The Emperor of Lies (48 page)

What followed was an orgy of random destruction.

First Samstag’s men pulled all the aquariums down off their shelves; then they set about the sides of the greenhouse, swinging their batons high above their heads and shoulders and smashing the panes one by one. Then they went into Feldman’s ‘office’, wrenched down cupboards and mantelpieces, and smashed plates and dishes. Even the solitary hotplate Feldman had installed, though there was scarcely anything to cook on it, was pulled loose from the wall and thrown to the ground.

Samstag stepped forward from all the unspeakable devastation as if through a sky-blue haze of broken glass. He was holding some of the wads of notes Lajb had given Adam.

Are these your squealer’s wages?
he said – it wasn’t clear if he meant him or Feldman – but he didn’t wait for an answer before sitting down on the edge of Adam’s mattress and counting up the cash he had found. When he was satisfied with the total, he stuffed the bundles of notes in the pockets of his new uniform and strode out with his men after him.

A minute or two passed; then there was the sound of car engines starting outside, one after another; then they were gone again, the line of vehicles in close formation, down towards Zagajnikowa Street.

Adam stood amid the destruction. Glass cases that had each at one time held a world of their own lay in fragments all around them.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Adam.

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Feldman.

The fire was still burning in the stove with the same, faint flames. Adam took Lajb’s notebooks out from the interior of the mattress where he had hidden them, took up the poker Samstag had threatened him with, tore out page after page and pushed them in through the stove door with its pointed end.

And so they all burnt up: Marek with the club foot, Mr Gelibter, Pinkas Kleiman; and Jankiel, of course. Then Adam shut the stove door, unsure if he had now saved them or merely condemned them to an even worse fate.

She saw him growing out of the
quivering streak between the flooded earth and the blindingly bright sky – a
lump of clay swelling and stretching until it became a person of flesh and
blood, slowly moving towards her.

Vĕra had not seen Aleks for almost ten
months, not since the day Biebow gave the order for the Palace to be destroyed.
But Aleks hadn’t changed much. He had always been thin, and now he was even
thinner, his face indented around his brow and cheek bones. But his eyes were
the same. They stared at her in growing wonder, as if he were the one most
surprised that they had met each other again.

For ten months she had been more or
less locked in the cellar beneath the archive, puzzling together all the pieces
of news that she or the others in the group had managed to get from the radio.
Even when she found out nothing, she forced herself to note something in her
diary. She noted rain or snowfall and the colour of the sky. She noted the
number of air-raid warnings they had been woken by that night. The sirens
wailing through the ghetto and the illumination of the German anti-aircraft
defence’s huge, swinging searchlights, falling from the sky and suddenly
bringing a roof, a gable wall, a deserted street out of the ghetto darkness that
always enveloped them.

But above all she noted what the
newsreaders said. The voices coming out of the radio were as thin and pointed as
needles, and constantly awash in a roar of static: high, whining, oddly
undulating ebbs and flows of sound that made her think of big, vibrating hoops
swirling towards her through the air.

But still in the end she was able to
make out at least something in the vast flood of information flowing by, and to
get the words down on paper. She used the quotation code she and Aleks had
agreed in advance. The day the Allied troops landed on the Apennine peninsula
for the first time – September 1943 – she got out an old Baedeker atlas, and was
then able to mark the places where the battles took place, including those at
Monte Casino. In a volume of well-known quotations from Latin poets, she wrote
lines by Ovid, Seneca and Petronius that would make it possible to chart the
progress of the campaign from a distance:

Omnia iam
fient quae posse negabam.

‘Everything I used to say could never
happen is happening now.’

Anyone wanting to find out what she
knew would have had to take every book off every shelf and extract sheets from
every file and folder in the entire basement library. And that would still not
have been enough, because all the words and sentences were coded, and the maps
Aleks had drawn were divided up into so many little fragments and pasted into so
many different volumes that it would have been impossible to piece them all back
together again even if you had known what the whole thing looked like. It was a
painstaking construction process. By building it up in the strictest possible
way, she hoped to make it look so much like reality that the boundaries between
the world outside and the ghetto she lived in would, if not disappear, at least
be less visible than before.

An impossible project, of course.

But the walls were getting thinner and
thinner.

