The Birthday Buyer (14 page)

“Got any maps?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And postcards?”

“I couldn’t say. Take a look for yourself. Come with me.”

The concierge took a key from his pocket and opened a small door opposite his cubbyhole. He switched the light on. It was very dusty in the bookshop, but it didn’t look untidy. Everything gave the impression they’d been forced to abandon it in a great hurry.

Yakov lingered looking for maps of Jamaica but didn’t find any. On the other hand, he found a box with bundles of postcards tied round with a rubber band. Each bundle had a label with the country or region they were from. There were none from Jamaica, but nailed to the wall, above the place where the postcards were kept, was a 1931 calendar that said
JAMAICA: VIEW OF KINGSTON HARBOR
. It was a reproduction of an old English engraving of views of the bay where several sailing boats and steamers were anchored. Yakov interpreted this find as a piece of luck that was enough to justify his trip and frustrated visit to his father’s friend. He insisted on buying it from the concierge but the concierge gave it to him as a present.

“I doubt Mr. Azvel will miss it, if he comes back,” he said.

When he was back with Sofia in the Hotel Merkur, both of them lounged on the bed and stared at that old calendar for ages. Resting his head on Sofia’s belly, Yakov daydreamed about going there one day; he told his wife it was the next best thing to Paradise and if they had children he couldn’t think of a better place in the world for them to grow up than that island.

“It’s better than Palestine. We’ll have coffee plantations.”

“But you don’t even know if there is coffee in Jamaica,” said Sofia.

“We will plant some,” he said.

Then the noise of the boots of German soldiers on the sidewalk out in the street brought them back to reality. They were both suddenly scared and realized they were in danger. They held hands and their expressions clearly said that Jamaica didn’t and couldn’t exist. But the noise disappeared and was immediately forgotten. The loving couple went out to dinner before going on the Ferris wheel, as they had planned.

A few days later, Yakov and Sofia are strolling cheerfully through Krakow without a care in the world prompting knowing smiles from other passers-by. They walk along whispering very private, sometimes naively erotic sweet nothings to each other, most of them meaningless because they only show how love has put them in a world apart. They cross a bridge over the Vistula. The huge mass of Wawel Castle looms threateningly behind them.

They walk arm-in-arm, holding hands, feeling their faces almost cheek-to-cheek. Yakov is wearing a light-colored hat that doesn’t match his dark striped suit. They innocently laugh and joke. Suddenly, a cyclist in sporting gear rides past at the end of the bridge and turns right before pedalling off at top speed. He seems to have broken away from the pack behind. Yakov loves cycling and watches him in awe like a wide-eyed child. The Pawlickas halt and watch the other cyclists race by and then realize it isn’t a race but a single team, RKS Sport, the Polish champions, who are training on the outskirts of Wawel. Yakov applauds and cheers them on.

After skirting the rock under the fortress, the couple heads on to their destination for that morning, Poselska Street, and enters the Papugami Cinema. The film showing that day was
The Blue Angel
. Sofia thought the young Dietrich seemed frivolous and affected. Yakov found the stupid, cackling character of Professor Unrat very unpleasant, but maybe that was all to do with Emil Jannings, the actor playing Unrat, the Führer’s favorite actor, together with Henny Porten, Zarah Leander and Jenny Jugo according to a magazine report he had read. A ghastly performance, Yakov decides. A young woman sold drinks during the intermission; Yakov wasn’t to know this but he coincided at that drinks stall with Hans Haupt, the same Nazi officer who a few months later would lead off the convoy of trucks that was to take him and Sofia to Auschwitz in different vehicles. Shoulder to shoulder, now, in front of the refreshment seller, the two men don’t look at each other, but they do collide slightly, quite unintentionally, before returning to ther seats. “I’m sorry,” said Yakov. The officer said nothing and just politely waited for him to walk by.

On another occasion, a few days after their visit to the cinema, Yakov is wandering around the bookshops and antiquarians in the center searching unsuccessfully for maps of Jamaica like a hard-boiled collector. I picture him quite clearly, walking purposefully, seemingly at a loss, through the disturbing, suspicious city, hands in pockets, gabardine raincoat over one arm and hat on the tilt.

