The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Your mother, boy, will not thank you,’ he said to Felix, as they rolled into the yard. He lifted a sleepy Sissy off the cart and planted her on the frostbitten ground. And he gave Felix another clip across the ear as they entered the eerily dark and silent house.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Papa asks absently as he moves around the unlit, abandoned kitchen. It looks as if Mother has run out of the house leaving everything just so. There are some glowing embers in the stove; the table is scattered with the tacky leavings of dough as if she were interrupted by a knock at the door and had gone to investigate with floured hands. Maria runs into the bedroom.

  ‘Papa, Papa,’ they hear her excited voice call.

  ‘What is it now?’ Papa replies exasperatedly. It is as if his children are too much for him and every cry is a demand.

  ‘Come, come quickly!’

  Papa is not going anywhere. He has pulled off his damp boots and sits sprawled by the stove, half-heartedly trying to stoke life from the flaky ash.

  ‘The eggs …’ he begins again his litany of lament, ‘the bloody eggs.’

  Felix hovers by the door, nursing his burning ear.

  ‘Mr Schanzkowski!’

  The face of a gold-toothed woman appears in the doorway. Her face, bathed in the flickering glow of a candle she holds gingerly in a small hand, has a dwarfish look. She beams triumphantly at Papa. Sissy is afraid of the midwife, the gold terror of her smile.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ Papa answers wearily.

  He does not even look up, or register the strange voice in his house.

  ‘You have a son!’ she proclaims.

  ‘Don’t I know it!’ He casts a surly eye on Felix.

  ‘No,’ the midwife insists, ‘you have another son.’

  BABY! SISSY BELIEVED he was a charmed child. Born magically of the fecund splattering of eggs and Papa’s desperate prayer in the foetid marketplace. What power he must have! Sissy watched avidly as the infant suckled at Mother’s breast. She had climbed up on the high, ruined bed, the twisted mess of bloody sheets and sweated blankets. The dark room, lit only by a candle sputtering on the low sill, had the warm whiff of the stable and the sour milky odour of Mother’s cheesy sweat. Baby had a mop of dark hair. His tiny claw was puckered as if his skin were too loose for him. He had an old, wizened face. Surprised wrinkles creased his angry-looking forehead. Sissy sensed his great newness, the sheer strangeness of him. If she pressed up close enough to him she thought she might get a whiff of where he had so recently come from, as when Papa came home, smelling of smoke and spirits, his coat soaked with faraway rain, his boots bearing the dead leaves of distant places. But Baby had come from somewhere even darker and more mysterious, the deep pulp of Mother’s innards.

  Papa stood in the doorway, stooped under the lintel, looking, as always, as if he was too big for their dim and cluttered house. Gertie, large and attentive, mopped Mother’s brow. She had always seemed to Sissy like another mother with her big-boned, capable frame, her amiable dexterity. She poured steaming water into a basin by the bedside. It smelt of burnt onion, which the midwife had ordered to hasten the delivery.

  ‘A difficult birth, Mr Schanzkowski,’ the midwife was saying, ‘a long, hard labour …’

  A look passed between her and Papa, of warning.

  ‘I had to send Gertie to ask Father Kosinski to open the door of the church and expose the Holy Sacrament.’

  Mother smiled dazedly. She looked small in the bed, her soaked hair and her beaded skin luminous in the candlelight. The midwife lifted the child and carefully moved with the swaddled bundle towards Papa.

  ‘Your son, Mr Schanzkowski, do you wish to hold him?’

  Papa waved his hands in the air deflectively, but the midwife held Baby aloft like an extravagant gift. He hitched up his trousers and sighed and took the child into his large embrace. Sissy watched a look of baffled and luxuriant pride steal over his features. His face broke into a wide, embarrassed beam.

  ‘Where’s Felix?’ Mother asked.

  A cloud descended. Papa scowled.

  ‘I don’t want him in here. He might cast a spell on my fine, healthy son,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not bewitched, Josef,’ Mother said wearily. ‘He’s just slow.’

  Maria had warned her that Papa would thrash them.

  ‘It’s the tradition,’ she said.

  It happened the day Baby had his first bath. The midwife dipped him in the bread trough so, she said, he ‘would grow like dough’. She added mugwort and thyme to the water to make him strong. Baby had made a good start. He was born on a Tuesday, the best day for boys.

