The Emperor of Lies Page 2
But for some reason, the Chairman had let Feldman keep his. The two of them were often to be seen in Feldman’s office together. The big man and the little man. (Józef Feldman was diminutive. People used to say he scarcely reached to the top of the graves he dug.) The Chairman would be talking about his plans to transform the area round Feldman’s nursery business into one huge beet field and plant fruit trees on the slope down to the road.
It was something often said of the Chairman. He basically preferred the company of ordinary, simple people to that of rabbis and Council members in the ghetto. He felt more at home among the Hasidic Jews in their school in Lutomierska Street or among the uneducated but deeply devout Orthodox Jews who continued making their way out to the big cemetery on Bracka Street for as long as they were allowed to. They would sit there for hours then, crouching between the graves with their prayer shawls over their heads and their well-thumbed prayer books held to their faces. Like him, they had all lost something – a wife, a child, a rich and prosperous relation who could have been providing food and lodging now they were old. It was the same eternal shoklen, the same lament down the years:
Why is the gift of life given to one tormented so bitterly;
to one who waits for death but waits in vain;
to one who would delight if he could find his grave;
to one whose path is wreathed in darkness:
pervaded, immured by God?
From the younger visitors, less lofty sentiments were heard:
— If Moshe had left us in Mitsraim we could all have been sitting in a café in Cairo instead of being trapped in here.
— Moshe knew what he was doing. If we hadn’t left Mitsraim we would never have been blessed with the Torah.
— And what has our Torah given us?
— Im eyn Torah, eyn kemakh, it is written; without the Torah, no bread.
— I’m quite sure that even if we’d had the Torah, we still wouldn’t have had any bread.
The Chairman paid Feldman for the winter upkeep of his summer residence in Karola Miarka Street. Virtually all the members of the Council of Elders had ‘summer residences’ in Marysin at their disposal, in addition to their town apartments in the ghetto, and some were rumoured never to leave the area, like the Chairman’s sister-in-law, Princess Helena, who was said only to leave her summer residence if there was a concert at the House of Culture or some rich business owner was giving a dinner for the shpitsn of the ghetto; then she would always put in an appearance, wearing one of her many elegant, flat, wide-brimmed hats, with some of her favourite finches in a hemp-rope basket. Princess Helena collected birds. In the garden round the house in Marysin she had her personal secretary, the versatile Mr Tausendgeld, construct a large aviary to accommodate no fewer than five hundred different species, many so rare that they were never sighted at these latitudes and certainly not in the ghetto, where the only birds generally to be seen were crows.
As for the Chairman, he shunned all excess. Even his enemies could testify to his modest lifestyle. Cigarettes, however, he consumed in great quantities, and when he was sitting up late, working in his office in a barrack hut at Bałuty Square, he not infrequently fortified himself with a glass or two of vodka.
And sometimes, even in midwinter, Miss Dora Fuchs would ring from the Secretariat to say the Chairman was on his way, so Feldman had to take his coal scuttles and march all the way up to Marki Street to light the stove, and when the Chairman got there he would be unsteady on his feet and cursing because it was still cold and damp in the house, and it would fall to Feldman’s lot to get the old man to bed. Feldman was more intimate than most with all the swings of the Chairman’s mood, and well aware of the oceans of hatred and envy that lay behind that silent gaze and sarcastic, tobacco-stained smile.
Feldman was also responsible for maintenance of the Green House, on the corner of Zagajnikowa and Okopowa Street. The Green House was the smallest and most outlying of the six orphanages that the Chairman had set up in Marysin, and here it was that Feldman would often find him, sitting hunched in Kuper’s carriage opposite the fenced-off children’s playground in the garden.
The old man clearly found it soothing to watch the children at play.
The children and the dead. Their horizons were limited. They took sides only on the basis of what was right before their eyes. They did not let themselves be duped by the machinations of the living.
They talked of the war, he and Feldman. Of that immense German army which seemed to continue expanding on all fronts, and of Europe’s persecuted Jews who had to submit to life at the feet of the mighty Amalek. And the Chairman confessed that he had a dream. Or rather, he had two. He spoke of one of them to many people; that was the dream of the Protectorate. He spoke of the other to only a few.
He dreamt, he said, that he would demonstrate to the authorities what capable workers the Jews are, so they would let themselves be persuaded once and for all to extend the ghetto. Then even other parts of Łódź would be incorporated into the ghetto, and when the war was over, the authorities would finally be forced to admit that the ghetto was a special place. Here the lamp of industry was kept burning, here there was production such as had never been seen before. And everyone had something to gain by letting the incarcerated population of Litzmannstadt work. Once the Germans had realised this, they would declare the ghetto a Protectorate within the borders of those parts of Poland that had been incorporated into the German Reich: a Jewish free state under German supremacy, where freedom had been honestly won at the price of hard work.
That was the dream of the Protectorate.
