Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  And, grand egoist that she was, the countess believed that all she’d done, all she’d thought, all she’d lived for was others. For Andzelika, of course. Her Andzelika. But more recently also for Janusz. Prince Janusz Rudski, with whom, two years earlier, Andzelika had stood in the Sigismond chapel of Wawel Cathedral—a glory of a bride in ice blue satin, her five-meter train rippling behind her, held barely aloft by eight page boys in white velvet breeches and damask waistcoats—to take the prince as her lawfully wedded husband. Sitting as the countess is now in the second from the last pew on the left side of the Mariacki, her brown and white toeless spectator pumps—revealing perfectly enameled dark red nails—resting on the kneeler, her lighter brown silk dress kilted above bare, unsunned, perfectly taut knees, she recalls her triumph.

  Truth be told, though, Janusz was all too willing to court Andzelika. Less than my wiles, it was Andzelika’s beauty. Her father’s ivory skin. But her eyes, black as Magyar grapes, I admit her eyes are mine. And all that hair, worn loose that day when Janusz first saw her, wasn’t it? Flying behind her as she rode past him with the others in the hunt. A long pink jacket buttoned up to her chin. He’d arrived late, Janusz had, too late to ride that first day, and I remember how he paced and paced, the long, lean frame of him striding the rooms, running his fingers through his white blond hair, waiting for them to return. For her to return. Foolish child, she thought him old at thirty-one, went sashaying about in league with the two Rolnicki brothers the whole week long, but Janusz was patient. It was the mazurka on that last evening. Reckless and nimble a dancer as she was, his hands turned palms up at his waist, he circled her tauntingly, chin high, hair falling in a fringe over his forehead with each stomp of his boot until Andzelika’s eyes narrowed, smiled at him, dared him. Everyone saw it. Janusz smiled back, and it was done. Were they ever apart after that for more than a day or two? I can’t recall.

  I feared she would tell him of her escapade, and so I begged her silence. We’d carried off the impossible feat, Andzelika and I, that of keeping a secret among our set. There were times when I began to think that even she didn’t recall it, so rarely, so very rarely did she address the child. How I’d feared her announcing one day her desire to visit the grave site in Switzerland, how I’d armed myself with reasons why such a journey would … But she never asked. When she heard that Droutskoy had married, she sulked for a few days. Asked me, was I certain that no one had ever informed him she’d given birth to his child? Wholly certain, I told her. And that was the last time she spoke of him, of the child. As though both were part of the same bad dream she’d willed herself to forget. I know they were real, though. I know that the child was real and I have been besieged by her every day and every night for all these nine years. By now I am expert in my war with the agony of her. And then I think of Andzelika, Princess Andzelika, how her life would have been stained, not throttled, by the presence of the child. Who would have wanted her? Surely not Janusz.

  The countess always ends her reverie just at this point. With the same question. The same answer. Over and over again she must convince herself that her deed was in Andzelika’s name. If she thinks it one more time, perhaps the lie will change color, become a truth. It never does, though. In the deepest place in her heart, she understands that it was not to protect Andzelika that she abandoned the child but for her own vendetta. Her revenge against Antoni, against that one, that single act which demonstrated that his little baroness meant more than life to him. How could anyone expect that she, Valeska, would love and embrace a child of the same blood that flowed through Antoni’s own whore?

  Any other man or boy, Andzelika, and I might have, I would have looked beyond my displeasure, but never to the issue of Droutskoy. And so my sins were not those of maternal ferocity but simply those of pride. My own. My only salvation is that, no matter how I try not to, I always tell myself the truth.

  Untying the white kerchief that covers her head, stuffing it into the string bag hanging from her wrist, she walks out through the south-facing doors of the Mariacki into the unusually sultry late May morning.

