The Puppet Boy of Warsaw Read Online Free PDF Page A

exist. Mama let me be and I was grateful. She grieved in her own silent way.
    But eventually my stomach rumbled and tightened. I hated myself for it, but a definite sharp pang of hunger gripped me, and so I explored the coat’s pockets, hoping to find something edible without having to leave its protection. And as my hands searched their way through the pockets’ labyrinth, many treasures slipped through my fingers: a wooden pipe, a pair of spectacles, a small book of poetry. I never knew Grandfather cared for such things. Pebbles, sticky sweets, a fountain pen and objects I could not make sense of, like a piece of fur, scraps of colourful fabric, a paper flower.
    Suddenly my fingers touched a cool, curved surface with wire strings attached. I pulled it from the depth of the seams and through the tunnel of the sleeve. It was a perfectly formed little violin. I had never heard my grandfather play but here I held a miniature, built as if for a dwarf or as a child’s precious toy. I carefully picked it up, pinched the strings and searched the coat for a bow. I found the bow in another small pocket, this time a slim vertical one, behind the row of buttons.
    I spread the coat on the floor, sat down in the middle of it and tried my very first scratchings with the little bow. I imagined Grandfather’s hands holding the tiny violin like a newborn, but the sounds I produced were far removed from music.
    Later that afternoon I discovered another pocket around the height of the kidneys. Inside it were some letters. A small bundle, neatly tied with a light blue, silky ribbon. They were fragile and pale, as if written by a ghost, someone barely of this world. The ink had faded and the handwriting was barely legible. Slowly I pulled the ribbon, and the letters fell into my lap like moths.
    That night, burning a precious candle, bent over the pages, I learned things that transformed everything I thought I had known about my grandfather and father. Grandfather not only had an aptitude for mathematics, but also for language – he wrote beautiful poetry. These were letters to his wife, the grandmother I had never met, written during the first big war. He poured his love and the pain of separation into images and metaphors, and although he hardly mentioned the war, the thin crumpled paper streaked with mud spoke of the horror and hardship of the trenches. He had filled the paper right to the edges with tiny scribbled words, aware of the same scarcity of paper we now experienced in the ghetto.
    Grandmother in turn wrote sturdy prose, mainly about her boy, my father: disrupted school days, a knee cut open, and my father’s insatiable thirst for adventure stories.
    I read wide eyed, hungry to learn everything I could about my father. When the dark gave way to grey morning, I wrapped the letters up and hid them once more in the depths of the coat. Exhausted, I sneaked back to bed.
    For weeks I left the house as little as possible and the coat became my second home, my cave, my quiet companion. Meanwhile the world outside grew increasingly desperate and hostile. The days when I played with Bolek and Henryk in our streets or in Krasinski Park had become a distant memory. The boy’s life I had once lived lay shattered. I had no friends to fool around with and whenever Mother sent me for errands, to barter for something or to join a queue when a rumour sprang up about some fresh vegetables, I saw how terrible things had become: the stench, overcrowding and an overwhelming greyness threatened to swallow us whole.
    From within the coat I observed the ghetto as if in a dream: who were these hordes of humans, dressed in dirty, torn rags, always running, pushing, shoving through crowds as if trying to reach the last train home? A grey mass of people mixed with rickshaws, the shouting drivers navigating their way through the chaos, and the occasional small horse-drawn carriage. The one overcrowded tram that still moved back and forth through the