Ordinary Daylight

by Andrew Potok

  Neighbors had come over too. Like us, they were rich Jews allowed by the Poles to live and prosper. Like us, they were seldom touched by pogroms, because they and we performed essential services for the Poles. My mother and my uncle Max made furs that were more beautiful than anything the wealthy Poles could find elsewhere, even in Paris.

  Throughout the night, my mother’s voice was quiet. What she said was always sober and selfless, though the men often took credit for her ideas. She had built the business, and her persistence had kept it going. Everyone knew that. The men, especially her brother Max, indulged in flights of theatrical rage and bombast, which they seemed to need as they needed their extravagant cars, their suits tailored in Vienna, their luxury apartments on the Vistula. They knew that they could depend on my mother to bring them back to reason.

  I slept on and off, at times in my room, at times at the long dining-room table. The grandfather clock ticked loudly. The rich, dark wooden floors creaked ceaselessly from the pacing feet. Off and on we heard sirens and far-off explosions.

  My cousin Anita, Max’s daughter, with her governess, was beside me the whole night. Since then, we’ve always lived near each other and have become, by our own declaration, brother and sister.

  I awoke often to hear the sound of voices, whispers swelling to crescendos, then falling away again.

  “The men and the children go,” I heard my mother say with authority. They had told me, and I even heard them say to one another, that this war would stop in a day or two. England would stop it, maybe France, then we’d all be back as before. “I will stay to take care of the business,” she added.

  Max and my father agreed. Everyone else was silent. Tears filled my eyes.

  Then I felt a surge of a new kind of strength. “I won’t go without you!”

  The noise level rose again. Hands were stroking my head and face.

  My mother always incorporated the wishes of the men, and for that instant, I had become a man. “Yes,” she said. She came over to me and kissed me. Her cheeks were wet. “We will all go. We will go together.” And that night, at four in the morning, we drove out of Warsaw, which was already half destroyed. My cousins Marylka and Bronek were there; they have since settled in London. Anita came with us. Most of those who met in our apartment that night stayed and died in the Holocaust.

  Trajanowski, the chauffeur, drove the Citroën van that belonged to the business, and my uncle Max drove the elegant Packard with its silver, red, and white hubcaps. We headed southeast, toward Lublin, planning to wait out the war there. Caught in the caravan of creeping carts, wagons, and trucks, we inched our way through obscure towns—Otwock, Garwolin, Dȩblin, Puławy. At Lublin, we heard that German and Russian tanks were converging on the town, so we turned north and headed toward the Lithuanian border.

  All along the way the endless procession of refugees was bombed and strafed by German planes. We would leave our cars at the sound of plane engines and run for cover at the side of the road. When each raid ended, those of us who had survived would creep out, push the disabled vehicles off the road, and continue. The first time, my parents tried to hide the dead from me by covering my eyes, but I was curious and, after a time, indifferent.

  Sometimes we traveled at night, sometimes we slept in barns or farmhouses. We traded sapphire rings for bread, a mink coat for a tank of gasoline. And when there was no more gasoline to be had, we abandoned the beautiful 12-cylinder Packard. The men couldn’t bear leaving the car, and my uncle Max, exhausted, said he was going back to Warsaw to stand guard in his office and fight the Germans.

  “My whole life is there,” he said.

  “You won’t have any life,” my mother replied. “Now your life is only inside your skin. We must keep going. Don’t turn back. Forget the car; forget Poland.” And we went on, though the men continued to argue with her.

  When we reached Wilno, the crossing point into Lithuania, it was storming. We passed columns of retreating Polish soldiers, and artillery was booming in the near distance. Tens of thousands of people and cars were on the road and in the fields, waiting to cross. We were among the last to leave before the border was closed.

  We managed to get to Latvia, then to Sweden, where we waited for American visas. In February 1940, we sailed for New York on the Bergensfjord, the last boat out of Norway.

