Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  Winter Eyes is an unforgettable book about secrets, silence, and revelations—and the hope for healing and change. It shows us how the past controls and divides the immigrant Borowski family, and how their American-born son Stefan ends up searching for safety—and for himself. We see the world as Stefan does, first as a small boy lost in magic, visions, and fears; then as a detached but hungry adolescent; and finally as a lonely young man on the edge of self-discovery

  “Winter Eyes works so well precisely because it is scaled to intimate human dimensions. Raphael’s book resembles a piano sonata, a piece he knows so well that his fingers breathe the music.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A strongly affecting coming-of-age novel. In spare and controlled prose, Raphael captures the ambiguity, ambivalence and anger of this singular family. His stringent honesty makes their private anguish and their peculiar solutions compelling.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  WINTER EYES

  A Novel About Secrets

  Lev Raphael

  Copyright © 1992 by Lev Raphael.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  First Ebook Edition: December 2010

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Lessons

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two: Separate Lives

  5

  6

  7

  Part Three: Connections

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Acknowledgments

  For Kris and Gersh

  “There are some people, they are like countries. When you are with them, that is your country and you speak its language. And then it does not matter where you are together, you are at home.”

  Christopher Isherwood

  The World in the Evening

  Prologue

  FANIA

  Warsaw Ghetto, 1940: My German’s very good, Fania had thought without irony as the Polish eagle crumbled like a plaster-of-Paris statuette in the Nazi fist. Her Russian was much better, but she had not crossed the new Soviet-German border scarring Poland while conditions had still allowed it. She had not joined tens of thousands streaming east though friends had urged her.

  And many of them had returned, unable to face the bleak reality, unable—in the end—to leave behind friends, family, home.

  She had been too afraid, more afraid than her parents, who died of pneumonia that winter. Her sister Eva had fled, smuggled into Russia by her lover Boris. There had been no word since.

  “It’s just us,” she told Sasha. “Just us.” Their cousins, uncles, aunts, were now as scattered by the war as grain tossed in a barnyard waiting to be pecked and gobbled.

  Sasha nodded without speaking. Her brother was still weak from typhus, and his pale, thin face was as dismal as those of the children who begged for bread in the ghetto streets, their high hungry voices snatching, tearing at the passersby who had nothing to give.

  “Just us,” Sasha brought out, folding and unfolding his restless hands. They sat at a buckling little table in the cold bare apartment to which they and two other families had been herded when the ghetto was decreed.

  She glanced affectionately at his once-beautiful hands that always twitched now, with fatigue, hunger, and regret. Sasha had not touched a keyboard in a year. Their German piano had been confiscated as “unfitting for Jewish swine to play.”

  The nightmare—first the terrible September news day after day, the mad tension, the bombardments, the refugees, the Nazi phalanxes conquering every paving stone for the Führer—the nightmare was worse than the tales of 1917 a St. Petersburg aunt had told them once, worse than the life in a Poland that had risen in independence twenty-two years ago to torment its Jews in freedom, and had not stopped.

  They had taken Sasha’s piano, Mother’s jewelry, the silver, all the zlotys that weren’t hidden well enough, leather suitcases, clothes, silk stockings, everything. Her parents had been broken by the shock, by the officer who slapped her father when he protested in flawless German, knocking him to the floor.

  “Rushka,” her brother was saying. “If only I’d gone with her.…”

  “No.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it,” Sasha said.

  “You didn’t know.”

  “The streets were dangerous for Jews.” Sasha stared at his hands, seeming much older than twenty.

  Whoever said that pain was ennobling, Fania thought, had never experienced it, had never heard that his fiancee’s pretty face had been clubbed in by a German office wanting the Persian lamb coat she had not been eager enough to donate to the Reich. This in broad daylight, of course—like the random beatings, shootings, the soldiers kicking old Jews into the street, forcing others to do exercises till they burst, others to clean gutters with their hands or beard.

  “But the war can’t last,” Fania insisted, for her brother, for herself.

  SASHA

  Warsaw Ghetto, 1942. I will not cry, Sasha thought over and over, in all the languages he knew: Yiddish, Russian, Polish, French, and even German, the language of killers, the people whose music was no longer Beethoven but bullets, whose poetry was the roar of tanks. I will not cry. The words were his only talisman, the only thing no one could steal from him.

  His parents had died because he and Fania could not get enough black market medicine; Rushka had died like an animal in the street. He could not stop picturing her bloodied brown hair, blood on the coat he had saved to buy her before the war—but he would not give in and cry. It did nothing, solved nothing.

  Neither would he harden himself, become an operator, scheme, sell, join the Jewish police, stop feeling. His life, his courage had been evaporating in the glare of the German sunburst. Who was he now? No longer a promising young pianist with a good home, loving family, a woman he adored. He was just another miserable Jew, dying in pieces, another desolate face. He saw himself everywhere in the frantic, crowded ghetto: the large sunken eyes, the dirt that somehow had penetrated into the soul and lingered no matter what one did.

