The Pretender

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘She smelled of perfumed dust,’ Mother said, wrinkling her nose.

  Outside on Franziskanska Street, Bella’s mother, who would have spent the hour shivering on a park bench or pacing up and down out of sight of the house, would hurry towards her.

  ‘Well?’ she would demand.

  Bella never knew what her mother expected – some sign, some chink in Grandmother Dulska’s armour, a sliver of forgiveness. But Bella would only shrug her shoulders and hand over a couple of coins the footman always slipped to her on the way out.

  Sissy loved to hear this story. She pressed her nose up against the glass of its lost splendour. She felt a special connection with the Dulski house on the street with a name so close to her own. (Years later she was to discover that the street was named for the neighbouring Franciscan monastery.) She tried to imagine the wide promenades of Poznan her mother described, the black-plumed soldiers – it was a garrison town – flags fluttering from the fortress and gala evenings, where well-born young women like her grandmother might have made a match. Mother, at least, had known it even if it was from behind the counter of Tailor Kurowski’s shop. In the early days the shop was packed with customers who had come, not to order suits, but to see how the mighty had fallen and to gawp at Eva Dulska, the tailor’s new wife. Sissy looked around their sad, cramped house and for the first time felt the impoverished constriction of it. Eva Dulska’s wilful foolishness had brought them to this. And all that was left of that other life were remnants – the christening robe, Mother’s Sunday coat and the wall clock in the kitchen.

  ‘Maybe we could go to Poznan some day? Back to Great-Grandma’s house?’

  ‘Sissy, love,’ Mother replied, ‘let’s not get carried away.’

  Mother had a fear of being carried away. Perhaps because her own mother had been so entirely carried away. Her parents had met when Eva had entered his shop to order a waistcoat for her father. Stefan Kurowski emerged from the darkness of the back workroom, a tall, dark-eyed young man, hair in tight drills, though even then, at twenty-two, it was already receding. In his hand (he was left-handed, which made him clumsy with sharp instruments and uneven as a tailor) he had a pair of large pinking shears. He was irritated by the peremptory tinkle of the bell at the front of the shop which had broken his concentration at a delicate juncture in the cutting of a collar and reveres. His father was supposed to look after the customers but was nowhere to be seen. Stefan had several pins clamped between his lips, which made it impossible to speak. He need not have worried. The young lady did all the talking. A bright, glossy-haired beauty, seventeen years old, who spoke disarmingly all in a rush but with the briskness of her class, almost as if she were talking to herself.

  ‘It’s for my father,’ she was saying, fingering a leather pelt that lay, naked-looking, on the counter. ‘We want it as a surprise for his birthday so we thought you would have his measurements. He always comes here, so we – that’s my mother and I – she’ll be along presently, thought we might order something very special for him. Brocade, perhaps? Mother doesn’t agree, says it’s too extravagant. But I don’t see the harm in extravagance, do you? I mean, he’s not a young man any more, and soon he might be dead …’ She laughed, a gay whinny. ‘Oh, what a thing to say! You’ll think me indiscreet, worse, heartless. It’s not that I wish him dead, not at all. God forbid, but life is short and we should grasp our happiness while we can, don’t you think?’

  She stopped for air, or for an answer.

  Stefan opened his mouth and a tiny shower of silver came out. He’d forgotten about the pins …

  Papa allows Sissy to wind Grandma’s clock into the new year of 1903. She has learned to tell the time from it, the big hand for the minutes, the little hand for the hours. It always seems the wrong way round to her.

  ‘It is a job for the man of the house,’ Papa says, ‘but till Walter comes of age you can do it, Princess.’

  Felix is crouched by the stove, feeding wood into the roaring porthole. Even as Papa lifts Sissy in his arms, she realises that one mistake is enough to make. One mistake like Felix’s and she too might be abandoned. Papa opens the clock’s octagonal glass door and produces from his pocket a brass key.

  ‘Here.’

  He points to the slot at the bottom of the face just over the seven. Sissy grasps the warm key and clicks it in. Then she begins to twist it. It always resists. It is as if time is weight, pushing against her like a gale trapped behind a flimsy door.

