I Am Juden

by Stephen Uzzell

  The evening began pleasantly enough, though was soon tainted as my thoughts turned towards my imminent departure. When I felt tears brimming, I poured another glass of wine, which provided the sweetest of temporary relief. Before too long I was a besotted fool, prone to the most excessive of eye-watering. Another side-effect: the more I imbibed, the more worried I grew of the large man across the street, whose eyes seemed to follow me from wherever he stood, like Fra Pandolf’s fabled painting of the doomed Duchess. Every time I glanced out the window, he was watching. Eventually I became so agitated, I confided my fears to Anton.

  ‘Fellow with the ginger moustache in the black suit,’ he said without turning to look.

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Rest assured, cousin, you’ve got more to worry about from the friendly inn-keep.’

  ‘But who is he?’

  ‘Ilya Legrino. The only man in this village for whom death is a business plan. He owns the funeral parlour. Unfortunately he’s also undertaken something of a shine to my eldest daughter.’

  Now his attentions made sense, given my proximity to Eva.

  ‘What’s so bad about an undertaker?’ I said.

  ‘Ilya’s a dim-wit of the highest order. And a particularly stubborn one at that.’

  I laughed. ‘So you’ll be fending him off until the war ends.’

  ‘Salut,’ Anton said, raising a mournful glass.

  Towards the end of the evening, an accordion player and violinist strolled in off the street, positioned themselves on stools in front of Petr’s bar and struck up a lively tune that soon had the families stomping along, fathers punctuating each verse with lusty whoops. After a couple of minutes, Barbora and Radka skipped up and stood in front of the musicians, hands on their hips, swinging back and forth to the rhythm. Petr swooped in from the side and pulled Barbora towards him. With his arm around her small waist, they began waltzing in a circle before he lifted the girl clean off her heels and span round holding her in his arms, depositing her back to her feet with a bow, to great applause. Eva joined them next, standing in front of the younger two with her hand on her hips, sashaying from side to side. I thought Petr might take her for a spin, too. But it was to me that Eva turned, casting a sly look. Before I knew it, I was propelled from my chair and sent stumbling onto the floor. Over my shoulder I saw Anton rocking back, face creased red and white with laughter.

  ‘Pick her up!’ a voice yelled, and I found myself doing just that, although not, I fear, as nimbly as my predecessor.

  Lifting Eva was the easy part. No sooner was she cradled in my arms did the violinist double his speed, which the guests took as their cue to start drumming on the tables, sending the cutlery chinking against china. Goaded into action by their insistence, I began to turn, shuffling at first, but with a gay Eva urging me on, we were soon whirling like a Viennese

  carousel. The inn disappeared in a drunken blur as we sailed round and round and I amazed one and all by remaining on my feet and not flinging my cousin’s daughter into the shelf of vintage cognac. After setting Eva down, more wine was poured to celebrate our performance, and I gulped down several glasses in quick succession, thirsty from the exertion.

  We must have trotted back to the farm on the horse and cart, but for some reason, I have no further recollection of the evening.

  I struggled through Sunday morning with the sorest of heads, milked the cows and fed the rest of the animals in a fugue-like trance before scrubbing up at the kitchen sink and donning my host’s spare suit for church. The priest’s sermon washed over without making much of an impression, much like the cold sink.

  That afternoon, Eva helped me pack a bag of provisions for my departure, and we sat on the bed, laughing at our performance of the night before. There was a moment where I thought I might lean forward and cradle her once again in my arms, but I refrained. Leaving the farm was already painful enough; I had no right to complicate it further.

  The big tin bath that hung on the garden fence was carried into the kitchen that evening and put in front of the fire. Water was heated in the copper, and transferred by bucket. The children bathed first, youngest to oldest, then Barbora and Radka went straight to bed. Eva took to the water next, adding her coconut shampoo into the soup, followed by her mother and father, and finally myself.

  Alone in my room, I made a final tour to ensure all was packed ready for the morning and saw my photograph of Shoshana on the boards between the bottom of my bed and the wardrobe. I bent down to retrieve it. As my fingers grasped the paper, I could have sworn I heard a faint ‘snap’ in the air, like the firing of a rubber band. A pain flared up the back of my leg, as if the calf muscle had been whipped by the same phantom band. The entire incident was so unremarkable - I had not stumbled on my ankle, or even twisted it. At most, I was suffering from a tweaked muscle.

  I retired early to bed, since dawn was to be my departure. But for the first time at the farm, sleep was elusive. I could not find a comfortable groove in the mattress, and twisted this way and that, each turn aggravating the back of my leg, still sore from the tweaking.

  After two hours of increasingly sweaty and fretful restlessness, I gave up, lit the candle and heaved the dusty family Bible off the bedside cabinet.

  I awoke with the birds, finding myself propped semi-upright against the pillows, the good book open on my chest. I had made it to the furthest reaches of page two.

  Within five seconds of regaining consciousness, I became aware of the most abject pain. If the skin of my left shin had been split open and the bone replaced with a red hot poker, I would have not been in more discomfort. Gingerly, like the child who fears a fiend has stolen in under the covers, I grasped the sheet and peeled it back. My shin was intact, but the foot beneath was a purple, swollen monstrosity.

