zagajnikowa. Along the roadside and behind the garden fences are mounds of snow that have thawed and frozen again. But the snow looks untouched. No remains of footprints anywhere, as far as he can see. If he is still capable of seeing anything at all. His gaze is clouded; it seems to swell up as soon as he tries to fix it on anything.

He is so weak that he has to lean on anything he can.

Garden gate, house wall; then the door into the front hall, and from the (thank God!) dark hall down into the protection of the cellar.

He has already gathered up all he needs. Some tarred roofing paper, for example, to line the bottom of the stove so the damp does not stop the wood burning. He feeds in some oak twigs, still with leaves on, and then builds a little tower of bits of wood. The fire takes almost immediately; first he lets it burn up in the cross-draught, then he carefully closes the stove door, so the warmth will spread round the room and not just evaporate.

The smoke from the fire can no doubt be seen for several kilometres.

But he doesn’t care. The fire in the stove sucks and crackles away, serene and majestic; he even starts to sweat inside Feldman’s big coat. Sweat pours out of him; even the stiff, frozen skin of his face is sweating. It trickles down his ears and lips and eyes.

And this pleasure he has created around himself, as unexpected as it is seductive, makes him feel almost like a devil in his earth or den. Utterly hateful in his irresponsibility.

Let them come.

But nobody comes.

Eventually, the flames behind the bars
of the stove die down. The fire goes out, and with astonishing speed the cold
takes possession of the room again.

Lying there semi-naked and shivering,
listening for any sound, he steps forward once more to the German soldier he
killed.

He has seen much of death, but this is
the first time he has killed another person.

A German, moreover. Some people would
no doubt say the swine deserved to die.

But for him, the action is still too
huge to be grasped in word or thought.

First he thought: he killed someone. So
they will come after him. They won’t give up until they have exacted their
revenge. They will flay him as they did that Jew Pinkas or whatever his name
was, who had the goldsmith’s shop in Pietrkowska Street before the ghetto was
set up, and when the Germans came he tried to hide away all he owned in various
places around his flat, and with friends and acquaintances. When Pinkas refused
to reveal where he had hidden the gold, they beat him up, stripped him, tied a
rope round under his arms, fixed the rope to a motorbike and sidecar and then
dragged Pinkas’s naked body up and down the length of Piotrkowska Street from
the Grand Hotel to Plac Wolności until all his skin was gone, and the arms
and legs sticking out of the bloody remains. In the end, only his head and trunk
were left.

That was what they would do to him,
too. Or so he imagined.

But when they still did not come, he
was less sure.

Maybe what had happened somehow hadn’t
happened. Maybe he had only dreamt it, the way he sometimes thought or dreamt
that Lida was with him.

She was there, but she wasn’t
really.

And maybe the soldier he had killed
wasn’t really dead, either, since he was German and it was a known fact that
Germans couldn’t die. He saw the spray of blood that had issued from the torn
carotid artery flowing back into the body again. He saw the soldier get up,
regain his composure; grip his rifle again and turn to him indignantly:

Die?
If anyone was going to die here, it was surely him –
the Jew
.

It had been decreed from the very
beginning that it was the Jew who was going to die, and since it had been
decreed, then so it had to be in the end. Who did he think he was, anyway? The
master of history? Not even a German could go so mad that he believed he could
rule over everything just because he was all alone in the world.

Fresh snow falls, and lies on within its darkness.

And the darkness stops and thickens around him, too.

He is in the heart of this winter, embedded in it like a stone in the stomach of some large, hibernating animal.

The cold persists; but the snow is also an insulator, remarkably enough.

It is no longer as raw and damp in the Green House.

He pulls up the hall floor and saws the floorboards up for firewood. He uses a rusty old iron grate he has found to spread the ashes from the fire more evenly and make the heat last longer.

Slowly, oh so slowly, the Green House starts to become inhabited again.

One night he thinks he can hear piano music from the Pink Room.

But the shell of the music has been peeled away. All he can hear are the dry, mechanical thuds of the wooden hammers hitting the steel wires in the vast belly of the instrument. A music from
within
. And the thuds come harder, faster. In the end, the noise is deafening: a cacophony of cold hammering that transmits itself into a shaking of his whole frame.

He realises he is sick.

The fever washes through him in waves, alternately hot and cold. There is a dangerous drowsiness in his body that he instinctively senses he must not give way to. To stop the drowsiness getting the upper hand, he starts shouting. He shouts out loud, with the full force of his lungs. He shouts Feldman’s name. He shouts his father’s name. He shouts Lida’s name. When he can’t think of any more people’s names, he starts shouting the names of places he has been, of streets in the ghetto.

Do his shouts really get out to echo round the room, or do they escape him merely as faint, whispered exhalations? He dare not trust his own hearing any more. Impossible to say whether what he hears is also what is heard in the room around him.

In the end, all the voices abandon him as well, and he succumbs to his weakness.

In his fever, he is crawling around on the floor like a baby.

There are other children crawling on all fours around him.

The room is full of children. All is as it should be.