  ‘Gently, gently,’ Papa admonishes, ‘three times to the right. That’s all. Otherwise you’ll overwind it. And it is a family heirloom, isn’t that right, Mother?’

  Sissy wondered how her grandmother had managed to smuggle it out of the house on Franziskanska Street. It did not seem the sort of thing you would bring on a honeymoon with a tailor.

  ‘Your grandma knew it was in for repairs and persuaded the watchmaker she was collecting it for her father,’ Mother explained. ‘The watchmaker knew nothing of her scandalous match and handed the clock over. It wasn’t his place to question. He told her that the pendulum had stuck, but he had oiled all of the clock’s works and it would run for a lifetime. And it has!’

  ‘But why?’ Sissy persisted.

  ‘She wanted her mother’s time,’ Mother said. ‘Dulski time.’

  ‘Such fancies,’ Papa mutters as he swings Sissy to the floor. Below, in his bassinet, Baby holds his little fist up as if saluting his father.

  ‘That’s my soldier,’ Papa says, ‘a glorious patriot for Poland.’

  It is Mother’s turn to shake her head.

  ‘How can he fight for something that doesn’t exist?’

  They live in a place that doesn’t exist. Each day Sissy walks through what Papa calls Poland – the track across the fields with its aisle of green in the centre, the waving summer fields of corn, the woods of tall umbrella pines, the needle-brown carpet underfoot. It is called Poland, but it is not written down. Even the village, Borowy Las, has become something else – the sign above the schoolhouse now reads Borowihlas, as if someone has waved a German wand over it. When she tries to find the village on the schoolroom globe it is not there.

  ‘It’s a one-horse town, Sissy,’ Mother tells her, ‘you won’t find it on any map. It’s too small.’

  Sissy locates Poznan and Gdansk, but they are not themselves; on the map they are Posen and Danzig. She has heard of Lodz, but that belongs to Russia. She fingers the globe carefully, searching for Poland. Finally in desperation she asks Miss Tupalska.

  ‘Poland is a dream, my dear,’ she says mockingly. ‘What do we sing every day before class?’

  ‘God save the emperor,’ Sissy replies.

  ‘Precisely! You are a little Prussian girl living in the German empire. And that’s thanks to the kaiser.’ She points fondly at the portrait of the emperor.

  Sissy finds herself living on Dulski time in the German Reich.

  A man starts calling for Gertie. Sissy is amazed. Plain, stolid Gertie with flour under her fingernails and bad teeth. His name is Theo. His father is the blacksmith in the village, a small, elderly man with bandy legs and a crooked smile. She and Maria spy on the courting couple sitting in the kitchen. They make a funny pair. Theo, neat and smallboned, with a large wreck of a nose and deep-set eyes the colour of mud, and Gertie, large and loyal and ill at ease with love. He moves gingerly in the house, clutching his cap; he has a nervous twitch in his eye. When he calls shyly at the door Mother treats him with a fond indulgence as if, Sissy thinks, he is a fool. He is sweet and bashful in Gertie’s company. When he is with her he acts like a man who cannot believe his own luck. He paws her affectionately on the hand; he gazes at her doe-eyed while she clatters about, a meal bucket on her arm or elbow-deep in potato peelings.

  ‘Bit of a frog prince, if you ask me,’ says Maria, who at thirteen has developed an appraising eye where boys are concerned. She spends summer evenings loitering near the mill-wheel, where village boys go dipping. In bed at night
she speculates constantly about them in a half-mocking way. There is a roll-call of names which Sissy knows by heart – Leszch, Wladek, Piotr.

  Gertie’s stout capability so at odds with her age – she is eighteen – gives way under Theo’s devotion to something softer. Sissy fears for her. Softness in the Schanzkowski family is something to be hidden.

  ‘Probably a gold-digger,’ Papa mutters when the matchmaker arrives with a flower in his buttonhole and his coat bulging with a bottle of vodka. Mother releases a bitter, silvery laugh.

  ‘Gold?’ she queries. ‘What gold?’

