On Sundays after Mass the “gentry” from the surrounding estates, the wives of the officers and higher government employees, appeared on the Promenade and in the cafés. Gossip flourished, deadly antagonisms and illicit romances were conceived.
Every morning for an hour and a half we strolled back and forth on the Promenade, only turning into a side street when an officer detached himself from his group and followed us. No one would ever dare to address our mademoiselle on the Promenade.
One of our governesses, Mlle. Berthe Fleuty, had soft, dreamy eyes and very thick, long, blond hair which we adored to comb and braid. Edward was madly in love with her. She took us to more interesting places, such as the military training grounds. Our walks were also changed to the afternoons, when the grounds were deserted. We found it great fun to run around and play as we pleased. It was also more fun for Berthe. A handsome infantry lieutenant appeared regularly and they huddled together, hiding from us behind a large mound used for target practice. Then flushed and excited, Berthe would appear at the top of the mound and run down into the open arms of the lieutenant, her loose golden hair flying behind her like a pennant.
In the autumn as the days grew shorter, we would come home almost in the dark, and someone advised Mama to keep an eye on Mlle. Berthe. It turned out that our lovely afternoons on the training ground were not the only reason for her dismissal! Berthe had been seen “half naked” in the window of the lieutenant’s quarters. From then on our governesses were unattractive and in their late forties.
I must have been six years old then. Niania had taught me the Lord’s Prayer and I said it fervently every night. So did Edward and Rose, but softly and with less dramatic passion; they prayed politely, while I was attacking God with all my violent soul. I pleaded and bargained with Him. I implored Him to let me die before anyone else in my family, because I could not bear the thought of losing them. Rose was indignant about such selfishness. As death was inevitable it certainly was more decent, and showed truer concern, to die last and spare others the sorrow and the mourning; it was very unfair to inflict upon them a pain one did not want to bear oneself. I was furious as I realized that there was some truth in what she said, but I loathed to admit it, and pulled her hair.
The other thing I prayed for, but secretly, was that my father and mother would not quarrel. It always started at the dinner table, making us so miserable, we dared not look up from our plates. Instinctively I was on my father’s side, perhaps because my mother was always so much louder and more violent than he. It always seemed to me that Papa, this aloof, immaculate man, was being brutally dragged down from the pedestal upon which he justly belonged.
Once I woke up at night and heard Mama’s voice. She was saying that she was sick of it, and would leave. In panic I ran into their room. My father was in bed while Mama, in her nightgown, was walking up and down. “What do you want?” she screamed at me. I wanted to plead with her to stay, but lost my courage and lied that I had had a bad dream. She ordered me back to bed, but I clung to her, sobbing and quite beside myself. Grabbing me by my shoulders, she led me to the door. I resisted violently; Mama turned me around and gave me a few hard slaps on my behind. Just then Niania appeared, scooped me into her arms and carried me to bed, where, outraged at Mama’s injustice, I cried myself to sleep.
All this happened before Mlle. Juliette arrived. She was thin, with deep-set black eyes, a sallow complexion and fanatically Catholic.
Having discovered that I prayed more intensely and did not fall asleep as fast as Edward and Rose, she decided to take advantage of my piousness and to convert me to the Catholic faith. Sitting at my bedside she whispered gruesome stories of the martyrdom of Saint Denis, walking with his head under his arm, Santa Barbara having her breast pinched with red-hot irons, Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, and others. The Crucifixion, in her fanatic version, was the most terrifying of all. She told it with such passionate hatred for the Jews that I was crushed with guilt. I knew that we were Jewish, but we certainly did not belong to those strange people in long black kaftans, with beards and sidelocks, and we did not understand their harsh idiom. Still, we were not Christians either, although we had a Christmas tree and sang Christmas carols. Our parents never went to church—but also they never went to the synagogue. Sometimes Niania or one of our French governesses had taken us to church, and afterward, to their great amusement, we reenacted the chanting and genuflections, Edward officiating with a bath towel tied around his shoulders. Until Juliette’s arrival no one in our house had been serious about religion. Niania was not a churchgoer; she turned to God quietly without the intervention of priests. She distrusted them, as she distrusted all men, my father being the only exception. One evening she overheard Juliette’s whispering and my sobbing, and called my mother. They must have listened for a while and then my mother stormed into the room. “Pack your things and leave,” she said to Juliette. I was so terrified that I would not have dared to defend Juliette for anything in the world. After Juliette left the room, my mother kissed and comforted me, but I pushed her away. I did not want to belong to those who had killed and tortured Jesus.