One morning she heard Maman playing the
piano again. She was playing the old Pleyel piano. That was the piano they had
had in the apartment by Rieger Park in Prague, before they got the grand piano.
Vĕra recognised the dry tone with the same instant clarity as she did the faint
rustle of her mother’s dress as she bent over the keyboard and the inner side of
the arm of her dress brushed against the bodice. They were simple practice
pieces:
Papillons
and
Kinderszenen
.

*

There were four listeners in the group
Vĕra was part of. She knew the others’ names but little more. She usually did
not know when they would be listening until she was called. The listeners had
few set rules, but they did insist on one thing: if you were listening in a
group, you only gathered when the group leader called you.

There were also people who listened
alone – so-called
solitaires
.

Solitaires were people who had had a
radio in their basement even before the war, or had been able to bring a small
set with them when they were deported here, and had then not handed it in when
ordered to do so, even though this could mean paying with their lives. Vĕra was
sure there were several such solitaires at the archive where she worked. She
thought she could see the same flash of joy in their faces that she felt every
time the Allies advanced or took some stronghold of strategic importance. Many
of the solitaires kept what they heard to themselves. But some were persistently
indiscreet. That was how news of the war leaked out into the ghetto. If there
was one thing Chaim Widawski and the other ‘real’ listeners feared, it was not
the Sonder’s informers – who were now lurking at every corner – but that all the
careless talk about the war, about the Russians and where they were and what
they were doing, would sooner or later lead the Kripo to those who knew
more
but said nothing.

Chaim Widawski and Aron Altszuler were
in a group with Izak Lubliński and the three Weksler brothers. Out in Marysin,
Aleks Gliksman was part of another group; and round the set in Brzezińska Street
were the third group: Vĕra and two Polish Jews named Krzepicki and Bronowicz,
and a ‘German’ called Hahn.

And then there was the lad, Shem, who
was their
goniec
and took messages if anyone
was sick or couldn’t come, or if they had to change the time or maybe even the
place, if the ‘station’ where they listened was under surveillance.

All the groups had messenger boys, who
were not necessarily in the know about what the listeners were up to. The less
they knew, the better.

Vĕra never found out how much Shem did
or didn’t know. The lad had a stiff leg, or perhaps he was handicapped in some
way. When he walked, he pushed his healthy hip forward and dragged the bad leg
after him, which gave him a generally hunched-up look, his head tucked down into
his shoulder, giving him an air of perpetual subservience. But he smiled all the
time, his eyes screwed up as if in a state of crafty or knowing expectation.
(Vĕra knew scarcely any more about Krzepicki and Bronowicz – did not understand
very much of what they said, since they only spoke Yiddish or Polish. She didn’t
know anything more definite about Hahn, either, though he had been in one of the
transports from Berlin, so he ought to be ‘the same type of person’ as her.)

It was mainly the Polish-language
broadcasts from London they were able to pick up, and sometimes the ones from
Moscow. On those occasions it would be Krzepicki wearing the headphones. But
locating the right frequency was far from easy. The German transmitters in Posen
or Litzmannstadt broke in with a ‘symphony concert’, or the German newsreader
with his voice high in his throat reported new successes on the Russian front,
where the proud German army had engaged in fierce fighting – it was always
‘fierce fighting’ – and succeeded in repulsing the Bolshevik attack.

Vĕra tried to keep note of all the
places mentioned, so she could add them to Aleks’s loose-leaf map, but she
normally only got a few of them before the newsreader went over to something
called
Aussenpolitische Berichte
, which was
always about diplomats and ministers meeting in Berlin, and always led up to
some extended, indignant haranguing of
der Totengräber
des britischen Imperiums
or
der
gemeine englische Gauner
, as Winston Churchill
was known, and Vĕra listened, hoping to get at least some hint of what
Churchill’s
Lügen und Betrügereien
amounted to
in concrete terms. But she never did. The newsreader would start talking about
fleet manoeuvres in the Baltic, or the programme moved on to an item with an
experienced nurse giving advice on the hygienic cleaning and dressing of
wounds.

Afterwards, they would discuss what
they had heard. Whoever had been wearing the headphones in that session would
translate for the rest of them. None of the other listeners wrote anything down.
It was an unspoken rule that there was to be no written evidence of their
activity – all news was to be passed from mouth to mouth. But when Krzepicki did
manage to pick up the BBC, and Vĕra had the headphones, they could all see
Werner Hahn nodding and biting his lips as if mentally trying to note every word
that had been said.

Perhaps Hahn was building up his own
internal archive of what was happening on the main sections of the front.

