by Lily Brett
She needed this walk. She needed to clear her head. She walked around the old city. The old city was small. Eight hundred and seventy-two yards wide and thirteen hundred yards long. Every street in the old city was charming.
Pretty. There were lots of young people out walking and sitting in cafés.
Groups of students talking. The young seemed to mingle easily with the older generation, the middle-aged and the elderly.
Most of the cafés were full. The people inside were looking at each other with such intensity, Ruth thought. They looked each other in the eye, with a direct unflinching gaze. In New York, people looked distracted, whether they were on their own or with someone else. Ruth was mesmerized by the way people talked to each other here. The conversations seemed passionate and emotional. Was this just Kraków? Or had she not seen this side of Warsaw and Lódz? Maybe there was a similar vitality and intensity in Warsaw, she thought, but definitely not in Lódz. No one in Lódz had this much life in them.
She looked at the people sitting in the window of a café in Kanonicza Street. There were women talking earnestly to other women, men talking to men, and men and women talking. Everyone was engaged. As though the conversation really mattered. In New York, Ruth thought, people were often looking over their shoulders or at their watch. You didn’t see this sort of passion. You didn’t see it between acquaintances, friends, or lovers.
There were still lovers in Kraków. Ruth had been struck by that the minute she had arrived. Couples walked around hand in hand or gazed into each other’s eyes. Couples kissed passionately in public. Ruth wondered if
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the abundance of lovers was a consequence of people having access to less.
Polish people had less money, fewer distractions, fewer possessions, fewer prospects. They didn’t have that much. Was that the reason they still had love? If only the love lasted, she thought, thinking of the posters of the battered wives and battered children. In New York, people had everything else. They had to look for love in the singles pages of local newspapers.
Ruth passed a store with more wooden Jews in the window. A large sign above the carved Jews said, in capital letters, SOUVENIRS. What were these souvenirs of? A community of dead Jews? Ruth didn’t think so. She didn’t think most Poles were missing them. Suddenly, Ruth wanted to go to synagogue. She knew it was an irrational desire. What good would it do her or anyone else if she went to synagogue? Still she wanted to go. It was Friday, there would be a Shabat service at the Remuh Synagogue. She looked at her watch. If she hurried back to the hotel, she would just have time.
Edek was in exactly the same position she had left him in. She couldn’t believe that they were all still there. All the food was gone. The empty plates were in front of them.
“Back so quickly?” Zofia said.
“I’ve been more than an hour,” Ruth said. “I came back,” she said to Edek, “because I want to go to synagogue.”
“To synagogue?” Edek said. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Sit down, Ruthie, and have a cup of tea,” he said.
“Have a cup of tea,” Zofia said.
“I want to go to synagogue,” she said.
There was a silence. All three of them looked at her. She felt as though she had intruded and disbanded everyone’s happiness. The silence was as uncomfortable as if she had burped loudly or farted.
“Synagogue?” Zofia said.
“We do never go to synagogue,” Edek said.
“I would just like to go tonight,” Ruth said. “It’s a very sweet, small synagogue,” she said to Zofia. As though the size of the synagogue would make it appear more harmless.
“It is not so bad to go to synagogue,” Walentyna said. “I go to church sometimes.”
“I never go to church,” Zofia said firmly.
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“We do never go to synagogue,” Edek said.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Ruth said. “You stay here and enjoy Zofia’s and Walentyna’s company. I’ll go on my own.” She knew that pitching herself against Zofia and Walentyna might move Edek to declare his loyalty. She was right.
“I will go with you, of course,” Edek said.
“Of course,” Zofia said. “He is a very good father,” she said to Ruth.
“I know that,” Ruth said. She wasn’t sure why she wanted Edek to accompany her. Maybe she just wanted him away from Zofia and Walentyna. She thought he must be tired.
“Maybe I will see you later,” Zofia said to Edek, nudging him with her shoulder.
“We’ll be home late,” Ruth said.
