by Ann Charney
What enchanted me most about those trips, more than the things she brought back for me, was the effect the trips had on her and consequently on us. My mother was then in her early thirties. The war had marked her, as it had everyone else. She had lost her husband, parents, a brother, sisters, most of her friends. The war had destroyed her home, a way of life, the beliefs that had been the core of her existence. It left her physically ravaged—her weight had been halved during the two and a half years we lay hidden in the barn loft. Now she had to provide for us in a world that was as alien as anything could possibly be to the enlightened, prosperous milieu in which she had spent most of her life.
Yet in spite of what she had endured, there was nothing passive or submissive about her. People always thought of her as someone very strong, someone to lean on in difficulties, a person who seemed in charge of her life.
I had absolute faith in her. I knew she would take care of me and that with her I was always safe. The events of my childhood, terrible as they were, did not affect me as might be expected. My mother was always there, a protective barrier between me and all evil. Because of her presence and her strength, I grew up with the impression that mine had been a happy childhood. Strange as it seems, this was how I always thought of it.
As a child I was never taken into her confidence, and I knew very little of what she thought or felt. When I compare her with the other adults I knew, she stands in my memory apart from them, illuminated by the energy and vitality that always emanated from her. In those days everyone who came near her seemed to me by comparison half-dead and because I belonged to her, I knew that nothing really terrible would happen to me.
Somehow she left me and others with the impression that even during the war and immediately after it she did more than just survive. There was a sense of satisfaction about her life then. She had fought against impossible odds and won. Years later, in Canada, living in prosperity and peace, her sense of resolution and strength ebbed away. As I grew older I became familiar with her frailties and her limitations, but the impression from my childhood remained with me despite all the changes in her and in me.
On the days she returned safely from Lwow, it was as if a spark had reanimated all of us. My aunt forgot her burden of grief and rejoiced, restored to the vital person she must once have been. At these moments, I could picture her as the young lady of her stories. The rest of the time she was as the war had made her—a frightened, superstitious woman, ageless and old at the same time. The simplest acts of everyday life had become terrifying obstacles for her, and she turned more and more to omens, old wives’ tales and the magic of repetition to help her through her days. I sensed even then that my aunt had lost touch with reality, but it was only much later that I became familiar with the terrifying world she inhabited.
Yet, on the nights when my mother was about to return and my aunt was busy cooking for her, I would look at her and see, not someone familiar, but someone whom I regretted not knowing. I would have given anything to keep my aunt as she was just then, smiling, animated, in control.
When my mother finally arrived, we both rushed at her, filled with excitement. Sometimes it seemed to me that my aunt was the true child in these moments. It was something about the way she would lose herself totally in the pleasure of my mother’s return, while I viewed them both from a certain distance.
I watched my aunt. Her eyes turned an intense blue, the fair skin of her face flushed, her hands, always occupied, seemed suddenly fragile and fluttering. Surreptitiously, because she knew my mother disapproved of this habit, she lit a candle in the corner of the room, an offering for my mother’s safe return. In a few minutes, the emotions that caused this transformation subsided and she became her familiar self once again.
After my mother had been going to Lwow for some time, I became dissatisfied with waiting for her, receiving my present, and listening to her adventures. I wanted to go with her. My pleading to take me along became a ritual of her departures. She always refused, of course, and her reasons were valid enough to satisfy any adult: the roads were bad, the trucks that picked her up were crowded and would not stop for a woman with a child, she wanted to keep me away from large crowds. But to a child, they meant nothing. There had to be something else. I was certain she was keeping the real reason from me.
Perhaps I had caught this habit of suspicion from my aunt, who was never satisfied with the explanations that seemed plausible to most people. As it happened I was right to doubt my mother. But there was no satisfaction in my discovery.
I learned the truth about my mother’s trips from Elsa, the daughter of one of our neighbours. It was on a day that had begun with much pleasure. I had a new dress, my first real dress. Until then my aunt had made my clothes from old remnants or dyed sackcloth.
Elsa was one of those girls who are born to be coquettes. There was no other way of explaining her obsession with her appearance. She did not acquire her tastes from her grandmother, with whom she lived. Nor were there any women at the time in the town whom Elsa could have regarded as models to emulate. Yet, in spite of the drabness around us, Elsa, on the verge of adolescence, managed to develop the same preoccupations with grooming that I was to discover a few years later among teenagers in Canada.
When I came down the stairs from our flat, I spotted her in the doorway leading to the courtyard, but I didn’t go over to her. Normally she had no use for me: I was much too young to share her pastimes or to be of any interest to her. This time, however, my changed appearance roused her. She called me over and I walked towards her, proud of her attention, and stiff with the responsibility of keeping my new clothes clean. Elsa looked me over with enthusiasm.
“How nice you look!” she exclaimed. “I wish I could get something decent to wear.” An expression of resentment and spite settled over her pretty features. “You’re lucky. Your mother works for the Russians and she can get you anything you want.”
“You’re wrong,” I protested. “My mother didn’t get this dress from the Russians. She bought it for me in Lwow.”
