Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  “Tibia has been reduced by six centimeters, resulting in antalgic gait. Network of neuromas developed around site, partial source of localized nerve pain Mrs. Bakoski suffers from. Treatment scheduled as follows: procedure to remove foreign elements and neuromas to increase blood flow and reduce pain, and reconstructive plastic surgery. Recommend orthopedic prosthesis, pain medication as needed, and routine post-op psychiatric eval.”

  By the time Dr. Rusk clicked off his recording machine, I was short of breath. Could he tell?

  “Any questions, Mrs. Bakoski?”

  “After the operation, will I still have pain?”

  “Hard to say one hundred percent. Chances are there will still be some pain, yes, but substantially reduced. Your gait will improve significantly.”

  “No more questions, Doctor. Thank you.” I stepped down from the examining table, eager to escape that room and the x-rays hanging there.

  “We’ll also schedule the post-op psychiatric evaluation later.”

  “I’m not crazy, Doctor.”

  “It’s standard. The Hiroshima Maidens found it helpful.” The doctor helped Zuzanna up to the table. “Good then. You’ll spend the night here, and we’ll get started in the morning. You can wait here or in the reception area to check in.”

  “The operation will happen tomorrow?” I asked.

  “The sooner we proceed, the sooner you recover.”

  Recover? My mind flashed to the Revier recovery room. How could I do that again?

  Dr. Rusk moved on to Zuzanna, and I left the room, panic jagging through me. Would the surgery be painful? Would I lie in a cast for days?

  I changed back into my clothes and made my way down the maze of corridors and out the magic doors. There would be no operation. I was happy to keep my antalgic gait, thank you.

  1958

  Once out on the street, I pulled off my hospital band and tossed it in a trash can. It was good to be anonymous walking the crowded streets of New York.

  The crossing sign lit up: DON’T WALK. I stopped there on the sidewalk, but the rest of the crowd continued across the street.

  I walked until my leg ached, looking at hats in shop windows, then made it back to the waiting room at Mount Sinai. I sat and paged through magazines—my favorite part of a doctor’s visit, especially looking at American magazines. I flipped through the Saturday Review. I stopped at an advertisement for The Diary of Anne Frank, a new picture at the cinema. A pretty actress sat cross-legged, dressed in a peasant skirt, and smiled from the page, America’s idea of what the real Anne Frank was like.

  Then I stopped short at an article: THE LAPINS ARE COMING was the title, and it was written by Norman Cousins. Lapin. How much prettier the word “rabbit” is in French! The way he told the story it sounded beautiful.

  “So far nearly 300 Saturday Review readers have contributed almost $6,000 to the general Lapins’ fund….The biggest costs are yet to come, of course….” How generous people in America were to us.

  Suddenly Caroline and Zuzanna were upon me.

  “Kasia, where have you been?” Caroline asked. “We paged you.”

  “I needed some air. Can we go now?”

  “Go?” Caroline looked about to fall over. “They’re waiting for you at check-in. Where’s your ID band?”

  “I’d rather not—”

  “Do you know what has gone into all this for you? Dr. Rusk is one of the best surgeons in America.” The little feather on her hat shook as she spoke.

  “No one asked if I wanted this,” I said.

  Caroline’s cheeks flushed pink. “You’re risking everything we’ve worked for. Now Zuzanna is late too.”

  Zuzanna took me by the arm, and none too gently. “May I speak with Kasia in private?”

  She steered me around the corner.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I can’t do this again,” I said.

  “I know this is hard for you, but you won’t have this chance—”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “No, Kasia. It’s now or never.”

  “The thought of another plaster…and how do I know I can trust them once I’m asleep?”

  “There’ll be no plaster. I asked. And I’ll walk you there. Keep an eye on things.”

  “Stay with me?”

  “I’ll scrub in if they let me. Watch the whole thing. No one will hurt you, except me if you don’t get back in there.”

