All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘Here,’ the driver curtly tells her, but carries her bag across the pavement to the address she had written out for him, close to Dominikanski, a church that to her untrained eye is like a huge dark brick barn, with a steeply angled roof. He thanks her with no more than a nod when she hands across her notes, making it clear she does not expect the change. She rings the bell beside the ‘Boransky’ label to the side of a wooden door. She thinks as she waits how it would have been nice for Milan to be with her, but he was right, she knew that, insisting this was something she should do by herself. She feels alone, as she had not done for years, but so I should, she thinks, so I should. She presses the brass button a second time, she hears its burr from deep in the apartment. A cough before the door swings back, the middle-aged woman smiles warmly at her, tells her she is welcome, and takes her bag from her. Is good to get here? she asks in careful, heavily leaned-on English. She says her name is Vera. She is handsome, perhaps fifty, she wears a ring on her left hand, but in the days her guest will be with her, no mention is made of a husband, and there is no sign of a man’s presence. She leads through to a sitting room, sweeping her hand as if to introduce her home, the plush magenta chairs set against the dark table, the vase in its centre stacked with artificial flowers, the long settee with buttoned leather cushions, and above it two big tinted photographs in oval frames, from a time when men wore whiskers and a woman’s bosom swelled beneath a black tightly drawn bodice. There is a smaller table that holds brochures and folded maps for guests. And what clearly is an item of pride, a sideboard carved to match the ornate legs of the dining table, its shelves bright with sets of coloured flutes and glasses, and photographs in ornamental metal frames, and in the centre, the statuette of a dancer, her arms flung behind her head, her hair falling loose and long as her spine arcs back.

  Esther smiles to let Vera knows how she admires her home, that this is what she had hoped for.

  ‘All good?’ Mrs Boransky asks. She leads Esther to the bedroom with its wide bed, a blue rucked quilt, small crossed flags on one wall, on another what must be a religious picture, a man in a long robe holding his own heart as though he has caught a cricket ball. She is anxious that her guest feels at ease. She offers to make her coffee. She places a plate of biscuits on the table back in the dining room, and says the name for them, says them again, smiles at Esther’s first Polish word, as she takes it to be. She places a fan of brochures for her to look at. ‘So much to see.’ Her hand circling again, this time to the city she so obviously is proud of. She assumes this is what the pretty pale woman with her mass of hair has come for, the handsome square, the famous town hall, the steep-roofed churches, the sunbursts of baroque. There are boats that make excursions on the river. There are islands you cross to on iron bridges. There is so much here to see.

  Esther walks slowly through the town, one of whose names she has known since she was a child, but not the other as Mrs Boransky pronounces it, that is written there on the guidebook she carries with her. But it is the earlier name that means where the family began, and her great-grandfather, and the list of names in her father’s desk. The old aunt whom for some reason they had called ‘Grandmother’ in Polish, but who had spoken to the family in German that only Eva understood a little; and somewhere in the story as David told it, another language too Babcia heard as a girl with old people who were not as well-off as her own family, people from distant places.

  Those few words Esther liked repeating as a child when her father said them and ‘Remember these,’ he would tell his daughter, as if he gave her something precious. But Esther guessing, even by the time she was eleven or twelve, that the story was not as David told it, that the old woman Stephen spoke about more frankly, with her increasing quietness, her obsession with a few ornaments and photographs, her methodical routines and the delight she took in her one friend from the worst of times, had a life already more diminished than they could know. Stephen had taken her to a specialist, one of the few in Auckland at the time with any training of the kind that was called for, an Austrian who spoke with her and told him, more as a human fact than a medical diagnosis, ‘You should be grateful for how much she has forgotten, how marvellous it might be to sit in a room and to have the children liking to sit there even in silence with her, the gift of getting beyond language altogether.’ But Daddy convinced until the end they might all somehow have done much more. A row she remembered at the bach when she walked in from the beach and heard her father shouting, heard her grandfather saying in his measured considerate way, ‘But we gave Babcia more peace than she ever would have known had she not been with us,’ and Daddy shouting back, ‘But on your own terms, wasn’t it, always yours!’ She had felt grief for both men but mostly for her father, with that narrow valley he lived his life in, between his easy tears and an equally ready fretfulness. But at least the streets. Esther could walk them now for all of them.

  She decides though she will walk about the town as a stranger might, before looking for more, before finding the special scraps of it she has come so far for. She stands at the corner of Rynek, the great square with its high coloured houses, its ornate facades, the dozens of restaurants extending in front of them, the sound of music coming from a group that plays further along.

