The Girl from Krakow

by Alex Rosenberg

  “I didn’t report you.”

  “To the police or Stalin’s stooges in the Comintern?”

  “Neither. Can I buy you a glass of something?” She nodded, and they moved to the nearest of the four cafés on the Place de Sorbonne. Wordlessly she led him to the inside seats—cheaper and a little more secluded. He liked that.

  She lit another cigarette from the stub of her first and offered him one. They ordered two blondes, light Alsatian lagers. “So, did you buy all that talk in the meeting?” She exhaled. Her skeptical tone surprised him.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Not a word.”

  “But you helped organize the meeting.”

  “It’s the family business. My father is on the political committee of the ICL. You don’t have to believe in the lyrics to like the melody.”

  “I thought the analysis was correct.”

  She frowned. “The only times dialectical materialism is right about what’s going to happen, it’s right by accident.”

  Part of him wanted to argue. But he didn’t want to put her off. “It makes a lot of sense,” he hedged.

  “Yes, Das Kapital is a wonderful story. But good stories are easy to make up. Too easy. When it came to predicting the future, Marx got just about everything wrong.” When Tadeusz failed to contradict her, she decided to carry on. “The only thing Marxism ever got right was the emptiness of bourgeois morality. But Marxists don’t realize their analysis destroyed proletarian values too.”

  “I don’t follow.” Tadeusz didn’t like admitting it. But he liked listening to her.

  “It’s all in The German Ideology.”

  Tadeusz looked at Lena blankly.

  “That’s the title of a book by Marx you haven’t read yet.” She went on unbidden. “Anyway, Marx was right about bourgeois morality. But he didn’t realize his analysis applies to his own values too. When the dictatorship of the proletariat is achieved, it will just be another case of the economic substructure, the new means of production, determining a new set of values. But that won’t make them right.”

  “What are you saying?” She was going much too fast for him.

  “Look, five hundred years ago, le droit du seigneur was established morality.”

  “What’s that?” Tadeusz was now totally out of his depth. This woman knew more history than he did.

  Lena decided to slow down. “The feudal lord had the right to a night with a maiden before her marriage to one of his vassals. Three hundred years later, le droit du seigneur is rape, and the French Revolution proclaims the rights of man and of the citizen. D’accord—OK? Now people own their labor, and they can sell to the highest bidder. What makes that a moral improvement? It’s just a change forced on everyone by the industrial revolution. When the proletariat finally seizes power, will that make communist morality right? Only if feudalism made le droit du seigneur right. Get it?” She fell silent.

  He thought he understood. “What will make proletarian morality right?”

  She glared at him. “Nothing will. There is no right and wrong; there’s just what the means of production force on us.”

  “That’s not Marxism. That’s nihilism. Where did you get these ideas?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s just say they’re going around.”

  “I’m confused. You go about pasting up posters in places you could get caught by the flics. You go to meetings where students and workers are rallied to the cause of the left. But you don’t really share these values?”

  “You don’t get it. Of course I’m for the revolution. But that doesn’t make me right. It’s just a matter of taste. I told you I don’t believe the lyrics. I just like the tune.” Lena lit another cigarette and pulled at a watch pinned to the blouse. Suddenly Tadeusz was afraid she was going to leave. He didn’t want the evening to end. “Can I buy another round?”

  “I have a better idea. Let’s go down to the Latin Quarter, get a bottle of wine, and take it to my place.”

  As they walked down the Boul’ Mich toward the Seine, she casually slipped her arm through his, and he could again smell the trace of Arpège. Her nationality may have been proletarian, but her citizenship was Parisian.

  Outwardly stolid, Tadeusz was giddy with expectation. He never expected to lose his virginity so young and so easily. Why had she taken him up? Was it simply that he had been willing to listen?

  They drifted down the hill, under the leafy plane trees, past the ruins of the Cluny. Lena’s thigh brushing against his, Tadeusz ceased to envy the couples they passed. The avenue opened up at the vast bronze statue of the winged Saint Michel facing the Seine. The place was alive with groups and couples and the ubiquitous clochards—winos—cadging spare change.