In the other, the secret dream, he was standing on the prow of a big passenger ship on the way to Palestine. The ship had left the port of Hamburg after he had personally led the exodus from the ghetto. Exactly who, apart from himself, had been allowed to emigrate was never clarified in the dream. But Feldman understood that most of them were children. Children from the vocational schools and from the ghetto orphanages, children whose lives the Praeses had personally saved. In the background, on the far horizon, was a coast: faint in the strong sun, with a strip of white buildings along the shoreline, and above them rolling hills that merged imperceptibly with the white sky. He knew it was Eretz Israel he could see, Haifa to be more precise, but he could not make anything out very clearly because it all melted into one: the white deck of the ship, the white sky, the refracting white sea.
Feldman admitted he found it hard to see how the two dreams could be compatible. The dream of the ghetto as an extended Protectorate, or the dream of the exodus to Palestine? The Chairman answered, as he always did, that the ends depended on the means, that you had to be a realist, and see what opportunities presented themselves. After all these years, he was familiar with the Germans’ way of thinking and behaving. And even he had acquired many confidants among their number. But one thing he knew for sure. Every time he woke up and realised he had dreamt the dream again, his breast filled with pride. Whatever happened, to him and to the ghetto: he would never abandon his people.
Yet later, that was precisely what he would do.
The Chairman rarely spoke of himself or where he came from. That’s all over and done with, he would say when certain events from his past were brought up. But still sometimes, when he gathered all the children around him, he found hims
elf coming back to certain events that had presumably taken place when he was a child himself, and that he had obviously never got out of his mind. One of these stories was about one-eyed Stromka, who had been a teacher of Talmud classes back home in Ilino. Just like blind Dr Miller, Stromka had a stick, and that stick had been long enough for him to reach any pupil in the cramped schoolroom at any moment. The Chairman showed the children how Stromka used to deploy his stick, and then rocked his own heavy body just the way Stromka would rock up and down between the desks where the pupils sat hunched over their books, and every so often the stick would shoot out furiously and rap some inattentive child on the hand or the back of the neck. Like that! said the Chairman. The children had nicknamed the stick the extending eye. It was as if Stromka could see with the end of his stick. With his actual, blind eye he could see into another world, a world beyond our own where everything was perfect and without distortion or imperfection, a world where the pupils formed the Hebrew characters with complete accuracy and rattled off their Talmud verses without stumbling or hesitating in the slightest. Stromka appeared thoroughly to enjoy looking into that perfected world, but he hated what he could see on the outside.
There was another story, too – but the Chairman was not as fond of telling it:
The little town of Ilino where he had grown up was situated on the River Lovať near the town of Velikiye Luki, for which many fierce battles were to be fought during the war. The town consisted at that time almost exclusively of narrow, rickety wooden houses, built close together. On the short slopes between the buildings, which swelled into shapeless areas of mud when the rains came in spring and the river burst its banks, there was room for little garden plots. The mainly Jewish families who lived there traded in cloth and imported comestibles and other goods from the colonies, conveyed all the way from Vilna and Vitebsk. The district was poor, but the synagogue looked like an oriental palace with two substantial pillars in front; all made of wood.
The bathhouse stood on the riverbank. On the far side of the bathhouse was a stony beach, to which the children often went after Talmud classes. The river was shallow just there. In the summertime it looked like the stagnant water from the well that his mother used when she was washing clothes on the front porch; he loved dipping his hand into the water, warm as his own urine.
At low tide, a little island would appear, a flat streak of land in midstream, on which birds would stand spying for fish. But the bank’s shallow appearance was deceptive. On the other side of the ‘island’, the muddy riverbed fell away sharply again and the water grew suddenly deep. A child had drowned there. It had happened long before he came into the world, but they still spoke of it in the village. Perhaps that was why his schoolmates were drawn to the place. Every afternoon, crowds of children competed in daring to go out to the island lying bare and exposed in the middle of the fast-flowing river. He remembers one of the boys waded in almost to the waist and stood with elbows raised far out in the choppy, glittering water, shouting to the others to hurry up and join him.
As he remembers it, he was not among the boys who then, laughing, ploughed their way through the water.
Perhaps he had volunteered to join the game but been rejected. Perhaps they had said (as they often did) that he was too fat; too clumsy, too ugly.
That was when he had a sudden inspiration.
He decided to go to Stromka and tell him what the others were up to. Afterwards he could only dimly recollect the effect he had hoped to achieve. By turning informer, he would somehow win Stromka’s respect, and if he only had respect, the other children would not dare to exclude him from their games any more.
A brief moment of triumph followed, as blind Stromka came stalking down to the river, his long stick swinging in front of him. But the moment of triumph was short-lived. He did not find himself in favour with Stromka after all. On the contrary, the evil eye stared at him from then on with even greater contempt and ill will, if that was possible. The other children avoided him. They would stand aside and whisper each day when he came to school. Then one afternoon, when he was on his way home, they came too, crowding round him. He was surrounded by a whole crowd of shouting, laughing children. That was what he remembered afterwards. The sudden surge of happiness that ran through him when he thought himself accepted and included in their circle. Though he realised at once that there was something forced and unnatural about those smiles and comradely thumps on the back. They joke and play around, they tell him to wade out into the water, they say they bet he doesn’t dare.