In the adjoining room I heard Juliette pulling out her suitcases. She left next morning with a cold good-bye to us children and some very un-Christian remarks about Niania. Mama told us a more objective version of the Crucifixion, dividing the blame equally between Jews and Romans and revealing the astonishing fact, which Juliette had suppressed, that Jesus himself was a Jew.
The weeks “between governesses” were always like a holiday. I spent them mostly in the stable, as I was in love with our coachman, Michal. He was a stately, middle-aged man with a huge blond mustache. I helped him polish the carriage and groom the horses, and drove with him to town. I intended to marry him, as soon as Michalova, his wife, died. Otherwise, I was very good-hearted. I would give away toys, clothes and candy not only to beggars but, much to Niania’s annoyance, also to the gypsies. When they appeared she watched me like a hawk.
There were many beggars in the community. Twice a week they came to the house to receive alms. The Christians on Thursday, which was also market day, the Jews on Friday. The gypsies came and went as they pleased, at irregular intervals.
On Thursdays and Fridays copper coins were piled on the kitchen windowsill and handed out to the beggars. Some got one cent, some two, others only food. Those Niania disliked received a piece of bread, and a severe scolding when they stank of vodka. They were a nightmarish procession of misery: crippled, whining old men and women, young paralytics and drooling imbeciles, some so severely maimed and afflicted that they crawled on all fours like animals. Their knees were padded with dirty rags, many were blind. Most pitiful were the children they dragged along, whom they cursed and beat with sticks.
In summer, after the harvest, when the pilgrimages to the shrines of the Saints and the Virgin started, thousands of beggars followed the processions of singing and praying priests, nuns, townspeople and peasants. The fetid smell of filth, rotting sores and decay hung over the landscape long after they had vanished in clouds of dust.
On such days we stood behind our closed gates and watched the procession. We were told that the beggars stole little children and broke their limbs, so that they might arouse greater pity in people and collect more alms. Also the gypsies stole children and dipped them into a black liquid, to make them look dark. Listening to these tales I was convinced that all over the world there was a gigantic conspiracy against children and that we were in constant terrible danger.
•
Fräulein Marie’s appearance in our household changed my life considerably. This did not happen suddenly: at first I was quite ready to accept her as an indubitable improvement over the governesses we had had. Then, after several major collisions, we became enemies. The excitement which the appearance of a new personality invariably created had subsided and we, Rose, Edward and I, decided that she was a terrific bore. The daily walks on the Promenade were resumed immediately
after she took charge of us. She was no less flirtatious than our beloved Berthe, but she was much more of a “lady.”
Our lessons took place in her room, which was at the top of the house. Its windows and balcony looked out on the road, where an infantry company marched by every morning. The bugles sounded and we ran to wave to the soldiers; Marie smiled and nodded graciously to the saluting officers. Then we returned to our books and she to her dressing table, with her back to us, but she could see us in the mirror. I sat at the far end of the table, Rose and Edward as a protective rampart between me and Fräulein Marie. Luckily she rarely turned around, as she was too busy experimenting with different hairdos, plucking her eyebrows and putting on all kinds of rouge.
That was the last year of the nineteenth century and extraordinary happenings were anticipated. The assassination of the Empress Elisabeth the year before had made us greatly apprehensive. It left a much deeper impression upon me than the Dreyfus case.