Elsa looked at me with contempt. “I know how she got it better than you do, silly. Of course the Russians didn’t give it to her. What do you take me for? I’m not a baby like you. I know how much they pay. But I also know that she didn’t just buy it. She must have stolen plenty from the Russians to get that dress for you.”
For a long moment I could think of nothing to say. Was Elsa serious, or was this just another form of the teasing to which she subjected all those younger than her?
“Stolen? How can you say that? My mother told me. She said it was just luck. She found someone who needed the money and she bought it for very little.”
“You’re just a kid. What do you expect her to say? She’s not going to tell you the truth. It’s too serious a matter for her to trust you with.”
At this point Elsa’s insinuations clicked with my own previous suspicions. I became certain that she did know something I didn’t know. A wave of terror, something like nausea, came over me, and I knew I shouldn’t persist. But it was too late. Too much had already been said to turn back.
“What do you know? Tell me. What do you mean—the truth?”
Elsa looked at me in a different way, calculating just how much she could benefit from the anxiety she had just evoked in me. After a minute she turned away, as if she had no further interest in talking to me.
“I can’t tell you. I overheard my grandmother talking about it to a neighbour. She’d beat me if she found out I told you. You’d better go away.”
But I was not going to be dismissed. Besides, I sensed that Elsa was after something. If only I could guess what it was.
“Your grandmother won’t find out. I promise. Look, I’ll give you my piece of white tulle. Maybe you can make something out of it.” I trembled inside as I committed the precious bit of cloth that wasn’t mine to give. But Elsa wasn’t interested.
“Don’t be stupid. What would I do with that piece of rag? It may
be all right for you and my sister and that kid you play with, but don’t expect me to play games like that. I’m going to get some proper clothes.”
My mind did a quick inventory of all my possessions. Did I own anything that Elsa would consider fit to wear? All I could think of were some hair ribbons, but surely Elsa would find these too childish as well. I was about to give up in despair, when Elsa herself came up with a suggestion. She must have paid more attention to our games than we suspected.
“I want your perfume bottle.”
I hesitated when Elsa named her price. For the last few days our play-acting props had been enriched by a perfume vial with an atomizer attached to it and a handle decorated with a ragged gold fringe. The perfume had been used up long ago, but its fragrance still lingered inside the container. I don’t remember which one of us found it. It belonged to the three of us. We kept it at my house, however, along with our other treasures, since we agreed I had the most privacy.
The bottle, like the piece of tulle, was a sacred communal object. By giving it away, wouldn’t I be betraying my friends? My heart filled with remorse, but I knew I could not resist Elsa. I ran upstairs, and in a minute the bottle was in my hands. No one saw me with it, and there were no witnesses as I handed it over to Elsa. When she accepted it I felt almost grateful to her. It seemed a small price to pay for the information I was about to receive.
Elsa did not even look at the bottle when I handed it to her, but with a quick, careless gesture she made it disappear.
“What are you going to tell the others?”
“I don’t know. I’ll make something up.”
“Well, that’s your worry. Now I’ll tell you. My grandmother said your mother steals little bags of sugar from the army storehouse and brings them home, hidden in her clothes. At the end of the week she takes the sugar to Lwow, where she trades it. My grandmother said that what she is doing is very dangerous. If she’s caught, they’ll shoot her. It’s true that everyone steals, and they overlook it if it’s an unimportant person, but your mother is the translator for the head colonel. That’s an important job. I heard the women say it happened once before. The Russians caught a man who did what your mother does, and shot him on the spot.
“That’s all I heard. Now you know how your mother gets all those things for you. Remember, you promised not to tell anyone I told you.”
It never occurred to me to doubt Elsa’s words. The horror of her explanation fitted in perfectly with the view I myself had of the world—danger lurked everywhere. My pretty new dress carried the price of my mother’s life. There were no innocent pleasures.
I had always suspected that my mother and my aunt kept things from me. I knew I was more sheltered than other children. Now it was my turn to keep a secret from them. But how? Where would I find the necessary self-control to hide such terrible knowledge from them?
As I walked away from Elsa, sobs such as I had never experienced convulsed my every step. I made it to our secret shelter. All care for my new dress was forgotten. I saw it now as an object of shame and terror. By wearing it I betrayed my mother to everyone who saw me. I never wanted to put it on again. But how could I explain such an action at home, when only this morning I had been so happy with it?
I stayed in the hideout as long as I could. The degraded condition of my dress seemed to me a proper camouflage. When the crying gave way for a while, it was replaced by grandiose schemes I invented to protect my mother. By the time it became dark outside, I had already given up both alternatives: I was too weak to cry or to hope. Whether my mother continued her trips or not, we were in equal danger. Either way, I was certain we were lost.
I came home later than usual, hoping against all probability that they wouldn’t notice me. In fact, just the opposite happened. For once, my mother’s anxiety equalled that of my aunt’s. My arrival reassured them momentarily, but when they noticed my appearance their fear returned. They fussed over me and tended to me, and then they began to question me.