  ‘Not like poor Felix,’ Maria said, ‘born on a Friday, and a Good Friday what’s more. No one will ever marry him. But who would have Felix anyway?’

  When the midwife washed Baby he cried and kicked, which meant that though he would have a temper he would thrive and grow. When the bathing was done the midwife lifted Baby out of the trough and held him out for Mother and Papa to kiss. Sissy envied Baby that kiss, Papa’s lips noisily smacking the infant’s damp head. She stole a glance at Felix who stood behind her. His lower lip trembled. Sissy turned away. If Papa saw tears he would see red. But luckily he was too busy carrying the bath water away to spill it on the threshold to give Baby a lucky future.

  ‘This is it,’ Maria said to her under her breath, as he returned with the empty trough and a switch in his hand.

  The midwife put Baby on Mother’s bed and Papa lifted the switch and struck the pillow once, calling out to the bright child, ‘Obey your father and your mother.’

  The harsh tone must have frightened Baby and he set up a high, aggravated wail that continued while first Felix, and then Maria, were motioned to come forward and bend over. Papa clattered them several times each on the back of the legs and the rump with the thorny stick. Sissy thought he would halt at her, that he would never strike her, not knowingly, not when she had done nothing. But he crooked his finger at her when the other two were done and he whacked her briskly on the calves.

  ‘So you will never forget,’ he said when the deed was done and the children had straightened up, their legs and buttocks smarting. ‘Obedience is meant to hurt.’

  For days Papa is in high good humour. He whistles around the house or sings jovially in the yard. He has a strong voice; it carries in the crisp, silent mornings. The first snowfall of the winter has lodged in high-mounded drifts around the house, looming at the windows. A pearly luminescence leaks into the darkest corners. Sissy follows in the wake of Papa’s breezy cheer, sinking into his large snowy footsteps, which criss-cross the yard to and from the byre and then to the store. This is Papa’s domain, a wooden lean-to at the gable end of the house. The ceiling sags where the timbers have rotted. Grandfather Schanzkowski died in the old iron bedstead abandoned in the corner. Maria says the store is haunted. But Sissy likes its feeling of ghostly possibility accompanied by the scratch and scurry of mice.

  Here Papa stores his tools and fashions stick dolls for the girls out of driftwood. He will spend weeks building a milking stool or a clumsy chair or the crude dresser in the kitchen, a rough and tender object much like himself. She tiptoes into the sawdusty room. Sissy loves its air of random splendour, the kiss-curl shavings, the broken pieces of furniture. Plaits of onions hang from the rafters. Old flour bags lie folded in a pile which Mother will bleach in the spring. Her jars of pickled gherkins stand in serried rows. Apples and plums seethe in their sugared juices. Papa is busy whittling at a small piece of elder, humming and talking to himself as if he is conversing with frightened ghosts. She hides behind a large chest, trying to still her breathing. If she is quiet she knows he will let her stay. Papa’s humming comes to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Sissy?’ he calls out. ‘Is that you?’

  She peers through the legs of an upturned chair.

  ‘This is no place for a little girl.’

  ‘Please,’ she begs, ‘let me stay, I’ll be good.’

&nbs
p; She is desperate to savour the backwash of his happiness.

  ‘Imagine, Sissy,’ he says, throwing his arm up and gesturing to his kingdom of junk, ‘one day all of this will belong to Baby! I have a son, Princess, a son and heir.’

  Princess and Baby uttered in one breath. Even Papa saw them as a pair. The two most favoured. She knew the feel of Baby’s downy skin as well as she knew her own, the silken rise of his cheeks brushed by his lovely lashes, the swaddled warmth of him, his gritty breath against her cheek, the plump perfection of his feet. She liked to watch him in the cradle as he burrowed into his deep, dreamless sleep; she envied the sated contentment of his slumber. She loved the noises he made, gurgles coated with frothy bubbles, a crooning babble punctuated with high, delighted shrieks, his arched glee when she swung a spoon or a glass bead in front of him. He loved anything shiny; he would make for it with a dimpled hand.

  ‘Another magpie,’ Mother said, ‘just like you.’

  When Mother allowed her to take him outside, Sissy would lift him up and point to his reflection in the mossy depths of the rain barrel.

