by Bina Bernard
Within minutes of her discovery, Zygmunt had come down to check on her, and she jumped into his arms. Embarrassed, Lena quickly let go, and shouted, “You have no idea what this means to me! Now I may be able to find my parents!”
Zygmunt was pleased. His wife had been nagging him to clear out the basement. He was glad he had ignored her.
“Would you be willing to sell me these pictures and negatives?” Lena asked, handing him the batch she had selected.
“They’re yours if you want them.” He repacked the photographs and negatives into a tidy bundle she could easily carry, and wished her well with her search.
It was still light when Lena exited the photo shop. With the time she had left before catching the train back to Warsaw, Lena decided to visit the address she’d found scribbled on the slip of paper, assuming it was the house where Hershel Stein had once lived.
Her heart pounding, Lena stood across the street looking at the red brick building with gray wood trim around the windows. After a few minutes, she summoned enough courage to knock on the door and face the current occupant.
“Yes. What do you want?” the woman asked suspiciously as she peeked out the door. Her salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper. Lena thought she looked to be in her early forties.
“I’m trying to find someone who used to live here. Hershel Stein.”
“Nobody by that name lives here. No Jews in this neighborhood,” the woman said and slammed the door.
“Did you know him or his family?” she yelled at the closed door.
“No. Go away!”
“That was pointless,” Lena said out loud. As she continued her walk, she felt someone was following her. Lena looked around and saw an elderly woman staring at her, shaking her head. When their eyes met, the woman seemed to want to say something to her.
“Good evening,” Lena said when the woman reached her.
“Are you looking for someone?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. Do you live on this street?”
She nodded and pointed. “Just over there.”
“Did you live here before the war?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know Hershel Stein?”
The woman crossed herself. “I thought you were a ghost. You look so much like Malka.”
“Like who?” Lena asked.
“Like Malka, Malka Stein!”
Lena fumbled for the picture of the blonde woman with the two little girls. “Is this Malka Stein?” she asked.
“Yes! Yes! With her daughters!”
“They had two daughters?” Lena was almost shouting. I have a sister! She looked skyward and mentally thanked Stefan.
“Do you know where Hershel and Malka Stein are today? Did they live here after the war?
“Sorry. I don’t know what happened to them,” the woman shook her head. “It was a bad time.”
“I should introduce myself. I’m Lena Malińska.”
“Nadia Rustycka,” the woman identified herself.
They shook hands. Neither wanted to let go.
“You want to find the Steins?” Nadia asked, still holding Lena’s hand.
“Yes. I believe they are my parents. I was adopted as a child. I never knew who my parents were. Now I’m trying to find my real family.”
“You certainly look like Malka,” she said. “You live in Krakow?”
“No. Warsaw. I came for the day.”
It was getting late. Lena knew her time was limited. “I want to talk to you about the Stein family, but I can’t now. I left my son alone,” she explained. “I will come back another time. Then you can tell me everything you know about them.”
Nadia shook her head. “The person you should talk to is Ela Wyszyńska. She was good friends with Malka. If anyone knows what happened to them, she does.”
“How do I get in touch with her? Does she still live here?”
“No. Not anymore. I may be able to find her. I know her daughter. Might take some time. Ela has been ill. Not sure she’s still alive. But if anyone knows what happened to Malka and Hershel Stein, it would be Ela,” Nadia repeated.
The two women exchanged phone numbers and embraced.
“Call me if you find out anything.” As she ran off, Lena yelled, “If Ela will see me, tell her I’ll come back to Krakow whenever she wants.”
Racing to make her train, Lena repeated over and over, Hershel and Malka Stein are my father and mother. When she settled into her seat for the trip back to Warsaw, Lena took out the photograph of Malka with her daughters. Without any tears flowing this time, she stroked her mother’s cheek and thought, I still don’t know where you are, but finally I know who you are!
PART III
CHAPTER
12
New York
THE DOCTORS WERE RIGHT. It was not major surgery, and Harry’s operation was a success. But seeing her father wrapped in a shroud-like sheet when she was finally allowed into the recovery room, Hannah felt herself slipping to the floor. A nurse caught her halfway and made her lie on a nearby gurney.
“He looks worse than he is,” she assured her.
“Is he in a coma?” Hannah asked once her light-headedness had passed.
“No. He just hasn’t come out of the anesthesia yet. You better stay here a few minutes. I don’t need you as a patient, too!”
Lying on the gurney watching Harry’s motionless form under the sheet, Hannah thought about his fear of ending up as a vegetable.
When she reported her father’s condition to Molly, she said, “He’s resting comfortably.” Hannah left out the morbid details. Her mother, who had been praying silently in the visitor’s lounge, grabbed her hand and kissed it.
“Help me! Somebody, help me!” Harry was screaming when Molly and Hannah came in for their ten-minute visit once he was moved to the surgical ICU. He looked like a mad character cavorting in Marat Sade. Shocked, Molly stopped dead in her tracks. Hannah ran to the nurse attending another patient, who seemed oblivious to Harry’s cries for help.