Just as she was. Or the legendary Chaim
Widawski.

Widawski
. At the start of 1944, he had just turned forty, bachelor;
lived with his parents in a cramped flat in Pozdrzeczna Street, along with two
of his cousins.

Widawski was given employment as an
inspector in the ghetto’s card and coupon department (
Wydział Kartkowy
). He found himself quietly stepping into one of the
most important posts in the whole ghetto. Bread, milk, meat and vegetable
coupons to a value of thousands of marks passed through his hands every day, but
strangely enough it never seemed to occur to him to exploit his position to gain
influence and power.

But he did keep records. In spring
1943, in the margin of the big office ledger where he had to enter the
authentication numbers of the coupons as he checked them, he started to write
number and letter codes describing the front-line positions of the German and
Russian forces; how far particular armies or corps were from certain strategic
points; and notes of the armies’ relative strengths – for example, how well
armed the German tanks and artillery were when they were sent out after the
defeat at Stalingrad to meet General Zjukov’s counter-offensive.

This exposed a remarkable paradox.
Though Widawski’s coded war diary was kept entirely secretly, everybody in the
ghetto knew that Widawski was the one to ask if you wanted details of what was
happening on the various sections of the front. If anyone had
war news
, it was Widawski. Yet still no one
seemed to realise he was among the listeners. Everyone was
taken totally unawares
when this fact was
revealed.

It was as if there were two different
sorts of knowledge in the ghetto; two worlds existing side by side without ever
coming into contact with each other.

But the walls between those worlds,
too, were now starting to get thin.

*

Es geht
alles vorüber

Es geht
alles vorbei

Nach
jedem Dezember

Kommt
wieder der Mai

That was what he had written, the
letters squashed up together so he could fit them onto the greasy brown wrapping
paper that was presumably all he had to hand; his characteristic handwriting,
sloping forward slightly, seemed as yet unimpaired. The scrap of paper had been
on her desk one morning at the end of the month, and was just one of the
countless ways in which Aleks proved that he shared that escape artist’s ability
to get through any number of chained and bolted doors to deliver his message.
She knew that, because Mr Szobek, an Orthodox Jew who had been the archive
caretaker for many years, and who apart from Vĕra was the only one with keys to
the cellar, had finally succumbed to tuberculosis and been admitted to the
Dworska Street clinic.

But there was something special about
this particular popular song that she, and doubtless Aleks too, had heard
several times on the German radio stations:

Even long after the Germans arrived
(Aleks once told her), the
shomrim
of the
ghetto used to sing German songs in the collective in the evenings; and further,
they sung in
German
, as if to send the message
that the longed-for liberation applied to people of all nationalities. If Aleks
had wanted to appeal to her to come and visit him in his far-flung banishment,
he could not have put it in any better or clearer way.

Marysin in
May
. The contrast between the noise and frantic activity in the
centre of the ghetto, where every
resort
was
now involved in the production of Speer’s emergency housing, and the old garden
suburb, which after the night-time rain had awoken to new life beneath the
blossoming cherry and apple trees, could not have been starker. Only a few
hundred metres from the puddles of Dworska Street, where the ‘city’ formally
ended, stretched one perfectly straight row of carefully measured and
parcelled-out allotments after another. The whole route, from Marysińska Street
out along Bracka Street and Jagiellońska, was like one big garden with green
sprouting all around, each allotment with neat rows of canes supporting the
delicate plant stems. Some of the plots were so small that they were entirely
taken up by little cold frames, stacked on top or alongside each other in some
ingenious system that would ensure maximum sunlight for each frame.

She would later look back on that day,
as one of the last she and Aleks spent in the ghetto together.

Aleks had inspected her parcel, as he
jokingly called their plot, hers and her brothers’, and the watering system that
Martin and Josel had built, which now watered not only their plot but also a
number of neighbouring allotments. Then they took a walk, just the two of them,
up along the narrow streets of Marysin.

The sky was a sail of dazzling blue.
Larks beat the air, as if they hung quivering on invisible threads.

The grass was warm.

(When she came to write about her ‘day
out’ in her diary, she would think that she had never before – not even in
Prague, when she and her brothers went walking in the hills outside Zbraslav –
thought of the natural world as having human qualities. Like hair or skin or
discarded clothes. But that was what the grass was like that day, what was left
of the grass in the ghetto. It was
warm
; body
temperature, almost lukewarm.)