‘Think again. Who is the Shoemaker?’
Roza couldn’t speak.
‘Who are the Friends of the Shoemaker?’
This minute, transferred attention to the making of a fly was exactly what had happened three days earlier, before she was kicked off the stool and taken to the pit. The threat was heavy between them, his unblinking, timeless gaze upon her. She opened her mouth but no sound came from her throat. Major Strenk peered into the metal tray and selected a bobbin of bright green thread. He tied a knot on the hook and reached for some tweezers.
‘Where is the printing press?’
Roza began to shiver. She heard the dripping in her mind. Her voice was quiet and beseeching, ‘I’ve told you, Comrade, I don’t know’
Major Strenk put the tweezers between his teeth and picked up his pencil. While writing down the answer, he nodded vaguely towards Brack. The guard behind Roza kicked the footstool away.
Roza woke up soaking wet and freezing. She’d been strapped to a chair with a belt. She did not know if it was night or day The guard stamped on the butt of his cigarette and brought her back to the interrogation room.
‘Name?’
‘Roza Mojeska.’ Her voice was so faint she hardly heard her own reply.
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-two.’
Major Strenk picked up a magnifying glass and examined the tied fly He didn’t seem especially pleased. Something had gone wrong. He suppressed a belch and said, ‘Date of birth?’
On the third day, while testing the mechanism of a fishing reel, he asked about the Shoemaker. It whirred efficiently like a drill, eventually slowing to a series of dry clicks. Roza watched and listened unable to speak. The major opened a drawer and nodded at Brack. Without resisting, without remembering the hauling down the corridor of waxen light, Roza fell into the darkness and the deluge. A last conscious thought, like fingernails hooked on the ledge of sanity, was about life: the irresistible, inexorable power of life. It was as though her mind was lit for a moment by a spark of divinity. She knew she was pregnant. She carried a life that Major Strenk would never catch.
Chapter Thirteen
After the third visit to the cage Roza was dragged back to her cell. There were nine other women sitting on the floor. A tenth with straggling ashen hair walked around aimlessly, moaning to herself. She wagged a dirty finger at Roza, admonishing the air long after Roza had slumped in a corner. The walls were damp and gouged with hatch-patterned desperation: the days crossed out in blocks of seven becoming weeks, months and years. All the prisoners were a strange grey-green, melding them to the plaster. One of them with cropped blonde hair watched Roza guardedly over knees held tight against her chest. Roza pressed her face into the wall. She was the bearer of life. She had to survive so that this child might one day sing. Her mind turned to Otto Brack who, given time, without a war and without conflicting ideologies, just might have been the father.
A boy turned up in February 1943. He was first seen with Mr Lasky, the caretaker, helping to shave a door that had never jammed. He had to be about fifteen. A few questions to one of the more indiscreet nuns produced the unlikely disclosure that Mr Lasky wasn’t getting any younger and the building was only getting older, so his nephew had come to help out with the chores. Everyone knew it was another secret: he was being hidden from the Nazis, like Magda, the girl in Roza’s dormitory. They had the same tragic look that comes with enforced separation.
Roza met the boy by accident one Sunday afternoon.
The top floor of the orphanage was reached by a set of warped stairs by a broom cupboard, understood by tradition to be haunted by seven orphans who’d fallen off the roof and a nun who’d killed herself with a candlestick, though no one knew how Few used the stairs, either from fear, or because the attic held nothing of interest save bedsteads, worn mattresses and broken furniture. But Roza discovered something else: a window, the highest in the building. It looked out over Warsaw, and this was where she came on Sunday afternoons to escape the institutional existence she led down below — it couldn’t be any other way, but she was tired of the discipline and the very public life of a locker without a key She would daydream, gazing over the rooftops, imagining an existence with some colour: brothers and sisters round a table, a mother in the kitchen, and a father playing the banjo. One Sunday Roza climbed the stairs and found the door ajar. On entering she saw the boy by the window It was wide open and he was smoking.
‘Do you want one?’
‘Yes.’
He’d made them out of old newspaper that had lined a drawer and threads from a doormat. His hair was rust brown, his eyes a deeper brown, flecked with green. His skin was naturally dark, as if he’d just come back from a holiday in the sun. Like Roza, he was thin, lacking muscle on his arms and legs. His shoes and jacket were too big. The boots had come from Mr Lasky.
‘This is my room,’ said Roza, curtly taking the cigarette.
The boy ignored her and lit the rolled matting, his lips held tight when he exhaled. While Roza coughed and spluttered, he stared enquiringly over the bombed, sunlit capital.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Roza, after she’d picked some fibres off her tongue.
The boy breathed in the black fumes and said, ‘I’m thinking of my father and my mother.’
Roza met the boy in that room frequently thereafter. They made no arrangement, but over the next few weeks Sunday afternoons became the time they smoked by the window He never again revealed anything about himself or what he cared about, what he’d lost and what he hoped for. He told her his name, and no more. He was Otto. That single flash of sincerity and vulnerability was replaced by a mature frown and long simmering silences. With his top teeth he’d scrape his bottom lip and Roza wondered if he might open up the skin. Once, for something to say, Roza told him her daydream: of a red dress and red shoes, and a deep green jacket, and a father who played the banjo. He listened, drinking in her hope for something better.
These two moments of brief sharing — of his loss and her dreams — created a bond between Roza and Otto. Something that could turn into love was slowly catching fire, like the dried matting wrapped in yesterdays news. By choice or chance they’d both been walked on and thrown aside; but they’d found each other among so much bric-a-brac; they’d opened a window on to something different. Which was why Roza instinctively risked her life for him the following April when the German secret police arrived with their whistles and dogs.
The community and all the children were ordered into the rear yard, but Roza and Otto made for the top floor.
‘I wouldn’t go up there if I were you,’ said Roza to the squat interpreter, shaking uncontrollably.
‘Why not?’
She was barring his way at the foot of the stairs, arms outstretched. Behind him stood two men in long leather coats. Otto was in the cupboard, two feet away.
‘There’s a dead nun waiting with a candlestick.’
They laughed and one of them tousled her hair — not affectionately, but as if she were a dog that had learned a trick. It took them half an hour to search the attic, during which time Otto hid in a room that had already been ransacked. When they’d gone, Roza learned that the Prioress and Mr Lasky had been taken away at gunpoint and that Magda had been found in the infirmary: she’d had no papers and no temperature.
Roza was completely distraught. At night she lay awake, staring at Magda’s empty bed. During the day she kept looking out for Mr Lasky, expecting to find him mending a perfectly serviceable sash window A couple of weeks later the explosions started. The rumour was that those in the Ghetto were fighting back. Standing beside Otto in the attic she watched part of the Warsaw horizon gradually collapse in clouds of smoke and dust. When the noise came to an end there was a ringing in her ears that wouldn’t go away — not from the bombs but the lost voices.