  Three weeks before the wedding the peddler makes his yearly visit. He is a bearded man, tall but stooped from many years of pushing his wares ahead of him in a handcart. He has come from Lodz, where the Russians are. He might as well have come from the other side of the world. Polish on his tongue sounds strange, foreign almost, as if the words stick in his throat. Mother invites him in and feeds him while he unpacks lengths of cotton and serge. The peddler’s cart stands for many hours in the Schanzkowski yard, its shafts pointed skywards, as Mother debates the merits of his merchandise. She must choose a year’s worth from him, enough to make trousers for Papa, a shirt for Felix, shawls for the girls, a sailor suit for Walter. He carries in his boxes and fishes out his treasures. Sissy fingers the pouches of needles, the blue-rimmed enamel plates, the shiny lacquered boxes. Papa arrives home to a kitchen adrift with swathes of cloth. He does not approve of the peddler; he is Jewish and Jews, he says, would rob you blind. But today he is merry. A man in the village who owes him money has coughed up and his pockets jangle.

  ‘Pick something, Princess,’ he says.

  ‘Josef,’ Mother warns.

  ‘Really, Papa! Can I?’

  A gift, something for nothing, is a rare thing, especially from Papa.

  ‘Anything you want.’

  ‘Josef,’ Mother says again, ‘you mustn’t favour Sissy over the others.’

  ‘Hush, woman,’ he says and scowls at her.

  She chose a matryoska doll. She had never seen a doll like it. She knew only Papa’s stick creatures, but this doll was round and fat and painted.

  ‘Look,’ said the peddler, holding the doll in his small, nimble fingers. He was as proud of his wares as if they were his children. ‘You can open her up and inside – look – another doll lives.’

  Sissy opened it excitedly four times until the last doll, which was no more than a miniature wooden egg.

  ‘What will you call her, Princess?’ Papa asked.

  ‘Them,’ Sissy insisted, ‘each one has to have a name.’

  ‘Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia,’ the peddler intoned, ‘the Russian grand duchesses.’

  Sissy tried them out.

  ‘And this one’, the peddler said, pointing to the smallest, ‘can be the Tsarevich Alexei, the boy who will rule Russia.’ Sissy dances with Papa in the yard. The wedding band plays a mazurka. It is Gertie’s day. She is garlanded, fat with pride, but Sissy will remember only this, dancing with her father. She tries to follow the shuffle of his dusty boots as they reel about in the tumbleweed. In the summer-streaked night his dripping shirt tails have a white, dishevelled splendour. And then he swings her high and the world falls away, the wheezing band fades, the halo of trees spin, the sky overhead like the furred blush of a ripe peach. She is in Papa’s arms; she will not forget.

  WITH GERTIE GONE, Maria is taken out of school to help Mother in the kitchen and Sissy is given the yard work. In the mornings she must milk the cow before school. The skies are leaden with snow-fat clouds. A wind howls at the gable, pouncing as she turns the corner on her way to the cowshed, then whistles through the clumps of weeds that have grown up around the rusting mangle. The house seems hunkered down, vainly trying to escape the bitter wind. The track made by feet going from the house to the byre is peppered with hoar frost. The cow bellows, anguished and mournful. She slaps its rump and sets to work in the dark. Her fingers pull on the cow’s swollen, fleshy teat, her head rests on its russet flank. She has to cajole and croon before the cow will yield up a full pail. She goes to school with the smell of stable in her hair and the curdled spurts of cow’s milk on her skirts.

  Now that he is weaned, Walter sleeps with the girls, sharing the small room off the kitchen with Sissy, while Maria gets Gertie’s old cot. He is a golden-haired child, the dark mop at birth has been replaced by flaxen kiss-curls, and now that he is tottering uncertainly around the house his fat baby limbs have become sturdy and strong. Sissy may be the cleverest of the Schanzkowskis, but Walter is the most cherished. She sees the blamelessness of his milk teeth, the limpid innocence of his blue gaze, the startling softness of unblemished skin. But she cannot stifle the constriction in her throat when Papa halts at the doorway on his way to bed and leans over Walter, fetching his outflung arm and placing it reverently under the blanket or fingering stray strands of his dream-soaked hair. Once she must have been gazed upon with such love. She turns towards the wall and pretends to be asleep. She cannot bear to watch. A picture dances on her closed lids; Papa and her, alone together, travelling towards the horizon, propelled by the dream of the distance. To Poznan, Berlin, Gdansk. Anywhere but here.