  There were underground schools cafes, there was music, study, life that defied Hitler with every word and note and bitter smile—but he could not partake.

  Dying, his father had said, “Live, live,” and nothing more, as if the fierce injunction tore the last shred of life from him.

  Live? For what? To watch others die and suffer? To be dragged off on work details that were certain death? To replenish a dying people? Let them die, Sasha hoped, let the misery end.

  He did not trust his own thoughts anymore—they were the voice of hunger speaking, of despair. Where was his own voice, the man he’d been in August of ‘39?

  That was lost, gone with the piano, the conservatory that had been destroyed by bombs.

  Fania was not so gloomy as he. Sullenly optimistic, she said the war would end, the Americans would come to Poland—the British would take Berlin, something, anything.

  “They want us to die,” he told her when the black and white posters sprung up all over the ghetto, announcing that every Jew would be resettled in the East except for those working for German firms, the Judenrat, the Jewish police, and other exceptions. The ghetto was dark with rumors.

  “Don’t believe them,” his sister begged. “Only the sick will be resettled, the sick. Orphans, cripples.”

  “
But Fanuchka, we’re all sick, we‘re all crippled. Every Jew is an orphan now.”

  When the ghetto was liquidated still he wouldn’t cry, not even a year later when with the other Jewish men he stood stripped and silent, waiting to be ordered into the camp barrack that had been newly concerted into some sort of laboratory.

  He knew what the radiology equipment was for.

  MAX

  Hillersleben, American Zone, 1945. The female war correspondent Max was translating for at the temporary DP camp was a simpleton. Pretty, perhaps, in that scrubbed American way, but a simpleton. Miss James kept marveling at his command of languages that were second nature to him, not a sign of talent. His English was more correct than hers, but he did not point out her errors, merely funneling her words to other survivors from Bergen-Belsen and Magdeburg in that obscenely beautiful Nazi officers’ retreat with its ponds and walks and gardens and red, red roofs.

  “What was it like?” Miss James always asked, the question ridiculous in the midst of lawns so green they made the war seem a bad joke.

  What was it like? The camps?

  He could tell her.

  He had seen a man kicked and trampled to death in the mud by a Russian kapo the barrack called “the terrible.”

  He had seen a man’s balls set on fire.

  He had seen a noted cellist have his hands hacked off and hung around his neck.

  He had seen men talk about God with the chimney smoke hot in their eyes.

  He had seen a type of selection Darwin could never have dreamed: dead men pinching their cheeks to look healthy, had seen them break inside when chosen, shrink and shrivel before boarding the truck to their end.

  He had seen—he had seen—he had seen.

  And this pretty little American, who knew only the end, the corpse pits, the precise records of “shipments and “transports,” she did not understand what it was like to have you face smeared in your own merde, your own guvno, your own shit, to choke and scream in it.

  Sasha, the Warsaw Jew he’d met here at Hillersleben, was always trying to calm him down by talking of the future, but it was his sister Fania, with the clear distant eyes, who merely had to touch his arm to quiet him.

  “We’ll go to America. We’ll be free. We’ll forget everything. I shall give lessons, you and Fania will make a family—”

  “Never,” Fania swore. “I will never have a child.”

  Part One

  Lessons

  1

  As soon as Stefan woke up he went straight to the kitchen without a bathroom stop. His mother turned from the sink where she scoured a pan. “You’re up early.” She smiled. “I just made juice.” And then she said good morning in Polish: “Dzien dobry.”

  Stefan opened the humming fridge, enjoying his mother’s smile, the rushing water, the familiar way she leaned against the sink, the large glass pitcher of juice which was always so heavy and wonderful and looked so round when he carried it with both hands to the table. His mother went on washing; he got his Peter Pan tumbler.

  “Put your slippers on before Daddy comes back with the papers.” She dried the pan and stacked it away under the sink as quietly as usual; Stefan loved crashing pans a little and did so whenever his mother asked him to get one out.

  “Remember your slippers,” she told him. His father got very angry when Stefan went around barefoot: “The floors are dirty.”

  “Mommy washed them,” Stefan would protest but it was no use; his father had a great many rules Stefan knew he had to obey. Stefan’s father rarely yelled, instead his father got all tight when he was angry, like a squeezed balloon.

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. I was lost—I couldn’t find you—or Daddy.”

  “Did you wake up?”

  “No. Maybe.”

  His mother left the kitchen now and Stefan clutched his glass, wanting to run after her. Instead, he drained his juice, slipped off the chair to go to his room—and to see where she was. The bathroom door was closed.

  “Mommy?” He pulled the slippers out from under his bed.

  “A minute,” she called.