  After nine months of occupation, Krakow appears astonishingly unchanged, its architectural glories whole, a semblance of normalcy everywhere about the nearly quiet streets. People work, go to mass, light candles, pray, shop, dine, sleep, hold tight to their heritage, their ideals, to the word of Polish allies. After all, would France betray them? Would England? This too shall pass. A short war. Until then, this half life, half familiar. One must submit to the illusion that Krakow center has been transformed into a film set on which hundreds of splendid-looking jackbooted boys and men parade about in uniform, yes, a semblance of normalcy wants only a flash or two of a small distorting mirror. To further the cheat, though, one must ignore the neat hand-lettered signs announcing Nur für Deutsche—for Germans only—posted in the windows of the better restaurants and shops, choose not to hear the talk about the torturings in Montelupi Street, hurry away—head cast downward—during the lapanki, the random arrests that the jackbooted boys perform here and there, now and then. And at the dry, sharp crack of a pistol from the far side of the café, eyes forward and another jaded sip from the tiny crystal cup of slivovitz. Oh, one more thing. Keep far from the Podgórze, from the ghetto where the Jews have been herded. All the harum-scarum of the occupation of Krakow happens there. Mortification, hunger, the quick spray from an MG34 across the apartment doors facing onto an upper balcony just to rip the tedium of a quiet spring evening, the jackbooted boys rival one another for duty in that province beyond the pale. That place where the Jews are. Yes, by all means keep far from the Podgòrze.

  The countess wanders into the Rynek Glowny, the main market square, to look at the occupiers’ leavings of the day, food for the Untermenschen: rotting vegetables, bruised and broken fruit, the less tempting parts of a pig. It matters little, though, she thinks, fondling a hill of small, hard brown pears, since hers is an exercise in habit, this morning perusal of the marketplace. Crates and boxes and sacks of exquisite food are punctually delivered to the back door of her palace each Tuesday and Saturday. Lake fish from the north on Fridays. She walks back down Franciszkanska Street past the Nazi Partei-Haus to the Czartoryski palace to leave her few findings with the cooks, to check the progress of lunch, and then to freshen up, to rest before her ritual presiding over the one o’clock meal. They would be eight today, or was it to be nine?

  Rather than friends or family, she will be dining with her German houseguests. Wehrmacht officers and their aides. Long-standing houseguests. You see, despite the desperate urgings of her daughter and other members of her family, the countess had stayed behind in Krakow when the others fled. The selfsame zeal with which she had protected Andzelika, she will employ to protect her home, her possessions, the pulse of her life. As though her presence could stay the very German army.

  She’d waved from her bedroom window as Andzelika and Janusz, the white Bentley piled with valises, joined the nearly soundless dawn hegira from Krakow of the Rudski clan less than a day before the invasion. Hundreds, thousands had gone before them, exiting Krakow for the outlying villages and farms, for destinations beyond the borders into Romania and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, unaware they raced not toward freedom but into the vile embrace of the advancing Russians. But on that last day of August 1939, it was to Paris that Andzelika and Janusz and his family were headed. Just as threatened Poles of lesser and greater nobility had done in the nineteenth century and again during the Great War, Andzelika and Janusz and the others would establish a Polish court of sorts in several of the grand hotels, entrench themselves in much the same life they’d lived in Krakow. They would wait out the war as befitted those of their station. Though the opera house was closed and air raids interrupted late suppers and there were maddening shortages of preferred wines, there was consolation that the war was far away. Just as the Krakovians who stayed behind used the distorting mirror to survive, so did those who fled. On June 3, 1940, though, when Ge
rman bombs first fell on Paris, even those mirrors were shattered. Meanwhile in Krakow, just as she had done always, the countess had arranged things to suit her.

  In early October 1939, when the Wehrmacht colonel Dietmar von Karajan and his aides banged the lion’s-head knocker against its iron plate on the great carved doors of the Czartoryska palace, the countess was prepared. She’d wondered, in fact, why her home had been so long left unclaimed while, in nearly every other prestigious palace, SS and Wehrmacht officers and sometimes men of the Gestapo were already ensconced. What she didn’t know was this: The colonel had seen her three weeks before, on one of the first days of the occupation. She had been walking, hurrying over the stones back from mass at the Mariacki. As the colonel’s auto passed her, their eyes met. He told the driver to stop, to have her followed, to find out who she was. With that intelligence, the colonel would secure lodgings and, perhaps, he thought, a woman. He had business in Warsaw, and when he returned, it was he himself, his aides surrounding him, who struck the lion’s head against the countess’s door.

