The Upright Heart

by Julia Ain-Krupa

  There is nothing like the smell of that jam as it fills the kitchen. When the aroma of apples and butter baking together hits the atmosphere there is a slight pause in life, and for a second there is familiarity, a feeling of coming home, a sensation that you were always there to begin with, no matter what has gone wrong. This smell is so evocative that it will forever recall childhood, family, and memory.

  Looking up from her bowl of baking powder and sugar, Elżbieta glances over at Bolesław, who is sitting on a stool, hunched over a bowl of eggs, eyes cast downward, intent upon completing his task to perfection. He feels her looking, so he looks up at her and smiles, a break of sunlight that doesn’t come to his face often, but when it does, it is always a miracle. Uncharacteristically, he grabs Elżbieta and pulls her onto his lap. The flour from her hands get all over his face and shirt, and together they laugh. They laugh and laugh, and, for this moment in time, everything is as it should be.

  XV

  Better not to remember the war, now that it is over, Anna reminds herself, walking down Ulica Sławkowska on her way to buy groceries. The old market has little to offer now, but there are things one can get, like potatoes and carrots, things that can help keep a person alive. Out of the corner of her eye she sees that same haunting little boy again, the one who was wandering the streets with another child just days ago. He is standing in Planty, carrying a little dog in his arms. This dog has all of the fat that the young boy lacks. He is old and scruffy, and his eyes look filmed over, as if they are almost blind. The little boy holds the dog close to his face, inhaling his fur, as if he will never let him go. A bearded man in a dark brown suit sitting on a nearby bench turns around to say something to the boy, and as if in response, the boy puts down the dog and the dog runs back to the man. The boy stands there, frozen, and the man says something to him again. The boy comes over to sit next to him.

  Carrying a bag with a few necessities, Anna sees the boy again on her way home. This time she stops to really look. The hollows of his cheeks are just as sunken as they were before, and his hair is even wilder than it was. Eyes closed, he listens intently to the man. The man looks like a foreigner. He has a small bandage on the right side of his forehead. Occasionally he pauses to touch the plaster and shut his eyes. In these moments the boy looks away.

  She decides to walk through Planty so that she can really observe them. She hears the man speaking to the boy in Yiddish. She cannot help but worry about him, at least a little. Maybe it isn’t necessary anymore, but it is still an automatic response to want to tell them to hide who they really are. An elderly lady with a German Shepherd comes along, and the little dog gets excited and begins to jump up and down and bark. The little boy goes after him. The man on the bench holds his head as if in pain, probably in reaction to the sound. The little dog lifts his leg and begins to urinate on the large dog. Something more marvelous than the leg of lamb Anna has just purchased on the black market is the sight of this seemingly starving boy opening his mouth and howling with laughter. He laughs so hard that he has to lean over and press a hand to his belly. The old lady curses at the boy in disgust and tries to pull her dog away, but the German Shepherd just bends down to lick the little dog’s urine. She shudders with horror, and the boy is rendered so hysterical that he is now rolling around on the ground, the last traces of winter’s mud and dried leaves sticking to his back, spring’s newborn hyacinths crushed beneath him. He tries to catch his breath now.

  “Come back over here!” the man from the bench shouts, now in Polish, holding onto his head.

  The beautiful, midday sun moves to a location central enough to sparkle as a reflection in the small pool behind them. The light diverts Anna’s attention, and as she turns to look back at the scuffle she notices a lean figure in the distance, standing behind an old tree. His nose is thin and his eyes twinkle with the look of a small mole that has rediscovered his burrow. His white shirtsleeves are rolled up at the cuff and his hands are shoved into his pockets. Observing the odd couple, he smiles at the scene. He turns toward Anna and she looks back at him, but something about her attention makes the light fade from his face. He walks slowly to another tree, looking back at her every so often, and then away. It is as if he is being caught doing something wrong. What is it? She wants to understand. There is no way to know, as he quickly retreats behind a birch tree, branches twisted, like a mother’s arms reaching for the sun.

