The Warsaw Anagrams Read Online Free Page A

solfeggio exam.
    He would still have to pass the medical check-up, however.
     
     
    Dr Mikael Tengmann, Ewa’s father, was a cheerful, duck-footed Charlie Chaplin look-alike. In his fifties, the lucky physician still had a crest of wild black hair and a youthful glimmer in his deep brown eyes. He and Ewa lived above a broom-maker’s workshop on Wałowa Street, and they’d converted one of the bedrooms into his medical office and the dining area into a waiting room.
    The next morning, he weighed Adam and jotted down his height, poked and prodded him in various sensitive places, and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. While he noted down Adam’s measurements, I studied the pictures of the Alps on his walls; the deep shadows and surges of sunlit stone made the mountains look like entwined torsos. All but one bore the physician’s signature; a small photograph of a white-glowing Matterhorn had been signed, ‘To Mikael from Rolf.’
    When I asked about it, the doctor replied that he and a university friend had shared what he called ‘an interest in how and why we seek out the human form in nature’.
    An answer that pleased me. And to my relief, Mikael soon concluded that Adam was healthy – though too skinny – with no sign of scabies, tuberculosis or any other disease he might spread to the other miniature Carusos. Before we left, he went to his kitchen and offered Adam a big jar of horseradish as a present, since the little traitor had told him that he’d eaten the last of our supply weeks earlier and that it was the bland food we forced on him that had sent his appetite packing. Electric with excitement, the boy grabbed the jar and hopped around the room like a kangaroo.
     
     
    I decided it was time for my nephew to learn English as well, especially since Polish and German no longer seemed to have a future tense for Jews. We started with the lyrics of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ and it became the anthem he and I would sing every Sabbath. But they did fence us in, of course, and on Saturday, 16 November, we were sealed inside our Jewish prison. Our universe was reduced to little more than one square mile.
    Right away, residents began hoarding flour, butter, rice and other essentials. I bought half a dozen black ribbons for my Mała typewriter just in case I got the urge to put some thoughts down on paper. Prices rose so high that Stefa would sneer at the absurdity of buying potatoes at 95 złoty a kilo or asparagus one stalk at a time for 1 złoty each. And the queues – wrapping around entire city blocks – were worthy of a biblical census day. To buy new shoes for Adam, I waited two and a half hours in one of those dismal Warsaw drizzles that always made my father promise to move us to the desert.
    Over that first week, we all came out into the street as though shipwrecked, gazing at the perimeter of brick and barbed wire shutting us in as if someone had written us into a Kafka short story. We had become four hundred thousand outcasts corralled in our own city.
    How is it possible? A question that makes no sense now that we know what we know, but at the time astonishment – and unspoken dread – widened nearly everyone’s eyes, even the old Hasidic rabbis, who were used to seeing strange and impossible visions descending upon them from out of the firmament of their prayers.
    Thankfully, Christians could still come inside with authorization, and Jaśmin Makinska, a former patient of mine, brought us fresh fruit and vegetables – as well as delicacies like coffee and jam – a couple of times a week. She was in her early sixties and worked nearby, at an art gallery just off Market Square. She brushed her hair into an aristocratic crest of white and wore exuberantly feathered hats, which both awed and amused Adam.
    Jaśmin visited us for the last time at the end of November. When I opened the door to her, she fell into my arms. Her cheeks and hair were streaked with mud, and her tweed coat