“Please help my father,” Hannah begged. “He’s screaming for help.”
“I have patients here who’ve just had heart transplants. Your father is in much better shape than they are,” was the nurse’s answer. Not bothering to hide her annoyance, her nostrils flared as she spoke. Hannah thought she looked like a horse braying.
“He’s cold. He’s shivering. At least give him a blanket,” Hannah pleaded.
“We’re out of blankets,” she snarled. “If you can find a blanket, by all means bring it in,” she said, challenging Hannah.
Leaving Molly waiting outside the ICU, Hannah ran to the recovery room and begged the nurse who’d helped her onto a gurney for a blanket. Within minutes she returned with two blankets. As she covered her father, Hannah was shocked to see that his arms had ballooned to twice their normal size.
“No!” she blurted out. Hannah felt impotent. Harry’s cries for help reverberated in her head long after she’d left the ICU.
Twenty-four hours later, with him back in a regular room, Hannah regained some optimism. He’s alive! But Harry’s recovery did not go as planned. Nobody had predicted that post surgery his arms would continue to fill up with water.
When visiting hours were almost over, Hannah bent down to kiss her father. She thought he seemed warm, but ascribed it to the heat in the room. The air conditioning was off and it was a hot day. The nurse making her rounds came in as they were about to leave.
“What’s my most demanding patient griping about this evening?” she asked, sounding playful. When Harry didn’t open his eyes, she checked his vital signs. After charting his pulse, temperature and breathing, the nurse left without saying anything. Hannah rushed to read his chart. Harry’s fever had spiked to 103 degrees.
She ran out to talk to the nurse and crashed into her and the intern-on-duty just outside Harry’s room. The young doctor looked uncomfortable seeing Hannah.
“You have to leave now,” he said.
/> Hannah ignored his words. Molly, who was still sitting next to Harry’s bed, did as she was told, but hovered in the hall.
“Why is my father’s temperature so high?” Hannah wanted an answer.
Ignoring her question, the intern nervously read the chart. Without making eye contact with Hannah, he cautiously approached Harry, whose face was now covered with red blotches. His lips were dry and cracking, his breathing labored.
“Do something!” Hannah demanded, still hoping he could work magic.
“You have to go now,” the intern repeated. “It’s past visiting hours!”
Hannah stayed put.
Once he realized she wasn’t going anywhere, he left. Hannah followed. “What are you going to do?” she yelled as he walked toward the nurses’ station. When she saw him reach for the phone, Hannah went back to her father and tried to calm herself. Harry was burning up and she was sure he was drifting into unconsciousness. Twenty minutes later Dr. Russo, the resident-on-duty, arrived.
“Don’t worry. It may look bad to you, but it’s nothing we can’t fix with some antibiotics,” Dr. Russo said confidently, and ordered some medication. He was reassuring. Hannah wanted to believe him.
“Go home now. I’m on all night. I promise you I’ll keep an eye on your father.”
She agreed to leave but not before she hired a private duty nurse to stay by Harry’s side for the night. Hannah wasn’t going to lose her father to carelessness.
The next morning when Hannah and Molly walked into his room, Harry was asleep. His fever was down slightly, to 102, but his Popeye arms were still waterlogged. When he awoke, Harry begged to be taken home.
“Can’t you see they’re trying to kill me? Get me out of here,” he whispered conspiratorially.
Hannah was afraid they were killing him with incompetence, but she didn’t know how to reverse that course. Two days later when she and Molly came into Harry’s room and found another man in his bed, she thought her fear had been realized. Hannah ran to the nurses’ station.
“What happened to my father? Where is his private-duty nurse?” she asked the woman at the desk she hadn’t seen before.
“Who’s your father?”
“Harry Stone.”
The woman calmly checked the patient roster.
“Oh, he had trouble breathing. He was taken to the ICU last night. Private nurses are not allowed there. The night nurse must have sent her home.”
Hannah grabbed her mother by the hand and the two raced to the ICU.
Hannah went in to see Harry alone. Her father was now breathing with the help of a respirator.
“Oh my God,” Hannah cried out, then covered her mouth. She thought Harry’s fear of ending his life attached to a machine was close to being a reality. And it was all her fault. When she touched his cold hand, Harry opened his eyes briefly and tried to form a smile.
“How are you feeling?” Hannah asked without thinking.
Unable to speak, Harry squeezed her hand several times, and drifted back to sleep. In his drug-induced haze, Harry communed with the daughter he was so desperate to see again. He told Lena about his life and how much he missed her.
For as long as Harry remained tethered to the respirator, Hannah vowed to stay close, hoping her presence would keep him alive long enough for his body to repair itself. Her normal routine stopped. She didn’t go to work that day, not the next, nor the days after that. She did not act like herself, nor look like herself. She had no interest in her appearance and shunned make-up entirely. Even ChapStick never touched her dry lips. The person who carefully picked out just the right outfit each morning now pulled on the first thing she grabbed.
