The Warsaw Anagrams Read Online Free

account would soon be zooming downhill at top speed. Sometimes he’d launch himself across a bridge of thought where I didn’t know how to follow. His words would whizz past me like honeybees.
    To have a buzzing little nephew telling me stories that I didn’t have to understand or interpret was to be in a state of grace.
     
     
    Adam and I soon got into the habit of visiting Izzy after school and having lunch with him. My old friend had had his elegant clock shop in New Town closed by the Nazis and was repairing watches in a dank, dungeon-like workshop at the front of a stationery warehouse on Zamenhof Street. What Adam loved most about our afternoons there was watching Izzy perform lengthy surgery on a watch or clock. The boy would kneel on his chair and lean across the worktable, his chin propped on his fists, entranced by how his uncle-by-affection could tweezer even the most microscopic gears, cogs and springs into place. And bring what was dead to life.
    In a way, Izzy became the wizard in the story of Adam’s life inside the ghetto. Just as Ziv was soon to become the awkward genius …
    One Saturday evening in early November, the baker’s apprentice stopped by with an alabaster chessboard under his arm and challenged me to a game. As if he was a schoolboy unable to dress without his mother’s help, the tail of his white shirt was sticking out and one of his shoelaces was undone. His stiff ginger hair fell sloppily over his ears.
    I thought I might have a chance against such an oddball, but within twenty minutes he had taken my queen, both bishops and a rook. Worse, the upstart had chosen his moves with lightning speed, making it nearly always my turn. A few minutes later, he had my king cornered.
    When Adam asked how he could play so quickly, Ziv replied, ‘I’ve always been able to think many moves ahead – up to ten or twelve, of late.’
    After that, my nephew began to look at the older boy with eager curiosity, and late that night, he trudged over to me from out of his sleep, while I was lighting my pipe at our window, and asked if I thought that Ziv was smarter than other people.
    ‘Maybe, though there are different ways of being smart,’ I told him.
    ‘Is that why he’s always quiet, and so … so strange?’
    Sighing, I took his shoulder. ‘Wait till you’re seventeen, young man, and you’ll see it isn’t an easy age.’
     
     
    While he was humiliating me at chess, Ziv had mentioned that Ewa’s paediatrician father had started giving medical check-ups to children in an inter-school chorus. An opportunity for Adam? The boy enjoyed singing as long as no spotlight was on him, and when I asked him the next morning if he’d permit me to talk to the music director, he eagerly agreed.
    That afternoon, I found out his name – Rowan Klaus – and paid a call on him at his small office in Adam’s school. An earnest young man in his early twenties, he had olive skin and intelligent black eyes – handsome in a mysterious, Sephardic way.
    Rowy – as he preferred to be called – told me he’d studied violin at the Vienna Conservatory until the Nazis added Austria to their bag of goodies. He wore a homemade splint on his right index finger, and when I asked him about it, he replied that he’d just returned from a labour camp where the Germans had forced him and twenty other Jewish men to dig ditches along the Vistula. ‘The goons knew I was a violinist, so when they decided I wasn’t digging fast enough, they held me down and broke it with a hammer.’
    Now, he was terrified he’d fall victim to another labour round-up . ‘I pay regular bribes, but they don’t give out guarantees,’ he told me morosely.
    Over the next half-hour, Rowy spoke of music as a noble pursuit, emphasizing his opinions with German slang and exuberant hand gestures. Adam would be charmed by him, so I signed the boy up for an immediate tryout, and later that afternoon he successfully warbled his way up and down his