Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  The colonel had sent a note to Valeska saying that he and his men would not be “at home” for lunch or dinner, and so she’d stayed most of the day in her rooms, listening for further BBC announcements and waiting for the colonel to return so that he might somehow explain to her what it meant, this French surrender.

  It is sometime after ten o’clock when she hears him enter the main hall. She puts down her book, walks out to meet him. No words. He removes his hat, pulls her close, presses his dry, soft lips against her temple. Somehow, between that morning and this evening, that which had separated them is no more. German, Pole, war, duty—all that remains is his mouth on her skin, her thin, weeping body in his arms.

  She sends him off to bathe and change, orders supper for him, takes up her shawl and goes out into the night. A short walk, some air, so much to talk about.

  She walks up the narrow back street behind the Czartoryski palace to the market square, finds it bedecked for the grand occasion of France’s fall with a great red forest of Nazi flags, hundreds upon hundreds of them, yes, a strange red forest under the moon. And there are bells. Every church in Krakow rings out the news. As though the bells know, the sounds they make are knells. All holed up against the flags and the bells and the news, there is not a Krakovian in sight. Standing along the edges of the square, her hand resting on one of the flagpoles, she watches the jackbooted boys at play, shouting, singing, cracking the green glass necks of French Champagne.

  France has quit, and I am here to see the pageant of her funeral. All the while Andzelika is there. And, somewhere in France, is the little one also there? The little one. Is she alive? Where is she? What will become of her now? What has it been? Ten months? Is that what it took to bring the Franks to their knees? Whimpering. Heil Hitler.

  There will be masses of French fleeing to God knows where. Will the convent be requisitioned? Where will they go? I shall contact Montpellier, I shall go to Montpellier, I shall see for myself, yes, Dietmar will help me. Yes, I must tell him, I will tell him this evening. No, what am I thinking? To put at peril Andzelika’s gingerly built life? I must remember who she is, who she might have become had I not protected her. Ah, such a noble mother am I. Nearly as noble a mother as I am a selfish one. What was it that I decided about myself that morning while I sat in the back of the Mariacki? How did it go? … My sins are not those of maternal ferocity but of pride. At least I am still telling myself the truth.

  Valeska stands nearer to the flagpole, one arm encircling it, resting her head against it. She tries to imagine what the child looks like now. Turned nine less than two months ago. A noise distracts her. An explosion, like fireworks. Oh, these boys think of everything. A second explosion, a third. The singing has stopped, there is silence and then another kind of screaming and then a voice, a single voice through a speaker shouts over all of it. What is it saying? Long live Poland. The Germans flee the square; she would run, too, and yet her legs are leaden. She feels faint. I need air, too many people, too hot, the shock, the news, yes, I must get back home and wait for Dietmar in the garden. He’ll be down by now, surely he’ll be down by now. She is falling, sliding really, her arm still clinging to the pole, trying to throw off her shawl with the other hand. What is this warmth, this wetness gushing from my side? And from my head? Just where he kissed me. She begins to laugh, a giddy, breathless laugh. Ah, so this is how it shall be? She thinks of Antoni. She thinks of the baby. She falls. Men who are living in her home see her as they run. One lifts her in his arms, the others run ahead down the alleyway, to the back entrance of the palace.

  Thinking she, too, has gone to freshen up, the colonel has been playing the piano while waiting for Valeska.

  Bring her to her room. Contact the medics, tell them it’s I who need them.

  Colonel, sir, it’s, it’s … The wounds are … There is chaos out there, bombs, the resistance …

  Leave me alone with her.

  Colonel Dietmar von Karajan kneels by the countess’s bed. He can see the wounds now. Understands. He holds her, whispers to her. He rips the hem of the sheet to tie about her head, and he screams out to God. She opens her eyes.

  Can you hear me?

  Her voice is someone else’s, someone far away.

  He kneels once again by her, lays his head on her breast.

  I beg you to listen. My daughter …

  Your daughter will be safe …

  You must tell my daughter. The baby did not die, the baby did not die. I left her there with … She did not die. I left the necklace, Andzelika’s necklace. The baby did not die. Tell her. You must tell her.

