Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  I walk to the campus on my first day, feeling as if I’ve arrived in a place that has been waiting for me the whole of my life. I think, ‘Vera, Werunia, you clever girl. The Germans couldn’t kill you, and here you are at a great university and your brains will make you famous.’ Birds – lapwings, wrynecks and cuckoos – are singing in the trees. I think, ‘Werunia, you are beautiful, too – many adventures await you.’

  Do I think that? Maybe not. Maybe I only think it now when I look back. But it is true that my heart is full and that I have a sense, on this day, that all the things that would have been lost to me if I had died in Lvov are now crowding around me, like the flowers of a garden, so many colours reaching for me in their brilliance.

  I think, ‘A university is our greatest invention.’ I am full of brains and beauty. How many times in your life do you feel this: that you are where you are meant to be? I think of the books I will open, of the smell of their pages. I will spend hours and hours and years of hours in the library of the university, with such a silence spread around me, a silence like a type of honey that you draw in through the pores of your skin, sweet and nourishing. No-one will come to where I sit and say, ‘You are a Jew. Get out of here.’ Other students will watch me with my head over a book, breathing in the smell of the pages, drinking in the honey of silence, and they will say, ‘I wonder what she’s reading, that beautiful girl; by the look on her face, you can see she is clever.’

  I attend my first lectures, relishing the company of the students around me. Are we not here in the same endeavour?

  I am studying, within the journalism course, economics, Western philosophy (including Marxism), modern history, ancient philosophy and logic. I love every subject – every hour of study of every subject. I walk into lectures as if I have come from the sea and my lungs are full of the most bracing air on earth.

  A few years earlier, Warsaw was one of the worst hells we had ever made on our earth, and now look at what has succeeded it.

  I sit, whenever I can, close to the best-looking young men. Also close to the brightest. Sometimes the brightest and the best-looking are one and the same. So much the better for me.

  My lecturers, most of them, I adore. My logic teacher is Professor Tadeusz Kotarbiński, who already has a fine reputation in the world of philosophy. He is seventy years old when he becomes my teacher, and is tall and still fairly slim, with receding grey hair and a handsome moustache, more gorgeous than Stalin’s. His great contribution to logic is his ‘reism’ theory. What I am expected to grasp – and I do – is that we must think of three categories of names. First there are singular names, such as ‘Vera Miller’, which is a grammatical subject and refers to people or things, such as me. Second, there are general names – ‘woman’, ‘chair’ – that are subjects in what, he explains, are universal propositions, when we mean ‘every A is B’ – meaning, ‘every woman is a woman’, ‘every chair is a chair’. And this category obviously allows for any number of chairs, any number of women, but each chair is a chair and each woman is a woman. Are you following this? Concentrate, because it’s actually quite thrilling. And finally there is the category Kotarbiński calls ‘empty names’, such as ‘gorgon’ and ‘harpie’, which do not exist and cannot be the subject of any true proposition, since nothing true can be said about something that has no objective existence – including ‘God’.

  Studying logic helps me to understand how to think, and what thought is. Much of what we study in logic is completely abstract, but it fills me with wonder. It does so despite the monstrous irrationality of what I have lived through. To know that people continue to be fascinated by the abstractions of logic even when the world is burning – that is good.

  Another wonderful teacher is Leszek Kołakowski, whose subject is the history of philosophy and political philosophy, mostly French rationalism. Kołakowski is much younger than Kotarbiński – only eight years older than me, a brilliant man. He has a long, lean, naked face, high Polish cheekbones, a tall forehead for a skull full of brains, eyes that he can narrow and make mysterious, and a manner both ironical and entirely serious. He always wears a tie, and very often a sleeveless pullover under his suit coat. In his coat pocket, you can see the tip of a white handkerchief protruding. But he never looks dapper. His clothes are well worn, as if they go through the same rigour that his brain goes through, the worn look of his clothes recording the hard process of thought that goes on behind that tall forehead.