  I tried to ignore the transformation, summoning the indomitable spirit of Gregor Samsa. I was lucky to have made it through the night with only a mutated foot – poor Gregor woke up to find his entire body had morphed into a beetle! It was inconceivable I had inflicted this much damage by the mere act of bending down to pick up a necklace. So I simply refused to believe it, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  The rest of the house was stirring. Children thumped from room to room, Eva softly sang. I imagined her at the mirrored dresser, brushing her coconut hair in its reflection. A wholesome smell of baking arose through the floor from the kitchen. We were to have one last breakfast together, as a family. Anton had offered to drive me the first twenty miles south, but I was determined to make the journey under my own steam. The family had already done so much.

  It was time for me to get up. I had trapped a nerve, that was all. Once I was on my feet, I would soon be back to normal. Such was the swelling, it took five minutes to get my shoe on. The mere act of getting onto my feet was trickier still, since the left one was reluctant to bear its share of the burden, firing molten bolts up to the knee in protest. But I succeeded in setting the shoe down, and kept it down. I even managed to hobble a few steps around the bed, and persuaded myself the pain was tolerable. Hoisting a bag as heavy as a wild boar, I backed out of the bedroom, closing the door for the last time.

  Downstairs at breakfast, Anton and Hanna were putting a brave front on my departure for the benefit of the girls, who had grown quite fond of their old teacher. I could not respond in like. All my effort was required just to keep the pain from contorting my features that I was quite incapable of a smile. I must have looked aggrieved, as if I was being evicted from the farm against my will. Several times I was told it was not too late to change my mind, but all I could do was nod. Of the bounty of sausage and eggs assembled before my eyes, I was able to eat a modestly-heaped triangle of toast. Eva offered to wrap a sausage for the road, but I declined. I couldn’t have carried another crumb.

  At the vertiginous descent of the front door step, I was so distracted by anguish that I was barely able to mumble my goodbyes. Eva looked as if she was about to grab my arm at on
e point, but she composed herself and stepped back into the protective fold of her parents. In this most miserable of manners, I departed, every movement an agony.

  Only when I heard the door close behind did I abandon my attempts to walk without a limp. The exertion of those thirty seconds had converted the shirt on my back to the consistency of a damp dish-cloth: I was sodden with sweat before even reaching the farmyard barn. But I kept going, unable to believe I had crippled myself picking up a photograph. Once the heart was pumping in the fresh air, I’d feel right as rain.

  Consulting Anton’s hand-drawn map, I paused against the lane’s first telegraph pole, launching a stork into startled flight. I could only marvel at the grace with which it recovered its trajectory, gliding under such steely wings. My own stuttering progress below would resemble a fox that had chewed off its own paw.

  Instead of following the village road, Anton’s route sent me over cemetery hill. Cursing my ruined foot, I schlepped it up step after step and collapsed at the summit on a plump pillow of grass. The vast southern horizon spread out before me, and behind, the Popolowsky’s smoke signal of a chimney beckoned my return. I was defeated, utterly.

  Twenty minutes later, I fell through the front door into Hanna’s clutch, an incoherent wreck. She led me first to the parlour couch, where my shoe was prised off the bloated appendage. The men later carried me back upstairs to Barbora’s bed, freshly made since my departure. I watched tablets dissolve in water and fell into strange, ecstatic sleep.

  Waking intermittently, I refused all offers of medical help, still convinced the swelling would go down of its own accord. But by evening, my entire leg had turned purple, and I relented.

  The doctor arrived shortly before midnight. After a thorough examination, he announced that my non-accident of bending down had severed the tendons from my ankle to the knee, and from the ankle to the toes. A clean break of the ankle bone would have resulted in less damage. Alternating cold and heat treatments were to be applied to the afflicted areas, but the real cure was rest.

  I was ordered off my feet for fourteen days.

  12

  For the first forty-eight hours, I wallowed in a stupor of pain-killers. When I could hobble around on a pair of wooden crutches, I made myself useful around the house with chores that could be performed seated, or slumped on the floor. One of the first of these was to clean out the large cupboard under the stairs – more of a spare room than a closet - where I found Anton’s set of encyclopaedias languishing under a blanket, two dozen volumes bound in scarlet cloth. Since the invasion, families were only allowed to own books in the German language, so these encyclopaedias had been hidden away.

  I have always been powerless to control myself in the presence of a good book. After the cupboard was tidy, I took the first encyclopaedia to the kitchen table, and began to scan through the entries, imaging myself back behind the soft green lamps of the University reading room.

  Before long I was joined by Radka and Barbora, enraptured by the sight of a man so brazenly turning Polish pages. Radka was young enough to have never seen an encyclopaedia, and was amazed to discover that it contained the sum of all human knowledge. When I told her the book on the table contained only words beginning with the letter ‘A’, she begged me for more. But the day was drawing to a close and Anton would be home soon for dinner. I contented the girls with a cautionary explanation of the effects of Absinthe before ending the lesson with a quick recap of the early successes of Emiliano Zapata, a subject I chose to deliberately dampen their curiosity. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was still explaining the ins and outs of the Mexican Revolution when dinner was served, much to their father’s bemusement.

