Our house was not an architectural masterpiece. It was large and rambling and sat squarely in a huge garden, the steps of the front terrace descending into the driveway which rounded a large rosebed. Under the windows were lilac and jasmine bushes, and farther away, near the iron fence, clusters of pine trees sheltered us from the road dust and the merciless November winds.
In the back was a long, covered veranda facing the orchard and the vegetable garden, planted in rectangular plots separated from each other by wide gravel pathways bordered with raspberries, gooseberries and red and white currant bushes. There were hundreds of fruit trees in the orchard, which in springtime was a white and pink promise of paradise and in the autumn a stomach-wrecking fulfillment.
Beyond the far end of the garden ran the railroad track. Climbing on the fence, we children waved to the passing trains. They made our world seem narrow and confined. However, the garden and the little forest were large and dense enough to hide us from the tutor and governess. I would disappear there for hours to dream of my glorious future as a world-famous actress.
We were four children: I, the oldest, my sister Rose (Ruzia), my brother Edward, each only one year apart from the other. The youngest, my brother Zygmunt, called Dusko, was born when I was nine, and was not included in our world. We three, each different in temperament and character, were an extremely tightly woven entity, sticking together through thick and thin. And that’s how we remained all through our lives. From his earliest childhood Edward was destined to be a musician. He was my mother’s reward for her own abandoned career. Rose and I conceded to him without a trace of envy the first place in her heart.
As we lived far out in the country we were not sent to school. We had governesses, and a Polish student-tutor came every day to teach us all the required subjects.
Once a year we were taken to town for our examinations. Later, when I was ten, I was sent to a boarding school in Lwow, while my sister and brother continued to be tutored at home, passing their examinations at the Gymnasium in Sambor, a high school equal to the American Junior College, with Latin, Greek and German as compulsory subjects. As we had German and French nurses and governesses, we spoke both languages fluently from our earliest childhood. When I was five I learned from an older playmate to read and write the Polish (Latin) alphabet. At six I knew the Russian. The Ukrainian language was taught in the second grade (a concession to the otherwise badly treated part of the population) and in the third I wrote German sentences in pointed Gothic letters. We read avidly and with passion. Music and books were the constant topics of our conversation. I will never forget my feverish excitement after I finished Schiller’s Mary Stuart. I learned it by heart and recited it all day long.
I built a small stage in a corner of our room, using chairs, books and shawls. The performers were the lovely ladies I cut out from Mama’s fashion magazines and pasted on cardboard. I spoke their parts, varying my voice from deep to high. The plays went on for days, like those in the Chinese theater. Rose, Edward, Niania and the other servants, even our French governess, were an attentive audience. Still, I had trouble with my casting: there were no men in the fashion magazines.
As a young girl my mother had studied singing, preparing for an operatic career; her unfulfilled hopes, which she conveyed to us, stimulated and fed my obsession with the theater. I wanted to be an actress but was told that I was not pretty enough for the Imperial Burgtheater. Any other alternative was out of the question. My sister Rose, gold-haired, delicate and lovely, would have encountered much less objection from my parents, had she expressed the desire to act. But wisely she suppressed it, while I stubbornly persisted.
To be an opera singer would have been quite a different matter—it was a more “respectable” profession. Mama’s clear, lovely soprano voice and great musical talent—she was also an excellent pianist—had justified her ambition. She would have been an ideal Elsa, Gretchen, Sieglinde and Senta. Also her red-gold hair, blue eyes and rosy complexion would have fooled the keenest expert on the Aryan race. But this Nordic beauty came from a Russian Jewish family.
Strange as it may sound to many to whom a Russian Jew suggests a rabbi or a merchant or a violin virtuoso, my mother’s ancestors were landowners. My great-grandfather, Solomon Rafalovicz, had inherited from his father large country estates in Podolia and in Bessarabia. He had a beautiful wife, Rachel, and three daughters: my grandmother Deborah, slim, dark and perpetually engrossed in French novels, but surprisingly courageous in adversity; Sophie, a voluptuous redhead; and Nadine, who never married because a childhood injury to her spine left her a hunchback. She was the most vain and frivolous of the sisters but died quite young.
