The Warsaw Anagrams Read Online Free Page B

was ripped at the collar. Her ostrich-feather hat was in her hand – and ruined.
    ‘My God, what’s happened?’ I asked, steering her to the sofa.
    Jaśmin told us that German guards had discovered half a dozen bars of Stefa’s favourite lavender soap in her handbag and had confiscated them. When she’d protested, one of the Nazis grabbed her, threw her down and dragged her into the guardhouse. Adam wasn’t in the room, but the terror-stricken woman wouldn’t tell us exactly what had happened next.
    I went to the kitchen for vodka and came back to find Stefa whispering to Jaśmin while cleaning her cheeks with a towel. When my niece looked up, her eyes were darkly hooded, and I realized then what should have been obvious: the German guard had raped her.
     
     
    Without Jaśmin’s supplies, we would need a good deal of cash to bolster our rations of coarse black bread and potatoes, and I decided to look into the possibility of selling off some of the jewellery and silverware I’d brought with me into the ghetto. Through Jewish smugglers who ventured regularly into what we had begun to call Sitra Ahra – the Other Side – I was able to make enquiries at the antique shops and galleries along Nowy Świat in early December. Unfortunately, the owners – friends, I’d once believed – offered only a small fraction of what my treasures were worth. So I held on tight for the time being.
    Shortly after that, Adam began foraging with the other members of his gang for chestnuts, dandelion leaves and nettles in the bombed-out lots and abandoned fields throughout the ghetto, turning their afternoons into urban safaris. He usually spent the tiny allowance I gave him on the molasses gloop that passed for candy in our ramshackle Never-Never-Land, though he managed to come home once with half a chocolate cake, earned, he beamed, by teaching a new friend in the chorus to ride a bicycle.
    Adam rehearsed with Rowy and the other singers two afternoons a week. Just before Christmas, he also started taking chess lessons from Ziv in the young man’s room at the bakery.
    The weather had turned bitter cold by then, and it became common to see shivering beggars and even stone-frozen corpses on the street. The German guards must have hated being so far from home throughout the winter, and they started beating Jews at random to keep themselves entertained. In consequence, Adam’s extensive wanderings left Stefa in a state of nervous exhaustion. She scolded him often, but he’d simply disappear with Wolfi, Feivel, Sarah and his other friends whenever we left him on his own. By this time, he and his playmates had demonstrated that they were able to avoid the Gestapo and the Jewish police far better than any adult, so after a while Stefa and I stopped worrying ourselves sick.
    Still, I began to suspect that he and his friends might be up to no good – maybe even smuggling – when Adam came home late one afternoon smelling like manure.
    ‘Wolfi pushed me into a rubbish heap!’ he told me.
    By then I’d heard of kids crawling through sewage tunnels to reach Christian territory and offered him a sceptical look.
    ‘It’s true!’ he insisted. ‘You know Wolfi is meshugene ! And he’s getting worse!’
    ‘All right, I believe you,’ I told him, since Wolfi was indeed a handful. I took him by the hand. ‘Anyway, let’s get you clean before your mother comes home or we’ll have no peace tonight.’
     
     
    Mail was still being delivered, though we had to pay weekly bribes to the postman, and a first letter from Liesel reached me in early January. The photograph she sent showed off what she called her ‘Mediterranean tan’. Her new friend Petrina had short needles of black hair and watery eyes. Her arm was draped over my daughter’s shoulder in a comradely manner, but I could see from the solemn way Liesel looked at her that she had fallen in love.
    Liesel had posed that way to tell me what she didn’t dare write.
    My daughter