Lida is a child, too. An enormous head with a warm, wet, dribbling mouth. She is swathed, as she used to be, in a dirty sheet with small holes for her arms and legs, so she can’t reach to smear herself with her own faeces.

And every day her mother took the sheet off her, washed it and dried it and put it over her head again.

But Lida is clean now. She drags her long body after her as if it were nothing but a bulky and constricting cover, the case from which the pupa is about to emerge.

And she smiles from her wet mouth. A bright, open, trusting smile.

I’m never dead, she says.

He has been hearing sporadic gunfire for several days without understanding what he hears. Not the solid carpets of noise as the Allied planes flew over, not the whine and violent detonations of falling bombs. Not the recoil of trench mortars – not even the concentrated rattle of automatic weapons.

No,
mechanical
firing is what he can hear.

A swift, sporadic grazing of what is his external sky now, the sky he wears around his head and shoulders like a helmet, every time he wakes up.

The sky above the cemetery is enamel grey above the low walls and mutilated trees. He cannot believe it is the same landscape, the same landscape returning day after day, and his first impulse is to go and lie down again: defy the hunger by at least trying to sleep. In the end, the firing becomes as ingrained a sound as the patter of rain or the sound of water dripping and running down off the roof as the night’s heavy snowfall starts to melt.

Only when the shots are accompanied by voices does he really rouse himself.

The voices are sometimes close, sometimes far away, and again it is hard to tell whether they are coming from inside him or outside.

To be on the safe side, he straps the rifle over his shoulder and goes out.

After a long period of inactivity, unhampered movement is difficult. It feels as if someone has fixed heavy wooden cuffs round his arms and legs. His head is pulled, or at least tries to slump, downwards all the time. Anyone who saw him would have said he was a shadow of his former self.

And perhaps that is true. At any rate, he has survived his own self.

Against all the odds, he has survived.

A dazzlingly white winter light over fields and arable land still covered in snow.

But not entirely: bits of the dark soil beneath are slowly burning their way through. The world is white and black, with strands of snow running across the black fields like reflections of the vast whiteness of the sky.

Against the white, he sees figures moving. They are following the same route the marching columns used to take to Radogoszcz Station. But these people are moving more freely, as if refusing to be kept together by any officer’s command. Every so often, one of the figures stops and shouts something or waves his arms above his head. Whenever this happens, the whole column stops, and others start shouting and waving their arms too. Impossible to hear what they are saying. Their voices merge into an acoustic wall, as sharp and repelling as the wall of light, the sky.

Are they trying to signal to him? Is he the intended recipient of all this shouting and waving? But in any case, how can they see him, since he can hardly make them out? In all likelihood, the distance is too great.

Then a few of the figures break away from the group and start running towards him.

Three people running. Józef Feldman out in front. He can plainly recognise the rapid, springy strides that always seem to be throwing his body forward. The head protruding from his coat is bright red – excited and anxious at the same time – as if he is finding it hard to assemble the various parts of himself into one coherent face.

Feldman shouts something, and individual words detach themselves from the shout.

He pieces it together as:

. . .
Russians . . . are . . . here . . .

Then, as if Feldman’s words were a covert stage direction, the first of the Russian armoured vehicles turns into Zagajnikowa Street. They are proper tanks: KV tanks on caterpillar tracks, mud splashed right up to their guns, the red hammer-and-sickle flag fixed at the back, above the din of their engines and the belching exhaust fumes. There are two or three men on each gun turret. Some of them are singing. At least he thinks he hears something like singing, rising and falling around him.

In the singing and the racket of the engines, Feldman tries to shout something else, but the singing overpowers him. Adam can’t contain himself: he runs down towards Zagajnikowa Street, from which one convoy after another is emerging; tanks and supply vehicles with radio equipment.

Halfway to the Russian tank units, he turns and waves.

Feldman waves back. With big, emphatic swings of his arms.

Come here . . . here . . .
 it sounds as if he is saying.

But Adam ignores him. He has got to accept this wonderful moment of liberation with his whole body. Otherwise it will never be real.

And now he sees it, too. At the far end of Zagajnikowa Street, the barbed wire and fencing have been torn down, the
sentry box where the German ghetto guard used to stand with his submachine gun on his stomach has been thrown on its side. On the other side of the boundary, the landscape is just the same as here. The same flat sunlight, the same dirty slabs of melting snow. He can’t restrain himself any longer. He runs past the barbed wire that has been tossed aside, straight out into the open field, and starts dancing round – whooping with joy – with his arms stretched up towards the boundless white sky.

Then the first shot finds its target. And another, straight after it.

He can’t understand why the legs beneath him suddenly refuse to obey. In a wave of panic, he realises they are shooting at
him
.

Where are the shots coming from? Who is shooting?

He turns round to wave again, to somehow make it clear that it is all a misunderstanding. They have been liberated. He was never anyone’s enemy.

But then another shot echoes out over Marysin and his body is thrown face-first into the sweet, black clay.

He tries with all his strength to raise his face from the mud and turn it up to the light.

And the sky is fixed at that angle. Now it no longer exists.