by Andrew Potok
I was hardly a stranger in the landscape of betrayal. Twenty-five years after Charlotte and I married, I fell prey to what now appears to be a family trait. How to justify it? Oh, so many excuses, almost reasons for flight, for seeking change. How about the end of an evolutionary passion for reproduction, a burgeoning creative urge, a newly felt need to take a major risk? I had begun to paint again, and I felt rejuvenated, the possessor of a new power. Risk taking had been severely reduced by the care and caution imposed by blindness, and now the joys of risk taking were again in the air. And there she was, a young woman who wanted only to furnish intellectual spice to my predictable life. She loved reading to me daily, loving the material. She announced baseball games with knowledge and humor. Her love of art was genuine as, eventually, was her interest in giving and taking erotic pleasure. After more than a year of daily reading to me in my office, my reader told me that she was in love with me. How could anyone as tuned in to female sensibilities as I was could have missed the electricity that must have permeated our daily lunch hours together? I was in my early sixties with only a shred of eyesight left, not precisely an image—at least in my mind—of a lover, especially to a woman more than thirty years younger than I.
Leaving the marriage was giving up years of learning to live in relative peace with another human being, with its shared ups and downs, the good times earned by sustaining the difficult times, the carefully constructed give and take, the allowances for infractions and even little betrayals, the opportunity to keep building on what there was and, absolutely essential to my happiness, a community of friends that was full of love, warmth, conviviality, conversation, exchange, learning, and reciprocity.
The moment of a final decision was upon me, the pull in both directions seemed equal, the strength of a feather capable of pushing me one way or the other. Although the comparison did not occur to me at the time, I now wonder if my betrayal-waiting-to-happen was in any way comparable to my father’s moment at the Lithuanian border. His was a thoughtless, unfathomably selfish choice of personal survival. Was mine, though perhaps trivial in order of magnitude, as selfish as his, based on fantasies of pleasure? Movement rather than stasis? Curiosity? A magic bullet. I inflicted pain everywhere, on Charlotte, on the young woman whose promises were so tantalizing, on the community of friends whose responses to my action were devastating. “One does not leave a woman in her sixties,” said an old friend, a part of my life since college, in her sixties herself. “Fuck your young woman as much as you like,” she said, “but don’t leave the marriage.”
A close friend, a writer with whom I had shared my work as he shared his with me, was outraged and began treating me with anger and disdain. “I thought that friends remain friends even though from time to time we may disapprove of each other’s behavior,” I said.
“Wrong. You are a friend until you do something I find morally repugnant,” he hissed at me and slammed my office door.
Aloneness turned out to be my hell, and though blindness did not help, it was only one of many reasons for feeling destitute, empty, hopeless. Blind people do live alone, often with dignity and grace. As a child, I liked being alone. The careers I have chosen are lonely ones but, at the end of the day, there was company. During the few years between Joan and Charlotte, I had cherished being alone, though with my children and friends nearby who filled my life with warmth and love.
A year living with Karen had its ecstatic pleasures, intellectual and sexual, as well as its sometimes trying adjustments to another person, with her unique history, neuroses, and obsessions, compounded by the fact that I’d had sixty-three years of life by that time, and Karen only thirty. Even though we were each acquainted with the other’s songs, Karen’s were harder for me, the old dog, to adjust to than, I think, mine were for her. Our mutual interest in literature, the visual arts, and sports was intoxicating, sometimes comical. “He’s showing bunt,” Karen would announce as she watched and I listened to a baseball game on television, or “It’s in the dirt!”
My children, Mark and Sarah, both older than Karen, were outraged, as were my friends and Charlotte’s children, my step-children, Jed and Maya. Charlotte was grief-stricken, enraged and humiliated, quite unprepared for the direction my actions had imposed on her. With the help of a few friends, she burned the sheets we’d slept on and kept on making exciting, often whimsical pottery. She continued to live in a smaller house built for her by her son Jed on our fabulous property and, fourteen years later, in 2008, died of heart disease and lung cancer.