  XVI

  There is a piece of music that runs through my heart whenever I need escape from the world. My piano teacher used to play it softly, and I would strain to listen to it from the cold hallway as I waited for my music lesson to begin. I could see that my teacher had been crying. She would carefully fold the sheet music and tuck it away beneath our lesson, putting a crease along the “t” in the composer’s name, Satie.

  The remains of my life are like this piece of music that mirrors all the last bittersweet traces in the world. They are: an image of Wolf, a lonely ghost-train ride. Only this melody knows how to make the pain of loss beautiful again. Close my eyes and make me once more, I ask. I ask again. I ask, and there is no answer. Make me alive and whole so that he may come to me and our bodies can unite one more time. There is no love in the realm of ghosts.

  I tried my best to protect what was his, but in the end I could not win. His family may have moved on to the other side, but somehow I cannot. I am pinned to this earth, to rewitness my place, my life, even though I have none until I can love him once more or else find peace at last.

  Are they waiting for me there? Really, I don’t know.

  He once held me against a tree in the oldest, most glorious forest in the world, where berries grow like flowers and leaves blanket the earth. It was there that we made love for the first and last time, where we created a new and secret life. No one will ever know. When he left, the baby died. Sometimes I blamed myself. Now I just reenter the dark, dark world, and whenever I think that I cannot take the pain anymore, that sweet, sweet music begins to play again. This is my music. The Gymnopédies. It reminds me of the sound of a man weeping, a beautiful woman lying naked in his arms.

  XVII

  Wolf feels the joy that comes with taking another breath. He is in Kraków now. He is alive. It is hard to know how he made it. The train ride was unimaginable.

  It was almost as if an invisible source lifted him up from his place of pain, his position of subtle death, lying there on the ground of the town of N, an arm’s length away from the house that had once sheltered him—the home of his family, his heart that ached with his first love. Who had bandaged his forehead? Helped him with his luggage, and brought him onto the train? There are still kind people in this part of the world, he thought, smiling between hallucinations on the train. Wolf could have sworn that there was a thin man with a mustache sitting across from him, every so often checking his bandage and his pulse. This man was very concerned about him, but whenever they arrived at a station and Wolf opened his eyes, the man was gone.

  The scruffy little dog remains with him. From Białystok to Kraków that dog was nestled beside Wolf, emitting warmth as much as his little body could. Reaching into his bag (how was it that his bag had also made it onto the train?), he finds that he still has his daughter Leah’s little piece of pink string. It is tied in a tender bow around his key ring. Relief washes over him. He has his bag. He has his life, his family in America, and all will be okay. He wants life. No more imaginings, no more dreams. He will find a place of burial in Kraków and recite a prayer, and then all those souls might begin to feel free. He is close to Auschwitz now, to the place where his family died, and here he will pray for them and put his sadness to rest. No, I choose life, he says to himself, only to go to sleep and dream again.

  Every time Wolf closes his eyes he sees the same man, and then he dreams of Olga. The dreams come and go quickly. In the first dream, Olga is walking away from him in the forest. She is happy and free, collecting wildflowers in the summertime. He keeps calling out to
her, asking her to turn around, but she never does. Finally he catches up to her. She leans her head against a tree and weeps.

  In the second dream Olga is running through a house, screaming. Wolf tries to run after her, but soon he realizes that she is running from him. “But it’s me,” he pleads, crying with the pain of her fear, but she just keeps running. Finally she trips and falls on the stairs. All she can do is scream.

  In the third dream, Wolf opens his eyes and sees the man on the train sitting across from him. The man smiles and holds out his hand. Wolf marvels at the strange absence of the man’s hands—the sleeve cuff and the emptiness that seems to take form in an effort to move. How sheepishly the man looks down at it, as if to say that he too is amazed. This exchange of curiosity is long enough in the dream and it seems eternity is interrupted when Olga enters the train car. She slides open the door and looks down at the ground, her long gray skirt rustling against her military boots, loose strands of blond hair floating in the wind of her exhalation. The dog barks and Wolf shushes him. It was only when Olga sternly said, “Cicho (be quiet),” that the dog can listen. She sits across from Wolf on the bench beside the disappearing man. She looks at the man, and then at Wolf. She takes his hand.