My grandmother Deborah married an attractive young landowner, Simon Amster. It was a most incompatible match. Still, they had four children and when my grandfather was at home—which he rarely was—they played duets on the piano. Both my grandparents and also my great-grandparents were very musical.
My great-grandfather Rafalovicz must have been an extraordinary man. He had traveled a great deal, spoke fourteen languages and had acquired an encyclopedic education. He was born after Napoleon’s victorious armies had marched through Europe, leaving in their wake innumerable corpses, but also the enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution. First 1812, and later the uprisings of 1830 and 1863, which Russia brutally crushed, ended the hopes for a united Poland. Hundreds of men and women were sent to Siberia. My great-grandfather had the opportunity to save many from deportation and death and to obtain clemency for political crimes, because the Governor of Poland, General Muraviev (“The Bloody Muraviev”), had taken it into his head to study Hebrew with him. My mother never mentioned what progress he made or how it influenced his attitude to the Jews.
Even in her old age Mama remembered the sprawling, one-story, country house in which her grandparents lived. I had seen similar ones on the estates near Sambor. In the center was a porch, which led into the reception room, the “salon.” To the left and the right of it flights of rooms ran through the house. She remembered that there were two kitchens: a kosher one, where a Jewish cook prepared meals for the Orthodox guests, and a second, where a French chef ruled with an iron rod over petrified peasant girls. The two kitchens were always working full blast. Some of the guests came for a day, others for a week. Some stayed a month or two, others a year or more. A pianist, Mr. Horr, remained as long as my great-grandparents lived. Then he moved to the house of my great-grandaunt Sophie, a widow with eight children, where he stayed until he died. Everyone spoke of him with the greatest affection. My grandmother pronounced his name the Russian way: “Gorr.” He was one of Liszt’s favorite pupils, and could have had a great concert career if it had not been for his attachment to the Rafalovicz family.
In the eighties an edict forbidding Jews to own land forced my grandfather Simon to sell his property and settle in the Austrian Bukovina, where he leased a large estate to farm and raise cattle. My grandmother and the children—besides my mother there were two other daughters, Wilhelmina and Arabella, and a son Emil—moved to the capital Czernovitz, which was a loyal outpost of the Hapsburg monarchy and Austrian culture. But everything went wrong. The cattle my grandfather had imported succumbed to foot-and-mouth disease, the crops failed, all his investments turned out to be disastrous and my mother, who was studying singing in Vienna, was called back home from lack of money. As life in the family had become unbearable, she was determined to marry the first man who came along. It never occurred to her, nor to anybody else, that she could have tried to work. At that same time, in faraway Sambor, my father had decided to look for a bride.
Although almost forty years old, he was a desirable husband. Tall, well-built, handsome and wealthy, he had an excellent reputation and his law practice was flourishing. He commanded respect and confidence. The matchmakers got busy. As he was hard to please they searched in vain for many months until they showed him my mother’s photo, which prompted him to travel to Czernovitz. My mo
ther found him quite bald, “not unattractive” and “too serious.” After three days he proposed, adding that he had “no objections” to her singing and playing the piano, as long as it did not disturb him, and he insisted that she learn Polish. He was accepted and went back to Sambor. During their six months’ engagement they saw each other a few times, always briefly, then they had a June wedding.
My father generously helped my grandfather to arrange his complicated affairs; however, they never could be untangled until after my grandfather’s death. He was only fifty-two when he suddenly died of a heart attack after his nineteen-year-old son committed suicide.
My youngest aunt, Bella, told me the story: She was fourteen years old and doing her homework, while my grandparents were in the living room playing an arrangement for four hands of a Mendelssohn symphony. It was their accepted form of communication, as they rarely talked to each other. Emil crossed the room. He was serving a compulsory one-year term in the Austrian army and was wearing his uniform. He pulled Arabella’s hair as he passed her, continued to the living room, stopped in front of a large mirror, took out a revolver, said: “Well, good-bye . . . I’m leaving now,” and shot himself through the heart.