  They turned from the broad space to narrow streets of the Quarter. The épicerie on the Rue de la Harpe was still doing a lively trade at ten in the evening. They split the price of a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Then Lena took them back to the Seine, where they passed along the bouquinistes’ closed book lockers till they reached the Rue Bonaparte. Walking away from the river, she led him past the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Then they turned right into the Rue Jacob.

  At a nondescript door, Lena took out a skeleton key and opened the lock. She dropped her purse in the hall and said in a loud voice to no one in particular, “I’m back.” There was a dim light on in the kitchen, but no response. She led Tadeusz up four flights of stairs and opened a door at the end of the hall. He was not going to inquire of this nihilist if her family approved of her taking unknown young men of twenty-two to bed.

  Lena didn’t ask him if he had done this before. Quietly she took command. “There’s no rush. We’ll go slowly so we can both enjoy it. No one will disturb us.”

  She faced him and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it up from his trousers, and dropped it behind him. There was no undershirt to deal with. He moved both his hands to the sleeves of her off-the-shoulder blouse and slowly pulled. As he had hoped a dozen hours or so before, the blouse finally fell to her forearms. He looked down at two small breasts, which seemed to bud around the darkest areolas he would ever see. She raised her hands to each side of his head, drew him toward her, and kissed him with an open mouth, inviting his tongue with hers, while his hands reached for those breasts and began slowly to brush across the nipples. She smiled, and he seemed to hear the word “Bien.” Did that mean “Good,” or was it an expression of impatience—“Well?”

  Now Lena dropped her skirt and he his trousers and shorts. With both hands on his shoulders, she pushed him to his knees. “Me first. Then you,” she announced. He did not resist but moved down slowly, managing to unroll her drawers as he did so. He had never done any of this, but he knew enough to follow her unspoken cues. There was no rush . . .

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was in February 1934 that Tadeusz began to realize he’d have to get out of Paris. Either that or give up medicine, his parents’ subventions, and any thought of a comfortable life. If he stayed there would be excitement, risk, perhaps even the chance to be a hero, lots of revolutionary solidarity, and penury.

  From the summer of ’33, Tadeusz had been spending less and less time at the Ecole de Médecine. By then he knew quite well enough that the lectures didn’t matter. What mattered was transcribing whole textbooks into your memory. Memorizing was something he could do anytime. Meanwhile, there was too much else he cared about, and nothing much he had to do. There was Lena, her friends, friends of her friends. His fellow medical students, French and foreign, took him drinking. There was an overlapping cinema crowd he fell in with, endlessly fascinated by the intertwined life and art of Jean Renoir. In late spring and early fall, he could always find time for long afternoons playing chess under the centuries-old chestnuts in the sepulchral Place Saint-Sulpice. Saturday mornings he’d be searching for trophies of the 1870 Commune in the Marché aux Puces up beyond the Porte de Clignancourt. Somewhere he acquired an inexpensive interest in urban architecture and spent mornings walking from Mo
ntparnasse to Montmartre.

  And always there was the politics. In the fifth and the sixth arrondissements, everyone was a militant, organized into an array of left and far left splinters. One evening a friend sporting a length of black comb under his nose, with a huge cigar in his maw, solemnly and repeatedly announced, “Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.” Only the seriously Stalinist could suppress a laugh.

  By May Day that spring, Tadeusz had not been in the Ecole de Médecine more than twice in five months. Every time he had opened a medical book, someone had come knocking at his door to attend another meeting, demo, protest. He did not have the willpower to say no. He went. But he was unable to dissemble the skepticism he had learned from Lena and her small group of cynical Marxists over the previous year. He knew that once you got in bed with the Stalinists, you’d be murdered in your sleep. He also knew that Trotskyite dissent was as futile as it was fun. In fact, it was too much fun. He had to leave Paris if he was not to be swallowed up by the Left Bank, if he was ever to become a physician.