“This is such a small synagogue,” Edek said to Ruth. “They not going to have a service what lasts hours.”
“Good,” said Zofia.
“You must be very tired, Dad,” Ruth said. “You’ve had an exhausting day. You need to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Of course,” Walentyna said.
“Edek is a strong man,” Zofia said. “He does not look tired.”
“I am okay,” Edek said.
“Well, I am going straight to bed as soon as I get back,” Ruth said.
“That is a good idea,” Zofia said, before Ruth could add that she felt her father should do the same.
“Good night,” Ruth said to Zofia and Walentyna. Edek and Zofia and Walentyna stood up. Walentyna and Zofia shook hands with Ruth.
“Good night,” both women said to her. Walentyna patted Edek on the back. “You have a good night and a good rest,” she said to him.
“Good night, Edek dear,” Zofia said. She gave him a small peck on the cheek.
“Good night, ladies,” Edek said.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Ruth said to Edek in the taxi.
“It is okay,” he said. He looked at her. “Did you eat something more than those biscuits what you had?” he said.
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“No,” she said. “But I’m not really hungry.” He shook his head.
“You do not eat enough,” he said. Edek was right, she wasn’t eating much. She must be losing weight, she thought. She felt the waistband of her skirt. Even sitting down, it felt loose. Definitely loose. She was pleased.
There must be a bonus to be had out of all of this. She would weigh herself as soon as she got back to Manhattan, she thought.
There were fifteen to twenty people at the Remuh Synagogue. Even in a synagogue as small as the Remuh, fifteen to twenty people still didn’t look like many. Ruth felt disappointed. What was she hoping for? A crowd. The sort of crowd who were already filing into the Samson Restaurant across the square for the twice-nightly cabaret? Ruth counted the people who had turned up for the service. There were eighteen people, including the rabbi.
Ruth and Edek stood in the entrance of the synagogue for a few minutes. A man from Idaho introduced himself. “I come here every year,” he said to Ruth and Edek. “I grew up in a village not far from here, Tokarnia,”
the man said. “Near the mountains. We used to walk in the mountains every day. Me and my mother and father,” he said. “From there we went to the ghetto in Plaszów and then to Auschwitz,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and displaying the familiar inked number. “I don’t know why I come here,”
he said. “I come here every year. And every year, after two or three days I want to leave.”
“Where is everyone?” a woman said to Ruth and Edek. Ruth knew what she meant. Where was the congregation? “Dead,” Ruth said. The woman, a woman from California, in her fifties, looked shocked. “Of course,” she said. There were three other Americans and a Canadian at the synagogue.
All of them looked bewildered. “Where is the congregation?” the Canadian man said. He was about Ruth’s age. “Dead,” Ruth said. The man looked stunned.
“Ruthie, maybe you should not put it this way,” Edek said to her when the Canadian man had wa
lked away.
“What other way is there to put it?” she said. “I can’t say they’re vacationing in the Bahamas.”
Edek shook his head, but laughed in spite of himself. “You for sure cannot say that,” he said. The only Poles present in the synagogue were old.
They didn’t look Jewish to Ruth. But they must have been. No old Pole would be attending Shabat services in a synagogue, she thought.
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Ruth went into the back room of the synagogue with the rest of the women. The room was at the end of a small passage, and was quite dark. It felt airless. Ruth tried to open one of the windows, but it was jammed shut.
It looked as though it hadn’t been opened in decades. Ruth went back to her seat. In this small airless room in the back of the synagogue, Ruth could feel herself starting to relax. She realized she had left her bag, unattended, on a seat, several seats away. She was obviously letting down her guard. She realized how rigidly she had been holding every part of herself. Her body felt almost limp now.
She looked through the small window to see if she could see Edek.
Edek was in the main room of the synagogue with the other men. The window in between the rooms was covered with old lace curtains. Ruth could hardly see through them. She couldn’t see Edek. She looked around her.
