by Joanna Gruda
All the soldiers took their guns out of their holsters and we left the station together. It was pitch dark in the town, except for occasional flashes of light, accompanied by the sound of explosions. We could hear isolated gunshots. I got the impression that the news the war was over had not traveled this far. We made our way slowly into Wrocław. Another group of soldiers suddenly came around the corner in the dark. We stopped short. All the soldiers raised their guns. Long minutes went by. In all those years of conflict, this was the closest I had ever come to anything remotely resembling real warfare. And it was happening now that the war was over. Or at least, I had thought it was over.
After a while, one man left our group. He was holding a flashlight and he shone it on his face. From the other side, a soldier started walking toward us, also shining his flashlight on his face. They stood directly facing each other. All eyes were glued on them. They exchanged some papers. Finally they shook hands and embraced one another. There was laughter from both camps, and everyone put their guns away.
Our envoy came back to inform us that it was a detachment of Russian soldiers, not German, as we had feared. We went over to them, everyone shook hands and patted each other on the shoulders. Our group set off for the city hospital. And that’s where Emil and I ended up staying.
My father was very busy at the hospital, even though I didn’t understand the exact nature of his activities there. He visited the patients, wounded soldiers for the most part, and spoke with them, filled out papers for them, and had discussions with the hospital management.
Since the beginning of our train journey, I hadn’t been feeling very well. I was aching all over, and I felt weak. And now I was in a bad way. All my joints were painful and I was finding it more and more difficult to walk. Emil didn’t seem to be taking my state very seriously, and tried to cure me with shots of pepper vodka. But eventually he had to face facts: whether he believed my illness was serious or not, I had reached a point where I could hardly walk straight. He wasn’t worried exactly, but he saw he could no longer force me to go along with him: he would have to do something and have a doctor look at me. He dragged me out to a car and only managed to get me inside it with great effort. There was no position where I felt comfortable, and I seemed to hurt all over, all the time.
I don’t know why Emil didn’t simply have a doctor from the hospital in Wrocław examine me instead of taking me by car, when I was in pain, hours away from the town of Łódê, where I was taken directly to the military hospital.
The doctor who examined me had studied in Paris and spoke fluent French—that did me a world of good! He loved it when I used slang, even though he didn’t understand everything; he actually spoke astonishingly colloquial French himself for someone who rolled his r’s the way he did. And while he was learning new words of Parisian slang I was quietly learning Polish again with the help of some kind nurses, who saw to it that I spent several hours a day in a heating device. But my aches did not go away.
One of the first words of Polish I learned at the hospital was pluskwa. I was with a dozen other patients in the same ward. My first night at the hospital, when it was time for bed, the patient in the next bed tried to explain something to me, waving his arms. I understood noc (night) and a few other words, but not the whole message. One word came back on a regular basis, this word pluskwa, but I had no idea what it was referring to.
When everybody was in bed, they switched off the lights. I tried to find a comfortable position in my bed, in spite of the pain. A few seconds later, the lights came back on, and all the patients sat up abruptly and began pounding on their beds with their bedroom slippers. They gestured to me to do likewise. I set about it somewhat halfheartedly, and then I saw little red dots spring up all over my sheets. Now I got it: pluskwa meant “bedbug.” Every night we had to go through the same rigmarole, as clearly it was not the final solution for getting rid of the critters.
After a few days had gone by, my doctor came to me with the diagnosis: rheumatic fever.
“Bloody fucking hell! Where did you pick that up?”
He examined the back of my throat closely.
“Your tonsils look healthy. So we’ll remove them.”
“What?”
“I bet that will get rid of the pain! It’s often a bacteria due to tonsillitis that attacks the joints. So we’ll do it right away, although the nurse is on leave . . . ”
And that is how I found myself assisting on my own operation. The doctor explained that he absolutely needed my help, because there was a shortage of nurses in the hospital. He made me learn the names of all the instruments, explaining that I would have to hand them to him as he asked for them one after the other.
“If you get the wrong instrument, it could be serious, I might botch the operation. You have to concentrate. I’ll only give you a local anesthesia, so you’ll have all your wits about you. Do you think you are up to it?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not going to be scared stiff?”
My pride prevented me from showing just how terrified I was. At the time I did not realize that his method aimed to make me forget fear and pain, because there was indeed a shortage of nurses, and he had nothing in the way of effective anesthesia. It hardly mattered, I took my job very seriously and had my tonsils removed, by what was virtually cold surgery, and I was neither bound nor in pain, so focused was I on my work as an assistant, since any error on my part could have disastrous consequences.
“You see your tonsils? They look like they’re in perfect condition. Hang on a moment, I’m just going to cut them . . . ”
I watched attentively. The interior of my tonsils was full of pus. It was disgusting to think I’d had that in my throat for god knows how long.
“You see? I was right. You’re going to start to feel better, but you’ve had a nasty illness, and while it might have only licked at your joints, it has bitten your heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll have to go easy on your heart. You have to forget about sports, and settle for a job that doesn’t require physical effort—something in an office, sitting on your butt.”
“But why?”
“Your heart has been affected, there’s no doubt; that’s the way it is, it will always be weak.”
The thing was, I really had no desire to spend my life sitting on my butt. I wanted to become a great journalist and travel all over the world and file reports.
CHAPTER 39
And Now?