My father subscribed to two daily newspapers, a Polish one which arrived with the evening train from Lwow, and the Neue Freie Presse which took a day or two to come from Vienna. He considered the latter the best newspaper in the world. My mother read it as well, but more critically, and I often heard her make ironical remarks about Papa’s “Bible.” Both newspapers were most conservative. The Polish paper was anti-semitic and nationalistic, while the Neue Freie Presse, owned and published by a Jew, was monarchistic and loyally Austro-Hungarian. I was too young to be interested in the reopening of the Dreyfus case, and the mention of names like Clemenceau, Labori and Esterhazy during meals only signaled that dinner would last forever. I don’t remember whether my parents believed in Dreyfus’s innocence or whether they differed in this also, but I owe an important, enlightening discovery to the Dreyfus case.
Having read Zola’s J’accuse, Mama ordered the whole Rougon-Maquard series. The yellow-bound volumes were kept under lock and key in the bookcases of my father’s study. But, forgetful and careless, Mama would leave the book she was just reading, wherever she happened to be. I used to find them in the garden, the dining room, even in the kitchen, and read surreptitiously and in great excitement while Fräulein Marie created her complicated hairdos. It was Une Page d’Amour which affected me most deeply. I identified myself with its heroine, a sick little girl whose mother has an illicit love affair with her doctor.
The birth of my youngest brother had not opened my eyes to the facts of life. Rose, Edward and I were sent to Grandmother, and when we came back Mama was in bed “with flu”—and the stork had brought us a baby brother. However, Kasia, Niania’s daughter, with whom I used to play, told me in direct, simple words about the sexual act. She described it drastically, destroying the wistful, poetic notions with which I had superseded the stork.
I don’t think that Sambor’s society differed from that of any other garrison town. Its morals were, if not exactly austere, not too depraved either. Adultery was the favorite remedy against boredom. The wife of Captain X. had an affair with Major Y., while Mrs. Y. loved Captain X. If it had not been for anonymous letters, denunciations and occasional illegal abortions, this fair exchange would have remained among those concerned only.
After a few months of promenading on the A-B, Fräulein Marie acquired a beau. He was an Infantry officer, a Mohammedan from Bosnia, and his first name was Murad. Fräulein Marie told us that she was secretly engaged to him, but Niania found out that Murad had another girl. We were not surprised—wasn’t he entitled to have a harem? Soon Marie became very irritable, losing her temper at the slightest provocation. When, at last, she discovered that I had a novel under my French conjugations, all hell broke loose. I was so engrossed in my reading—this time it was Nana—that I didn’t even notice her standing beside me. She was furious and slapped my face. I decided at once to murder her and spent hours imagining how to make her death most painful. I planned to trip her when she came into my room, hit her head against the protruding edge of our tiled stove, and then jump with both feet on her hideous face and trample it to a pulp. It was a great relief to conceive this plan.
One day, after we returned home, Marie made a big scene. Lieutenant Murad had told her that I was a shameless flirt (I was not yet eleven). He said that I looked provocatively at the officers, half closing my eyes. “But I have to screw up my eyes, otherwise I can’t see!” I screamed. I was so indignant that, howling, I ran to Mama. But my mother didn’t believe me. Marie had told her previously that I was just imitating her own short-sightedness—Mama wore glasses when she read music but in public used a lorgnette. Marie assured her that I too wanted to have a lorgnette. My tears and the support of Rose and Edward finally made my mother take me to the doctor, and I was vindicated. Not only was I near-sighted but also threatened with curvature of the spine from hunching over my books and exercise pages. Immediately the hunchbacked ghost of my great-aunt Nadine began to haunt my mother and she traveled with me to Lwow to have an orthopedist examine my back.
A new chapter in my life began. I had just read Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Dr. G., handsome, blasé, and forty-five, was for me the reincarnation of Petronius.