In the middle of our first summer together, Karen, a Shakespeare scholar, left for New York, where she had been offered the directorship of a student production of All’s Well That Ends Well. In her absence, I began to realize not only that I was filling her need for a father figure but that, as wonderful as Karen was, we came from very different worlds, an abyss that would deepen into misery on both our parts. Why was this happening? I chose not to live with Charlotte and now I was choosing not to live with Karen. They both loved me. Karen seemed to thrive on my blindness, my dependence. I knew I couldn’t live alone and now I was proving that I couldn’t live with anyone. After swallowing a few—very few—sleeping pills, I ended up in the ER room where some sort of charcoal cocktail eventually cleared my gut of poison.
I moved to a dismal apartment in Montpelier from which I walked for miles with my guide dog Topper to and from a psychoanalyst who showed little understanding or tolerance for my misery. My life hit rock bottom. As I sobbed on his corduroy couch, he demonstrated empathy by bringing me a box of man-sized Kleenex, then returned to sit silently in his chair. Toward the end of one of my miserable sessions with this silent recipient of my grief, he picked up his phone and called the hospital psych ward. Turning away from me, he arranged for my incarceration.
“Me?” I said, stirring from the couch. Topper sat up, ears perked. “You’re sending me to the psych ward? The loony bin? What are they going to do to me?” I had mentioned suicide once or twice but, as usual, curiosity about the next world outrage won out. It was the mid-1990s, with Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, O.J. Simpson in California, the Serbs in Srebrenica. So if not suicide, how to survive? A few days before, as my arms were numbing from the wrists to the elbows, I felt as if, finally and for all time, I was going mad. Perhaps the loony bin made sense.
“I’ll call you when you’re settled in,” Dr. Shithead promised.
In the hospital, nurses came in and out of my room with pills served in little paper containers, and dragged me to intensely depressing group meetings featuring the psychologist-in-chief asking the one vital question: “Mr. Potok, did you take your meds today?”
Karen went on to have a successful life in the theater. As for Dr. Shithead, I should not have been surprised that he never called. My two-week incarceration simply changed the location of my misery.
And then, as close to a miracle, a deus ex machina, as it could possibly be, on the day before I was to be discharged from my two weeks in the loony bin, Loie called. I had not heard her voice for twenty-five years, and it took a few moments to fully understand who was on the other end of the phone line. She had come to Vermont to see old friends. “Everyone I met in the streets told me that you were not in good shape and that I’d be a rotten person if I didn’t call you.”
That night, for the first time in decades, I recalled our brief time together. How did I keep her magnificent image out of my mind for so long? Memories of Loie hovered not only in the brain stem to be called up when searching for erotic events, but in the finer frontal lobe where quieter emotions simmered. I couldn’t picture her body aging. But me? Twenty-five years before, I was driving, my hair was black, my own body lean and strong, all the teeth in my mouth mine. Now, blind and nearly bald, with white hairs poking out of nose and ears, fingernails striated and gums retracted, I recalled a story about Felix Mendelssohn’s grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his first meeting the woman whom he knew he wanted as his wife. Sh
e was shocked when she saw that he was a little weakling with a hunchback and a huge nose, anything but handsome. Standing there, facing each other, he told her that God had ordained that it was she who was to be born deformed, but that he had prayed to God to give him the hunchback and let her grow up straight. This not only touched her, but won her. She became his wife and bore him many children.
And so, a few days later, Loie knocked on my door. After hours of catching up, she lay down on the couch and I kneeled beside her. I couldn’t stop smiling. My fingers felt her lips, smiling as well. Little by little, we touched more of each other, blotting out the dissatisfaction, grimness, and loneliness in each of our lives. And, wonder of wonders, Loie never left.
8
TESTIMONY
1.
