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By Root 364 0

She would be cheated. We needed a reliable crook; that was probably the sort of person grandfather would know. And where would we go when our week here was over? Presumably grandfather would know about that as well. Perhaps we could move in with him. We would need, in any case, a story to explain why she was here with me looking for a place to live. We would use Hertz’s idea. For instance: wife of Polish officer, doctor in civilian life, prisoner of war in a Russian camp, rest of the family killed in bombardments in 1939 or perhaps deported to Siberia. But why did we leave Lwów? It must be that her nerves no longer could stand Lwów after so many losses. That part of the story, she felt, would have to be perfected as she told it. She would see how her audience reacted; she might try it on the landlady here. And how about me, why didn’t I go to school? That I wouldn’t go to school was understood between Tania and me; one couldn’t take my penis where it might be seen, for instance to urinate in the common toilet, never mind what vicious games boys might invent. The reason had to be my delicate, congenital heart condition. I would be tutored privately; that might be an additional reason for coming to Warsaw. Teaching privately was forbidden. It may be that people willing to take the risk would be easier to find in Warsaw than in Lwów. We could not carry our questions and answers further. Tania turned out the light. We would sleep.

Our rest was interrupted by the now-familiar red visitors. These were big-city bedbugs, more active and more ingenious than their cousins in Lwów. Not content with hustling along the sheet and scurrying up and down walls, they dropped on the bed and on us from the ceiling and swarmed over the plush of the settees and chairs. We even saw them run on the floor, staying close to the wall. The light Tania turned on restored order. Pressed against each other, we fell asleep. On subsequent nights, when we were less tired and more apprehensive about the insect colonies with which we shared our space, we went to bed with the light on and cloth bands tied over our eyes. Tania called it Warsaw blindman’s buff.

The struggle against bedbugs became a leitmotiv of our days and nights in Warsaw. At Pani Jadwiga’s there was nothing to be done other than to turn the bedbugs’ night into day. Our term there was too short. In subsequent rooming houses, more was at stake, sleepless nights being worse than nightmares, and the combat became more varied. On some nights, of course, too discouraged or overwhelmed by the number and tenacity of the enemy, we lay awake in the lamplight or simply let the bedbugs feed. But in the day, we went on the offensive. Tania sprinkled foul-smelling powders on the mattress, under the mattress, around the walls. We poured boiling water on suspected nests. We exposed the bed, if the space and the location of the window permitted, to the disinfecting rays of the sun. This activity provided, in addition to a temporary material improvement in our comfort, another war game I did not mention to Tania: in this limited sphere, I could be a hunter and an aggressor, like SS units destroying partisans in the forest or, very soon, rebellious Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw. The SS sometimes had to act in secret. So did we. Our landladies resented any mention of bedbugs on their premises; we were in no position to antagonize them. From that point of view, our favorable experience with chemical agents paralleled that of the Reich. They were the easiest means of murder to conceal. Use of boiling water and, at night, manual extermination of fleeing bugs presented considerable risks and difficulties. The former laid us open to the charge of destroying property by spillage of liquids. The latter often left red blood stains on the wallpaper. Stealth and lies were needed to cover our operations with water. We could sometimes, unobserved, rush the pot from the kitchen we shared with the landlady and the other lodgers into our room; at other times Tania claimed she needed to prepare a hot-water bottle. In one room