  Like me and a million others, Kołakowski struggled to educate himself during the Nazi occupation of Poland. He struggled more than I did, and more successfully. An underground education system was in operation throughout the Nazi years, and Kołakowski went in secret from location to location to meet with teachers or with couriers. At these clandestine classes, books would be exchanged – novels, poetry, philosophical texts. Kołakowski continued reading all through the war. Think of that! Above ground, the Nazis in their madness were attempting to create a world that nobody would wish to live in; below ground, dedicated people with a vision projected beyond the war, beyond the Nazi frenzy, quietly furnished the ambitions of people who wanted a world of learning and objective enquiry.

  So Kołakowski lived through the frenzy, and after the war studied at Łódź University, and then at Warsaw University, where I was enrolled. He was a communist all through the war, when it was a death sentence if the Nazis got their hands on you, but after the war, as a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party, when the communists were on top, he began to question the foundations of Stalinism. This came after a trip to Moscow in the early 1950s. He looked around and hated what he saw. Marx’s political philosophy suggested one future only for the state, but that future was not totalitarianism.

  Kołakowski became critical of Stalin, while still remaining a communist, but in Poland at that time it was unacceptable to say anything about Stalin that was not complimentary.

  Do you know what the great defect of Stalinism was – aside from the propensity of Stalin himself to murder people by the millions? The Stalinists wanted robots: machine men and women who only say what is written on a block of steel and hammered inside their heads. In the ideal world of the Stalinists, subversion could never exist. What is important to me – love, mischief, getting drunk at midday and spending the afternoon in bed with an interesting man – that was poison to the Stalinists. They didn’t want human beings, in all their madness and stupidity and genius and foolishness; that sort of thing made them sick.

  Fortunately, human beings remain as ridiculous as they are no matter what system of government they live under.

  Kołakowski wants a ‘humanist Marxism’. Maybe such a thing isn’t possible, but that’s what he wants. He makes the authorities nervous. He makes many people nervous. But not me. I adore him. He has the sort of charisma that gives a handsome man the power to see you naked even when you’re fully dressed.

  In his classes, I think, ‘If he wants to sleep with me, sure.’

  Here’s a strange thing about me, if you’re ready: I carry out of the ghetto a love of life that is completely irresponsible. I carry many other things, too, things that fill up my nightmares. But just as powerful is this irresponsible hunger for life, for beauty. I want to gorge myself on it. I read a great work of literature – Tolstoy, for instance – and it’s in my blood like vodka. You could take a sample from the fluids of my body after I read something great and test it in a lab, and you would find it there: Tolstoy. It is the same with paintings, the same with music. Matisse, Chopin – in me, art and sex work through the same organs. Before a great painting – by Matisse, if you like; it could be any of a thousand – but before a painting that gets into my blood, I want to dance, thrust myself into some physical involvement. It’s like the hunger you have for a lovely man, someone beautiful and interesting at the same time, if possible. You can’t sit back and admire him, and nothing else. You want the physical complement. I want to fill myself up, like a glutton, more and more.


  I can go further: the ghetto, the war, the compartments, my father and what he asked me to do – these have made a type of monster out of me. I am a monster. Not all monsters are bad. Most artists are monsters, the great ones and the not so great. A monster has appetites in her or him that go beyond what is wholesome and pleasant. Strange appetites, strange hungers. That’s what I’m like.

  But I’m a very beautiful monster, I have to say.

  12

  THE BOHEMIANS

  The intellectuals of Warsaw live the sort of bohemian life that had been fashionable in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and for a century before that. The people I know drink for most of the night, go to bed with each other whenever the opportunity comes up (all the time), take art and writing seriously – which means that they are happy to make jokes about artists and writers even while they revere them (or some of them) – and ridicule the communist government. We are communists ourselves, but our version of communism allows for much more fun than the government’s version. Fun – enjoying ourselves – has a higher priority than almost anything else.