Between visiting hours both Hannah and Molly stayed in the lounge near the ICU. Nursing a container of black coffee, Hannah sat close to the door, ready to pounce if she spotted one of Harry’s doctors who might give her an update on his condition. She tried to distract herself by reading the newspaper. But the news paralleled the disorder in her own life. A car bomb injured a reporter in Arizona, eleven people were killed when the Teton Dam collapsed in Idaho, and on the international scene, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon was assassinated in Beirut!
With Harry now unable to talk, Molly and Hannah kept their conversation simple during their visits. Hannah was reminded of the bad old days when Molly instructed her not to say anything that might aggravate her father.
Harry responded to their prattling about the weather by closing his eyes. When Hannah brought a pad and colored markers so Harry could jot down his thoughts, he gripped the pen forcefully, but the shaky letters he formed were illegible.
“We need a pharmacist to decode your writing, Dr. Stone,” Hannah said, hoping for a smile. She got a cold stare, and the word LENA scrawled in large block letters across the pad.
As she said “Lena” out loud, Hannah felt her cheeks turn red.
“I’m working on it, Dad,” she lied.
Consumed with the state of Harry’s health, Hannah had done nothing regarding Lena except feel guilty. The books and clippings about hidden children languished alongside folders of letters she’d written to government agencies in Washington, Jewish organizations around the world, the Red Cross, even the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Everyone she had reached had been polite, even sympathetic, but no one had gotten back to her with any useful information. Even Malcolm’s leads in Poland led nowhere.
As a reporter, Hannah prided herself for being able to figure out a plan of action in pursuit of any story. But she usually had more to go on than a frayed photograph and a first name. Still, failure was not an option, she told herself.
Seeing Harry’s eyes fill up with tears, the tightness in Hannah’s stomach hardened. Desperate to lift her father’s spirits she said, “I should know something soon.”
For Hannah there was an upside to the present crisis. Every Friday, as soon as he could get away, while hordes of New Yorkers headed to the beaches in the Hamptons, Robert made the reverse commute into Manhattan. Hannah did not even have to ask. He usually found her in the hospital lounge waiting for a chance to visit Harry or on the lookout for one of his doctors.
On the down side, even after Harry was breathing on his own and out of the ICU, Hannah showed up at the magazine between hospital visiting hours only to do the minimum. The yellow legal pads usually filled with future story ideas were blank. She felt guilty for letting her work slide and worried about losing her job, but she couldn’t help herself. Hannah had fought to get herself accredited to the Democratic Presidential Convention to be held in Madison Square Garden in mid-July, but her press credentials on top of her inbox were now of no interest to her.
When Robert was in New York, as soon as the three of them returned to the apartment from visiting Harry in the evening, Molly would run into the room she had co-opted from Christy, to be out of their way. Hannah knew her mother felt like an intruder. She was sorry she didn’t make her feel more welcomed. Something else I can feel guilty about, Hannah thought. Having Robert next to her in bed at night made life bearable.
Robert tried repeatedly to bring some needed diversion into their life.
“Hannah, you can’t stop living because your father is in the hospital!” he said for the umpteenth time.
Hannah’s guilt kept her tethered to her father’s hospital room. “You don’t understand,” she argued. “I put him there, thinking they’d make him better!”
In spite of her protestations, Robert finally forced Hannah to take a real break on July 4th. The whole city was geared up for the bicentennial celebration and Robert had accepted an invitation to a black-tie party. When he told Hannah about it, she automatically said, “No. I can’t go.”
“Hannah, I’m dragging you away from the hospital this Sunday, kicking and screaming, if necessary. Not out of town. Just downtown,” he said. “We’re going to the new Windows on the World Restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. We’ll have a great meal, watch the Tall Ships sail by and the G
rucci fireworks fill the sky. I promise you’re going to love it.”
“I can’t,” Hannah insisted. “Harry needs to know I didn’t abandon him,” she said. For her there was nothing worse than feeling abandoned.
“Hannah, you’re not helping your father by suffering along with him!” Robert shot back. “Besides, you’re the history buff. You can’t ignore the bicentennial!”
“That’s what television is for,” Hannah insisted.
“Not this time. You’re coming with me and that’s that. I don’t want to see you end up in a bed next to Harry. Or in a padded cell,” Robert added sarcastically.
“My father’s body is filling up with water. Nobody knows why, and I’m supposed to go on with my life as if nothing was wrong?”
“No. But you’re not supposed to stop living either.”
Hannah relented.
Sunday morning on July 4th, while Robert was in the shower, Hannah turned her attention to getting ready to go out in public. She took a look at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom and barely recognized the reflection that stared back at her.
“What a mess!” was her assessment.
Hannah’s hair hung, straggly and limp, just below her shoulders. Her face was drawn and she had dark circles around her sunken green eyes.
Although she hadn’t weighed herself, Hannah knew she had lost weight. Her bell-bottom pants now rested on her hips instead of at her waist. Hannah guessed she was probably down a couple of dress sizes. As she searched through her closet looking to find something appropriate to wear, it shocked her that after three months, her clothes still smelled of stale smoke. While lighting up always remained an option, Hannah was proud that the sealed box of cigarettes in her bag remained untouched even with everything that was going on.