  The train pulls into Kraków Główny. Olga and the man are gone. There is such a feeling of emptiness to their absence, and yet Wolf reminds himself that of course it has only been a dream. But the feeling of comfort is still there. Wolf and the little dog disembark from the train with renewed strength. Passing a large window, Wolf could swear that he sees the man walking behind him, his face solemn, hands deep into his pockets, head turned to the ground. When Wolf decides to look behind him and finalize his imaginings—to believe or disbelieve—the image passes and his head just whirls.

  XVIII

  I could have taken that dog away from him if I’d wanted to, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. He reminded me too much of my father, with the same dark hair and stooped shoulders, as if the weight of the world had been pushing down on him for a long while. You might say I don’t look so much like him, but that doesn’t matter to me. My mother had a Roman nose, blond hair and blue eyes, but my dad looked just like that. So did my sister. I try not to think about her.

  It all started yesterday. I was standing at the railway station making my usual rounds. I had some French cigarettes I was trying to sell to make enough money to buy a loaf of bread and some seeds to feed the birds that have been hanging around. I hadn’t even earned half of what I needed when this man came off the train and I nearly fell over because he looked so much like my father. Of course I knew it wasn’t him, but seeing him stopped me dead in my tracks. I felt that whoever this man was—Italian or Jewish—I’d better pay attention to him. Not only that: he had an elegant suit made of some kind of material you don’t see in Poland.

  He had this funny little dog with him, and that dog looked so smart, and I cannot tell you how much I have been longing for something alive to love and hold. But this man was in a bad way. He had a bloody bandage on his forehead and a little leather bag, but it seemed like he could hardly carry the bag, he looked so weak. He had another man with him, a tall thin guy with a mustache who walked seriously, hands in his pockets. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive (he had that funny smile the dead sometimes have). I am so used to seeing ghosts that I tried to just ignore him. Whoever doesn’t talk to me, I don’t talk to them. That’s my way. It’s better than walking around talking to people who aren’t there. Makes others more at ease. People don’t like it when you are too comfortable with the dead, and besides, I can’t spend my time separating out the living anymore.

  The man nearly passed out, he was so weak. I saw him leaning over a bench, dragging his bag on the floor. I ran over to him (even dropped a few of my French cigarettes on the floor, and left them there). The dog was whimpering at his feet. I asked him if I could help him, and at first he looked at me with fear. I thought he would faint, so I helped him sit down on the bench. I asked him what he was doing here, and he asked me who I was.

  “I’m from here,” I said. “What do you mean?” I added, tensing my fists and biting my tongue, as I have become accustomed to doing, and something changed in his eyes.

  “Where are your parents?” he asked. “Oh, don’t tell me. I know where they are.” Then he mumbled something in Hebrew that sounded familiar, but which I couldn’t understand. The only word that I knew was obvious. It was “HaShem.”

  Then he asked me in Yiddish if I liked potato pancakes. He didn’t need an answer to know that I would say yes. He asked me to help him get to a hotel and take a rest, and then together we could get some lunch. I tried to cover the sound of my stomach growling.

  He told me that his name was Wolf. He wanted to stay in the Jewish quarter, but I said better not to, and took him to one of the finest hotels in town. He told me he had money to spend. It was Monday and everyone was out on the streets soaking up the sunny spring day. Walking there was pretty tough, because the man wasn’t feeling well, and so I had to carry his bag plus hold him up a little.

  When we got to the hotel, I also had to hide the dog. The hotel is in a beautiful old building right near the center of town. I had always heard about it but had never been inside. They have a fine restaurant, big bathtubs, and faded carpets. Of course they didn’t want to let us in. They didn’t like the looks of me, and they didn’t like the looks of the man either. First, he was wounded, and second, it was pretty obvious to them that he was a Jew. So he bribed them with some American dollars he had in his inside jacket pocket. I guess he’d put them aside for this kind of occasion. Now I knew for certain that he was a smart man.