He goes in and out of bookshops, wastes time, and reclaims it thinking about the future, the big engineering enterprise he may set up in the city, while he waits for Sofia, whom he has agreed to meet in a couple of hours time, when she finishes her stroll down the shopping streets, on the trail of a present for him, a tie perhaps, cuff links or a handkerchief. While Yakov is poking around the street stalls, belonging to scared Jews, looking as if their minds were elsewhere, in another part of the city, Sofia stood outside the shop belonging to Josefina Luftig, who specializes in off-the-rack clothes for men (
prêt-a-porter
, as several signs next to the garments written in red ink indicate), where two dummies in the window wear suits and ties that she likes for her husband. Folded shirts, overcoats and jackets full of empty air hang on an invisible wire attached to the ceiling above the window display. Sofia finally walks in the shop and buys a pale purple shirt and a tie with a cheerful geometric pattern.

She remembers how on a previous occasion, in 1940, also on a trip with Yakov, she had entered that shop and bought nothing. She even remembers talking to Josefina Luftig, a slim woman, recently widowed, who was very jovial and animated and wore her hair tied back. Her children—she then told Sofia—worked with her in the shop. “We all make ends meet together,” she concluded. Mrs. Luftig wasn’t there now, and Sofia asked after her, prompted by no particular reason other than curiosity that was a prelude to fate, but no one could tell her where she was. Perhaps she was measuring up a customer in their house, the shop assistant suggested. She regretted not being able to say hello to her again. Nevertheless, Sofia did see Josefina Luftig again, but in the gas chamber, when they were both naked and, in an instinctive, desperate desire for a final gesture of affection, they embraced and died together.

The story of Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski was soon to come to an end. Two weeks after arriving in Krakow, Yakov and Sofia ran out of money and that killed off their fictitious, grand-sounding surname. They were back to being merely Mr. and Mrs. Pawlicka. They had to leave the Merkur Hotel on Krakowska Street and were welcomed in the ghetto by cousin Frankie’s family. Life had started to become difficult for everyone, since, because of their race, they were unable to return to Rzeszów or leave the city. When someone in a restaurant identified them as Jews, they had had to leave their table and present themselves to the police in the street, who told them they were lucky because they’d already done in several Jewish pigs that morning (“Each got three bullets,” grunted or laughed one of the policemen) and didn’t feel like expending anymore sweat. They would simply leave them at the entrance to the ghetto, which is what they did, while on the way they several times tried to take off Sofia’s clothes to a chorus of obscenities. “On other occasion they’d simply have shot you between your tits,” cousin Frankie, not one to beat about the bush, later commented.

Initially their life in the ghetto wasn’t so different from the life they’d been leading up to then in Krakow, even in a house in the worst possible state, lacking space, running water and light, because they were granted certain privileges as newlyweds. That meant they didn’t have to contribute to daily domestic life, whether with money, of which they had none, or by helping with the most minor domestic chores. They even roamed the streets of Podgórze as if they were still on holiday. Although in that they were only imitating the vast majority of the ghetto’s inhabitants, who packed the streets, huddled in tight little groups, and walked along with no particular purpose. Several times on their daily wanderings they met brother-in-law Artur and his daughters trying to find something to eat, sometimes even stealing food, as he would finally confess. Sofia and Yakov breathed a different kind of air: they made love when they went to bed and got up. After a frugal breakfast, they walked the streets casually trying to sell Frankie’s family’s candelabra though with no success. On the other hand, Sofia got into debt buying on a whim a stringbag for hats that she didn’t need, and even Yakov borrowed money to buy cocoa sweets (from Jamaica, according to the wrapper!) that were on sale by a doorway where one night three violinists played a selection of the gloomiest music they could ever remember to a most miserable audience. That night Sofia longed for the cheerful waltzes and polkas in the Klub Camelot on Bracka Street that had intoxicated her a year ago as if she’d entered a new paradise. That word “paradise” was never to come to her lips again after listening to those searingly sad violins.

From then on, Sofia became aware of the relentless passage of time. Within a few weeks she realized people lumbering up and down the same street in a state of despair, and she kept bumping into the strangest of street hawkers: some sold orthopedic arms; others, potties; others, spools of colored thread; others, fishing rods; others, half-filled packets of cigarettes, pocket watches that had stopped, rusty knives, foil bracelets, turnips, and different sizes of stale bread. Others even set up a stall with magazines emblazoned with the effigy of Hitler and heroic scenes of the glorious German army in action.

