Free The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler

my true home now. I sat by my niece, my hand on her shoulder so that even inside her dreams she would know I was beside her. I thought of her father and mother, who had adored her, and then my parents, and slowly, one by one, the room became peopled with everyone I’d ever loved. Adam brought my wife Hannah to me as though leading her towards a bed of wild flowers, and she was laughing at his merry insistence. Hannah had died just after Adam’s birth, but in my dream the boy was about five years old. He climbed up on to my lap when I summoned him forward. My tears of gratitude dripped on to his hair.
    ‘How’s Gloria?’ he asked me.
    ‘Not so good,’ I replied, and then I awoke and Adam’s death seemed to fill my mouth with blood.
    In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face. Removing the towel that Stefa had draped over the mirror, I stared at the skeleton-sockets I had for eyes, and at my cumbersome, blue-veined hands. Who was this useless man? How had I fallen so far?
    I knew that an emptiness with exactly Adam’s size and shape was awaiting me in my bed, so I fetched a woollen blanket and made a nest for myself in Stefa’s armchair.
     
     
    At dawn, I set out for the addresses I’d memorized. I showed my nephew’s photograph to seven guards and a dozen smugglers, but no one recognized him.
    At the funeral that morning, dread paralysed me, pounding so loudly in my ears that I barely heard the rabbi’s condolences. The ground was stone-frozen, too hellishly hard to make a ditch, though two gravediggers had used their picks to chip away an inch down as a symbolic gesture. Seventeen homemade coffins made of bare planks of wood – the smallest being Adam’s – were stacked around our quiet group, waiting for the spring thaw to be lowered into the earth. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon were six bodies wrapped in rough cloth; their families couldn’t afford coffins.
    Ewa, Rowy, Ziv and several other friends stayed close to Stefa during the ceremony. She had the frantic eyes of a lost child, but I didn’t go to her.
    Withholding oneself as a way of feeling the pain even deeper.
    When Stefa finally looked at me, I saw that she wanted to keep some distance between us as well. Perhaps she was thinking – like me – that it would be impossible to ever forgive me for failing to protect Adam.
    Stefa insisted on standing between the pale winter sun and the gravesite. I didn’t understand why until I noticed how her shadow stretched into the soil that would receive Adam this spring. Maybe she imagined that her dark embrace would accompany him into his resting place.
    A belief in magic can offer solace, even if we know it is a lie.
    I am with you – that’s what she was telling her son in the language of shadows.
    At a discreet distance behind Stefa and her closest friends stood a middle-aged woman in a brown headscarf, with a searching, foxlike face. She carried a book, which I found curious. When she noticed my gaze, she turned away quickly.
    Adam’s friend Sarah shuffled up to me leading her parents. A merciless wind from Russia was buffeting our little group, and the girl’s hair was swirling in her eyes. I put down the bag I’d brought with me and lifted her up. As I smoothed her hair back, she let her head fall against my chest, then shivered. I kissed her once and thanked her for coming, then handed her back to her father.
    Feivel’s mother soon came to me and told me – ashamed – that her son didn’t understand that Adam was dead. ‘He refused to come to the funeral. God forgive me, I couldn’t even get him dressed.’
    I kissed her cheek. ‘He’s better off at home.’
    She handed me a sketch that her son had done of Adam and Gloria a few weeks earlier. Drawn with scratches of wild colour, the budgie was riding on my nephew’s head. She was nearly as big as Adam.
    Feivel understood my nephew better than I did , I thought bitterly.
    Wolfi and his father then joined us, and the boy was