  She has taken the street from Mrs Boransky’s and the church whose roof strikes her as like a deep upturned keel. At a corner of the square she looks up to the tower of another church with its handsome tower, its copper dome. This too is part of what she must do. Odd that she should want to, but that is important too. Those who watched what had happened. They were part of Breslau. She stands in its porch, one of a group most of whom enter the church a few yards ahead of her with their hands raised as if in some parodic salute, their cellphones held high to bring down the great arched vaults to fit into their pockets, the brilliant slits of light from the tall shafting windows at the nave’s further end. The irony coming in on her, as she thinks of how she will speak of it in a few days’ time to Milan, in the flat that at this moment seems another world. None of them, none of her people, she supposes, have ever stood here, not exactly here. The oddness of her being the first to do that! But so many of those who knew them, neighbours and friends perhaps and those they spoke with through business and casual greetings in the street, they must have, surely; all were part of that, the community of what so many must have shared. When the city had its other name. Before the borders moved.

  As she turns and goes back out to the summer light and the bright facades and the rising restored extravagance of the Town Hall facing her from the middle of the square, its ornate gilded clock and its medieval figures, its ironwork and high orange roof, Esther thinks, I am as much a facade as all this is, there is nothing but the moment we are in. I can no more be them than they are me. For those moments, minutes, whatever they are, she feels a surge, a panic, the taste of it in her mouth. You cannot do this for other people! Not for Daddy or Eva or Babcia, not in any way that matters for them. Let alone the ones before. She finds a table beneath a canvas awning and orders coffee. A tall elderly man brings it to her without saying a word.

  She thinks it a mistake not to stay at a hotel. If only there was a room she could return to and be alone in and not have to speak, not go through the game of making out this is an authentic thing, to sit in someone else’s home, to watch as though kindly Mrs Boransky has been caged for her to gawp at, the meals she feels obliged to praise, the pictures on the wall, the meaningless television. As if she has the right! She begins to walk at random. Her resentment but with no clear idea at what. She knows had she seen a woman like herself at that moment, and bothered to guess at what distressed her, she would despise her slightly. Why expect things to be other than they are?

  She follows the streets towards the river and, because there seems nothing else she might do, buys a ticket and walks up the tilted gangway to the wooden benches on a small river cruiser. Making no more conscious effort than if she were observing a screen that pretended
this indeed was life, she watches a group of young Americans hand around among themselves a carton of sliced pizza, and the boat pulls out into the river, and the grandness she supposes of the city’s architecture slips past, until the town is left and she watches the shallow banks of the river turn to countryside. There are solitary men fishing from the edge of the fields, a few families camping, which makes her think of the few times back home when she was first at school and her father had said they must do more of this, live as their country gave them the rare opportunity to live. But he found they had no gift for the outdoors, and her mother hated it enough to throw a Primus stove into a lake when their food was stolen at a camping ground, and from then on they stayed at motels, and her mother read, and David watched the clock until it was time to drive back home. It lightens her mood a little, thinking back to that. Even a warmth for her parents in remembering how awful the holiday had been!

  There are swathes of reeds further along the river, a group of young boys in yellow vests in a huddle of kayaks, a landing where people lolled in canvas chairs and drink at rustic tables. Then the small river boat turns in a broad sweep and plies back towards the towers and the high-roofed churches and the picture-book quays. Already life does not seem quite so grim. She would like to phone Milan but they talked about this only a few nights ago. She has to do this by herself.

  Through the night there is rain that makes her think again of back home, its soft beating against the window in her room, the runnels of water on the pane when she draws back the curtain and the street light level with her wobbles behind the moving glass. In the morning the rain is light, almost a kind of veiling Englishness. Then later the sky clears, the heat is sudden, the streets steam: it is summer again of the kind that tourists travel for.

  Esther checks her maps, the notes she carries in her folder, and in twenty minutes she has crossed Rynek and the smaller square that leads from it with banks of flowers outside shops, restaurants as everywhere, groups of young people here for a youth conference assembling under flags. She takes a narrow alley and is away from the tourist centre. She follows a broad road and crosses tramlines, finds other names she checks on her maps, is struck by the occasional ornate and grimed old commercial buildings, among the drab post-war office blocks, much as they might be in any city. Soon she stands before a high tiled building in quiet curving Włodkowica Street. She recognises it from the photograph in her guidebook. She passes through a short vaulted archway and finds herself in a large courtyard, the windows of several storeys rising on three sides, and facing her on the fourth, the facade of the synagogue, the tall flat white columns against painted stone, classical Greek detail flowering at their tops. She feels a quick stab of disappointment. There is nothing obviously religious, Jewish, about the building she looks at. It is like a concert hall, what she has waited to see.