  They sent a bellboy in a red suit to take the man’s bag and “escort us” to the room. Can you imagine? Just last week I was escorted out of the local police station, and here I was in the room of my dreams. I took the dog out of my coat and let him run free. The man said that he needed to rest, and suggested that maybe I would like to take a bath. I was happy to accept his offer.

  Soaking in the bathtub filled with bubbles, I could not believe my luck. What kind of good fortune was the pill bestowing upon me now? Was I the luckiest kid in the world? I sang a few songs that I overheard last time I snuck into the cinema, and I washed my hair not once but four times. I used one of those special spray attachments that they have for the faucet, and I could have sworn that I was in heaven on earth. I stayed in that tub long enough to watch the water turn gray and my skin wrinkle up, to sing those songs more than once. Suddenly I was overcome with fear. I remembered that when I was little, this friend of mine got knocked in the head with a ball, and when he went to sleep that night he died. I wondered if the man had been snoring before, because now everything seemed so quiet. I jumped out of the tub, bubbles still on my skin. I ran out of the bathroom into the room, just to make sure he was still breathing. There I stood, naked and dripping soapy bubbles onto the carpeted floor. I strained to see if the man’s chest was moving. After a moment, he lifted his head and opened his eyes.

  “It’s okay, child. I’m still alive,” he smiled, and then laid his head back down. With eyes closed he smirked and said, “Now go back to your bath. Get clean so we can go fatten you up.”

  I was so embarrassed by my shrunken manhood that my face turned bright red, but I didn’t really care. I was so relieved to find him still alive.

  I dried off and dressed back into my oversize clothes, and when I emerged again the man seemed to be feeling much better. He had replaced the bandage on his forehead and was looking a lot brighter than before. I couldn’t look him in the eye at first, but he told me I shouldn’t be ashamed. Then the three of us—the man, the dog, and I—went out into the town, the other man suddenly tagging along again. I didn’t say a word. Like I said, I have learned to ignore the presence of the dead.

  Then something wonderful happened: The man took me to the same restaurant I had been to with the elegant lady. What incredible luck! I could hardly bel
ieve my eyes. We ate two portions of potato pancakes with sour cream, and then we had big bowls of borscht. I could see that the man was very happy as well. It had been a while since he’d had this kind of food, Polish style. Then we walked out into the street and the man took me to buy a new pair of shoes. Nobody was happier than I when I threw the old pair in the trash as we made our way to the park. And as he offered me an ice cream cone, with my choice of chocolate or strawberry, I knew for certain that this was the happiest day of my life.

  XIX

  Sometimes Anna thinks she sees Maryna walking toward her. As if the sunlight is gathering in an aura around one woman on the street, and that spotlight calls out to her, saying, “Look here, pay attention to me!” Anna raises her eyes and waves her hand, opens her mouth to say hello and greet an old friend. Lips part into faded silence at the realization that a stranger passes. Remember this: the Jews are gone.

  “If we are ever separated will you look for me?” Rachelka used to ask, while playing games with Anna in the countryside. In that moment she would reach out her hand, fingers growing cold, palms sweating with anxiety. Anna would always assure her that they would never be parted. “You shouldn’t worry so much,” she would say.

  “Just promise me,” Rachelka would plead, a solemn look descending like thunder into those dark, misty eyes.

  Sometimes an act so simple as peeling carrots will conjure up this memory, and Anna is wracked with a feeling she cannot explain. The memory of Rachelka’s plea leads her back to an image of Maryna on a hot summer day, leaning out of the most glorious window in the building, her long hair blowing in the wind. The girls are happy because all of the governor-general’s men are away. Maryna leans out the window, the Wisła River below, her face washed out by the sun. “If I fall, will you catch me?” she asks earnestly? Anna holds her breath.