  Later than evening, I cornered Anton with my crutches, confessed my crimes and advanced a certain proposition of my own. The brief schooling round the kitchen table had rekindled a spark that I had not felt for many years: I yearned to teach again. It was, I argued, the perfect fit. Thanks to Hans Frank, the Polish lands were being converted into an intellectual wasteland. Barbora and Radka had received no education since June. Their extended summer holiday had turned into a six-month hiatus and there was no end in sight, like most things. Without some form of academic instruction, their intellectual development may never recover. At the moment, through no fault of their own, the girls were driving their sister and mother to distraction.

  Anton was initially reluctant. I was talking about a profession the Nazis honoured by sending educators to the Ghettos, or for immediate execution. Teaching children was no longer a kindness, but an act of war. I reminded him that, should the Gestapo come knocking, we were already in enough trouble. Having a Polish encyclopaedia on the sideboard could hardly make matters worse. Anton had been brave enough to provide a refuge for three of us in or underneath his property. There were few benefits he could receive in return. Why continue to deny his children an education when I was willing and able to provide?’

  ‘School’, such as it was, began the next morning.

  Eva and I rose early to put together a programme of study: Languages and Mathematics on alternate mornings, followed by History and Geography in the afternoons. Eva was keen to help, and offered to review the girl’s written work at the end of the day, to allow me to concentrate on the next.

  After breakfast we cleared away plates and cups and wiped the table down ready for work. The girls were delighted to see their school notebooks, which had lain untouched in their satchels since the beginning of the holidays. With one eye on the fields for any sign that the Germans were coming, I began my first ‘seminar’ in several years.

  At Kiel I liked to start the semester with an introduction to Socratic Dialogue. At the farmhouse, it was basic nouns and verbs, which caused me far more difficulty. Neither will I pretend I found the shift from young adults to infants easy in terms of temperament, but the work was stimulating in a way I had not experienced since the days of the Akiva house on Pilies Street. I knew instantly I’d made the right decision. Keeping the sisters engaged after their initial excitement wore off was a challenge I met with humour and hopefully good grace, although my patience was tested by the girl’s third round of uncontrollable giggles. Generally they were grateful students - a courtesy, I gathered, that their previous teacher had not been extended. For the first time since Sunday, I forgot all about my bruised foot, and slept soundly from the minute my head lay across the pillow.

  On the second morning we were interrupted by two boys from the village who had come looking to play. Eva announced that both girls were poorly with a bug, and were unlikely to recover anytime soon. But the boys were not to be dissuaded: they returned on the third day with a basket of fruit from their parents, and again on Friday.

  Over the course of the weekend, I argued that, should the boys also make the trek on Monday, we might consider asking them to stay. Anton pointed out that the two lads had been amongst the most enthusiastic Jew-spotters at the ritual of the threshing machine. In that case, I told him, they needed an education more than most. Anton ceded way, convinced my mission was an exercise in futility. I would be the first man in Poland to persuade a pair of teenage boys to voluntarily sit a spelling test.

  Not only did the boys return on Monday, but they brought three friends. Upon my insistence, Eva swung the front door wide enough to reveal the terrible truth of what was being perpetrated in the kitchen. Such were the initial sneers at our exercise books that I believed Anton was the shrewder judge of character after all. But when the boys understood that the only way to see the girls was around the teacher’s table, like the good old days, they grudgingly agreed to join in, ‘until we get bored’. They lasted a full day, and came back the following morning with another friend. By the end of that week, there were forty children attending, so many that we had to run separate sessions. Each group met for two-and-a-half hours, with the last children quietly departing in the evening.

  The kitchen table could no longer accommodate the new numbers, and I was also worried about
its exposed position in the centre of the room. Two seated children could be easily explained; twenty was a different matter entirely. Eva and I prepared a secret classroom in the cupboard under the stairs.

  The venture had taken off in ways I had never expected. Now a school was up and running, I was reluctant to walk away from it all, despite the fact I was finally free do so without the aid of crutches. My plan was to train Eva from homework marker to teacher’s assistant, to be my eventual replacement. Now that Anton had seen the benefits of home education, he had given Eva his blessing to work alongside me full-time. The two of us became very close, a fact not lost upon some of the older children, but we maintained our professionalism throughout. Day and night, night and day.

  Our expansion from a family concern to a fully-fledged village school brought other challenges, in terms of discretion. I feared that the students’ parents – many of whom had enthusiastically participated in mass murder at the Nazis’ behest – would balk at breaking Hans Frank’s ban on Polish education. But in this regard alone, we were aided by the fathers’ fervent nationalism. They may have been simple men with violent prejudices, but they were not prepared to stand back and watch their heritage be steamrollered. There were no loose lips to sink our secret ship. Parents didn’t talk about neighbours or politics or Germans. Since the murder of the Jews, people didn’t talk about anything anymore, Eva explained. The whole community was too stunned by what had been unleashed.