At the Hotel Rubinstein now, I try to shove all the betrayals from center stage, but as much as I try to keep my anger at bay, being in Poland brings previously unexpressed angers back with a vengeance. As Loie and I lie in bed, I reach out to touch her and try to find a pleasant topic. I tell her how much I’m enjoying hearing spoken Polish, my first language, its complicated sound a kind of music to my ears. Unable to sleep much in Krakow, my brain had begun recapturing forgotten words, declensions, conjugations. At breakfast in the morning, I give it a try, speaking it slowly, the acrobatics of tongue and teeth formidable. This high-wire act of crowded consonants, once so fluid and painless, now emerge like strands of meat forced through a grinder. Nevertheless, everyone responds to my efforts with exaggerated praise. “You speak so well,” they tell me, “so very well.” And I feel proud.
Mid-morning, Loie and I walk from Kazimierz to the center of Krakow, the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland, dating back to the seventh century. It is a center of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life, the capital of Poland from 1038 to 1569. The March weather continues to be lousy, cold and windy with snow on the streets and sidewalks. It’s a bad time to be in Poland. Still, I want Loie to get a taste of this very old and beautiful city, its Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architectural magnificence, the beautiful Vistula River flowing through it, surrounded by richly wooded landscapes. In my previous visit to Krakow, I still had some vision and loved walking from its Old Town to its perimeter. Here, until the war, 68,000 Jews lived, a quarter of Krakow’s population, most of them in the district of Kazimierz, which was more or less deeded to them in the thirteenth century. As soon as the Germans occupied Krakow in 1939, they built a ghetto across the Vistula River, and from there the train ride to Auschwitz was less than one hour. Today there are two hundred Jews left in Krakow.
In the medieval Market Square, Rynek Glowny, we find a bookstore where I long to get my hands on a children’s book that was read to me when I was a little boy by its author, Julian Tuwim, a friend of my family and an important poet of the time. When I tell the saleslady that I sat on Tuwim’s lap as he read me Lokomotywa (Locomotive), she is almost in tears. She tells me that the book, written in the thirties, is still a children’s favorite. Some of the words of the poem “Lokomotywa” have remained with me all my life, its language aping the deep sounds of the huge iron gorilla of a train, chugging and huffing, then gathering speed, rumbling, then flowing through the Polish countryside. I suspect that the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables of “Lokomotywa” and other Tuwim poems influenced my love of one particular lilt and flow of speech rather than another, as much as the horse chestnuts of the Saski Gardens influenced my love of paint.
This thirteenth-century square, the largest in Europe, the greatest tourist attraction in Krakow, is almost deserted, piles of snow and ice and howling wind making every step hazardous. On our way to an open café, we are accosted by a sleazy guy who offers a free lunch at McDonald’s if we take his tour of Auschwitz.
“I’m going to kick his ass,” Loie says. Another guy cuts in with an offer of pizza for his Auschwitz tour. Loie lets go of me and, as I imagine her pulling her arm back to slug him, the man flees. Loie’s arms and legs are very strong, thanks to her years of work at a coop bakery in Berkeley. “I hate this place,” she says as we duck into a bustling restaurant for hot soup. I want Loie to see Auschwitz, only thirty miles from here, probably as foolish a desire as the wish for the beloved to be excited by one’s birthplace. This is where you went to summer camp? Wow! The bushes where you made out with your girlfriend? Auschwitz is no more mine than hers, but I want to share this tribal grave with my wife even though I don’t do graves, not individual ones, not those of celebrity writers or other heroes, not my father’s. Not only that but I have mixed emotions about mass graves whose purpose is to concentrate the mind on the events that took place there, to soak up the miasma of horror, to have done with it, get over it, restore contentment, to have a transcendent experience, an epiphany, all of which might be better accomplished elsewhere.
My first time at Auschwitz was with Anita, who never forgave me for dragging her there. Our 1979 Auschwitz visit was, in fact, degrading. This killing ground, so well chosen by the German corporate beasts (although the existence of train tracks could have placed the death camp in many different places, and a minimum of local opposition could have been assured most anywhere in the country), was transformed into a museum. The blockhouses, the living quarters in which people had been stacked, were now cottages named for the many nationalities who contributed victims to the ovens. All European nations were represented except for Jews who, in fact, were not a nation. Off to the side, largely unseen and locked, stood a Jewish house whose entrance was unlocked only for groups considered to be large enough to disturb an Auschwitz functionary’s time away from painting her fingernails. When she did appear to perform this bothersome task of turning a key, her disgust was visible, her nose scrunched as if by a stinking outhouse.