  ‘Who’s that in there? Why is Baby in the barrel?’

  And Baby would scream with terrified joy as if she had made magic.

  The thaw begins. Mother is churched. It is the first time she has been in the village since Baby was born. She wears her Sunday best, a coat the colour of charcoal with a fleecy astrakhan collar, the one she calls her Poznan coat. The stove is fully ablaze as they leave and Gertie, fearing a fire in the house while they are out, removes some embers in a shovel and carries them out into the yard.

  ‘No,’ Papa shouts, ‘you little fool. Never carry fire out of the house. It will make the cows go dry. And it makes women barren.’

  He eyes Mother.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the midwife, Josef?’ she says. ‘Baby will be my last.’

  Gertie will walk with her the two miles to the church. Mother is not allowed inside. She must kneel in the doorway while Father Kosinski prays over her. He will hold a candle as he prays and she will touch it. Then she will follow him around the altar, holding onto his stole so that Baby will have a lucky hand. Then she must go to the midwife and fall three times at her feet, kiss her hands and thank her for her trouble. The midwife will sprinkle her with holy water. And then, only then, will Mother be clean.

  Baby has become Walter. Gertie and Papa brought him to be christened the week after he was born. Mother dressed him in the christening robe, fetched from the chest in the store. It smelled of camphor. Baby looked like a princeling in it.

  ‘Made from the best lace,’ Mother said. ‘All of our family were baptised in this.’

  ‘All the high and mighty Dulskis, you mean,’ Papa said.

  ‘I cannot deny my roots.’ There was a quiet steeliness in Mother’s voice that was often a prelude to an argument.

  ‘These are your roots now, Countess,’ Papa said as they stood in the kitchen. There were unwashed pots on the stove, globs of mud on the flagstones.

  ‘Give me my son,’ he said, taking Baby roughly from her and planting her in Gertie’s arms. ‘Come on, girl, let’s turn this child into a Christian.’

  Sissy was sent to school that year, in place of Felix.

  ‘What good will book learning do him?’ Papa had asked.

  Unwittingly Papa had done Felix a favour. He had been bullied by the village boys. His cowed acquiescence seemed to infuriate them. They drove him from the schoolyard with stones; they smashed his slate. Mother had sat with him late into the night poring over the German alphabet, but it was no good. Like his father’s contempt, it was a mystery to him.

  The school was in the village, which stood at a crossroads, four miles from the forests which gave it its name. The white timbered houses petered out, swiftly falling away into dilapidation as if the effort of standing tall had exhausted them. The mill alone stood proud, the village’s only battlement, its wheel tirelessly churning the waters of the Slupia. In summer the village’s two lonely streets would billow with choking dust, in winter the churning of carts and horses turned it into a mire. The one-roomed schoolhouse, ochre on the outside, deep brown within, had a high-beamed ceiling and long windows, through which the spire of the church could be glimpsed. Framed by a lozenge of blue, this view was one of two fixed points in the schoolroom. The other was the portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm behind the teacher’s podium. The church and the king were keeping their eyes on the children of Kashubia. Or so it seemed to Sissy.

  Sissy was good at school, cleverer than Maria, despite the six years between them. She had to crook her arm around her slate to stop Maria copying her subtractions. She was a wizard at calculation. Maria struggled with reading and spelling. When asked a question in class she would babble and stammer, casting around desperately as if the answer might come floating down from the ceiling on a scroll. Sissy could not bear the terrible tension of it. The schoolmistress, Miss Tupalska, would peer over her spectacles and rap the high teacher’s desk with her cane and bark, ‘Mach ein Ende, Schanzkowska. Mach ein Ende!’ Sissy would whisper the answer or scribble it on her slate, but so great was Maria’s panic that she could neither see nor hear. And despite her poor eyesight, Miss Tupalska could detect prompts or cheating at a hundred paces. Even when her back was turned – when she was writing on the board or stooping to replenish the pot-bellied stove – she would pause in mid-task and holler, ‘Franziska Schanzkowska!’ And Sissy would have to slope to the back of the schoolroom and stand for the rest of the day until just before going home when she would get the quick whip of Miss Tupalska’s cane.