  Stefan walked around the room trying to forget how much he needed the bathroom.

  When his father came back bearing the newspapers and fresh bread and onion rolls, Stefan sat in the kitchen with his feet out so there would be no mistake about the slippers.

  “Why are you up so early?” his father asked, depositing the pile on the table.

  Stefan didn’t know why, and didn’t know what to say—his father liked answers, and the right ones.

  “Well, we’ll all eat together.” Usually on Sunday his mother and father had an early breakfast and sometimes his father ate alone. Stefan leafed through a magazine, looking for pictures, and for words he didn’t know. There were a lot of those, but also a lot he’d just learned, like “choir” which he’d first thought was said “choyer.” Really, though, he had his eyes on the frying bacon, the eggs as his mother plopped them from their white shells into the big white bowl. The sizzling was a more important sound than his parents’ conversation which moved in and out of English, Polish, and Russian, so that even if he listened carefully he’d lose the thread of what they were saying. He felt very safe and happy at the table, surrounded by smells and Sunday. He glanced at his mother often enough to realize he was doing so more than usual, and that made him restless a little, but with both of them in the room it wasn’t as bad as his dream.

  “You’re quiet today,” his father said, putting on a pot of coffee to brew. “What are you up to?”

  Stefan shrugged.

  Later Stefan left the table because his father was reading. His father always cracked the large wide pages and slapped them down as if he was angry at the news. The crack-slam made Stefan wince, and it seemed to cut through doors and walls. In his room, lying on the floor, Stefan tried again and again to draw an eagle as good as the one he drew Friday morning in art hour, but no matter what he used, what kind of crayon or colored pencil, and no matter what kind of paper, he couldn’t do it. Stefan always had trouble drawing something he wanted to—the only time he did well was by accident, when he doodled in class, or changed his mind and began drawing without plan. There was magic in lines, only he didn’t know it so they wouldn’t listen to him. He tore up all the sheets now and threw them away.

  His mother came in before lunch.

  “We’re going to see Uncle Sasha in a while.”

  Something in her voice, or the way she held the ends of her open white sweater kept him from saying anything, even though he liked his uncle very much.

  Stefan watched his parents during lunch and on the short car ride to Sasha’s because they didn’t say anything in English except when they spoke to him to point out a tree or some funny dog. He felt left out and didn’t answer much. When his mother and father became Russian he didn’t really know them; they were meaner somehow. Polish and English were the same to him, even though it was only English at school, but Russian was strange and pushed him away.

  “Well, you look sulky,” Sasha grinned a while later, ruffling his hair.

  “I’m not,” Stefan said, edging off into the living room, which always delighted him because of the three stairs down and the curving iron railing on each side. He hovered on the steps while coats were hung away in the hall closet. The room looked very big to Stefan because there wasn’t too much more than the fat black piano and places to sit, and the floor was bare and so pretty, all made of squares of wood, with a dark thin border around the edges of the room.

  “Do you want me to play for you?” Sasha asked behind him. Stefan hesitated; he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be happy or not. Sasha passed him to sit at the broad baby grand piano that was like a tame bear: obedient and waiting. Sasha played a few notes and Stefan, forgetting his parents who were still in the foyer, still talking Russian, was drawn down the stairs across to where his uncle sat.

  Sasha smiled and played
something very loud and fast, his big hands as quick as squirrels. Stefan leaned on the vibrating piano, staring down at the keys and up at Sasha who always played with closed eyes. This amazed Stefan—it seemed more wonderful than drawing, to make a piano do what you wanted and not have to look. He hardly noticed his mother and father settle onto the couch nearby. Sasha’s face, wide and pale, expressionless, awed Stefan, and sometimes made him want to laugh too, though he didn’t know why. His uncle was a big broad floppy-haired man, like a clown almost, but not a clown. He liked coming to Sasha’s bare apartment because he liked this man who was so different from his father, but he was also afraid of Sasha—he was a kind of wizard. When Stefan had once read a big King Arthur book, the picture of Merlin made him think of Sasha, even though Merlin had a beard and different clothes. Sasha was special in a way his mother and father were not.

  “How about tea?” Sasha moved off from the piano, smiling down at Stefan. “Tea?” Sasha repeated, and Stefan’s parents stopped talking. His mother looked very tired and his father had that squeezed face. They nodded. Stefan drifted into the small, bright kitchen. He didn’t usually like tea because it made him think of the time he was sick with chicken pox, and even smelled a little of the pink lotion his father had smeared on him every night he was still bumpy, and made him think of sticky pajamas—but with Sasha’s tea he thought of Sasha and it smelled like the sunshine in his kitchen.

  “What do you want?” Sasha asked, reaching into tins and finding cups.

  “I don’t know.” He could say that to his uncle without being embarrassed.

  Sasha looked at him very slowly. “You like when I play for you?”