As the doctor had predicted, the pain in my joints soon disappeared. And I was just as fit as before. I decided not to pay any attention to his advice; I wouldn’t allow that idiotic illness that had only lasted a few weeks to dictate my future.
Back in Warsaw, it was time for major decisions. My mother had promised we would go back to Paris, but I could tell she had no intention of doing so. Lena felt at home, now that Poland was communist, and she had no desire to go back to a country that wasn’t. At first I was furious, because if I had followed her all the way to Poland, it was precisely because she had promised I could go back to France for my studies. At the same time, it was normal for her to want to live with my father. Since he worked for the Polish army and didn’t know a word of French, it was out of the question for him to want to go and live in France.
So I decided to go back on my own. Given the fact I had no passport, either French or Polish, there were a few administrative things I had to take care of first. I wrote to Tobcia, because she was the only person I thought I could go and live with. And while I waited for her answer, I began the formalities to get my papers.
Tobcia was taking a long time to answer. Obtaining my papers was incredibly complicated. And Lena, meanwhile, was doing a very efficient and persuasive job with her propaganda.
“What will you live on? If I send you zlotys, you won’t be able to do a thing with them. And I jus
t found a job in Łódê. We could live there for a while, you could go to school in Polish. The destruction in Łódê is not nearly as bad as in Warsaw, the atmosphere there would be quite different.”
I have translated this conversation so that it would be in the same language as the rest of my story, but Lena spoke Polish to me now, because I could understand almost everything. Yet again, she managed to persuade me. I was not sure I wanted to stay in Poland forever, but I could see that for the time being going back to France was unrealistic. Once I was an adult, if I still wanted to, then I could go back. For my university studies, for example.
We were given a two room apartment in Łódê, where my father, who had to travel from town to town for his work—he was a major now and in charge of an organization which helped demobbed soldiers reintegrate into civilian life—came to visit us from time to time. I was enrolled at the school, even though I had no papers—I was far from being the only one in such a situation. To enroll, all I had to do was give my name, date and place of birth. The administrators knew that my papers would come through someday, even though it might take a long time. I changed my life for the umpteenth time. A new life under the name of Julian Gruda. And that would remain my name for the rest of my days.
EPILOGUE
I’m on my way back to the house, just past the bridge, unmistakable with its green roof. My dog, Nez-Roux, is running ahead of me in circles. She still hasn’t lost hope of winning a race against the cars. Spring has come early this year, too early, according to my neighbor, Mr. Harrison, who is worried about his thousands of daylilies. I can hear the cries of the huge flocks of white geese, returning from the warmth. There is no ice on the river by the house. That too is astonishing. Normally in the month of March there are chunks of ice of every size and shape rushing past.
I turned eighty-two this autumn. No doubt I am living the last of my many lives here in Sainte-Angèle-de-Laval, not far from Trois-Rivières, where I worked for thirty years at the university as a professor of biochemistry.
If someone had told me when I was little that when I grew up I would be a science professor! In the end, I studied animal physiology and biochemistry at the University of Moscow. Because even though I learned Polish again very quickly, I didn’t master the written language sufficiently to study literature in Poland or become a journalist.
After I came back from Moscow I lived in Poland for many years, until 1968. I waited until my father died before I left the country. It would have been a hard blow for him; for all his life he remained a true patriot, and he would have seen my departure as a betrayal. Life can be astonishing. There I was, I had wanted to be a journalist in order to describe the virtues of communism, and among other things, I became a biochemist and fled from the Eastern Bloc. I lost my faith in 1956, when the Soviet tanks invaded Hungary.
Lena stayed in Poland until her death in 1989. She remained a member of the Communist Party until the rise of the Solidarity movement; she was carried away by the anti-communist fervor that reigned throughout the country, and in 1981 she handed in her party membership card.
I have to go and spend two weeks in France at the end of the month. There’s no one left there from my childhood, from the days when I spoke the language of dogs. When you get old, there are bound to be fewer and fewer chances of finding the people you ran around with when you all wore short trousers. My daughters have made numerous attempts through the Internet to find Roger Binet. To no avail. They would have so liked to give me this present, even if it turned out that he was dead—at least to find out how he had lived, the boy whose identity enabled me to get through the war.
Last week was the eighth anniversary of Geneviève’s death. She was a marvelous woman, all her life, involved socially and politically, always ready to help those less fortunate than her, and explain to her children and grandchildren everything they wanted to know about history, politics, literature . . . She never lost her patience, except in the face of injustice. Arnold did not age as well. Nevertheless I always considered him to be my spiritual, or rather my political father. He could be gruff, and sometimes downright disagreeable. But he was always pleased to see me, when from time to time I went to Poland for a visit, after I had moved to Quebec.
This is where the tale of my childhood ends, the chaotic childhood of a boy who knew how to speak the language of dogs. I’m looking forward to sharing it with my grandson, Émile—he’s the one who is so very fond of raptors. He is the only one of my children and grandchildren who has inherited my gift for communicating with animals.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Poland, Joanna Gruda arrived in Trois-Rivières, Canada, by boat at the age of two. She acted in the theater and worked as a comedian for many years, and she is a translator and an editor. Revolution Baby is her debut novel.
1Arise, children of the Fatherland/The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny/Raises its bloody banner
Do you hear, in the countryside/The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They’re coming right into your arms/To cut the throats of your sons and women!
To arms, citizens!/Form your battalions!
Let’s march, let’s march!/Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!