  —

  WHEN I WOKE AFTER the surgery, I thought I was back in the Revier at Ravensbrück. My pulse raced, but once I felt my leg wrapped in a clean bandage and remembered where I was, relief flooded through me to the tips of my fingers. The best part was I barely felt any pain. The morphine was administered intravenously—there wouldn’t be any sticking with a needle! Before long, I ate soft foods, even drank coffee. My bed had six buttons to adjust its position, and I had my own nurse, Dot, from a long island, close to Manhattan. She wore a white cap with black stripes along the top, meaning she had trained at Mount Sinai. Not that different from my cap I wore at home.

  The next afternoon I walked for the first time, leaning heavily on two nurses, but it was the best feeling in the world to take steps without the usual stabs to my calf.

  Once Dot brought my lunch, I could not stop babbling.

  “I’ll walk everywhere from now on. Dance with my husband again.”

  Dot cleared my lunch tray, something a nurse’s assistant would have done back in Lublin. “Looks like you’re in the clean-plate club.”

  Of course, I ate everything.

  “Today you see Dr. Krazny. She’s good to talk to.”

  I tucked the paper salt packets from my tray in my pocket.

  “A psychiatrist? No thank you.”

  Just what I needed, a report sent back to Lublin that said I was crazy. People had disappeared for less.

  “You won’t have to walk. I’ll get a wheelchair.” Was Dot chewing gum? This was allowed? “Dr. Krazny’s a doll. Wish I could sit for an hour and talk about my problems.”

  The floor supervisor came to the door. “Dot, your chair is here. Better get it before someone else does.”

  “Hold on—just a minute,” she said. Talking back to a supervisor? Dot wouldn’t last long on the trauma floor back home. “So you’re going to refuse treatment? Keep it bottled up, and it’ll just come out some other way.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” I said. It took getting used to—Americans giving out advice without being asked.

  Once Dot told me that all records were confidential and would not be sent back to Poland, I agreed to see Dr. Krazny. I doubted the confidential part but thought it worse to refuse.

  The doctor’s office was tidy but cramped, which did nothing to ease my nerves. Through the one small window I saw snowflakes dance in the wind. I was surprised to find that the doctor was a young woman. She wore pretty black glasses that curved up on the ends. Her diploma on the wall looked new. Probably just out of school. Inexperienced enough to write me up as mentally ill when that was not the case at all? I would have to stay composed.

  She barely glanced at me when the orderly wheeled me in. “You’re late. Half your time is up.”

  “Maybe it was a mistake to come,” I said.

  “Feel free to leave.”

  Could they not find a nicer doctor at Mount Sinai? “You’re so young—”

  The doctor capped her pen and tossed it onto the desk. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

  I pulled on the rubber tires of the chair, but the orderly had braked it.

  “I can’t stay,” I said.

  The doctor settled back in her chair. “In this country, you have a choice.”

  I pressed one index finger with the other. “First of all, I’m not mentally unstable.”

  “I’m a psychiatrist. Just here to talk.”

  Could I tell her about the cheese sandwich?

  “We have psychiatrists in Poland,” I said.

  “
One for every five thousand Polish people is what I hear. Can’t be easy getting an appointment.”

  “Would have been easier if the Germans hadn’t killed them all.”

  The doctor reached for my chart. “Says here you have trouble sleeping—”

  “My sister is a doctor. She told them that.”

  “And trouble breathing in small spaces. That is known as a claustrophobic adult-onset panic episode.”

  “I’m a nurse. I know what it’s called.”

  “Then you know how to stop the attacks? How is that working?” She stared at me. “You were in a camp.”

  “It’s on my chart—”

  “Ravensbrück. Only women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tortured?”

  “Every day was torture.”

  That got a crack of a smile from Dr. Krazny.

  “I don’t need sympathy.”

  Dr. Krazny sat up straighter in her chair. “I see.”

  She eyed the chart.

  “Your mother…” she said.

  I took a deep breath. “She brought me a cheese sandwich and was arrested along with me.”

