The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg

primarily affecting the liver.
Since an attack of jaundice many years before, Mrs Rumkowska’s liver was
officially sensitive. The obscure symptoms generated by this liver provided an
inexhaustible topic of conversation at the dinners she regularly gave at the
Soup Kitchen for intellectuals in Łagiewnicka Street. Only ghetto dwellers with
coupons for B rations, respectable people , as
she put it, had access to this kitchen, and it was certainly a gift from above
to be able to see Princess Helena pause in one of her tours of inspection, lean
kindly over some diner’s shoulder, pull out a chair or perhaps even sit down and
engage in a little well-bred conversation.
    An even more highly prized favour, out
of most people’s reach, was to be invited as a personal guest to Helena and Józef Rumkowski’s ‘residence’ in Karola
Miarki Street in Marysin. The couple’s home was not much to boast about in
itself: a run-down dacha with lots of poky
rooms, heated by wood-burning stoves, with carved wooden banisters, Russian
carpets and single-glazed veranda windows that steamed up when the winter cold
breathed on them, turning them as shiny white with frost as the outside of Dr
Miller’s removable china eye.
    But from the ceiling hung the crystal
chandelier which Princess Helena had brought with her from her old home in the
centre of Łodz – and that was a relic. Those who had been guests of the
Rumkowskis spoke not only of the ‘generous spreads’ Princess Helena was known to
provide, but also of the way the flecks of light cast by the chandelier spread
shimmering colours across the cramped room, from the simple tulle curtains to
the cane furniture and matt sheen of the linen cloth.
    For many in the ghetto, Karola Miarki
Street came to symbolise the pogodne czasy , the
‘golden days’ from before the war. It was beneath that very chandelier, for
example, that Princess Helena one memorable evening had ordered a sack to be
slit open, releasing a flock of finches collected on Mr Tausengeld’s
instructions from the aviary out in the garden: the aim was a symbolic driving
out of evil, not only from Princess Helena’s own body but also from those of all
decent ghetto dwellers. But not even this dramatic medication had any effect.
Princess Helena continued to be tormented by her liver. She lay shut in total
darkness in her bedroom for ten days, until Dr Garfinkel appealed to her to try
as a last resort to see the woman everyone was talking about, to whom for some
reason they attributed powers of healing.
    So in great pain, and with a good deal
of fuss, she had herself taken in one of the ghetto dróshkes to the Hasidic prayer house. She was dismayed to find other
people already there, and she ordered the opiekuni to drive them all, the crippled and the lame, out into the
yard. Only when the room was empty did she bend over the poor, pitiful creature
lying there on the litter.
    That was when it happened, the thing Princess Helena’s people found so hard to
explain afterwards. Someone was to write later that it was as if ‘sudden
tribulation’ had descended on the paralysed woman. Others described it as being
like when you cover a light with your hand. The woman’s pure and limpid gaze was
suddenly clouded with a dark, shifting anxiety. ‘A dybek !’ screamed Mr Tausendgeld. Perhaps it was simply that Mara had
briefly managed to fight her way up from the heavy, morphine-drenched sleep into
which Dr Szykier had sunk her, and Helena Rumkowska, ever prone to
sentimentality, had felt her heart wrung by something she felt she had glimpsed
a moment earlier in the sick woman’s clear, liquid eyes. Had been so moved, in
fact, that she took a little handkerchief from her handbag, carefully dampened
its edge with spit and leant forward to wipe away – what? – yes, what had she thought
to wipe away (afterwards, not even Helena Rumkowska could remember with any
clarity)? – perhaps the saliva at the corners of the woman’s mouth,