The woman from California was still crying. Ruth hoped that the Canadian man was okay. She felt momentarily bad, but there was nothing else she could have said to either of them. The Californian woman blew her nose.
“It’s only by being here, in Poland,” she said to Ruth, “that you really can absorb what happened. There really are no Jews here,” the woman said, and shook her head.
“We’re all here searching for something,” Ruth said. “Going from cemetery to cemetery. From absence to absence. All of us looking for the presence of people who are no longer present.” The woman started crying again.
Ruth wished she hadn’t said anything. She leaned back in the pew. It was such a relief not to be clenching her face, her jaw, her teeth. Not to have tense arms and legs. She felt as though she could fall asleep. The service was short. She met Edek outside afterward.
“It was not a bad service,” Edek said.
“Thanks again for coming, Dad,” Ruth said.
“I did enjoy it,” Edek said. He rubbed his hands together, in the cold.
“Let us go home,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen
R uth woke up. For a moment she thought that she was in her apartment on Fourteenth Street. She looked at the floral wallpaper on the walls and realized that she must be in Poland. Still. She felt terrible.
She felt as though she hadn’t slept. Her head was scrambled with random thoughts and images. Unarranged, unsorted, ungraded thoughts. All anxiety-provoking.
She sat up in bed. She had to get rid of this anxiety. There was nothing to fear. The formless, amorphous world of her dreams was not her world.
She was here in the very expensive Hotel Mimoza. She was able to pay for this very expensive hotel because she had the ability to think clearly. To sort out other people’s concerns and to articulate them. In her wallet, in the third drawer of the bureau, was an American Express card, a MasterCard, a Visa card, and a Diner’s Club card. She was a purposeful person. She was not a lost soul.
Then she remembered her dream. In her dream, her soul had slipped out of her. It had slipped out with the ease of words leaving lips. A slippery, swift ease. As though it had been oiled or anointed. It had happened in an instant. One minute she had been intact, the next minute her soul was hovering above her. She could see its outline, in the dream. It was the same height as her. The same shape. But it looked lighter. It lacked the heaviness T O O M A N Y M E N
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of living bodies. It was diaphanous. It floated. But it was her. Her mirror image. An imprint of herself, in the air, floating above her.
She used to have this dream as a child. It used to terrify her. She would be floating, facedown, above herself. For hours. However hard she tried she couldn’t get herself back down to the bed again. She always woke from this dream feeling queasy. She had been so relieved when the dream had disappeared. It had seemed to leave her when she was about seventeen or eighteen. An age when she had toughened up. She had dyed her hair jet-black and whitened her face with the palest shade of makeup on the market. She had gone barefoot in the conservative streets of Melbourne, Australia. People had gasped and pointed. She had been a beatnik. On her own. Out of kilter with the culture and the times. Edek used to look at her and cry. Cry at her black-ringed eyes and white lips. “What did happen to my beautiful daughter?” he would say.
Rooshka had maintained a stony silence. She had tolerated the bare feet and the black outfits. Ruth had lost weight, and Rooshka was more pleased about the weight loss than she was distressed at being the mother of a beatnik. Ruth was happy being a beatnik. For the first time she slept through the night, most nights. She didn’t wake when Rooshka screamed in her sleep. She didn’t have to cover her head with her pillow in order to drown out her mother’s shouts. The shouts that were always in Yiddish. Rooshka was shouting to her mother. The mother who went to the right, to the gas, when Rooshka went to the left. Eventually, Ruth got lonely, as a beatnik.
No one would join her in reviving the movement. She let her hair color grow out and threw away the white lipstick.
Ruth rubbed her eyes. They felt raw. As though she had been awake all night. Even as a child she had awakened tired from that dream. The face that floated above her in her childhood dream was always somber. It never smiled or laughed. It just hovered above Ruth. Looking at her. All night.
Suddenly, Ruth felt sick. The face in her childhood dream, the face that used to look down on her for hours, at night, was the face in the photograph. The face of Edek’s sister Fela’s child, Liebala. It was Liebala’s face floating above her. Liebala, who looked so like her. Liebala, who was always serious, always solemn, in Ruth’s dreams.