I was much too young to remember him. But I can still see my mother dressed in black with a long, crepe veil trailing from her hat as she left for his funeral.
2
I DO NOT BELIEVE that any of us knew our father really well. There was an aura of loneliness and aloofness around him which we did not dare to penetrate, not as children and not after we had grown up. I remember rushing toward him in an outburst of tenderness, then stopping taken aback by his tense, absent expression. My mother and my nurse, Niania, often claimed my father had spoiled me in the first years of my life. According to them he carried me around, held me on his lap during mealtimes, and even if I insisted on sitting on the potty right in the middle of the living room, my orders had to be obeyed. All that is completely extinct in my memory, and as I did not remember the time of my glory I cannot say that I felt rejected or unhappy after my father’s passion for me subsided. My youngest brother became the absolute ruler over Papa’s heart, and Rose, Edward, and I were often outraged about his privileged position, but we agreed that there was an indisputable advantage in not getting too much paternal attention.
Dr. Josef Steuermann—Papa as we called him and always in the third person, for example: “Would Papa permit,” or “If Papa wishes—” was born and raised in Sambor, a town to which, unlike my mother who hated it, he was deeply attached. I cannot recall his leaving it for any longer than four or five weeks, and then only twice: once when he had to take a cure in Bad Kissingen, the other time when he had to go for the same reason to a Viennese sanatorium. During the First World War, the Russians invaded Sambor and my father spent the most miserable ten months as an exile in Vienna, reproaching himself, and of course my mother, for having left his occupied town. This did not mean that he considered Sambor such a pleasant or beautiful place, or would not have longed to see the world. There were evenings, when he was in a good mood that he would sit down with us at the table, spread out a map and, consulting the Baedeker, plan a voyage. He would tell us exactly what train we were to take, where we were to spend the night and have breakfast and dinner, and which historical places he would show us. For a few minutes my mother would listen, then shrug and with an ironical or bitter remark leave the room. She knew that we would not budge from Sambor. For me these rare, delightful moments of communication with my father were sheer happiness, and the imaginary trips we took together in our living room were more important than some of my real ones in later years. I could never feel a stranger, or in an alien country, when I traveled with Papa.
We lived on a grand scale and he was a generous provider. The son of a prosperous merchant, he had studied law and having passed his exams brilliantly, he joined the firm of a highly respected lawyer. After the death of his partner, my father was generally regarded as his spiritual heir. His clients were mostly Polish aristocrats, neighboring landowners and Jewish businessmen. He treated them all with impartial severity. Feuding litigants usually followed his advice and made peace out of court. He was elected President of the Bar and was feared but revered by his younger and not always scrupulous colleagues.
I never heard Papa talk about his childhood. He lost his mother when he was quite young and was estranged from his father, who, at the age of sixty-four, suddenly married a middle-aged widow. She bore him a daughter named Natalie, and as he disapproved of his stepmother, Papa was not overly fond of Natalie. We visited them very seldom, much to my regret, because my step-grandmother always made delicious cakes for us and Aunt Natalie was pretty and only ten years older than I. They lived in the midst of town, their house surrounded by a large orchard, where, half hidden by raspberry bushes, was grandfather’s prayer house. On High Holidays ten select Jewish citizens gathered there for religious services. My flippant mother used to say that grandfather had this “private chapel” because the presence of poor Jews embarrassed him when he addressed the Almighty.
On Yom Kippur Papa used to attend the memorial services in the synagogue. Although completely assimilated into Polish-Austrian society, he had refused the directorship of a major bank in Vienna because it would have meant having himself and his family baptized. My mother paraphrased regretfully: “Vienne vaut une messe.”