  “I hope you don’t think it was your fault.”

  I examined my fingernails. Of course it was my fault.

  “She didn’t return with you? From the camp?”

  “She disappeared. I don’t know what happened.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “I don’t think of it.”

  “Not an inkling?”

  I watched a little tornado of snow swirl around on the window ledge.

  “Things happened there,” I said.

  “Care to elaborate? That’s how this works.”

  I brushed the hair back from my forehead. “She just disappeared. She was helping a doctor.”

  “Did the doctor do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not an inkling?”

  “It’s not that easy. You don’t understand.” Snow clung to the windowpanes, closing us in. I breathed hard. Not now. It was no time for an episode. “Many of the doctor’s colleagues were executed, but she’s in prison.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Good. As long as she stays there.”

  “And when she’s done her time?”

  “Not until 1967. I’ll deal with it then.”

  “Do you wish she’d been executed too?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Krazny looked at me, eyebrows up. “Why?”

  “She knows what happened to my mother.”

  “What was your relationship like with your mother? Did you love her?”

  “Of course. I was her favorite. What does this have to do with anything?” I pinched my hand to prevent the tears from falling.

  The doctor shook her head. “Not sure.”

  “Not an inkling, Doctor?”

  Dr. Krazny pulled off her glasses and wiped the lenses.

  “I do know unresolved questions can play havoc with a psyche. Produce hostility. Ruin relationships.” She replaced her glasses and looked at me for a long second. “I don’t often offer advice to my patients, Mrs. Bakoski—”

  “No need to start.”

  “But you’re lucky you’re alive.”

  “Lucky?” My palms were wet with sweat. “Please.”

  “You suffered, but you’re here.”

  “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “I do know you’re holding on to the pain of losing your mother. After all, that’s all you have left of her, isn’t it? Give that up, and you give up the last thing you have of her.”

  I turned my face to the window.

  “I also know you have considerable work to do, and you need to put your shoulder to it. That’s the secret to getting better.” The doctor gathered her papers and tapped them on her desk.

  “Orderly,” she called. “Mrs. Bakoski needs an escort to her room.”

  “I can make it on my own,” I said.

  The doctor leaned closer to me.

  “Look, Mrs. Bakoski, you’ll make no progress until you get to the bottom of that anger. And I would embrace the sympathy people give you. You need all the help you can get.”

  —

  CAROLINE BROUGHT US UP to her country home she called “The Hay,” north of New York City, in Bethlehem, Connecticut, for Christmas. Tears welled in her eyes when she told us her late father had named it “The Hay” after an estate his family once owned in England.

  She said the air was cleaner up north, good for recuperation, and maybe that was true for I was taking short walks before long. Zuzanna and I both felt so much better being up there at Caroline’s home. Perhaps it had something to do with Caroline’s mother, Mrs. Ferriday, treating Zuzanna and me like queens. From the time she met us at the door dressed in Polish folk costume to the minute we left for California, she fussed over us as if we were her own. She’d learned many Polish phrases to make us feel at home.

  How wonderful it was to be able to take steps like a normal person again! Mrs. Ferriday lent me her fur coat, and we walked, arm in arm, about their property. To a warm barn that smelled of sweet hay and horses, sun slanting in through the high windows. Out to the playhouse Caroline had used as a youngster, a child-sized version of the main house, complete with a working stove.

  But even with the special treatment, I couldn’t shake the homesickness for Poland and for Pietrik and Halina. It didn’t help that Caroline favored Zuzanna and rose early each morning to take tea with her, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table, heads together to share a little story, laugh at a private joke. It was understandable, for everyone loved Zuzanna. Thankful as I was to the Ferridays, I wanted my sister back.