  She received the troupe as though she’d invited them, the colonel, a captain, and their respective entourages—nine Wehrmacht in all. Speaking easily, volubly in her convent school Hochdeutsch, she offered them 11:00 A.M. silver cups of amontillado and hazelnut biscuits, stepped prettily in her white faille morning dress up the staircase to demonstrate the upper floors, the six sprawling suites where the troupe would sleep. The company of men had always suited Valeska. If there must be a war, if there must be an occupation of her city, a requisitioning of her home, let things be carried out with some modicum of dignity, she told the colonel with her eyes as he bent to light her cigarette.

  In addition to the second and third floors, the colonel requested full use of the receiving rooms on the first floor, including the main drawing room, the dining salon, the library. It was the countess who, desiring to save the colonel’s having to ask it of her, offered to arrange herself in a small ground-floor suite—bedroom, sitting room, and small drawing room—once the domain of Antoni’s aged mother. Like any fine hostess, she then set about to explain the house rules: the punctuality of meals, the quality of her kitchen and her cellars, demeanor at table—there would be no talk of war, she’d warned—the prohibition of any female guests unless approved by her, a midnight curfew so as not to disturb the servants, one of whom had a new baby. Each caveat the countess delivered directly into the dark blue Tartar’s eyes of the colonel, and he, his hand held loosely over his mouth, fingers pulling his lips from an involuntary smile, listened as though to profound, unimagined truths. Sharp nods of the head then, from the troupe, hand kissing, assurances of the completion of their quiet, efficient encampment well before dinner. Yes, it had all suited the Countess Valeska.

  Aloof as a portrait at the head of her table, flanked by her perfumed, scrupulously shined and creased guests, the colonel on her right, the countess sipped and dined with the Wehrmacht and, together, they spoke vaguely of their lives. During those first days, the countess thought to invite her female friends to dine so as to amuse the young men. But among those few who remained, there was no one who would be quite right. No one who was pretty but not too pretty, charming but not fatally so. Of course they found their own women, the paid ones from the Ukraine who sat in groups in the market bars and some of the local girls, too, love and lust or want of supper overriding patriotism from time to time. But the men were respectful and even drank in a mostly chivalric way. Some of the aides were posted outside the city several days each week and there were mandatory maneuvers each afternoon for the others, so the house was tranquil much of the time. Life proceeded.

  The evenings after dinner Valeska spent in her rooms, reading, listening openly to the BBC, even though it was decreed that those radios not already confiscated be surrendered. Early on the colonel asked if it would disturb her should he play the piano sometimes. Not at all, I play myself. She, Chopin, he, Bach, the two played for one another and often for the others. Valeska and the colonel were hardly ever alone yet, when they were, she grew skilled at keeping him close while keeping away—a dance that the colonel enjoyed—and the only intimacy they approached was in speaking of their families. Of Andzelika and Janusz, of the colonel’s wife, his adult children.

  One evening the colonel enters the salon while Valeska is playing the piano, her heavy white silk shawl in his hands. He stands behind her, gently places the shawl on her shoulders. His hands linger, trembling. She slows her playing but does not stop. Even as he begins to speak, she continues to play.

  “Come, let’s walk a bit. I’d like to take you to a little place where I go from time to time.”

  “As you well know, I go out very rarely in the evening and never in the company of an occupying officer. And less to some cellar bar.”

  “This evening I am not an occupying officer but a man who wishes to, to ‘court’ you, Valeska.” It is the first time he omits her title. “And what makes you think that I would take you to a cellar bar?”