Inside this “Jewish pavilion” the exhibition of photographs and artifacts was stunningly and movingly exhibited, but the feeling of being in enemy territory remained thick as the stench of rotten fish. In the structures designated by the names of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the rest, the displays of crutches and eyeglasses and vats of human hair were moving but pristine, like the British Museum’s ancient trinkets or masks from Africa. Even knowing that some of our family were put to death here did not eclipse the gentility of the raked paths, the barren but not unpleasant landscape, the picture postcards and now probably T-shirts.
Loie and I do not go to Auschwitz. That evening, rain and wind still howling outside the doors of the Hotel Rubinstein, we run across the street to the restaurant Shara, which is nearly deserted. Loie is not only tired but grumpy. “This weather is too much,” she says. We are shown to a table by a woman with a few basic English words, kielbasa and vodka primary among them. I remember the Polish words for potatoes and herring. She understands soup. “Did you want to go to Auschwitz at all?” I ask my wife.
“Of course I did,” she says, sounding a little annoyed, “but you’re a mess. I didn’t think you could make it.” The waitress brings herring in sour cream, and two little shot glasses of vodka. “Take mine too,” Loie says. Gladly, I polish them off. “I hate this place,” Loie says again.
“The restaurant?”
“Poland,” she says. “Do you realize what a mess you’ve been? You’re furious with everyone and everything. If anyone touched you, you’d smack them.” I fold up my white cane and plunk it noisily under the table. “Look, honey,” she says, “I’m not blaming you. You’re mourning for your lost family. I’m just saying that it’s been hard for me too. The place makes me feel like a wandering Jew.”
“Your roots are here too.” Even though Loie’s father was born in Czestochowa, he and his family escaped earlier in the century after a series of pogroms. I went to Czestochowa during my previous trip to Poland and hated the place, home to the Polish Catholic icon, their Black Madonna, and a pilgrimage site like Lourdes in France, crutches hanging on the church’s walls, testaments to the power of simplemindedness.
My mou
th is stuffed with kielbasa and cabbage, and I’m ravenous for the dish of boiled potatoes waiting on the side. “It’s amazing that you love Polish food,” Loie says, not yet touching the plate of herring in front of her. “Your mother never cooked.” I’m chewing and say nothing. “Right?” she asks.
I look down at the food and I’m struck with the lack of sensual memories from this place except for the eroticism of the horse chestnuts in the Saski Gardens. Is there not a single smell or taste that brings me the ecstatic nostalgia for childhood I hear so much about? From my many weeks with one governess or another, I cannot even recapture the smell of pines in Zakopane, or of lilacs and lilies in the meadows of Otwock, or the ocean smells of Gdynia. I love the taste of borscht, kielbasa, and pierogi, but these tastes, together with chicken Kiev, were born in the Russian Tea Room, not the pensions of Rabka or of Number Four Moniuszki. Jewish cooking was probably banned from my parents’ kitchen as were Yiddish, rabbis, and talk of ghettos or shtetls. I’m afraid that aromas and tastes disappeared together with the sense of family, probably embedded in the unreachable neurons of the amygdala. So what remains in the nostrils or the tongue? Fantasies of revenge, hatred, and anger.
During my previous time in Poland, I met the movie director P., a beloved troublemaker who, at that time of Soviet occupation, was treasured by sophisticated people, victims of oppression, scholars of allegory and allusion, and experts in partitions, insurrections, and consolidations who were eager to mock, if not yet overthrow, the moribund Soviet regime. Clearly, the arts had an urgency beyond the aesthetic. Art and poetry were dangerous, and I envied all of these artist-fighters’ life and death struggle with totalitarian ideology, and the small, furtive, cultural guerilla actions that inflicted casualties. Although I couldn’t possibly keep up with his intake of vodka, I had greatly enjoyed his company, our bantering about life and art; I loved the Polishness of the man, a jolly freedom fighter.