  CHAPTER XXV

  In desolation I inform you of your mother’s sudden death on the evening of June 22, the result of wounds suffered during a bombing in the Rynek Glowny for which the Armia Krajowa has claimed responsibility. The curia has undertaken arrangements. With humility I recommend that you do not travel to Krakow during this particularly uncertain moment. As there is other urgent business about which I must speak with you, please expect my arrival in Paris within the next twenty-four hours. Specific advisory to come.

  Yours truly,

  Dietmar von Karajan

  WHEN HER MAID KNOCKS ON HER DOOR SOMETIME TOWARD DAWN, wordlessly places the telegram in her hands while she is still prone in her bed, Andzelika is certain it can only be news of Janusz’s death.

  She throws down the unopened telegram, leaps from the bed, holds her maid by the shoulders, tells her, “I tried to keep him here. I tried, Bajka. I begged him to wait just a little longer. Janusz, Janusz. Open it, Bajka. Open it for me, please. I can’t, I can’t do it.”

  A deafening, strangling thrill of reprieve. And then fresh horror. Not Janusz. Janusz is not dead. It is Matka. Matka is dead. My mother is dead. How can that be?

  Over the past months, Valeska had often written to Andzelika about the colonel. About him and his men, about her peaceful coexistence with them in the palace. Still it feels odd, wrong somehow, that a Wehrmacht colonel has informed her of her mother’s death. A casualty of the Polish resistance. A telegram written in French. Perhaps it’s not so, only some sort of trick, a ploy, what could it be?

  Andzelika sends word to Janusz’s regiment, informs him, asks that he take leave and come to her. She walks the rooms of her suite, waiting for the absurd dream to end, for her mother cannot be dead. Valeska Czartoryska, the indestructible Countess Czartoryska, moja piekna matka, my beautiful mother, anyone but you.

  It is late in the evening of June 26 when the concierge calls to say that Colonel Dietmar von Karajan awaits her presence in the lobby.

  “I beg your pardon, Princess, for arriving without further notice, but travel these days hardly permits the courtesies …”

  The colonel bows, kisses Andzelika’s hand, looks in her eyes. “I hope, Princess, that you will also pardon my presumptuousness when I say that your tristesse is mine.”

  “My mother often wrote of you. She described you well, sir.”

  Andzelika, having moments before been wrapped in her husband’s dressing gown, smoothes the skirt of her black voile dress, pushes her toes farther into her black satin mules, wishes she’d taken time to do her hair, to bathe her swollen eyes. A handsome man, no matter the circumstances of his presence, she thinks.

  “I cannot bear, at this moment, to hear the details from your point of view. I have been in touch via telephone with Bishop Mateusz and—”

  “I have not come here to relive those moments. As you are not prepared to hear them, Princess, I am not prepared to tell them. I am here only to deliver the message your mother entrusted with me.”

  “My name is Andzelika, sir. My mother left a message for me? Something she said on, on that evening?”

  “Something she said as she was dying.”

  Andzelika grips the raspberry damask arms of her chair. “Go on, Colonel.”

  Word for word, the colonel repeats the message. He hears Valeska saying the words in his mind as he speaks them. As though s
he is coaching him.

  Andzelika is still as stone. Until slowly she begins to move in a rocking motion. She closes her eyes, bows her head. Andzelika weeps. Not as she has wept for her mother, not as she would weep for her husband but, for the first time, she weeps as a mother for her child.

  The colonel requests of the concierge that the princess be accompanied to her rooms. The maid arrives to help Andzelika and, as the two are leaving, the colonel touches Andzelika’s shoulder and nods as in good-bye.

  “Colonel, will you be kind enough to join me in an hour? I must be alone now, but afterward I believe I would welcome your company. It seems that my mother has made comrades of us.”

  “She must have said more. Tell me once again, word for word, where did she leave her, with whom, where is my baby?”

