The Warsaw Anagrams Read Free Page B

nervous to find his true voice, which was unstudied but beautiful.
    The boy loved music but was terrified of performing; he only felt comfortable revealing his inner life – and his gifts – to those he loved. Stefa sometimes forgot that he wasn’t a secret cabaret star like her.
    I saw in my nephew’s eyes that he was barely treading water, so, after the first verse, I jumped up and shushed him with whirling hands. ‘ Piskorz , it’s way past your bedtime,’ I told him, adding to our guests that we ought to call it a night.
    Stefa, furious, looked back and forth between her wristwatch and me. Faking a laugh, she said, ‘But you can’t be serious – it’s only nine!’
    ‘The boy needs his sleep,’ I told her. ‘And in point of fact, so do I.’
    Adam looked at me with a face compressed by fear, his straw hat in his hands.
    Stefa jumped up, glaring. ‘If you don’t mind, Uncle Erik, I’ll make the rules in my own home! Especially when it comes to my son.’
    ‘Very well, make all the rules you want – but without me!’ I snapped back, and I took a first step towards the coat rack, intending to walk off my anger, but Adam burst into tears and bolted into his mother’s room.
    I rushed to him, but when I caressed his cheek he turned away from me. I assured him that I didn’t want an angel for a nephew. ‘Especially since I’m an atheist, and I have no intention of going to heaven,’ I joked.
    Pity an old man with little experience of children; my attempt at levity only made him cry harder. While I was apologizing to him, Stefa appeared in the doorway, her hands on her hips. ‘Now you’ve done it!’ she began. ‘As if the boy didn’t have—’
    ‘He shouldn’t have to sing for me or anyone else!’ I cut in. ‘You know he doesn’t like it.’ Hoping to ease the tension between us with a little humour, I added, ‘Besides, I think we can do without him singing chansons d’amour in Yiddish-accented French, at least till we get a bit more desperate for entertainment.’
    ‘All you do is bully him!’ Stefa yelled vengefully. ‘You scare him half to death!’
    She was right, of course. ‘All that ends now,’ I told her, and I surprised myself by adding, ‘I’m through punishing him.’
    Tears welled in my niece’s eyes.
    ‘I’m sorry I’ve been difficult, Katshkele ,’ I told her, using the pet name everyone in the family had for her.
    She nodded her acceptance of my apology, unable to speak. I took Adam in my arms and kissed his brow. Stefa eased the door closed on the way out.
    Adam and I talked together in whispers, since it made our friendship more intimate. I dried his eyes and spoke to him of the journeys I’d take him on when we got out of the ghetto. New York was the city that crowned his dreams, and he stood on his toes when we talked of riding up to the top of the Empire State Building, showing me how he’d look out across the widest horizon in the world.
     
     
    Lying with my arm around Adam that night, I saw that my father had been haunting my mind to remind me I was failing his great-grandson . And myself, of course.  

CHAPTER 2
     
     
    I’d come to the ghetto planning to read all of Freud one more time, and eager to write up several case studies, but within two months I’d given all that up. It was strangely easy. As if all I had to do was hop on a tram headed into the countryside instead of the city centre.
    One minute, a man can think of nothing but leaving behind seminal works that will be read in London and Vienna for decades, the next he is waiting outside a soot-covered grammar school for his nephew, examining a ripped seam on one of his two pairs of trousers and wondering if he still knows how to use a needle and thread.
    Now that Adam and I were friends again, he’d tell me about his day as we walked home from school. He’d start in a cautious monotone, testing my interest, but each of my questions would encourage him to pick up his rhythm, so that his