  I tried to count my blessings. Bethlehem was a very nice place to spend Christmas. Caroline took us everywhere. To the small store across from the town green, Merrill Brothers, that sold everything one could want, even melons and green beans in the winter. To mass at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, home to cloistered nuns who sang haunting, beautiful chants. One Sunday, her chauffeur’s day off, Caroline drove us to mass in her long, green car, so big it fit all of us, including their Russian cook, Serge, with room to spare. Caroline stared straight ahead and gripped the steering wheel so tightly I thought she’d break it. Mrs. Ferriday told me later that people in town got word out to stay off the roads whenever Caroline took to that car.

  But I was happiest just being at the house, for The Hay was the most beautiful one I’d ever seen, tall and white with black shutters and enough room for a family of ten. The furnishings were all quite old, but very nice, including parlor curtains Mrs. Ferriday had sewn herself, with the most intricate crewelwork. The barns out back were home to three horses, a handsome German shepherd named Lucky (whom Zuzanna and I were terrified of at first, until he proved to be a most gentle, loyal companion), many sheep and chickens, and a pig that followed Caroline everywhere. She spoke French to it.

  “Come, chérie,” she said as it waddled after her. “Dépêchez-vous. Vous pouvez être beau, mais cela ne signifie pas que je vais attendre.” You may be beautiful, but that doesn’t mean I’ll wait.

  That pig even followed Caroline into the house on occasion, climbing up the front stairs with great effort, and to her bedroom.

  Caroline was a different person up in Connecticut. She mucked out the animals’ stalls dressed in blue jeans and a hunter’s cap, even climbed up onto the roof with her father’s old shotgun and shot at some rabbits she said had eaten her lettuce that year. Here was the solution to the mystery of why this woman was not married.

  —

  CHRISTMAS DAY WAS A DIFFICULT ONE with Pietrik and Halina half a world away. We wrote letters back and forth, of course, and Pietrik sent a package of my favorite sweets for Christmas and a pencil drawing of Papa and Marthe that Halina had sketched, but I still couldn’t shake the tears.

  It helped to keep Zuzanna close by. Zuzanna hadn’t required a corrective surgery like mine, bu
t suffered through a round of chemotherapy to fight her cancer. She was still weak, so Caroline arranged us side by side in their living room on Christmas Day, warm near the fireplace, me in a wheelchair and Zuzanna in Caroline’s father’s wing chair. This was my favorite room in that house, for it looked out across the garden, its great hedges and manicured boxwood paths beautiful even in winter.

  We sat near the fire facing the Christmas tree in the corner, the angel atop it grazing the ceiling. There was a surprise under the tree from Caroline for each of us: a bottle of perfume Zuzanna had admired at a store called Bergdorf Goodman and a selection of books for me, including The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. I had not thought to find a gift for Caroline, but Zuzanna made a cut-paper picture for Caroline and Mrs. Ferriday featuring the house and all their animals. The horses and pig, chickens and cats. Even Lucky the dog and their African gray parrot. Zuzanna said it was from the both of us, but it was clear who’d created the work of art.

  Mrs. Ferriday had Serge make the traditional twelve Polish dishes for dinner, which we all ate, stopping only for exclamations of true joy. After dinner, Mrs. Ferriday wheeled me into the big old kitchen at the back of the house. This was my second favorite room, with its black and white tile floor and white porcelain sink big enough to bathe a small adult in.

  I sat at the kitchen table with Caroline and Mrs. Ferriday and watched Zuzanna and Serge wash the dishes together. My sister was still frail but insisted on washing up. Her hair was gone from the radiation, leaving her completely bald, just as so many of us at the camp once were. She’d tied one of Caroline’s French scarves around her head like a milk woman. Serge stuck close to her all night, even after dinner. I knew they had become more than friends. I’d seen her sneak back to our bedroom just before dawn from the servants’ wing. The thought of it sent tears to my eyes. How could my sister be so secretive?

  Caroline poured us all coffee. How Matka would have loved being there. The coffee alone! Mrs. Ferriday opened a fresh package of my favorite cookies, Fig Newtons, and poured us each a thimble glass of orange liqueur.