Wartime lies - Louis Begley [36]
Tania’s research, confirmed eventually by my grandfather, led her quickly to conclude that for Jews like us on Aryan papers there was no apparent means of renting an apartment of our own in the capital or, for that matter, in Praga, the suburb on the other side of the Vistula. Perhaps apartments were to be had in Warsaw, possibly even at a price we could afford, but to find one it was necessary to have connections with Poles, and such connections were precisely what we wished to avoid. Therefore, the likes of us were relegated to renting rooms in more or less spacious apartments, usually belonging to more or less elderly ladies of reduced means. These ladies did not necessarily live in shabby buildings; indeed, apartments in buildings below a certain level of petit bourgeois pretension would have been too small to lend themselves to the business. In the apartments we got to know well, a room or two, including perhaps the salon, would be reserved for the landlady, and the other rooms, in some prewar era of greater ease probably intended for children, opening on a long corridor, were at present available to lodgers. Each such room would contain a single bed, sometimes narrow, sometimes quite comfortable (two beds would not have left enough space for other furnishings), a table, a few chairs, a wardrobe, a bookcase, a washstand. At the end of the corridor, there would be, in the best of circumstances, a bathroom with a tub with running water and its own gas or oil heater, used by everyone in the apartment. Next to it would be a separate cubicle containing a toilet, also for communal use. At peak hours, in the morning when the lodgers awoke and after dinner when they prepared for the night, unpleasant questions of priority were apt to arise concerning the toilet. Our policy was to avoid unpleasantness; we made sure to have a chamber pot in our room and could yield politely to those whose needs were urgent.
The landladies of Warsaw’s communal apartments did not feed their lodgers. One bought one’s own food, kept it in the room as best one could, iceboxes not being in general use, cooked it in the kitchen, and ate it at a common dining-room table or in one’s room, depending on the custom of the place and the lodger’s degree of dourness. And who were these lodgers? Dreary, unmarried office employees, widows and widowers whose apartments had been destroyed in some bombardment, and the deceivers: Jews with Aryan papers.
My existence continued to be a problem not susceptible to a pleasant solution. Children in these establishments were a rarity; they attracted attention and, therefore, danger. Questions of the sort Tania and I had rehearsed were to be answered before they were asked, so that the inquisitive landlady or fellow lodger would never begin the dreaded inquiry that might lead to the truth: Why did that young woman’s family not take her in, rather than let her and her boy lead a solitary, peculiar life in this place? They don’t seem poor, otherwise how could she afford the rent that we who work, or we who have a little pension, pay with difficulty? She doesn’t work. What kind of pension do young people of her sort have? Could they be Jews? Let’s see if we can find out; it’s amusing to set a trap.
The days and nights that would teach us these new skills were still to be lived. On the third day after our arrival in Warsaw, we finally saw my grandfather. He was waiting for us at the Cathedral. As always, he was bareheaded; he wore a short black