  I think: but this is me. It is as if I’ve been rehearsing for years for a part in this production – The Half-Mad Intellectuals of Warsaw – without knowing it. Not that it bothers me, but I’ve been wondering what sort of person I am, how all the bits of me hang together: the soft and spiky bits, the sweetness and the ranting, all the ideas in my head, many of them rude, others subversive.

  All at once, I’m surrounded by people who are crazy about me. This type of endorsement that seems to confirm everything about a person is rare. In certain situations, you may wish you were more of this and less of that. Or you may be aware of a type of censure radiating from those around you when you are doing no more than being true to yourself. You shrug it off, but an uneasiness settles in that you could do without. Among the bohemians, everything about me is accepted.

  While I think of it, I am to experience this type of relief in Australia twenty years later, when Gough Whitlam claims victory in the 1972 federal election and, over the space of a week, throws open windows and doors that let fresh air into the musty, stale-smelling suburban bungalow of Australian political culture. It had to happen; the place stunk to high heaven of lamb chops grilled to a crisp, the fumes trapped in the kitchen, in the hallways, in the bedrooms, in the living room.

  By that time, I’d spent fourteen years in Australia feeling like an escapee from a freak show. I would mention Dostoyevsky – or Gogol, Flaubert, Paul Klee, Kandinsky – and I’d be ridiculed as a pseudo-intellectual. I’d think: ‘What the fuck?’ Even Australian intellectuals are inclined to disguise their erudition, disown their very tastes.

  Then Gough won, and instead of being the bearded lady, I was once more a member of a class that could watch Persona without being embarrassed to mention it.

  There are many people like me – and not only Jews – who have come alive out of the war carrying a hunger for the sort of experiences that were impossible to imagine in our compartment existence. Or not impossible to imagine, but dangerous to imagine. There was no food, but conjuring images of the food you would wish for is weak. You did no such thing, and if you did, you were mad. (Except for my fantasies of colour – that is a different thing, because I could have the colours, their souls, just by picturing them.) But when the ghetto is past, when the camps are past – if they are ever past – you discover that certain inhibitions you may once have harboured are no longer there.

  Okay, maybe I should restrict what I’m saying to me. The war’s over; the Nazis are dead; I have this powerful need to make everything vivid. And I do.

  I look back to the first two decades of my life and I see Vera the child, Vera the teenager, in a terrific struggle to outlive the schemes of violent men.

  Something I notice: I prefer independence. I don’t distrust men. On the contrary. I fall in love with men, I go to bed with men, but it’s only Vera I rely on. I am free of the chemistry found in some women that urges them to find a man and devote their lives to him. I don’t scorn such women: not at all. Every so often, a woman finds a man well worth such lifelong devotion. But it’s not for me. I have to be able to please myself, and I don’t know if this need has a moral basis or if it merely expresses selfishness. It is what it is, and it has its roots down so deep in me that I can’t comfortably belong to any movement of struggle (even marriage, a movement of political struggle if ever there was one) for long without growing restless.

  In Warsaw, I am a communist of a certain sort, more like a Kołakowski communist than a party communist, but that is only because communism, if edited fairly ruthlessly, comes closer to defining my aspirations for the society I wish to live in than any other ideology. I have seen people suffer under a regime that consigned a large number of living, breathing human beings to the rubbish heap, as if some humans were disposable while others were to be glorified and entitled to live forever. I think – and you will pardon my language – ‘Fuck that.’ I want freedom for everyone, but those who already have their freedom, they can look out for themselves. Those that don’t, they have the support of Werunia. What could be simpler?

  I’m not unusual in wanting freedom for everyone. All the bohemians want freedom for everyone. Particularly for themselves.

  But the bohemians – the truth is I don’t know them, don’t live among them as soon as I go to Warsaw and attend university. A friend from university introduces me to Janusz Minkiewicz, the writer and satirist, who in turn introduces me to Jan, who will become my husband, and it is Jan who introduces me into such circles.