  All through the winter the children wore their coats and gloves in the classroom, which became a fuggy mist of damp clothes and shoe leather thawing by the low glow of the fire. The abused room with its pitted desks, its scored floorboards, its weeping windows and the roar of the stove at full throttle was what Sissy imagined a great factory in the city might be like. And she loved it. They learned by rote, no trouble to Sissy, who had once chanted the names of her brothers and sisters into a glorious mnemonic hymn. She was determined to memorise all she could. By the summer she could rattle off the names of all the German kaisers.

  Meanwhile Felix sprouted, as if in defiance. His little boy’s body grew alarmingly, grew soft, that is. His chest swelled and drooped; he had little breasts which Maria teased him about.

  ‘Look, look,’ she would shriek, dancing around him as he chopped wood in the yard stripped to the waist, poking at the little rolls of fat at his hips.

  He would swat her away angrily. His face too seemed like a baby’s, soft, quivering. Sissy imagined him in a carriage with a frilled bonnet like a foolish, full-grown infant. He glared at them both from a sullen, hurt distance, but he said nothing. Only Mother kept faith with him. Sissy came upon them in the kitchen one afternoon during haymaking. Hot from the fields, she rushed across the yard but something, perhaps the weight of the silent house, stopped her calling out as she pushed open the door. Sun streamed into the mottled room. Mother was bent over, crushing her engorged breast between squat fingers. But Baby was not in her arms. Instead Felix knelt at her knee, his mouth sucking at her bruised areola, as he drank milk her body had made for Baby. He fed greedily, gazing up at Mother, drugged and adoring while she stroked his close-cropped head and crooned to him. Neither of them saw Sissy standing in the shadows. Slowly she backed away, the cry of greeting dying on her lips. She did not tell anyone what she had seen. It seemed to her too sacred and forbidden.

  SISSY’S GRANDMOTHER HAD been well born.

  ‘God spare us from Poland’s curse,’ Papa would sneer, ‘the minor nobility.’

  The Dulskis owned a large house on Franziskanska Street in Poznan, to which Mother had been brought to visit as a child.

  ‘Your great-grandmother Dulska,’ Mother would say, pulling a grimace, ‘she was a grim old bird.’

  Mother would fall into reminiscence during the slow, measured rituals of laundry. The boiling of Papa’s sh
irts, the folding of the sheets. Sissy loved the courtly dance they made of it; the gay beginning with an acre of bleached hessian between them, the respectful touching of fingertips as the corners of the sheets were matched, and then Mother’s coy retreat with a stole of white on her arm.

  ‘I had to take my boots off in case I soiled her rugs,’ she would say, giggling. Sissy tried to imagine her mother as a giddy eight-year-old called Bella, and failed. Bella would be left on the corner of Franziskanska Street and pointed in the direction of the Dulski house. She had to visit her grandmother alone. Her mother had been disowned for marrying beneath her station. After the marriage, mother and daughter were never to see one another again. But after Bella’s birth, Grandmother Dulska sent the christening robe with a message that she would like to see her granddaughter. Once a year Bella, dressed in her best outfit made up of offcuts from the tailor’s shop, would have an audience with her grandmother.

  ‘There was a footman to open the door and servants to take my bonnet and when I met Grandmother Dulska I had been warned to curtsy,’ Mother went on.

  ‘Like royalty?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘More like the parlourmaid,’ Mother said ruefully.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Tea would be brought in on a silver tray with a tall pot with a spout like the neck of a swan.’ She laughed gaily. ‘And Grandmother Dulska would point to the pastries and say to the maid, “The child will have one of these.” She always called me “the child”, if she called me anything at all.’

  Her grandmother would enquire after Bella’s schooling, correct her low German, or speak about her own troubles – a bad knee, the inclement weather. She never mentioned her daughter, and certainly never her son-in-law, the lowly tailor with whom her daughter had eloped. Little Bella knew the rules and yet she would try to smuggle information through to Grandmother Dulska – how her mother had sewn her dress specially for the occasion or garnered the ribbons for her hair from an old dress of her own. She thought her grandmother would approve of such artful thriftiness. If she did, the old woman never pretended. She greeted the little girl’s prattle with a baleful silence and when the visit was terminated – sometimes in the middle of one of Bella’s gabbled passages – she would rap on the floor with her cane and the footman would appear to show her out. Grandmother Dulska permitted the child to brush her cheek with her lips.