4
MY PARENTS DECIDED that I should be sent to a boarding school in Lwow. I was entering at midterm and the pupils in my class were well ahead of me. In reading, writing and history I was more advanced than they, but I had never been subjected to school discipline. My father and mother welcomed this change, although, for the moment, my education was a secondary consideration; the most important thing was my back.
Luckily Dr. G. gave a comforting verdict. The slight curvature of my spine would soon be straightened out by the exercises in his Orthopedic Institute. He assured my mother that I would never reach the hopeless stage of great-aunt Nadine’s deformity. I was to come every afternoon for two hours of stretching, exercising and massage. I should consider myself lucky not to be put into a plaster cast like the girl I had seen in the waiting room. He spoke softly and kindly; his blue, smiling eyes never left mine.
The boarding school was run by two sisters, political refugees from the Russian part of Poland. They took only a limited number of boarders and the other children were day pupils.
Sophie Czarnowska was a short woman of undetermined age, plump and most unattractive. Her cheeks and part of her forehead were covered with a purplish rash, her mousey hair was carelessly pulled back, and when speaking she revealed long yellow teeth. Yet as soon as her probing eyes met mine, a smile appeared on her poor, blotchy face, and my heart leaped toward her. A few minutes later her sister Wanda Dalecka came in, a strikingly beautiful woman. She was cool and reserved, not like Sophie, who had her arm around me.
The sisters informed my mother that though they took only girls as boarders, the school itself was coeducational—an unheard-of thing in those days—and that religious instruction was only for those who desired it, which impressed Mama most favorably. There was no free bed for me and I was to sleep on the couch in one of the very informal classrooms. I had my cupboard and desk there and, as a matter of fact, with the exception of school hours, it was like having a room to myself.
My mother left and I sat down on my couch, fighting back tears. Sophie Czarnowska came in and asked me if I would not like to have a glass of tea and meet some of her friends. She did not say “other children,” she said “my friends.”
In the dining room, behind a large copper samovar, old Pani Czarnowska, Sophie’s and Wanda’s mother, was pouring tea. I had never seen anyone as thin and wrinkled. She told me that she was a Lithuanian, from Wilno, the town in which the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz was born. Next to her sat a huge man with a long, gray beard and a booming voice. I was told that he was Bronislaw Schwartze, a survivor of the Battle of Praga[1] in the 1863 uprising. A citizen of France, but of Polish descent, he had participated prominently in the ill-fated insurrection against Russia, was captured and sentenced to death. The personal intervention of the Empress Eugenie saved him from execution at the
last minute. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in an island fortress on the Ladoga Lake. I was told all that while we were having tea and everyone seemed to watch my reaction. I was almost in tears.
For seven years Schwartze had been held in solitary confinement without books, without papers and without news. The only thing supplied to him were cigarettes, and with incredible ingenuity he wrote poems and his political testament on their paper tips with burned-out matches. Death was always with him. The prisoners knew that their cells could be flooded with lake water. After seven years he was released from the prison and deported to a remote village in Siberia. He lived there, married, had children and waited for an amnesty which never came.
At the time I met him, a few years after he had managed to escape, taking his three children with him, he was sixty-eight. Hiding them in a sledge under fur skins, he drove and walked across the Asian continent, the Near East and Europe until at last they reached the Austrian part of Poland. I met the children that same afternoon—two girls, one fifteen, the other about my age, and a boy of thirteen. The younger girl attended Miss Czarnowska’s school. Judging by their slanting eyes and high cheekbones their mother must have belonged to a Mongolian tribe. I never asked what had happened to her.
To cheer me up Mr. Schwartze asked if I knew how to dance the mazurka and, as I happily said yes, he jumped up, singing in his loud bass, and taking my hand danced with me around the room. The samovar and glasses shook and clattered and everybody laughed when the huge, bearded man swung me around, gallantly bowing and even kneeling down before me at the end. Then, to disperse whatever was left of my homesickness, he lifted me high up and almost hit my head on the ceiling.
The Kindness of Strangers Page 4