  Sta, who was in Lwow when the war started, was captured by the Russians and sent into hard labor not far from the Finnish border. After two years, he was released to join the Polish army being organized in South Asia. He trekked with them through Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and finally to Italy, where he fought alongside the British in some of the most ferocious battles of the war. Afterward, he settled in England.

  In New York, I hid under beds when I heard airplanes overhead, and I often woke up screaming with terror at night. But I also quickly took in the newness of America. A few days after our release from Ellis Island, I remember walking back from P.S. 166 on Amsterdam Avenue, where I had just been told my name in English. Andrzej changed magically to Andrew, and I said it, rolling the r, for the first time. Within a month, the r was entirely Americanized; my English was without accent. My parents were obsessed with freeing me from our bitter European history. They were delighted, each time they came to visit me at some boarding school, that my Polish was being exiled by English words, and they laughed with pleasure at my Americanized mispronunciations of my native tongue.

  My parents and Max rebuilt their fur business: they were in their forties and they had escaped the Nazis. Max lived an energetic and successful ten years more. He felt liberated and excited by New York. “I love America,” he said often. My father, who had a long history of depression, sank deeper into it. He died in 1965. My mother was the most successful and grew the deepest roots. Her last fifteen years, productive and well rewarded, have been, I think, her happiest.

  Now about the same age as they were then, I was struggling with another kind of torment. I wanted to destroy it before it destroyed me. In the back of my mind, I knew that perhaps I’d have to learn to live with it, to live in spite of it. I knew that I would probably have to stop dreaming and believing in miracles. I would probably have to rebuild, carefully and deliberately, in my own New World, in order to survive again. They had done it with remarkable courage and energy.

  EIGHT

  THE NEXT MORNING, I opened my eyes and saw haphazard motion superimposed on the darkness. Vibrations emanated from the interior of my eyes, according to their own unique rules and reasons, unrelated to what others saw. I saw little more with my eyes open than closed. I closed them to try again.

  When I opened my eyes a second time, the charcoal gray of the bedroom window had lightened a shade. The day before, the window had been rectangular, but now there was nothing geometric about it. The dull, slate light spilled over its edges, rounding corners, distorting the straight sides.

  The harsh light of the bathroom hurt my eyes, and the mirror reflected a shadow again. I couldn’t remember how I had looked the day before. This reflection wasn’t mine. I stood anonymous, blinking my eyes, shaking them out; I nodded, I turned from side to side, but I couldn’t see the movement in the mirror. I had certainly seen better than this.

  Charlotte was still asleep, and I crawled into the bed beside her. My tears wet her face and woke her. She put an arm around me and understood, without words, what was happening.

  As the sun’s rays nicked the roofs of the buildings across the street, my eyes felt pierced by little spears of light. By breakfast, it was even worse and, very frightened, I called Helga.

  “You may come right away, angel,” she said. “And don’t worry. Once it has started, it will come back again.”

  We got dressed slowly. “But didn’t you see me run down Haverstock Hill, then across the street?” I asked Charlotte. “Didn’t you see me handle myself like a tightrope walker along King’s Road?”

  She said nothing for a while. She stood in front of the bathroom mi
rror applying eye makeup. “I don’t know how it would have shown up on an ERG,” Charlotte finally said. “I saw you happy. You were more perceptive, more acute, but I’ve seen you do some pretty amazing things before. You don’t miss a trick at the poker game. And you always seem to know when there’s a sexy woman around.”

  Later, as Helga was putting fourteen bees in my hair and down my neck, she said: “Yes, cherub, that is how the bees work sometimes. Especially on you poor depressed people—and who wouldn’t be depressed going blind? It will go up and down, up and down, then the ups will be longer and the downs shorter, and one day soon, it will be whoosh!” and she stepped in front of me and made an arc from floor to ceiling with her arms, like a conductor driving an orchestra to the final tonic chord, “All up, angel, all up!”