  It is Baby’s third birthday. (‘Not Baby,’ Papa roars, ‘the child’s name is Walter, he’s been babied too long. Too many bloody women in this house.’) It is All Souls’ Eve. Mother is baking pancakes in the kitchen, which later they will eat with fruit and honey. A pot of cooked barley bubbles on the stove, fruit of the recent harvest. At twilight they will sit at the table with an extra place set for the dead. The doors and windows will be thrown open and they will pile the dead person’s plate with peas and barley gruel.

  ‘What dead people do we know?’ Sissy asks, as Mother rolls out the floury dough and saves a little knob for Baby, which she will bake in the oven separately.

  ‘There are generations of the dead, Sissy, since time began …’

  ‘But we don’t know them, do we?’

  ‘We know dead people. Grandfather Schanzkowski, you remember him, don’t you?’

  Sissy has a vague memory of a leathery purse of a face and a smell of tobacco.

  ‘And there’s the first Mrs Schanzkowska, we set the place for her too.’

  Sissy feels a soft turnover of shock. Mother pounds the dough.

  ‘The first? Aren’t you the first?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mother says softly. ‘Papa was married before, but she died in childbirth. With Maria. The labour went on for days and the midwife did not know there were twins. She was frail, poor creature, it was too much for her. Only Maria survived, her baby brother was stillborn.’

  ‘So Maria is not my sister?’

  ‘Your half-sister, and Gertie too.’

  ‘And Valerian? Felix?’

  ‘You and Felix and Walter,’ Mother says, rubbing Sissy’s cheek with a floury knuckle, ‘you are my children.’

  Sissy pondered on this new knowledge, this sudden doubling up. It was simple, Mother said, two families had become one, but to Sissy it seemed that one had become two. She pestered Mother with questions, but while she had been happy to talk about Grandmother Dulska, she would not even utter the first Mrs Schanzkowska’s name in the house.

  ‘Your father was left with three young children. He could not afford to grieve for long. The Schanzkowskis were distant cousins of ours and he came to Poznan. I was,’ she said softly, blushing, ‘of a certain age. It was a lucky match.’

  ‘And what about her?’

  ‘Poor woman!’

  ‘Did you know her?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t … but I know her now, I have her life.’

  The notion of the other Mrs Schanzkowska made Sissy thrillingly uneasy. Her mother was living a life that did not belong to her. When she looked around the house she wondered what things here belonged to the other Mrs Schanzkowska. The rolling pin, the enamel bin for maize, the smoky-blue china platter on the dresser, cracked and sewn together. H
ad these been part of her dowry? Sissy mentally collected these items as if they were shiny trinkets. Like a curious magpie she pecked over them as if together they might conjure up the ghost mother. She even examined the clothes her mother wore. Could these too have been inherited? Sissy noticed how her blouses strained at the bosom and her skirts creased at the hips as though they had been made for a smaller, slighter, more fragile woman. When she entered the kitchen, she could sense another presence hovering and, in the yard, a shadowy wife scattering feed for the chickens. Sissy studied Papa in the belief that she might catch a glimpse, if she caught him unawares, of the life he had lived with the mother that was not hers. It made him seem like an impostor, somehow, as if he had been fooling her, nursing a secret other life within. One thing she was glad of. At least her mother was intact, still flesh and blood, and not some vague and sickly ghost. The discovery made their inside world seem vast with possibility. Their house harboured other lives, interrupted, unlived. The air was thick with spirits; the sudden silences that descended were theirs. If Sissy listened hard, she was convinced that they would speak to her.

  At seven she is a strong, pretty girl, dark hair to her waist, a moon-shaped face, eyes the colour of pale slate. She has reached the age of reason. She must confess her sins to Father Kosinski. She must enter the confessional and whisper her secrets to the dark. Martha Borkowska shakes her round, fleshy face and knits her brow. Her ginger hair frizzes in the damp. She is a worrier, a biter of fingernails.