Soon after, Sofia’s eyes saw a growing number of beggars and every day more and more poor people who no one could help huddled on street corners. As the weeks passed by, starved corpses began to appear on the sidewalks.

One morning in July Sofia began to see dead children being strewn out on the streets. They looked like recently hunted animals. That same day she realized she’d been three months in the ghetto and was pregnant.

Then Sofia remembered something else. She recalled how in 1940, on their previous visit to the city, she and Yakov had visited the zoo, though they never actually went in, because a strange incident headed them off. Trumpet music was blasting next to a few fairground caravans and a man disguised from head to toe as a bear stood by the zoo fence. It was an ugly, much mended disguise. He was advertising a drink, as they gathered from the large poster by the fence next to the pile of the man’s clothes. He was a gypsy, Yakov observed when the man removed his bear’s head and passed round a tray for small change for the pirouettes and roars he’d been performing. When he was level with Sofia, he stared at her and clasped one of her hands between his fake bear paws, whose touch made Sofia feel slightly nauseous. “Get off your high horse, little princess, your children will end up like me,” he told her. Then the man funneled his head back into the bear’s and continued gesturing ferociously and frightening passers-by, until, another man, another gypsy, disguised as a hunter, rushed upon the scene from nowhere and started shooting the bear. After whimpering in a dying vein, he collapsed at Sofia’s feet. The salvoes from the fake hunter scared away the zebras and gnus, and the condors in an adjacent cage flew off and crashed against the roof bars as did the pelicans and red-backed hawks. Wolves prowled around their sandy precinct and a climate of unnerving violence was suddenly unleashed in the zoo by the fence where the man disguised as a bear lay motionless on the ground. His colleague, who had acted the part of a hunter, saw his friend was taking far too long to get back on his feet and removed his bear’s head. The gypsy had died from a heart attack. All that made a vivid impression on Sofia, who refused to go into the zoo and, very edgy, forced Yakov to accompany her back to their Miodowa Street boarding house. Alone in the ghetto, Sofia now remembered that event and that strange prophecy about her offspring and didn’t know why but something terrible within her still led her to be afraid of her pregnancy, and she again became intensely aware of time and the little life she had left, as if she’d suddenly had an intuition that she would die young and would die soon: “Get off your high horse, little princess,” the words uttered by that enigmatic man echoed round her head. And soon after, her dreams were rent with horror, “Abort . . . the Nazis will devour it . . . ” or “He will never get out of the ghetto alive . . . ” words the man disguised as a bear said in the middle of a nightmare she had every night for a week. She decided right away to speak to her cousin Frankie and find out where, and how, and how much money it would cost her to prevent that baby,
their
baby, from being born. That’s why she said nothing to Yakov, because first she had to speak to Frankie, then act, take a decision and avoid adding more problems to the ones she already had. And all by herself.

In 1973 Federico Silla Accati made a present to his dear friend and partner Primo Levi of a book in Yiddish that had some chapters in Polish. It was a huge tome on chemistry in a fairly bad state of repair, with damp and mildew stains, missing its presumably colored illustrations. Its cardboard covers were battered at the corners. It was an elementary chemistry textbook, that bore no author’s name, and simply said on the front
Chemistry Lessons. Publisher Yoel Huppert. Krakow 1937
. Accati had bought it by chance from a stall in the Jewish quarter of Turin. The fact it was written in Yiddish caught his attention, although he was even more surprised when he read inside, carefully written in Chinese ink, “This book belonged to Artur Sugar, Podgórze ghetto, 1941.” Primo Levi thanked him for the present, was very moved, and thought it would be a way to keep the memory alive of at least one inhabitant of that ghetto that it was later discovered was entirely eliminated between the Plaszów and Auschwitz camps. But he could never have imagined that that copy was sold by Yakov Pawlicka, Hurbinek’s father who never knew he was Hurbinek’s father, on a July day in 1941, when he went into the only bookshop in the ghetto, sold his cousin Artur’s book, asked if they had any books or postcards from Jamaica and if by chance they knew bookseller Simon Azvel. They had no books about Jamaica, and as for Azvel, he had been shot in the head in the ghetto and died.