  For a brief moment she seemed to recognize my despair, though always in her own special, cranky way. “You know, I could see it all in your water,” she said. “I could see the depression fighting the improvement all the while. I feel so sorry for you. Me, I would have killed myself long ago if I were going blind.” She fell into some private thoughtful place for a minute. “But the improvement will win, you will see.” Another thought crossed her mind, for, like a child, she couldn’t hide the passage of a mood, an idea, a whim—not even from me. She always percolated, often erupted, and her silences were like a prolonged bar of rest in a tempestuous musical score, charged with anticipation. “Don’t you ever lie to me about improvement,” she warned. “I know how sneaky you people get. I know what to do with people who hide their improvement. Out they go, right out the door. . . .”

  “But why would people want to hide their improvement?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer for a moment, not believing my innocence. I felt her eyes examining me. “They leave without paying,” she snapped. “But I can always see improvement in the water, so don’t you think of trying to fool me.”

  “Do you charge people only if they improve then?” I asked.

  “What you think?” she snorted. “Everybody improves! Everybody pays.” She was thundering now. “I don’t do this for nothing anymore. No fees, no bees! I have learned my lesson. They are rotten if they pay and rotten if they don’t. You know that lying, cheating rake in my book?”

  “Your book? What book?”

  “My book, my book,” she snarled. “Didn’t I show you my book?”

  “No, Mrs. Barnes. But I’d love to see it.”

  She had already slid out of her chair and started up the stairs. “Yes, yes, two books,” she was saying, “I have written two books.” She came down with them and handed them to me. “Here, take them home and have your wife read them to you.”

  As I left, I knew that I was already in the process of becoming a part of the Helga Barnes legend. Other patients were surely being told: “You should see my American chappie. He is seeing beautifully, and he’s so wonderfully happy!”

  No one was home at Eton Rise. I paced the floor, dying for a look inside the books. One was called Disgrace in the Clinic and the other, Storming the Distant Tower. I laid them down and waited for Charlotte. My neck and ears hurt and itched; they were swollen grotesquely. Thus far, I had been stung by over 160 bees.

  Sta’s flat, which just two days before felt like the center of the universe, changed hourly into a dark hovel on the edge of some suburb. A forlorn photograph of his wife, taken years before in Zakopane, leaned in its tarnished filigree frame against the wall at the back of the dresser. Next to it lay a Polish-English dictionary, its hard cover long gone, the pages brittle and yellow. Ancient calling cards were strewn in a chipped dish, along with bent collar stays and loose vitamin pills. Even the narcissus from the day before was fading prematurely. I was flooded with memories.

  Through my father’s lifelong bouts with depression, he stamped each of our several New York households with gloom. As my mother became more successful, she refurbished our ever-fancier apartments, but my father managed to make even the Fifty-seventh Street place, their last and most elegant, appear untouched by either grace or Parke-Bernet. He always sat slumped in a soft chair, his head supported in his hands or flung back on a doily my mother put there. My mother never kept house, but the back rests of couches and upholstered chairs were watched by her with a keen eye for the stains made by my father’s scalp. With that doily, she insulated whatever she could from his “Potok character.” (“It hasn’t affected you, thank God,” she often told me.) The “Potok character” was, I think, a mixture of depression, paranoia, and a shabbiness spawned by misanthropy and the renunciation of pleasure.

  Their life together was full of incongruities. On my father’s way home from Maximilian Furs—which he opened up every morning and closed late each afternoon—he often stopped at the Automat for a cup of coffee, from which he’d return with packets of sugar or napkins, because, he said, he couldn’t bear to see useful things thrown away. The collected objects he brought, the wrapped cakes of hotel soap, the trial packages of free cigarettes, the coasters, swizzle sticks, and artificial sweeteners, lay in a dresser, two drawers down from my mother’s, which were silk lined and scented, full of Dior blouses, Balenciaga scarves, and pearls from Van Cleef and Arpels.

  He sat listening to the radio or reading the newspaper, cursing my mother for talking on the telephone too long or the maid for making too much noise. Periodically, he walked through the house to turn off lights and check for dripping water faucets. Everything—even the basic ingredients of life—irritated him.