  “I know nothing more. You must understand that your mother never spoke to me of, never, before that moment, told me of your child. Never. She spoke at length of your father, of his liaison with the baroness, his unfortunate death, their unfortunate deaths. She spoke of you and your childhood, your talents, your beauty. She spoke of your husband, of her joy in your marriage to him. But never a word about a child. Not until, not until then.”

  The two are sitting in the mandatory dark in the small drawing room of Andzelika’s suite, the long windows open to a midnight on the Île Saint-Louis, to the whispering of the Seine against the stones of the quai d’Orléans. Bajka hovers, brings tea, sets down a bottle of Frapin and a large Baccarat snifter in front of the colonel.

  “You see, had I known about the child, anything at all about the child beforehand, I might have asked her where, with whom but—”

  “I understand. It’s only that she has left me nothing, nothing at all with which to begin my search for my baby. My child. Nor has she left me an explanation as to why she would have ‘hidden’ her from me, kept her ‘hidden’ for all these years. Why the lies, the secrets, the mysteries? Yet I hardly need ask since my mother’s life was made of maneuvers and feats of the impossible. They were her drugs, Colonel.”

  Having himself been witness to a few of those maneuvers and feats of the impossible, the colonel smiles, asks, “What of this necklace she mentioned? ‘I left the necklace, Andzelika’s necklace.’ Could it somehow be traced?”

  “I’ve thought about it, and I think she must have meant the pendant she gave me on my thirteenth birthday. A very old Bohemian piece that belonged to her great-grandmother and was passed down from mother to daughter. She must have taken it from among my things at some point, because I recall looking for it and not finding it. I’d been fearful of asking her about it because I didn’t want her to know that it was missing. She loved that piece above all. Mother had magnificent jewels, Colonel, though I doubt she displayed many of them during your ‘stay’ with her. But how she loved that little amethyst carved into the shape of a bottle with a lilac pearl for a stopper. That she left that, precisely that, along with whatever else she bequeathed my baby tells me much.”

  “That she accepted her as, as the next female in line. Is that what you mean?”

  Andzelika nods. “Still, it by no means represents a clue to where she left her or how I can find her.”

  “Who was the child’s father?”

  “A boy who was a schoolmate of my cousin. Boarding school in Warsaw. I think he was a year older than I. About a year older. He didn’t love me.”

  “Did you tell him about the child?”

  “No. I never saw him after, after his visit. Mother made certain of that. She was very good at ‘making certain,’ Colonel. It would seem that she saw to everything. Even I didn’t know how wide was her sphere. She must have seen to it that the boy would never contact me again—I rather doubt that took much doing—and then she went about the ‘disposal’ of—”

  “Disposal is not the word, Andzelika. Surely she had her reasons.”

  “The child was born ‘unhealthy,’ with a weak heart, not given much chance of survival. That’s what she told me. And then she told me that she was taking the baby to Switzerland, to a clinic. Surgery. But when she returned, she told me that the baby had died. Of course I believed her. I had no reason not to. The distillation of the story is that, Colonel.”

  “Surely there will be tracks to follow. You can begin with the hospital where the child—I’m sorry, I don’t know the child’s name …”

  “Nor do I.”

  “Where the child was born, take her birth certificate to … And then there’s the Swiss clinic …”

  “That’s assuming my mother told me the truth about this Swiss clinic, the truth about anything at all. I don’t even have my child’s birth certificate. I have nothing.”

  “Yes, but among your mother’s papers, surely you’ll find … It’s only that now, now with this war, thousands and thousands of people are looking for one another, refugees, the loss of records, the broken communications, indistinguishable paths …”

  “Of course. I understand. But I have yet another trial to face, Colonel. My husband knows nothing of this child. Nothing of my history.”

  “She saw to that as well, did she?”

  Andzelika smiles, whispers, “Yes.”

  The two sit quietly then. Though there seems nothing left to say, neither of them wishes to be alone. It is Bajka who insists that Andzelika rest.

  The colonel promises to write, gives Andzelika numbers where he can be reached. Hat in hand, he bends to kiss hers, turns to leave. Bajka has gone ahead to open the door for him and, as he approaches it, he turns. “I loved her. I love her still.”