When I was older I asked my mother why Papa had married so late. She told me that for many years he had had a love affair with a very beautiful woman. She was Catholic, the wife of a judge, and loved my father desperately. Not only did they see each other every day, they also wrote daily letters, which were delivered by Jendrzej, my father’s valet. According to my mother, the letters were read by the whole town before they reached their destination. Then suddenly the judge was transferred to another district and they left. Soon afterward my father married.
My mother went on with the story: Several years later, after Edward was born, the whole family, with Niania and the cook, was spending a few weeks at a watering place in the Carpathian mountains. Rose and I were pretty little girls and people used to stop and smile at us when, holding hands, we danced in front of the bandstand. One day our parents passed by and sat down on a bench to watch us. Suddenly Mama noticed a lady staring at Papa. He jumped up and took his hat off—she acknowledged the greeting, and unable to control her emotion turned and walked away. An hour later Papa was summoned to her hotel. She had had a heart attack and wanted to see him. She died while he was at her bedside.
All this may sound like a Turgenev novel; I only know it made me terribly sad. I was pained by the ironical inflection in Mama’s voice and in spite of her lightness and frivolity I could detect that she resented the dead woman. For, in point of fact, Mama was most unsentimental, probably instinctively protesting the thoughtless romanticism of her own mother, who, as my father used to say, never got over the execution of Marie Antoinette.
3
I DO NOT KNOW what kind of childhood I would have had without my Niania; I adored her and she loved me as if I had been her own flesh and blood. From her I have my addiction to country life and animals. From her I have my superstitions, which I am still trying to discard, my “barbarisms” as Berthold, my husband, was to call them many years later.
She was a small woman whose dark, somewhat Mongolian eyes looked at people with a humorous interest not free from suspicion. She was pretty and neat, in her embroidered peasant shirt and voluminous skirts. When she took me for a walk she put on the elaborate, turban-like headdress of the married women of her village. Only a fringe of her shining black hair showed over her brow. She was always busy, always in action. I still see her, the bare feet hardly touching the ground, skirts billowing, and the erect, straight body moving swiftly like a figure in a puppet show; rushing from the stables to the poultry yard, from the vegetable garden to the meadow, and over the fields. She was never idle. When she sat down it was to peel fruit or vegetables, pluck a
chicken, mend a tear in my dress, or beat the egg whites for a cake. Then, she would jump up again and run to the cellar or into the garden, or climb a tree to pick the ripest fruit for the table. The poultry yard came to ecstatic life as soon as she approached. A bedlam of crowing, cackling, cooing, screeching, chirping, and flapping of wings would start at the mere sound of her voice.
Later Rose, Edward, and I were entrusted to a French bonne, but I still clung to Niania, who was to replace the cook and “studied” for a while in town at the restaurant of Pan Wierczak. He had once been the renowned chef of a Count Potocki. Soon she was able to compete with him and she took charge not only of our kitchen, but also of the whole household.
When I was five I could read and tried to share my knowledge with Niania, but to no avail. Letters somehow “did not make sense” to her. However, she knew numbers, and her extraordinary memory and intelligence made up for her illiteracy.
Our mademoiselles refused to take walks in the country, or let us roam around in our garden. They insisted on dressing up and marching us to town, where they were admired by the officers loafing in the sidewalk cafés of the Promenade. The Promenade was part of the large square around the City Hall. The shops and the pharmacy were on its main sidewalk, which was called Linia A-B. At each end was a cukiernia, a combination of a café and confiserie. Old acacia trees shaded the sidewalks. In summer Sambor’s “society” gathered in the kiosk in front of the cukiernia to sip lemonade and consume excellent ice cream and cakes. There were two kiosks, one occupied by the cavalry, the other, at the opposite end of the A-B, by the infantry. They hardly ever mixed, as members of the Austrian and Hungarian aristocracy served in the cavalry, while the infantry was mostly middle class. Some officers, though, belonged to the newly created military nobility, like the infantry colonel whose name “Brenner von Flammenberg” (The Burner from the Flaming Mountain) delighted us. Other names also sounded martial and sonorous.
The Kindness of Strangers Page 3