  When he returned to Karpatyn that summer, he explained to his parents that he wanted to study tropical medicine and needed to move to the medical faculty at Marseille. Besides, he told them, in the south living was cheaper, and his chances of passing into the final years and then securing a post were far better.

  Once Tadeusz got to Marseille, it would have been easy to make all the same mistakes he’d made in Paris. But from unknown resources came a steely determination to do nothing but study.

  In the late spring of 1936, Monsieur Tadeusz Sommermann presented himself at the national medical examinations, l’externat, that would determine his chances to begin clinical medical training, l’internat. The evening of the last exam, he took the night train for Paris. The results would be published. He could just as easily buy a copy of Journal Officiel at a kiosk on the Place l’Odéon as he could at Marseille’s St. Charles station.

  A week later Tadeusz had the good news and the bad. He had passed, but not high enough for clinical training at any hospital in l’Hexagone—metropolitan France. His marks in tropical medicine were just high enough for the health service outre-mer, provided he could pass the colonial service concours that autumn. He knew it wouldn’t wear. He couldn’t bear the thought of studying for another examination. He’d never be able to recapture the discipline he’d found in Marseille.

  That spring the remittances from home had ceased. He’d saved a certain amount in Marseille. It was a cheap town, and he had been too busy swotting to spend all his allowance. There was enough to spend the summer in Paris, if he was careful.

  While Tadeusz had been sequestering himself in the library of the Ecole de Médecine in Marseille, things were happening that would solve his immediate problems rather nicely. It was politics, of course. In February and in May, Popular Front governments opened for the season in Spain and France. The French left, almost all of it, had finally found a way to band together. In Spain another Popular Front had defeated a reactionary government at the polls. In France Leon Blum’s Socialist Party carried all before it, at least for a time. But in Spain the triumph of the left almost immediately precipitated a military coup. By July there was a full-fledged civil war in Spain. The next month, talk began in France of forming brigades—International Brigades—to defend the Spanish Republic. In September, recruiting centers opened in Paris.

  His money nearly gone and unwilling to continue sponging off his friends, one morning Tadeusz found himself before a nondescript building on the Rue de Turenne, waiting for a Republican recruiting office to open. It was not one of those streets daily hosed down by proprietary shopkeepers. In fact, several storefronts were shuttered. The gutter was thick with cigarette ends, and loose newsprint skittered down the pavement in the gusts. There were several rather scruffy-looking young men already in line, some with papers in their hands. It was a chilly morning for October, but none was wearing a coat. More than one exuded the strong odor of street living.

  When Tadeusz took out his cigarettes, le gar in front of him noticed. Offering a cigarette he couldn’t really afford to give away, Tadeusz struck up a conversation. “I see you’ve already got some papers in your hand. What’s the drill?”

  “It’s the usual. They want to see carte d’identité, and permis de conduire if you say you can drive. Discharge papers from a real army make a big hit.”

  “How about medical qualifications?”

  “No, they give you a physical after they—” Tadeusz interrupted. “I meant do they need doctors?”

  “Sais pas—Dunno.” The man shrugged.

  “What are you going to do?

  “Anything. I’m from Lille. There’s not much work there. Spain is sunny, and they’ll feed me.”

  “Sounds like you’re already signed up,” Tadeusz noted. “Why are you in line?”

  “I’m back with my clearance. I had to be interviewed by the political office. Which union? CGT—the communists, or CGTU—the socialist one? How did I vote in the first round of voting last spring? What newspaper do I read? Since the PCF—the French Communist Party—and the Russians are paying, they don’t want Trots or other troublemakers.”

  Now, twenty minutes after the advertised opening, the staff came along, three young women and an older man. They opened the office and sat down behind desks. The woman at reception handed out forms. Tadeusz went to a chair and filled them out, trying hard not to blot the porous oak tag with his fountain pen. He brought the forms back to reception. The woman looked them over and nodded him to the gray-haired man at another desk, who was evidently in charge.

  Without looking up the older man took the forms. “Medical graduate, eh? What’s in it for you, fighting for the Republic?”