My tears started again, and with them all my fears came spilling out. I told it all, stumbling over the words, dreading the moment they would be confirmed. My mother heard me out quietly, with attention. When my aunt tried to cut me off with reassurances, she stopped her so I could go on. Then it was her turn to speak. She didn’t deny any of it, nor did she offer excuses. Instead she urged me to have confidence in her ability to overcome all odds.
After all, she reminded me, she had escaped from the Germans. Twice they had caught her on the way to the farm where my aunt waited for us, and each time, with me in her arms, she had escaped. She had brought us this far, taking care of our needs where so many others had failed, and she would continue to do so. There was nothing formidable about the Russians. Most of them were young boys, half-starved themselves, one generation away from illiteracy. She wasn’t in the least afraid of them. As a matter of fact, most of them were her friends. They respected and liked her. Even if something was discovered, they would cover up for her. I was not to worry. From now on only good things would happen to me.
Did I believe her? She was very convincing. Like all mothers she had magical powers in shaping my perception of reality. I felt comforted and safe as long as she spoke to me. Yet from then on, until some months later when the trips ended, it was impossible for me to participate in the drama my mother and my aunt enacted around her arrivals and departures. I still felt an occasional response, but inside I knew that it was all different than it had been. I now had feelings and thoughts and fears that I had to hide, because I knew that confessing them would only add to my mother’s burden. From then on I fully accepted and practised dissimulation and illusion.
It was then, I believe, that I began to develop as a distinct individual, someone other than my mother’s child. Like everyone else I was learning to become a private, separate being, aware of parts of myself that I must never expose to others.
II
The trips to Lwow stopped when we left Dobryd. Our departure seemed to me a marvellous solution which would remove me from the horror I had experienced since Elsa’s revelations. I was overjoyed to leave, even though I had formed many attachments to the ruined city and to my first friends.
Our move came about mostly because of Yuri. Since the day when he and his platoon had liberated us and he had carried me out of the barn into the outside world, we had become his adopted family. When the time came for his regiment to leave Dobryd and move westwards towards Germany, he was not going to leave us behind.
There were other reasons to make us wish to leave Dobryd. Everyone in the town seemed possessed by the need to get away from this unlucky region. There was a frantic scramble for the few daily exit permits. Most people were too impatient to wait out this lengthy and uncertain process, and they chose the quicker route of night-time border crossings. This alternative required not so much courage as money with which to bribe border guards to look the other way. One also had to have a certain unconcern for possessions, since the crossings had to be made on foot with very little encumbrance. This restriction was a serious problem, since people clung to the most useless objects with a tenacity incomprehensible in normal times. Their meagre belongings seemed particularly precious when they were forced to leave them behind.
For some time my family remained apart from all this frenzy. Almost every week another neighbour would come to say good-bye. Yet the possibility of our own departure was not discussed. The reasons that made other people hesitate were not even mentioned in our house. My family lived from day to day, and the future, if it existed for others, no longer held any meaning for us. We excluded ourselves voluntarily from it and looked upon those who did not do so as lacking a sense of decency.
It required a will as strong as Yuri’s to force my mother and aunt out of this state. This was a role he had played in our lives from the beginning. From the time we had first come together, he had taken on the task of pulling us slowly and patiently into the world of everyday reality.
; The first time I saw him, he himself had seemed outside ordinary limits, a creature from another world. Now he was familiar, and close, part of my everyday world, but I could still remember our first meeting, when I had seen him as an extraordinary, god-like being. At the age of five, I had known only emaciated bodies like my own, for whom the mere act of walking had become almost impossible. In such a setting, Yuri’s presence and his appearance could easily pass for something miraculous.
Other things about him confirmed this first vision. In particular, I remember the military decorations he wore. Because of some trick of lighting, they glowed that day with a power of their own. I remained frozen before this marvellous sight, until it came closer and closer and I felt myself lifted into its magical beam.
Yuri was then in his early twenties, tall, with fair hair and a face that was never serious. Like most Russians, he had endured unbelievable hardship and suffering, but their effect on him was not apparent, at least not in the way that ours could be read in our faces and bodies. His enthusiasm and optimism seemed to have shielded him from the worst physical ravages. One had only to listen to Yuri describe the battles he had fought in, to realize how much he felt a part of the eventual success of his country’s struggle. His own private interest was insignificant. The common cause was the important one. Physical hardship was also neutralized by the intense camaraderie that existed between him and the other soldiers and the confidence they all shared in their eventual success.
When we first came to know them, at a time when the enemy was beaten and the end was in sight, euphoria had transformed this band of young people into superior beings. Later, when we knew Yuri better, as he came to depend on us for whatever family warmth we could give him, he lost this special aura for me. At times, when he asked my mother’s help with the books he was trying to learn from or when he kissed my aunt and thanked her for cooking a favourite dish, or when he gave himself entirely to one of my make-believe games, he seemed to become my contemporary. Still, I never forgot the promise and the beauty he brought with him the first time I saw him. It made the transition from hiding to freedom easier for me in many ways.