Free The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler Page A

crying silently. When I embraced him, his emotions loosened my own and I had to let him go. Izzy had guarded my back ever since our schoolyard snowball fights, and he hooked arms with me and took Feivel’s drawing. Turning me round, he had me face away from the grave, which must have seemed scandalous to some, but for me it was a godsend.
    Distance was my raft that day.
    Izzy whispered prayers to himself in Hebrew, and after a time I hung on to the sound of his voice. Still, I was angry with him, because he’d seen my pain and helped me, and I didn’t want to share my despair or diminish it.
    A psychiatrist who can’t cope, and who knows it. I’d fallen off a cliff, and the cliff was everything that Adam and I would never now do together.
     
     
    After the rabbi delivered his sermon, two Pinkiert’s men carried Adam’s coffin to where gravediggers had fought hard to chip down into the soil. When my turn came to shovel earth atop the casket, I took my nephew’s Indian headdress out of the bag I’d brought with me. On seeing it, I moaned; I’d forgotten about the feather I’d knocked off.
    I held it up to Izzy. ‘I should have fixed it. I wanted to put it on his casket.’
    He kissed my cheek. ‘Go ahead, Erik. What’s perfect has no place in the ghetto.’
     
     
    At the funeral of a child, the ground opens underneath you, and you tumble down, and you put up no resistance as the darkness throws its welcoming arms around you, because you cannot imagine sending a young boy or girl alone and naked into the underworld. If you have someone to live for – another son or daughter, a wife or husband – maybe you climb back out of the grave. Or maybe not. After all, people give up all the time.
    I used to say they were irresponsible, but I’d been an arrogant fool.
    I climbed out of Adam’s grave. Stefa didn’t. In a way, our destinies were as simple as that.
    If they don’t see that I’m under the ground with my son when they look in my eyes, then what’s the use of telling them? I imagined Stefa was thinking that over the rest of the afternoon, and over the next days as well, because she refused to talk about her son ever again. That afternoon, around 1 p.m., her fever reached 39.2, and I discovered flecks of blood on her pillowcase. I’d sent everyone home by then and was sitting at the foot of her bed.
    ‘I’ll be right back,’ I told her, getting to my feet.
    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked worriedly.
    ‘To get a doctor. This has gone on long enough.’
    A mother and her teenaged daughter were seated behind a pushcart outside our apartment, selling pickled cucumbers and carrots. The girl wore a Basque beret and a man’s coat, which made me understand we were raising a generation of Jewish children living under the weight of their dead parents. I offered her three złoty to carry a note to Mikael Tengmann. Jumping up, she slipped out of her coat, kissed her mother’s cheek and ran off.
    The girl knocked on my door a half-hour later, sweat beaded on her forehead, her beret in her hands. ‘Dr Tengmann says he’ll be here at six sharp,’ she told me.
    I gave her a one-złoty tip. Thanking me, she took a pale blue calling card from her pocket and handed it to me. Her name – Bina Minchenberg – was scripted in elegant calligraphy imitating the lion’s-paw shapes of Hebrew letters.
    ‘Who’s the artist?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s me,’ she replied, making an embarrassed face.
    ‘You’ve got talent.’
    ‘I’m also a very good cook,’ she told me, ‘and if you’ll pay me to prepare a meal for you on occasion, I’ll clean your apartment for no extra charge.’
    ‘How old are you?’ I asked.
    ‘Fourteen.’
    Her big brown eyes were full of hope, but she quickly realized I was going to turn her down and reached for my hand. ‘Dr Cohen, I know what men need – even good men like you.’ She pressed my palm to her breast and, when I tried to jerk it away, gripped it with both