Ruth remembered clearly the day the dreams began. It had been her
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first day in fourth grade. She had been eight years old. The youngest child in grade four. All the other children were nine. Some were ten. She had come home from that first day of the school year exhausted. Some of the boys had been rough with her. It was a working-class area. There were lots of tough kids. Ruth didn’t say anything to Rooshka and Edek. Ruth knew even then that a little roughness in the classroom was not comparable to what they had endured. And Rooshka had been happy that day. Happy and proud that Ruth was eight and in grade four.
Eight. That was the age Liebala must have been, in the photographs, Ruth thought. Liebala’s face had been less composed in the photographs. In the photographs she had looked more active, more eager, more spirited. In the dreams, Liebala’s curls were the only unruly part of her. They sprang out at wayward angles. The rest of Liebala had been still. Still face. Still arms and legs. She had floated quietly. Hovering above Ruth. Hardly moving. In the dreams, Liebala was dressed in layers of a sheer, white, gauze fabric. The fabric floated. Sometimes Ruth could feel the movement of air as the layers of Liebala’s dress shifted and moved in the room. Liebala, in her unclouded, gossamer layers, had looked down at Ruth, night after night.
Ruth sat on the bed in her room at the Hotel Mimoza and felt frightened. How could Liebala have been in her dreams? She had never seen Liebala’s face. She must have been dreaming about herself. She and Liebala were so similar. So alike. Except for one small detail. Ruth had noticed, in the photograph, that Liebala had a mole on her cheek. Her left cheek. Ruth remembered the mole from her dreams. How could she have known about the mole? She had probably created the mole, Ruth thought, in order to distinguish herself from her nocturnal visitor. She felt her own cheekbones.
She didn’t have a mole on her cheek. Just an elevated bump where the fly had bitten her.
She tried to calm down. There was nothing frightening about any of this. It was just a dream. And she must have been dreaming about herself.
She and Liebala were so alike. She must have transposed the expression on Liebala’s face, in the photographs, onto her memories of the face in her dreams. Of course that was it, that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
She should have a shower, she decided. Hot water and steam often cleared her head after a bad night. A hot shower made her feel internally T O O M A N Y M E N
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cleansed, as though the steam had reached her brain and heart and lungs.
Hot water seemed to wash some of the mess of bad nights away. It seemed to repair and redress the anarchy. To sanctify and purify. Most of the time, after five minutes in a hot shower, Ruth could feel herself returning.
Returning to who she really was.
And who was she, really? she wondered. She was a person in Poland.
Who she was was always a vexing question for her. This morning she needed a clear answer. She was Ruth Rothwax, president, CEO, chairman, owner, and director of Rothwax Correspondence. She could run ten miles, with ease. She could bench-press fifty-five pounds. And she was losing weight. Losing weight was always a cheering thought.
Ruth had always had a troubled relationship with her dreams. She had had nightmares about children and babies for years. Children she kept losing. Babies she couldn’t look after. The dream in which she gave birth to a damaged baby always left her out of kilter for days. Days later she would find herself trying to work out what was wrong with the baby, and where it had gone. It always disappeared by the end of the dream. Merely thinking about that dream gave her the creeps. Why had that dream come into her head? Just when she had established herself, in her head, as a competent businesswoman. A woman who could wear a suit and bench-press and squat, metaphorically, with the best of them. That was who she was! Not some lost, slipped soul. Inhabited by others.
Where had that sentence come from? She was not inhabited by others.
She had managed to separate herself from the mother. From the ghosts of her mother’s past. From all of the dead. She was inhabited by her own thoughts and her own imagination. She was inhabited by her own self. The years when she had believed that she had been in Auschwitz were over. She knew that that was her mother’s experience, not hers. The years of feeling more aligned with the dead than the living were over. She was living. She was definitely living. Living well.