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By Root 342 0

leather overcoat I did not recognize. We embraced, he looked me over, lifted me up for a kiss and said I had grown but was still his little man. Tania put her arm through his and drew us all inside. The Cathedral was nearly empty. We sat down in a pew near a side altar, and she told him what had happened. Grandfather did not cry; he seemed to sink into himself. I saw now how he had changed. Where it was not stained by nicotine, his mustache was as white as his hair; there were folds in the skin on his neck; his shirt collar looked worn and also yellowed as though from smoking. The fingers of his right hand were almost brown; he had probably stopped using a cigarette holder. After a long silence, grandfather said that Reinhard had been a fine man. He hoped that he would have had as much presence of mind himself and as much courage; if grandmother realized what was happening, she surely blessed Reinhard in her last thoughts. He was proud of Tania. The trick was for the three of us to stay alive. With America in the war and the English finally bombing Berlin it made sense to try hard.

He told us that in Mokotów he had a room and the use of the kitchen in an apartment. The landlady was a pleasant old cocotte, he liked her, and in fact the room wasn’t bad. But he did not think we could move in with him. For one thing, he doubted that the landlady would agree to giving up another room. More important, the only other lodgers were a young woman about Tania’s age and her boy, a little younger than I. He was quite sure they were Jews; the woman had a strange look about her, probably she bleached her hair to make it less red, and there was something too tender about her eyes. He was less sure that they understood about him. Having more Jews than absolutely necessary under one roof made no sense, it multiplied the danger, and this Jewish lady could be a real menace; she acted scatterbrained. He might have moved out on account of her if the place were not so satisfactory in all other ways. He would talk to the landlady; she would recommend something. The landladies all knew one another in this business.

I complained about his not wanting to look for a place where all three of us could live together, but Tania said he was right. She believed that we were safer without him, and he was safer without us. If the three of us were together, we would be drawing attention to ourselves; all the questions about our situation, why we were living in Warsaw in a rooming house, why we had no other family or friends, would be multiplied and become even harder to answer. The imperative need to avoid attracting attention, even at a cost as great as this, was another leitmotiv of our existence.

Grandfather told us he had not had any problems with the police and only minor problems with blackmailers; nothing expensive. Usually, it was some low-life youth who followed him for a while in the street, then asked for a light and said, Pan looks familiar to me, could he help with a little cash? These people had a look one could not mistake when they made their approach, like pimps in the old days. For the benefit of the landlady, so that she would understand where he got his money, he pretended he dealt in leather coats, the height of fashion in those days, on the black market; that is why he was wearing such a strange garment. His supposed black-market activity meant he had to be out of the apartment several hours each day. Being obliged to find someplace to drag himself to each day probably had kept him from going insane; he was so lonely. There was a mleczarnia where he went to eat cheese pierogi and sit over tea. He told Tania that she should not worry about being able to sell a piece of jewelry if she needed to. There was an intelligent jeweler who dealt in everything—stolen goods, Jewish diamonds and gold coins included. The man understood values. When grandfather was short of cash, he paid the jeweler a little visit. He told us he kept a couple of rings taped to his body, just in case it turned out he could not return to the apartment; the rest was