  The White Stork, that oddest of names for a synagogue, a long time back the name of a drinking house that stood there first, so there is no surprise in that. A pub, a place to stay, nothing to do with them, until the families of whom her own must have been one were rich enough to buy the land, to build in a style that showed their wealth, their education, their being like anyone else apart from this, apart from their wanting their God to have a place that no one would doubt belonged to them. To decorate it with fine galleries, with the white-and-gold patterns and designs and elegance that made it worthy of Him, and themselves worthy of it. This was the nineteenth century, this was Germany, the people she came from were part of what sustained the fineness of both. This was not a place where peasants, where mutterers in Yiddish or local dialects came to declare descent, but an educated people were proud to be seen. She had heard as much for years from David and now saw why his version was another world. But the building is a shell of what it may have been, expanses of raw distempered walls as she enters its big spaces, the derelict rooms, where workmen seem in the process of attempting to bring them back from their general sense of neglect, loss, decay. The rough concrete tubs, the tangle of pipes, as she walks down to the female baths. Back on ground level she makes out the dim high gallery where the women would have sat, the glaring emptiness of the windows whose patterned glass they would have faced. But the stairs she might take up to it are closed off with wooden barriers. The dull reality that this is what the past must first journey through, before it is retrieved. And her accepting too as she reads a summary account of where she stands, the further scouring disappointment that her family, those at least that she knows the names for, would not have attended services here in any case but have gone to the larger Reformed synagogue streets away, so grand and handsome, so certain and established, destroyed the night of the other Jewish fires across the country they once were part of. Yet to say so much as ‘was’ is surely to say it in the present: the past is here or not at all.

  ‘They were significant people.’ How she remembered her father saying that. And the quick snap of her irritation as a teenager, her demanding why he had to drag his bourgeois snobbery even into this, as if it mattered a damn whether a great-uncle as he claimed was a famous scholar? She had shouted, What difference would it make if he couldn’t read a word or was fucking Einstein? When they came to get him? When he died wherever it was they decided he would die? The hurt in David’s eyes as he took in what she said, and the words she chose to say it, and his own shame, the shame finally of everything. But telling her only, ‘You disappoint me, Esther.’ And the worst then she could think of to hurl at him, that he must disappoint them, did he ever think of that?

  She walks out again into the open air, to the walls rising on three sides of her, the lift of the synagogue across from where she stands. It no longer bothers her, the confusion of one imagined building in mind, the reality of another in front of her. Her accepting, she thinks, that is what must define me. The mess of it all is what I am. To be here now, in the square of the courtyard that struck her as so like the bottom of a well, rising several storeys to that other square of now sharp blue sky. Where they had been instructed to assemble, those who in absurd optimism, in incomprehension, still remained in the city to be rounded up. They most certainly were here for that. To stand for further instructions and watch the faces of the those they had known for a lifetime, their standing against the ones who mattered to them most, the comforted, the comforting, as they waited. For orders. How that word mines beneath all others, hollows the pit where everything in its implacable force descends. She looks at the overlap of one cobblestone against another, the window ledges exactly as they must have seen them, the rise of the flat pillars against the painted wall. They, the family, their hands holding, touching, comforting, she supposes. Or perhaps not. She had read how the older ones at times like this, the devout, the ones with certainty of more than fear, already would be moving their lips, speaking the words louder even than that, and the guards amused at their presumption, the joke that prayer might slow so much as a child’s shuffle on the march that would soon begin to the rail lines and the station. Once the timetables were set in stone. Esther’s own lips move as she says the names. Chaim. Lisabet. Sarah. Hannah. Ephraim. Sol. She closes her eyes, leans her head back against the wall. Like saying a line of poetry. A prayer. She says them over again. There is nothing more she can do. The closest she will be with them.

  It is a short walk, once she is through the archway back to the curving street, from there to a broad pathway beneath a canopy of trees, and a few yards to her left a long expanse of water that at first you may mistake for a river, with a narrow wooden bridge glimpsed through the foliage, spanning it a hundred or so yards away. But you notice the water has no more movement than a pond, that leaves and detritus and an abandoned toy boat lie as still on its surface as if placed on a table. This, as a placard behind a sheet of protecting glass informs you, is what remains of the old moat that once protected the city, which over the centuries one invading army and then another coveted. The long handsome wooded promenade, should you see it in a movie, or walk there
in a novel, may strike you as a place for trysts and confidences and the haul of nostalgia. Europe. She was amused at how she so fell for stereotypes, how easily the sludge of teenage reading and the thrall of films so survived in her! She watches an old-fashioned pram with a big cane hood being pushed by a mother in fishnet stockings, a leather skirt, shoes blood-bright as a wicked stepmother’s. But mostly elderly couples, an occasional single person like herself, on the benches at intervals along the path. On a seat close enough for her to hear their breathing, a young man and an older woman were talking very seriously. She strokes his bare arm with a leaf.

  Esther again unfolds her map of the city. She finds exactly where she is sitting, runs a fingernail towards the bridge she can see from where she sits, as she can the street across the moat, its buildings flecked and concealed by trees. The day has grown warmer, the tunnel of trees ‘as still as candles’, wasn’t that too a phrase David used because his mother was amused by it, when Babcia said how quietly Lisa sat as she read?

  She walks with the water glinting beside her, like a stretch of stalled river, she thought, if one can say such a thing. The brighter now for the sun angling on it more sharply. She puts her hands on the railing of the narrow bridge, looks down at the sprinkling of fragments and twigs on the metallic surface. A single leaf drifts too gently to think of it as falling. To the water like a stretch of silk. She stands aside for others to pass her on the bridge. A child heaves a toy saw from the side of his pushchair, which the mother stoops to retrieve, and the child lets go of it again. This time she places it in the bag that hangs from the back of the pram.