  My father’s aloneness always affected me deeply. I wanted him to be loved; I wanted to see or feel his love. When I was very young, I savored the times he glowed with pride or demonstrated his love for me by moving his lips across my forehead to be sure there were no signs of a fever. Later, the love I felt turned to pity, shame, and finally dread that I would be like him. When friends from school came home with me and he sat at the radio, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open, one hand on his forehead, the other hanging limp off the arm of his chair, his suspenders loose, his shirt collar frayed, his fingers scarred and scaly from picking on them with his fingernails, I burned with embarrassment and anger.

  My father’s genes had given me retinitis pigmentosa. The despair that accompanied my struggle with blindness, each depression, each selfish act or unkind motive of my life, held an additional terror for me: the fear of having inherited his “Potok character.” Even when I was young, my “moodiness”—to my early girlfriends a kind of romantic, artistic brooding, to others a well-known characteristic of a Cancer—came dangerously close to my father’s “sickness.” My eyes excluded others, just as his “sickness” kept people at bay. The darkness he cast around himself was not, I had to keep reassuring myself, the same darkness that was creeping into my eyes.

  My father watched wrestling on television and occasionally went to St. Nick’s Arena to see it in person. Wrestling was, as far as I knew, his only pleasure, probably satisfying some deep need for violence that surfaced at home only in impotent rages directed against my uncle Max and toward my mother. I wished that he had an interest more attuned to mine. He had once gone to the university, read books, heard Lenin lecture in Montreux, voted for Norman Thomas. I thought I remembered overhearing his talking about Gorky to someone, I don’t remember who or where. I wished he loved theater or movies, played bridge or poker, kept a mistress, or knew about opera. I wished he drove a car, did crossword puzzles, collected stamps, worked at a meaningful job. But the wrestling was what there was, and I was grateful because even that made him more human, normal, less a helpless victim of his terrible neuroses. Still, what I considered his wasted life loomed large before me.

  As my father lay dying, transformed by cancer into a skeleton, my mother would come home several times a day to discuss his changing condition with the day nurse. She felt bound by duty to the end. “I always acted correctly,” she told me, “no matter how hard it was.” At the end of thirty-five years of marriage—miserable, incongruous, anom
alous in every way—he lay dying in their pastel bedroom under a soft, pink nude painting of mine that he never liked. The maid dusted the Empire furniture, the French Provincial armoires, the delicate Chinoiserie in the other rooms, where the walls were also crammed with paintings my mother bought in little galleries off the Faubourg St.-Honoré, all of which he would gladly have lived without. My mother worked hard, though, for this touch of elegance and congeniality, which, by its sheer weight and perseverance, finally won over gloom.

  As I paced inside Eton Rise, I wondered if my father would have been happier here, living alone, like Sta, in this frugal little place near the parks, away from the threatening world my mother created, away from New York, which had offered him nothing but memories of better times in Poland.

  Charlotte returned from her morning’s outing. I didn’t budge from my place on the couch, and she came over to give me a kiss. The cold London air on her lips gave her an aura of energy, movement, purpose. The contrast made me feel like a lump of dough. She handed me a couple of icy ceramic tiles she’d bought from a crafts shop on Flask Walk. “They’re from a medieval English monastery,” she said, throwing down her coat and going into the kitchen to make coffee. Charlotte’s sudden energy had brought back one particularly vivid image of childhood: my mother standing in the vestibule of our Warsaw apartment, the dark brown bristles of her mink coat emitting a faintly noxious odor of lamb stew, and bringing in with her all the bitter cold of the Warsaw winter. Within those frozen animal hairs she brought a whiff of her busy, adult world, a world that excluded me.

  “We’ll have a cup of coffee,” Charlotte yelled in from the kitchen. “It’s bitter cold outside.” I fingered the tiles carelessly. They were brown or gray. They were dun or tan or earth color. They were mud. There are no brain cells for remembering mud.