  It is late on the next afternoon when Andzelika opens the doors to her husband. Never having seen him in the uniform of the Wielkopolska, the glory of him stuns her. A beautiful blond-haired cavalier in high, lustrous black boots, his crimson riding coat and white breeches taut like skin, Janusz—grave, pale—stands before her.

  She is awkward in his arms, wanting his comfort yet fearing it, heartsore with the burden of her mourning. More for what she must now confess. Janusz holds her, caresses her, speaks softly to her until she can no longer bear his tenderness. Asking him to sit away from her, to listen well, she begins her story.

  “As she was dying, Mother asked Colonel von Karajan to tell me something. She asked him to tell me that …” Andzelika stops, hides her face in her hands, looks up at Janusz, begins again. “She asked him to tell me that my baby did not die.”

  “What?”

  “No questions, Janusz, or I shall never be able to do this. Please. Only listen. When I was sixteen, I had a brief, a very brief romance with a boy. A friend of my cousin. The two of them had come for a holiday in Krakow. I had never had a boyfriend. I was a very young sixteen, timid, fragile, I guess. I was still wearing white stockings and oxfords. I was a convent schoolgirl who fell to pieces whenever I had to speak to a boy. I was Matka’s little darling. And so when this boy sought me out, told me I was lovely, I—”

  “You needn’t explain to me, Andzelika, how an adolescent male goes about seduction.”

  “No, of course. After the boy left our home, I never heard from him again. I was desolate, ashamed. I think I was angry, and when I understood, when I finally understood what had happened to me—I mean that I was going to have a child—I ran to my mother, as I always did. So much of what happened right then and for a long time afterward is unclear to me, Janusz.”

  “Unclear?”

  He is on his feet now, pacing the room, turning every once in a while to look at his wife as though to be sure it is she who sits there, she who tells him this tale.

  “Unclear. Yes, truly unclear because my mother did everything, decided everything. But let me go back a moment. You see, the boy, my amour, well, neither Mother nor I, nor, I think, even my cousin, knew who he was. I mean about his family. None of us knew that he was the younger brother of my father’s mistress. Of the baroness. He used a different name than she had used. Perhaps they were born of different fathers, I don’t know. Piotr Droutskoy.
That was his name. I don’t think he meant to conceal anything from us; in fact, I think he might not even have known who we were. Or, in any case, I think he made no connection between us and his sister. He would have been about three or four when his sister died. When all that happened. I was two so, yes, he would have been only a bit older. But Mother found out who our guest was at about the same time I told her that we’d been lovers. That I was going to have a child. A doctor came to the palace, examined me. While I was dressing, she came into my room, took me in her arms, held me for what seemed like hours, never saying a word except ‘Antoni, Antoni.’ She said my father’s name over and over again. A chant, a prayer. Of course I knew the story of my father and the baroness. A tidied version of it, I suspect. But we almost never spoke of him, so I was perplexed by her invoking him, addressing her lament to him.

  “Mother looked at me then, asked me if I would be willing to endure a ‘procedure.’ That’s what she called it. A procedure that would ‘make the baby go away.’ Thinking only of my lover and that I could never allow what he had given me to be taken away, I refused. Vehemently so, as I recall. Vehement not because I wanted the baby itself but because that creature was part of him. Mother was wise enough to understand. She never again mentioned the procedure. She promised me a vacation at the spas. Said I should worry about nothing. Nothing at all.

  “Days later, Mother announced our departure for an extended holiday, had our things packed, chattered away to family and friends about how I’d been studying too much, how it was high time we two took the grand tour. Rome, Venice, Paris, Vienna, she cooed, when all the while we were on our way to the Black Forest, to a villa on the grounds of Friedrichsbad. We stayed there for seven months. A little more. Until the baby was born. In a private hospital nearby. Another villa. All very posh and silent. I was heavily medicated during the delivery, and after that, all I remember are long sleeps, modulated voices, a constant needle in my arm. It seemed like it was days. It might have been less. I recall nurses and doctors who moved about me looking somber, Mother, who was always there, solicitous but distracted. I don’t recall much else.”