Then it all happens very quickly. He’s standing up to his waist in water, and behind him the children closest to him are bending down to pick up stones from the beach. And before he realises what is happening, the first stone strikes his shoulder. He feels dizzy, tastes blood in his mouth. He does not even have time to turn round ready to run out of the water before the next stone comes flying. He flails his arms, tries to get to his feet, but falls again; and the stones are landing in the water all around him. He sees they are aimed in such a way as to drive him out towards the deeper channel. The moment it dawns on him – that they want him dead – the wave of panic breaks over him. To this day, he has little idea how he did it, but by frantically pushing aside the water with one arm and holding the other over his head for protection, he somehow manages to get back onto the beach, find his feet and shuffle or limp away, as the stones rain down on him.
Afterwards he was made to stand with his back to the class while Stromka beat him with his stick. Fifteen brisk strokes on his bottom and thighs, already swollen and blue where the stones had hit him. It was not for missing lessons but for telling tales on his classmates.
Yet what he would remember later were not the informing and the punishment but the instant at which the smiling children’s faces down by the river were suddenly transformed into a vengeful wall, and he realised he was, in effect, in a cage. Yes, over and over again (even in front of ‘his own’ children) he would come back to that barred cage with spaces through which stones and sticks were perpetually thrown or poked at him and he was a prisoner with nowhere to retreat to and no means of protecting himself.
When does a lie begin?
A lie, Rabbi Fajner would say, has no beginning. A lie runs downwards like a rootlet, branching an infinite number of times. But if you trace the rootlets down, you never find a moment of inspiration and vision, only overwhelming desperation and despair.
A lie always begins with denial.
Something has happened – yet you do not want to admit that it has.
That is how a lie begins.
*
The evening the authorities decided without his knowledge to deport all the old and sick people from the ghetto, he had been attending the House of Culture with his brother Józef and his sister-in-law, Helena, for a celebration of the foundation of the ghetto fire brigade, precisely one year before. The following day it was exactly three years since Germany invaded Poland and the war and the occupation began. But naturally they did not celebrate that.
The soirée opened with some musical impromptus; these were followed by some turns from Moshe Puławer’s ‘Ghetto Review’, which had on that same day received its hundredth performance.
The Chairman generally found musical performances extremely trying. The deathly pale Miss Bronisława Rotsztat wound herself around her violin is if an electric shock were passing through her over and over again. Miss Rotsztat’s musical expression was, however, much appreciated by the women. Then it was time for the Schum sisters, who were twins. Their act was always the same. First they rolled their eyes and curtseyed. Then they rushed out into the wings and came back as each other. Since they were exactly alike, this naturally presented no problem. They simply swapped clothes. Then one of them vanished – and the other sister began to look for her. She looked in bags, she looked in boxes. Then the missing sister popped up
and started looking for the one who had been looking before (and who had now vanished), or maybe it was actually the same sister looking all the time.
It was all extremely disconcerting.
Then Mr Puławer himself came on stage and told plotki.
One of his stories was about two Jews meeting each other. One of them was from Insterberg. The second man asked: What’s new in Insterberg? The first one replied: Nothing. The second: Nothing? The first: A hintel hot gebilt. A dog barked.
The audience laughed.
Second Man: A dog barked in Insterberg? Is that all that’s happened?
First Man: Don’t ask me. A big crowd of people seems to have assembled.
Second Man: A big crowd of people assembled? A dog barked? Is that all that’s happened in Insterberg?
First Man: They’ve arrested your brother.
Second Man: They’ve arrested my brother. What for?
First Man: They’ve arrested your brother for forging bills of exchange.
Second Man: My brother’s been forging bills of exchange? That’s not news, is it?
First Man: Like I said, nothing new in Insterberg.
Everyone in the hall convulsed with laughter, except Józef Rumkowski. The Chairman’s brother was the only person in the hall who failed to realise the joke was about him.
There were also stories about Rumkowski’s young wife Regina and her incorrigible brother Benji, whom the Chairman was said to have locked up in the mental hospital in Wesoła Street for ‘causing too much trouble’; that is, for saying things to the Chairman’s face that the Chairman did not want to hear.
The most popular stories of all, however, were about the Chairman’s sister-in-law, Helena. Moshe Puławer told those himself, coming forward to the edge of the stage with his hands stuck impishly into his trouser pockets. For example, the fact that he referred to her as the Princess of Kent, making play on the Yiddish verb for knowing a person: Ver hot zi gekent un ver vil zi kenen? He asked, and suddenly the stage was full of actors shading their eyes and spying out for the missing princess: Princess of Kent? Princess of Kent? The audience went wild, pointing to the front row where Princess Helena sat blushing bright red beneath the curved brim of her hat.