  “Don’t they need doctors?”

  “Badly. But doctors don’t particularly need us.” Tadeusz noted the pronoun.

  “This one does. I can’t finish in France. Maybe in Spain I can help fight the fascists and get qualified.”

  “I see. Well, you’ll have to satisfy the political bureau. It’s the rule for all university students.” The gray-beard handed him another form with an address in the Avenue Jean-Jaurès. There was no point hesitating. He decided to go straight there.

  It was in a building that housed the party newspaper—L’Humanité—and the Soviet trade delegation. They weren’t taking any pains to conceal who was vetting volunteers. A man with close-cropped hair and steel teeth—Tadeusz had never actually seen steel teeth before—took his forms and invited him to sit.

  “Ever been a member of the Communist Party of France?”

  “No.”

  “How about the ICL?” It was Lena’s faction.

  “What’s that?” Tadeusz tried to sound quizzical, but the party hack was not buying.

  “Don’t play dumb. They’re the Trots, organizing world revolution on the Left Bank.”

  “Look, I’m from Marseille.” He handed over his lecture book, stamped and inscribed.

  “D’accord—OK.” The man examined the papers while he spoke. “Best be straight with us. Eventually we’ll get around to checking you out.” Finally he looked up, hard, into Tadeusz’s eyes. The stare held him in its grip for long seconds. Then the face looked down at the papers again. He stamped Tadeusz’s forms.

  And so back to the Rue de Turenne. By the time the day was over, Tadeusz had a ticket to Barcelona and instructions about where to present himself for military medical training with the International Brigades.

  The Barcelona train left from the Gare d’Austerlitz about eight o’clock in the evening. He had a window seat in second class, nonsmoking, facing a family speaking a language that wasn’t Spanish. It must have been Catalan. Next to him was a woman who did speak French and was visibly in the last stages of pregnancy.

  They both watched the setting sun paint the wheat fields yellow. Long shadows were cast across them by plane trees guiding the country roads that ran along the tracks. It was almost dark by the time the train rattled p
ast Auxerre, and in the dusk he finally felt he could venture a question.

  “Should you be traveling?”

  “No choice. My family lives in Tarragona. I was alone in Paris.”

  There was no ring on her left hand. She noticed his glance. It was already too dark in the compartment to detect a blush, but he thought he felt one. For no reason he could think of, he put his hand over hers on the armrest and said quietly, “Don’t worry. I’m a doctor.” They fell silent, and when the train stopped at two o’clock in Le Creusot, he awoke to find her head resting on his shoulder. He did not mind.

  Awakened by the sunrise, Tadeusz left the compartment for a smoke. He leaned out of the corridor window and let the wind rush past his face. Exactly why did he feel so good about going to Spain? Zeal for the Republic? Revolutionary enthusiasm? It certainly infected Tadeusz, watching the newsreel snips. There was that wonderful Communist woman orator they called La Passionara spreading her arms wide, enveloping her audience, promising them “¡No pasarán!”—They will not pass! Seeing the anarchist with the funny name, Durruti, leading his column of soldiers into Zaragoza brought tears as Tadeusz sat in the dark of the movie theater. He was glad no one could see. Lena would have laughed at him. The tears also welled up when he sang “The International.” What had she said? You don’t have to believe the words to enjoy the tune?

  But he could admit, if only to himself, it wasn’t solidarity driving Tadeusz to Spain. It wasn’t romance either. It wasn’t even calculation, though he later would pretend to himself and others that it was. It was just the easiest thing to do, the line of least resistance. It turned the page, wiped the slate clean, disembarrassed Tadeusz of all the obligations he had built up in Paris, Marseille, even as far back as Poland—all his covenants with his parents. He wouldn’t need to bow to conditions for their continued support, still less come home. He wouldn’t even have to excuse or explain his choices to them, or to anyone, for that matter. He wouldn’t have to sit any more exams. None of this made him feel heroic, of course, but at least he could look that way. And who knew, perhaps he’d become a hero. He was, after all, going to have to be a soldier, wasn’t he?