  “I understand it’s only those—only the most degraded of those—where we Untermenschen are permitted.”

  “Allow me to show you that, for every rule, there is an exception.”

  The colonel has two motives for his invitation. Apart from his wanting to be with Valeska in a setting where they might better ignore his role as the occupier and hers as the invaded, he desires to tell her that many of the officers have begun to send for their families. The governor-general of Krakow, Hans Frank, having a few days earlier publicly declared: “The world will cease to exist before we Nazis depart Krakow,” spurred a rush of soldiers’ communications with their families who waited in the fatherland. The colonel was not one of those who wrote to his wife. Rather it was he who received a telegram from her. “Ich freue mich Sie wiederzusehen. I look forward to seeing you again,” it said. He has yet to respond.

  Estranged emotionally for much of their marriage, the colonel and his wife had long been adept at farce, of painting over sangfroid, trying to make it pass for love. For the children, for the sake of familial duty. But when the children were grown and gone and the musings of war reached him, the colonel thought to take a mistress. The Wehrmacht would make a fine one, he’d thought. And she did. Until he saw the woman with the long black eyes mincing along across the market square of Krakow. Am I in love with the countess? Never having felt love nor even mistaken it, I can hardly say. Still.

  This evening he wishes to inform the countess of the impending arrival of some of his men’s families and, more, to watch those eyes when he tells her that perhaps his wife, too, will join him. Another game, yes. But how else to know what she thinks? Over these months, he has learned to listen more to her eyes than her words.

  The countess has been speaking. Something about patriotism, is it?

  “I cannot claim expressions of fervid patriotism, Colonel, and I freely admit that I have been more than a little Neroesque in my fretting over the state of my marble floors or my hairdo while shunning the gruesome truths about the occupation of my country. But I, too, am of the race of Untermenschen, Colonel; I, too, am a Pole. Why would you contaminate yourself by ‘courting,’ as you call it, one of us? What makes you think that I would want you, Colonel? How do I know what you do when you leave here in the morning, or what you’ve done or are inclined to do in the name of your heinous little god? The other name of honor is loyalty. Isn’t that the oath you swore, Colonel? In other words, shall you not do whatever is asked of you? Whatever. I beg you not to mistake my hospitality for anything more. I am playing house with you and your men, waiting as politely as I can for the day when you shall leave my home and my city.”

  The countess has brusquely removed the shawl placed by the colonel so tenderly a few moments before. It falls from her hands, and the colonel bends to retrieve it. Holding it, wishing he were holding her, he tells her quietly, “Madame, you quote the SS oath, which is not mine. The German race, like all others, births men of different c
haracters. I would peacefully shoot myself before I could be convinced to certain acts. But you already know that, Valeska. And, as well, you know something else.”

  “What is it that I know, Colonel?”

  “That my sentimental feelings for you are, are requited. Yes, that’s the word I was searching for.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  IT IS TOWARD THE END OF JUNE 1940—JUNE 22, TO BE PRECISE—A week or so after the encounter between Valeska and the colonel. Since that evening, the two have remained in genteel détente. They speak at table, play the piano for one another after dinner, but neither risks personal discourse. The colonel did, however, tell Valeska that some of his aides would be welcoming their wives and young children in Krakow, that—until other accommodations could be secured—they would be living together in her palace. As always, she was gracious, accommodating, set about to have small beds and other furniture brought up from the storage rooms, heirloom linens aired from long years’ resting in cedar chests. The colonel never mentioned his own wife, his own situation. He no longer needed to do that. By her silence, she admitted that he was correct in his thinking. She cared for him. That was enough for now. In time …

  Earlier in the day, the BBC had announced the total capitulation of France to her German invaders. Street by street, house by house, the news traveled through Krakow. Shutters banged, long medieval keys were turned in the doors, and, as though in mourning, families sat together around their kitchen tables and wept. France would not rescue them. Another sweet hope strangled, left for dead. Sixty citizens of Krakow would commit suicide that evening. There were those who would later swear the number was much higher.