  But before Jan comes Viktor Grajewski (as I explained to you, Robert; please keep up!). I meet Viktor after two months at university. I am out in the street near the university, in Krakowskie Przedmieście maybe, or a little street off Krakowskie Przedmieście, probably on my way home. I live alone at this time, in a tiny apartment: lots of noise, not so luxurious. Who cares? I am happy – almost insanely happy – all ready to plunge into the life I can imagine. He is attracted to me, of course he is: I am eighteen; I am gorgeous. He takes one look at me and thinks – I am imagining what he thinks – ‘If I play my cards right, I can get this girl into bed.’

  I’ve thought the same thing myself about various men: ‘Some of this, a little of that, and you’ll have him in bed, Werunia.’ It’s what you think – everybody does.

  Viktor is ten years older than me, handsome, strongly built (he is a mountaineer) and good-looking, and he has a confident air about him. He is wearing a suit (as all middle-class men in Warsaw do) – just his everyday suit, a waistcoat and a tie. No hat. He is doing what all men do when they’re talking to a pretty girl for the first time – a pretty girl they hope to get to know better: he is embarking on the first stage of seduction. You know how it goes, Robert: look the girl in the eye, smile a great deal if you have good teeth, stand just a little closer to her than you normally would to a stranger, glance down at her bosom every now and again without seeming to, maybe reach out and touch her briefly on the arm if things are going well, offer a compliment that stops short of expressing lust (‘Lovely scarf, I must say – it suits you’), use the girl’s name when you can to establish a foundation of intimacy, make sure you don’t brag about any credentials you might have, and, all in all, allow the girl to understand that if you can’t sleep with her, eventually at least, but sooner would be better than later, you will have to kill yourself.

  The reason Viktor and I can talk so freely on Krakowskie Przedmieście is that we’ve met years before in Germany at the displaced persons camp. Viktor was there, learning how to jump into the sea, how to grow oranges.

  ‘My God, you’re Vera. Zdumiewajgce! We were at the camp together. The oranges! I remember you like it was yesterday, truly.’

  Chatter, chatter, chatter, first stage of seduction, Viktor careful to mention in a feigned incidental way that he is separated from his wife.

  We go somewhere to have a drink, maybe. That seems very likely. After that
, we go somewhere else for a drink, on another day. Viktor is a journalist at the Polish Press Agency. So we have something in common, other than oranges, since I am studying journalism.

  We become lovers; I am soon pregnant.

  My friends say, ‘Vera, you don’t want a baby, are you insane? Go to the doctor.’

  I say no, the baby will be born.

  ‘Vera, it’s madness. One baby, two babies, three … Your career? forget it.’

  Oh sure, live through what the Nazis had in mind for me, then say no to a child? I don’t have to think hard. Viktor divorces his wife, and we marry. Marek is born, my son. I am a mother at twenty.

  A mother, yes, but an amateur. Well, all new mothers are amateurs, but they soon learn enough to be considered professionals. Not me. I rely on my mother. She is better at mothering than I will ever be. Okay, I love Marek, sure, and I do enough to avoid any accusation of actual neglect. But that doting manner of new mothers? No, I don’t dote.

  I am also an amateur at being married. Viktor has had practice at marriage; possibly he is better at it than I am. Nevertheless, the marriage isn’t working. We were at our best when we first met in the DP camp in Germany. Since then, it’s been all downhill.

  Robert, I am not about to spell out all the ways in which I demonstrated my incompetence as a mother and a wife. Marek survived. He grew into a cheerful kid, a fine young man, a decent human being. And I survived, too, and grew into a cheerful young woman and a decent human being. But this marriage – we, Viktor and Vera, are incompatible. I go hiking with him in the mountains, and I discuss politics with him, sure. But we’re incompatible. And so we divorce after two years or so.

  Robert, I know you’ll ask me in exactly what ways we were incompatible. Who can remember? Maybe he, Viktor, liked milk in his tea, and I didn’t, and maybe it became too much for me and one day I couldn’t face it, Viktor putting milk in his tea, anymore. Say that.